Karel Capek, War with the Newts

brimming bowls & deflating lumps

“In it was something black and lethargic, as large as an old catfish; except that at the back of its head the skin expanded and contracted a little.”

Every few years I reread Karel Capek’s War with the Newts, and each time I’m convinced that I now finally see what it’s about. A few readings ago it was climate change. Then consumerism. Then immigration. Now it seems to me the best and most chilling thing I’ve ever read about AI.

How did an uncategorizably strange Czech novel from 1936 — a book about, yes, humanity going to war with a race of super-intelligent newts — manage such prescience? Some of it has to do with Capek’s being a citizen of the future — a thinker who looked at his present society and followed the trend-lines much, much further than anyone else could, or dared to. He was (as any crossword puzzle enthusiast knows) the inventor of the word robot.

But another, more instructive reason for the book’s omni-directional prescience has to do with the brilliance with which Capek managed to sidestep the ordinary pitfalls of allegory.

You know how when you’re carrying a brimming bowl of soup from the counter to your table, everyone always advises you not to look at the bowl but rather to stare straight ahead? There is, in the writing of allegory — in the writing of all message-bearing fiction, really — a similar principle at work. The less attention you pay to the chilling message you ostensibly want to deliver — the more religiously you train your eyes on the scene directly in front of you — the more meaning will remain in your bowl.

Maybe the clearest place to see this principle in action, strangely, is not in books but in HBO’s The Wire. Season one: David Simon has a great deal he wants to say about institutions and corruption, but he keeps his attention firmly on the interactions of his cops and drug dealers, allowing the message to glide toward us gloriously undisturbed. Season two, on the docks: ditto. Season three, in city hall: now Simon is taking occasional glances down at the bowl (he wants so badly to skewer these smarmy politicians) and the soup is beginning to slosh ominously. Season four, in the schools: now Simon is looking at soup for entire episodes (the plight of the children seems to demand it) and soup is leaping clear out of the bowl. Season five, in the newsroom: Simon, angry to the point of incoherence, stands before you, shouting, drenched in soup.

War with the Newts is many things: a postmodern stylistic collage; a Vonnegut-worthy satire; a joyful vision of the apocalypse. But it is also one of the most virtuosic pieces of soup-carrying in the history of fiction. Capek’s story is about the discovery of an especially developed breed of newts, and how humanity goes, one perfectly reasonable step at a time, from exploiting them to having their very existence threatened by them. The newts, in other words, mean everything: they are human folly incarnate. But they are only able to bear this narrative burden because Capek never loses sight of their essential newt-ness — the smelly, damp, pet store fact of them.

Midway through the book a father, Mr. Povondra, is walking with his young son when they come upon a tent advertising some sort of newt performance. The newts are still at this point a curiosity, a freak show attraction (I think, with a shiver, of myself opening up ChatGPT and showing my daughter how it can, in seconds, compose a limerick about a pregnant unicorn). The father pays his three crowns and steps through the flap.

“Inside the booth there was nothing except a rather unpleasant smell and a tin bathtub.

‘Where’ve you got those newts?’ asked Mr. Povondra.

‘In that bath,’ the huge lady said indifferently.

‘Don’t be scared, Frankie,’ said Papa Povondra and stepped up to the bath. In it was something black and lethargic, as large as an old catfish; except that at the back of its head the skin expanded and contracted a little.”

God how I love that deflating lump of a sentence. Black and lethargic. As large as an old catfish. The skin expanding and contracting (not even vigorously!) at the back of its head (what a strange, and therefore believable, bit of anatomical observation).

Capek stares ahead with such fixity at this miserable newt that we can practically smell it. The newt’s significance — all the English paper stuff that makes this not just a fun book but a great one — glides along terrifyingly out of sight.