War with the Newts—Karel Čapek

The Human Comedy, but with Gills

The interview with Andrew

The Czech writer Karel Čapek published War with the Newts in 1936, two or three years after Hitler consolidated his hold over Germany. In just two more years, Germany would invade Czechoslovakia. Čapek did not live to see the conquest of his country, for he died in December, 1938, of pneumonia, three months after the Munich Agreement, in which Britain, France, Italy, and Germany agreed to let Germany annex the north, west, and south fringes of Czechoslovakia over Czech objections. Unaware of the author’s death, the Nazis arrived at Čapek’s family home in Prague in 1939 to arrest him as an enemy of the state. Finding that he had already died, they arrested and interrogated his sister, whom they later released, and also arrested his brother Josef, who later died in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I read this book back in the 1970s when I had responsibility for the SF/fantasy section of a bookstore. I don’t remember much about it other than how badly it disappointed me. The title held out a lot of promise; I imagined it like another War of the Worlds, or Forever War, or Starship Troopers. I imagined an invasion by some lizard creatures from another planet, or maybe giant mutant salamanders from the Black Lagoon, crushing tanks and swatting away airplanes. Instead, the book contained a tedious chronology of how a species of amphibian became a source of cheap labor for underwater construction projects. The book had no protagonist or antagonist. It had no plot. It didn’t even look like a novel, because it had diagrams, monstrously long footnotes, and even a few pages of some unrecognizable languages. Despite a few funny moments along the way, I found nothing to hold my interest. And worst of all, I kept waiting for the war, which only took place in the last few chapters, out of sight, without troops even engaging.

This week, however, I laughed out loud every few minutes all the way through. Čapek manages in fewer than three hundred pages to satirize just about every aspect of humanity. When I finished, I closed the book with an amazed Wow!

War with the Newts has three parts. The first part describes the discovery of the newts and the beginning of their exploitation as a source of slave labor. The second part consists mostly of reports and clippings that detail the expansion of the newt population and how they adapted to human society. The clippings also describe the changing attitudes of humans toward the newts and the growing awareness that we shouldn’t continue treating them as animals. The third part describes isolated incidents or clashes between humans and newts culminating in the newts’ terraforming the surface of the earth to accommodate their own overpopulation. The final chapter of part three involves a troubled discussion between the author and his inner voice about how they should end the novel—must logic prevail, they wondered, or couldn’t we offer some hope?

I don’t see War with the Newts as mostly about Nazism, even though certain events relating to Germany’s ascendancy obviously inspired many of the novel’s events, for instance occasional references to “the newt problem.” But Čapek also drew material from the history of the slave trade, industrialism, consumerism, and the many flavors of totalitarianism then extant. One can’t really fault the newts, since they simply respond to population pressure. They just go along with human demands, until they overwhelm us. I would call human cruelty and greed the main targets of this book. Humanity’s inhumanity toward the newts made the reversal of roles at the end feel like a sort of justice.

The newts possess many virtues that factory managers value, such as respect, obedience, and diligence. In fact, one couldn’t ask for a better worker. Not only do they work for virtually no pay, but they have no culture that could conflict with that of their owners. They have no music, art, or literature, and seem to exhibit few individual differences other than whatever human language or customs they happen to learn (and even then, they would gladly learn others). Čapek creates characters who have everything that industrial capitalists could hope for in a worker, and then he follows where logic leads. (He does something similar in R.U.R., with a similar outcome, but the robots of R.U.R. have more personality and ambition than the newts.) He makes the newts as malleable possible. At first, it seems like they could solve the human problem of Lebensraum by building new land masses for coastal countries. But even expansion into the ocean has limits. The newts spawn very quickly, and they could only survive in shallow saltwater. So the inevitable population growth drives them to create more tidal flats or bays at the expense of all those pesky continents.

The novel impressed me with its relentless logic. Given the premise that a species at least as intelligent as humans emerges, what must happen? First, zoos and carnivals would display them. But if people spoke to each other in the presence of the newts, the newts would start repeating overheard phrases. Some zoo worker would certainly notice. Humans would start treating them as talking animals like parrots. But when newt intelligence becomes obvious, humans would train them, and sell them, and exploit them for any number of underwater tasks. Scientists would perform experiments on them. Animal protection societies would intervene. And on and on. The book pokes fun at typical human attitudes at each step down the path toward the inevitable clash. In presenting these steps, the book encapsulates Western attitudes toward both nature and non-Western peoples. The message? Things will not end well.

The book lacks a central protagonist (or even a villain). Most readers expect a novel of modest length to follow the development or decline of a single character. We want a star. In War with the Newts, we have an accumulation of small fragments describing personal interactions between the two species. All those fragments combine into a grand narrative of the collapse of human hegemony. Individual characters do play minor roles. The colorful and irascible captain J. van Toch, who discovers the newts, comes to the house of a Mr. Bondy to propose a business venture. They knew each other as children, but their lives had taken very different paths. Their meeting only takes place because Mr. Povondra, Bondy’s doorman, decides, almost on a whim, to show the captain in. Upon his subsequent retirement, Povondra prided his spur-of-the-moment decision as a pivotal moment in world history, and so begins keeping a scrapbook, in which he hoards every written mention of the newts he comes across, regardless of language. (He eventually blames himself for the war.)

