Three Novels Read online

  Praise for Three Novels and Karel Čapek:

  Enjoyable philosophical novels can be counted on a hand or two … Now, thanks to Catbird Press, American readers can add to this skimpy list the obscure but thoroughly deserving trilogy comprising Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life.

  —Washington Post Bk. World

  Čapek’s masterpiece.

  —Chicago Tribune

  A stunning, mortuary trilogy of novels.

  —The Nation

  Fifty years after his death, Čapek’s work has lost nothing of its freshness and luster…. He is as great a delight to read today as he ever was.

  —N.Y. Times Book Review

  Karel Čapek (1890-1938; CHOP-ek) was Czechoslovakia’s leading novelist, playwright, story writer, columnist, and critic during the first twenty years after the founding of the nation in 1918. He was the inventor of the literary robot in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), as well as a writer of delightful detective stories, humorous columns, and the great satire on science and modernity War with the Newts.

  Introduction Copyright © 1990 William Harkins

  All rights reserved.

  This is a reprint of a trilogy of novels originally published separately in Czech as Hordubal, Povetron, and Obycejny zivot in 1933-1934, published separately in English translation in Great Britain in 1934-1936 by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, and published in a single volume as Three Novels in 1948 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd in Great Britain and in 1949 by A. A. Wyn in the United States. This is a reprint of the second impression of the one-volume edition published by A. A. Wyn. The Introduction by William Harkins has been added, and the translation of the Afterword by Karel Čapek has been revised by Robert Wechsler.

  CATBIRD PRESS

  16 Windsor Road, North Haven, CT 06473

  800-360-2391 [email protected]

  Our books are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group

  Third printing

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Čapek, Karel, 1890-1938

  Hordubal, Meteor, An ordinary life; Three Novels by Karel Čapek, translated by Maria and Robert Weatherall; introduction by William Harkins.

  ISBN 0-945774-08-7 (pbk.)

  I. Title. II. Title: Hordubal. III. Title: Meteor. IV. Title: Ordinary life.

  PG5038.C3A28 1990

  891.8’635-dc20 89-23957 CIP

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by William Harkins

  HORDUBAL

  METEOR

  AN ORDINARY LIFE

  Afterword by Karel Čapek

  INTRODUCTION

  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.

  William Harkins

  Columbia University

  HORDUBAL

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER I

  THAT man sitting second from the window, the one with his clothes all creased; who’d think that he’s an American? Don’t tell me! Surely Americans don’t travel in slow trains; they go with the express, and even then it’s not fast enough for them, the trains are quicker in America they say, with much bigger carriages, and a white-coated waiter brings you iced water and ice-creams, don’t you know? Hello, boy, he shouts, fetch me some beer, bring a glass for everyone in the carriage, even if it costs five dollars, damn it! Good Lord! That’s life in America, you know: it’s no use trying to tell you.

  The second one from the window dozed with his mouth open, all sweaty and tired, and his head hung down as if he were lifeless. Oh, God, oh, God, it’s already eleven, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen days; for fifteen days and nights sitting on my box, sleeping on the floor, or on a bench, sticky with sweat, stupefied, and deafened with the rattle of the machines; this is the fifteenth day; if only I could stretch my legs, put a bundle of hay under my head and sleep, sleep, sleep …

  The fat Jewess by the window squeezed herself gingerly into the corner. That’s it, at the end he’ll go off, and fall on me like a sack; who knows what’s wrong with him—looks as if he’s rolled on the ground in his clothes, or something; you seem a bit queer to me, I should say, I should like to move right away; oh, God, if only the train would stop! And the man, second from the window, nodded, bent forward, and woke with a jerk.

  “It’s so hot,” said the little old man, looking like a hawker, cautiously beginning a conversation. “Where are you going to ?”

  “To Kriva,” the man got out with an effort.

  “To Kriva,” repeated the hawker professionally and graciously. “And have you come far, a long way ?”

  The man second from the window made no reply, he only wiped his moist forehead with his grimy fist, and f
elt faint with weakness and giddiness. The hawker gave an offended snort and turned back towards the window. The other hadn’t the heart to look through the window, he fixed his eyes on the filth on the floor, and sat waiting for them to ask him again. And then he would tell them. A long way. All the way from America, sir. What do you say, all the way from America ? And so you are coming all this distance for a visit? No, I’m going home. To Kriva, I have a wife there, and a little girl; she’s called Hafia. She was three years old when I went away. So that’s it, from America! And how long were you there ? Eight years. It’s eight years now. And all the time I had a job in one place: as a miner. In Johnstown. I had a mate there; Michal Bobok was his name. Michal Bobok from Talamas. It killed him; that was five years ago. Since then I’ve had no one to talk to—I ask you, how was I to make myself understood? Oh, Bobok, he learned the lingo; but you know, when a chap has a wife, he thinks how he’ll tell her one thing after another, and you can’t do that in a strange tongue. She’s called Polana.

  And how could you do your job there when you couldn’t make yourself understood? Well, like this: they just said, Hello, Hordubal, and they showed me my job. I earned as much as seven dollars a day, sir, seven. But living’s dear in America, sir. You can’t live even on two dollars a day—five dollars a week for bed. And then the gentleman opposite says: But then, Mr. Hordubal, you must have saved a nice tidy bit! Oh, yes, you could save. But I sent it home to my wife—did I tell you that she’s called Polana ? Every month, sir, fifty, sixty, and sometimes ninety dollars. I could do that while Bobok was alive, because he knew how to write. A clever man, that Bobok was, but he got killed five years ago; some wooden beams fell on him. Then I couldn’t send any more money home, and I put it in a bank. Over three thousand dollars, I tell you, sir, and they stole it from me. But that’s impossible, Mr. Hordubal! What did you say? Yes, sir, over three thousand dollars. And you didn’t prosecute them ? Now I ask you, how could I prosecute them ? Our foreman took me to some kind of a lawyer; he patted my shoulder. O.K., O.K., but you must pay in advance; and the foreman told him he was a swine, and pushed me down the stairs again. It’s like that in America, no use talking. Jesus Christ, Mr. Hordubal, three thousand dollars! That’s a big sum of money, it’s a whole fortune, God in Heaven, what bad luck! Three thousand dollars, how much is that in our money ?