Karel Čapek has remained, over the decades since his death in 1938, the great national writer of his Czech people. At the same time, he has also enjoyed special favor in the English-speaking world, to the extent that all of his major and many of his minor works are available in English translations.
If we inquire concerning the secret of such popularity, an answer is not easy to give. Čapek turns out to have written many types of literature and to have meant many things to many people. One thinks first of his Utopian or, to use today’s terminology, dystopian works (a dystopia is a utopia gone amok): the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), the novel The Absolute at Large (1922), or the somewhat later novel War with the Newts (1936). These works, for all their penetrating insight into how human progress can be our own worst enemy, are also admirable for other qualities: the dramatic expressionism of R.U.R., with its robots marching in step to epitomize the dangers of mechanization; the trenchant satire and parody of the two novels, the first burlesquing a world of technological overproduction, the second describing man’s subjugation by a species of giant, intelligent newts which mankind had previously subjugated for its own industrial and military purposes. In a Swiftian vein, these novels mock the seeming achievement of our modern, civilized and technological world.
Standing next to this theme of the disasters facing our modern civilization is the theme of war. It first appears in the satirical revue From the Life of the Insects (1921), which Karel Čapek wrote with his brother Josef. In the third act of the play, one tribe of ants conquers and exterminates another. The war theme figures by implication in the scientific fantasy Krakatit (1924), in which Čapek foresaw how the power of atomic energy might be used for military purposes. Finally, his two late, anti-Nazi plays, The White Plague (1937) and The Mother (1938), finally accept war (Čapek had been a pacifist), but only on the ground of justifiable self-defense or, more precisely, the defense of others more defenseless. One does not normally think of Čapek as an anti-war author, but perhaps this theme did as much to establish his reputation, particularly in the modern theater, as did the theme of scientific dystopia.
Although his best-known works tend to be about social problems, Čapek was essentially a humanist. His concerns were not specifically political—about man—but rather stemmed from his interest in and love for men and for how they were affected by and could respond to the modern world. It is Čapek the humanist who is most keenly reflected in the work I consider to be his masterpiece, and it is with perhaps the most agonizing theme of our time—the search for identity—that he has made his mark.
This masterpiece is the trilogy of novels contained in the present volume. The literary theoretician and critic René Wellek has described this trilogy as ‘one of the most successful attempts at a philosophical novel in any language.’
Czech literary critics came to refer to this trilogy as Čapek’s ‘noetic’ [i.e., epistemological] work. Epistemology is that branch of philosophy which deals with the possibility and truth status of knowledge, and the terms as used here refers to the theme of a search for individual identity in the chaotic modern world. At first glance we can agree with this definition, but as we read and reread the three novels, the term appears increasingly inadequate: not only self-knowledge is involved here, but also the very nature of society and of human feeling. The deepest significance of the trilogy is its embodiment of the spirit of democratic humanism.
The three novels of the trilogy mark Čapek’s transition from his earlier, somewhat superficial philosophy of relativism—expressed particularly sharply, if somewhat facilely, in the novel The Absolute at Large—to a new philosophic absolutism. This transition was to serve the writer well in his duel with Nazism (if relativism made everyone somehow right, then Hitler would have to be right as well). This transition is orchestrated for the reader of the trilogy in the form of a Hegelian logical triad (or dialectic) of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Hegel’s triad was an attempt to get away from the static Aristotelian rules of logic and to find a more dynamic logic that could explain change, progress and organic growth. For Hegel, each thesis implied a contradictory thesis, or antithesis, and this conflict ended in another thesis, or synthesis, which implied a contradictory thesis, and so on.
The first novel of the trilogy, Hordubal (1933), maintains the relativist attitude toward truth characteristic of Čapek’s earlier period: the truth of Hordubal’s life and thoughts can never be discovered. But this epistemological concept is voiced as a point of departure in Čapek’s search for man’s truth. Like a domino, it completes an old pattern and begins a new one.
Hordubal also connected with Čapek’s earlier fiction in a more specific respect: based on a story drawn from real life, it deals with problems of police investigation and judicial trial. In these qualities, it may be viewed as a continuation of Čapek’s detective stories with a philosophical twist, Tales from Two Pockets (1929).
In Hordubal Čapek’s relativism takes the form of a series of attempts by different observers to reconstruct the logic of Hordubal’s motives and actions, which we see from Hordubal’s perspective in the first part of the novel. All fail, necessarily, because Hordubal’s secrets and his personality are essentially unique and incommunicable. Thus the thesis of our logical triad: all humans are distinct and unknowable.
In its authorial technique, Hordubal is more traditional—less original, perhaps—than the following two volumes of the trilogy. Its strongest qualities relate to its use of vivid symbolic imagery: e.g., the phallic, masculine horse associated with the hired man Manya, contrasted with the peaceful, brooding cow Hordubal reveres. Čapek manipulates these and other symbols with intense pathos. Indeed, although the novel as thesis concludes that we cannot know the secrets of another’s heart, Čapek has, through the miracle of a work of art, communicated these secrets to us.