Apparently Čapek took a great interest in cubism. His approach to the novel, patching together multiple views of the newts over time, clearly took its inspiration from those artists. Cubist paintings break apart multiple perspectives of the same subject and present them all at once, so the resulting image has no single point of view. Čapek replicates this nonperspectival approach in part by not having a main protagonist, but also by the device of Povondra’s scrapbook.

Čapek also took an interest, as did many others at the time, in the emergence of mechanization and the dehumanizing effect of factory work. A number of movies he would surely have seen explored that theme, such as Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936), Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929), Metropolis (Lang, 1927). Several of these impulses had merged in the amazing short film, Ballet Mécanique (Léger, 1924), directed by the cubist painter Fernand Léger with highly controversial music by George Antheil, scored for sixteen synchronized player pianos, drums, xylophones, airplane propellers, electric bells, sirens, etc. I would say that War with the Newts fits right into the dark side of this Futurist-Cubist milieu.

The advice I would offer to anyone wishing to read this book: read the footnotes. In them, you will find much of the book’s humor, delivered in fragmentary glimpses of how different people weigh in on “the newt problem.” In the footnotes, you learn about the Salamander Protection Society, the theological question of whether newts have souls (“They certainly haven’t got a soul; in this they agree with man.” —G. B. Shaw.), and if they do, would they even need salvation since they don’t have original sin, the question of whether they could appear in decent society without clothes, whether they were property or persons, their moral standing, our duty to educate them, and for that matter, whether they should live as citizens of various nations or constitute a nation unto themselves despite having no visible country.

I’ll offer one example of Čapek’s logic-driven humor. At a zoo, the speaking ability of a newt on display comes to light. After a while, the custodian teaches the newt, who calls himself Andrew, how to read the newspaper. Eventually some scientists come to interview Andrew, testing his cognitive abilities.

Give us the names of the English rivers.

Ans. The Thames.

And any more?

Ans. The Thames.

You don’t know any more, do you? Who is the King of England?

Ans. King Edward. God bless him. [In 1936, Edward VIII abdicated after 327 days—RBS]

Good, Andy. Who is the greatest English writer?

Ans. Kipling.

Very good. Have you read anything by him?

Ans. No. How do you like Gracie Fields? [British actress, singer, and comedienne—RBS]

We prefer to ask you questions, Andy. What do you know of English history?

Ans. Henry the Eighth.

What do you know about him?

Ans. The best film of the last three years. Stupendous scenery. A terrific show. Gorgeous spectacle.

Have you seen it?

Ans. I haven’t. Do you want to see England? Buy a Baby Austin. [Popular nickname of the Austin 7, an economy car produced from 1922 until 1939—RBS]

What would you like to see best, Andy?

Ans. Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, sir.

How many parts are there in the world?

Ans. Five.

Very good. And what are they?

Ans. England and the others.

Which are the others?

Ans. They are the Bolsheviks, the Germans, and Italy.

Where are the Gilbert Islands? [A chain of sixteen islands in the Pacific Ocean, between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii—RBS]

Ans. In England. England will not bind herself to the Continent. England needs ten thousand aeroplanes. Visit the south coast of England.

What sort of conversation could someone have whose only knowledge of the world comes through the London Times instead of direct experience? We might ask similar questions about people whose only knowledge of science or politics comes from memes. Or whose only knowledge of relationship comes from sitcoms. Or AI trained on a newspaper.

War with the Newts, while containing many references to then-current people and events, remains relevant, because it pokes fun at human qualities that haven’t changed. We humans seem doomed to always take a short-sighted, vain, and grasping approach to every new thing that comes our way, be it a new technology, a genetic discovery, a source of natural resources, or a talking amphibian. Even though we know that this usual approach of ours leads to disaster, we take it anyway, giving writers like Čapek great material for timeless and dark comedy. Thankfully we can LOL all the way to our extinction.

§ § §

For next week, I think I’ll look at a more historical work about the corrupting effect of power and how populism can easily slip into authoritarianism. I don’t know why that topic appeals to me at the moment. Stay tuned for All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren.

Thank you for reading these reflections on great works of literature. I keep seeing gradual growth in my readership, and that encourages me to stick to a schedule of one reflection per week. If you haven’t already subscribed, please consider doing so for free and receive each reflection in your in-box as soon as it comes out. If you already have a free subscription and wish to support me further, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I try to buy only hardback copies, so a yearly paid subscription would subsidize one or two more books.

Works mentioned in this reflection

War with the Newts, by Karel Čapek

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), by Karel Čapek

All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren

War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

Modern Times (1936), directed by Charlie Chaplin

Man with a Movie Camera (1929), directed by Dziga Vertov

Metropolis (1927), directed by Fritz Lang

Ballet Mécanique (1924), directed by Fernand Léger

Ballet Mécanique, composed by George Antheil