The good news is, you’ve finished Karel Čapek ‘s War with the Newts; the bad news is, the human race has been wiped out. But we had a few laughs along the way, right?
In celebration of Čapek’s fractured style, a few unrelated notes in lieu of an essay:
…
Most discussions of the novel focus on its “allegory” or “prophetic” elements, but for me, it’s above all a wonderfully written book. Čapek’s sensitivity to language leads to a lot of his best ideas. The very first word of the novel is “Kdybyste,” “If you were to…”, establishing the novel’s hypothetical, alternate history; the final word is “nevím,” “I don’t know,” and the arc between those two words could also summarize the novel’s slide from gleefully parodic adventure novel to impotent despair. There’s also Čapek’s recognition of the similarity between the Czech and German words for salamander (mlok, Molch) and Moloch, the bloodthirsty, sacrifice-demanding God often linked with capitalist greed; and the gradual evolution of Andrias Scheuchzeri (that whole story is real!) to Andy Scheuchzer, to the Chief Salamander Andreas Schultze, whom contemporary readers would recognize as another thinly-veiled A.S.: Adolf Schicklgruber.
…
Lots has been written about the novel, but I’m especially fond of this essay by Gregory Morrison at LARB, praising Čapek for creating “the slowest apocalypse in all of literature,” and therefore the most uncomfortably realistic, if not “prophetic” (I hate the term, but there’s something genuinely uncanny in Čapek making coastal Louisiana the salamanders’ first major display of strength). Morrison’s essay was published three years before the COVID era gave us an even better name for the phenomenon Čapek describes: the “dumb apocalypse,” wherein everyone sees it coming and nobody does anything to stop it.
…
The novel is usually described as “allegorical” and the salamanders as “metaphor,” but except in a few small ways, I think this is the wrong approach. After all, the salamanders don’t “represent” any oppressed group in the novel; they usually take their place. i.e. if a factory owner finds it easier to exploit salamanders than human workers, that doesn’t make the former a “metaphor” for the latter! Rather, Čapek identifies the mechanisms of oppression and asks how they’d reconfigure under different circumstances. The common allegorical/metaphorical readings also muddle the ending, and especially X’s warning, if the salamanders are just metaphors for oppressed humans. There IS some tension in the last act of the novel, consistent with Čapek’s own hesitations and contradictions: he recognized that there were world-historical threats facing the human race, but he was also suspicious of messianic ideologies (really, of just about any -isms) that would happily trample human beings in their quest to save humanity, a constant theme in his earlier novels. This tension is never fully resolved in his work.
…
In the introduction I suggested there are two (to my mind) defensible picks for main character. The first would be the lowly doorman Povondra, the only “character” as such to play a role in all three parts of the novel. The second would be what Povondra represents, the relatively new and “insignificant” country of Czechoslovakia. While Čapek was working on the novel, the “great” powers were negotiating the fate of Europe, including which parts of Czechoslovakia would belong to whom (that chapter where the “great” powers agree to carve up China to appease the salamanders? The real-life Munich Agreements were a mere two years in the future!) Čapek counters this “insignificance” by making Czechoslovakia a hilariously unexpected central character (as it has no coast, despite what Shakespeare thought), beginning with the grocer’s son Vantoch/Van Toch and the industrialist Bondy; the novel is also packed with insider jokes about Czechoslovak history and culture (like the battle between the Young Newts and the Old Newts, based on a real-life political struggle). But Povondra is really the book’s central figure, representing the “insignificant” nation whose choices are nonetheless just as consequential as those of the “great” powers: he’s really a plea to Čapek’s fellow compatriots not to take “insignificance” as an excuse not to take responsibility for their role in the future of the species. We are all of us responsible for one another.
…
That said, Čapek had little patience for nationalism (yet another -ism) and enjoyed deflating the inflated self-regard of his compatriots. Among other examples of this, we get the Czech-passionate salamander who names himself Boleslav Jablonský and speaks in a floridly archaic version of the language. I’d imagine the English counterpart might be a salamander who called himself Edward Bulwer-Lytton, if B-L were also known for his tediously didactic poems in praise of the motherland. That whole anecdote, including the husband and wife’s disagreement about the conjugation of the word for “horse,” is one of my favorite, funniest bits in the book.
…
Possibly because of Čapek’s background as a playwright, War with the Newts has been a popular subject for stage adaptation. There’s also a BBC radio play. Comics artist Jan Štěpánek attempted a cool-looking run in the mid-60s, but Communist censorship at the time forced him to delay publication until the late 1980s (more here). Pre-production on a film was announced nearly ten years ago, but given the drab, muddy concept images posted online, I think its gradual disappearance from conversation is for the better. In the meantime, I encourage you to use an image search to check out all the wonderful covers that this book has gotten over the years, including a really stellar version illustrated by Adolf Born.
…
I still have a hard time believing a novel this exuberantly weird (it has (very muddy) photographs of salamanders! and fake quotes from real celebrities! and enough footnotes to make David Foster Wallace jealous!) was published in the 1930s. Incredible. The part I return to most is the London Zoo interview with Andy, a string of ludicrous non-sequiturs that never fails to make me laugh out loud.
Anyway, that’s all from me. What’d you think? Any favorite parts? And are we all doomed after all?