The second novel, Meteor (1934), attempts the reconstruction of the life story of an unknown man, dying from a plane crash. Three versions are given: a nun’s dream, a clairvoyant’s fantasies and, finally and most completely, a writer’s artistic reconstruction. All three attempts are limited by both the personalities of their narrators and their means of perception.
The ultimate implication of relativism is that there can be no truth whatsoever: if there is no one truth, then there can be no truth, only a forest of different and conflicting ‘truths’ through which we wander aimlessly. However, the philosophers José Ortega y Gasset and Karl Mannheim had, in the 1930s, pointed out an escape from this paradox, to which Mannheim gave the name ‘perspectivism.’ Different truths are the products of different perspectives, but observations made according to these different perspectives add up to a coherent and consistent truth, not to contradictions. And, in fact, the three stories told in Meteor about ‘Case X’ are not totally contradictory, but overlap and could be gathered together into a more or less consistent and harmonious whole.
This ‘perspectivist’ structure of perception may remind one of the distortions involved in a cubist painting, which are intended to simulate a three-dimensional view of an object. ‘Literary cubism’ is best known in modern French poetry. In Czech literature, the concept is associated with Karel Čapek and his brother Josef, who was also a cubist painter. In Karel’s novel Meteor, we find the cubist concept fully realized. Meteor thus constitutes the antithesis of the trilogy: perspectives about a human life are indeed many, but people are not therefore unknowable; rather, the perspectives may be accumulated to construct a coherent truth.
Throughout the trilogy, Čapek was preoccupied with the theme of individual identity: in Hordubal the issue, while present, is still tangential; in Meteor it comes to the center of the stage; and in An Ordinary Life (1934), the final volume of the trilogy, it becomes more focal still, since not only are we concerned with the question of what the principal character is like, but it is he himself who undertakes the search for his identity. A retired railway official attempts to write the story of his life, but what he originally conceives as a simple, unencumbered, ‘ordinary’ story suddenly becomes a thicket of tangles and contradictions. These can be resolved only by the postulation of variety, of a whole host of personalities within him, some buried and silent, others potential, still others alive in rebellion. And here we have the synthesis of the triad: the plurality of perspectives without corresponds to a plurality of personalities within the individual.
But if this is true, then we have a metaphysical basis on which to establish the unity of society: the individual repeats within himself the variety of persons around him; therefore, he can empathize with others and they with him. And this society will be democratic insofar as nothing separates the plurality within from the one without. Hence Čapek has given a literary and philosophical solution to the troubling problem of democracy and a pluralist society.
He has also contributed a kind of psychoanalysis largely independent of Freud’s. This effort is especially apparent in An Ordinary Life, where introspection leads to the breakdown of the ordinary man’s jejeune self-evaluation and to the discovery of the deeper, more complex truth of a variety of persons within. Like Freud, Čapek emphasized childhood development and childhood sexual expression, but without any predisposition to an Oedipal Complex or a unilateral source of life energy such as Freud’s libido.
Although the three volumes of the trilogy are strikingly different in style and approach, and none of the characters or plot elements figures in more than one of the volumes, yet there is much to hold the trilogy together. The Hegelian triad is one such link. Another is the symbol of the human heart: in Hordubal the heart, sent off for medical examination, is lost (implying that Hordubal’s grief, his noblest aspect, is no more). In Meteor the heart is the organ implicated in the death of ‘Case X;’ while in An Ordinary Life the retired railway official dies from heart failure.
This central symbol of the heart is perhaps evidence that the trilogy is not purely or even primarily ‘noetic.’ No, it has to do with humanity, with human action and perception. And, in spite of Čapek’s self-proclaimed ‘optimism,’ it is tragic and pessimistic. Hordubal’s pitiful, self-sacrificial love leads him only to death. Meteor’s ‘Case X’ flies home to recapture his own identity, only to crash in the culmination of a violent, reckless, heedless life. The ‘ordinary man’ only pursues his analytic self-discoveries when he is about to die.
‘Is it all worth reading?’ old Mr. Popel asks of the doctor who has handed him the reminiscences of the ‘ordinary man.’ As a scientist, the doctor, of course, has no opinion. Reading the trilogy brings only sadness to those touched by it, just as it brought sadness to the ‘ordinary man.’ Obsession and tragedy are the two pillars of Čapek’s art in this great work.
Still, if the characters and events in the trilogy are tragic, the vision of a democratic society based on man’s perception of his own plurality is not. The contradiction may seem a paradox; but perhaps Čapek is hinting, as he and his brother Josef had so many years before in From the Life of the Insects, that while individual life is necessarily tragic, social life can sometimes transcend tragedy and become heroic and an occasion for optimism.