First Czech(oslovak) cultural artifact - Part 2

 

The play’s influences

Like H. G. Wells’s “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” RUR’s action is situated on an isolated island with a mad scientist named Rossum (which means “reason, rationality” in Czech). Čapek claimed to have conceived the idea for the play in a crowded Prague tram where people seemed to him like cattle or sheep.

Čapek also grounds his idea in the myth of the Golem. In the late 16^th century, the then rabbi of Prague magically created the Golem to defend the Prague Jewish ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. The Golem was constructed out of clay from the banks of the Vltava river, which runs through the center of Prague, and he brought the creature to life through rituals and incantations.

 

Čapek’s twist is to introduce bio-engineered, humanoid robots—and thus RUR is the work that inaugurates the modern robot trope in the SF tradition.

Success and reception of the play

Čapek wasn’t sure how the play would be received.

 

 

It was, however, a tremendous success in theaters: it literally went viral in a world-wide sense. The play premiered abroad in translation to great success in Slovenia (1921), Hungary (1922), German (1923), English in London (April 1923), and also Japan in the mid-1920s.

 

In June 1923, a public discussion was held about it with local artists and figures from the cultural-intellectual elite (Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton). Shaw provocatively turned to the audience and called them all robots. For his own part, he stated that he would like to be a robot for only two hours a day, so that for the rest of the day he could be Bernard Shaw.

The play also enjoyed huge success in America with over 200 performances in New York. Critics saw it as a fully original play that belonged to no conventional genre or cultural context.

 

The play “became one of the most widely performed plays of the century,” and its success abroad was something entirely new in Czech literature.

The SF robot cliché

Čapek doesn’t just give us the word, he gives us the idea in its modern, scientific form.

 

 

We’re still rewriting and refreshing the robot trop (androids and cyborgs, Daleks, the Borg, Cylons…). Writers after RUR have explored similar themes and moral lessons.

What’s new in Čapek’s play is not the robot idea itself but “the complex meaning of the symbol of the robot, which represents not only the machine and its power to free man from toil, but, at the same time, symbolizes man himself, dehumanized by his own technology” (Harkins).

Čapek’s pragmatism

Pragmatism is an American philosophical tradition that Čapek maxim greatly admired—and we could read RUR as well as other works he wrote through the lens of the pragmatic maxim.

“Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

 

The meaning of a phenomenon consists in what would happen—all the consequences that would conceivably flow form it—if that something were real. One good and quick example of the maxim is a law.

 

Čapek sets up an imaginative thought experiment by means of estranging our reality and populating it with a set of nova, and then he explores the logical (i.e., philosophical-pragmatic) consequences of this.

 

This is largely true of (serious) SF—or, as some authors insist, “speculative fiction”—in general.

Analysis of the play: humor

The prologue (some translations have this as Act I) is humorous and light. It takes place ten years before the robot insurrection against humanity.

 

At the same time, the prologue is quite funny—or at least it should be when properly staged. The humor of the opening part of the play draws the audience in.

Analysis of the play: characterization

This isn’t a psychological drama. Čapek’s characters aren’t fully developed people, but rather stand-ins for ideas.

 

Domin, who is the lord, the dominator; Helena (of Troy); Busman, the businessman; Dr. Gall, who takes his name from the famous Greek physician Galen; Fabry the engineer, from Latin homo faber or “man the creator”; and Alquist, either from Latin aliquis (“somebody”) and/or Spanish el quisto (“the favorite”).

 

Under siege by the robots, the characters discuss what went wrong among themselves, and this allows the various ideas to compete with each other for the audience’s attention. But who’s right?

Čapek’s pragmatic relativism

No character has the full truth.

No character (no idea) is fully right or wrong.

Critics of the play have generally identified two main worldviews that Čapek contrast: Domin’s vs Alquist’s (and Helena’s), the industrial capitalists who exploit for gain vs the humanists.

 

Čapek’s own interpretation of RUR

“I wasn’t concerned about Robots, but about people. If there was anything I thought exhaustively about in constructing the play, it was the fate of the six or seven people who were supposed to represent humanity. It is hard for us to think of humanity as a dying or dead race. Yet imagine yourself standing at the grave of mankind; even the most extreme pessimist would surely realize the divine significance of this extinct species, and say: it was a great thing, to be human.”

 

One critic adds: that the main danger in the play “is civilization itself, which threatens to overwhelm man by its sheer weight and impersonality. Human reason has created civilization, but is manifestly unable to control it.”

Suvin’s definition: Čapek as a deeply “cognitive” write

The main thing is that the novum and the estrangement facilitate—or really require—a strong cognitive return.

Some aspects of this cognitive return include: grand ideas often come at great cost; for-profit industrial capitalism usually leads to disaster, even though it may be possible to convince yourself otherwise (cf. Domin’s defense of mass robot production).

 

Čapek’s warning is more acute one hundred years after RUR than it was in 1920.

 

 

With Čapek, we might say that the SF techniques are not an end-in-themselves, but rather a vehicle or means to facilitate this cognitive return.

Texts for end-of-class discussion

1.  A piece written to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the play.

2.  Another journalistic piece on a similar theme: his ongoing relevance.

 

Your homework is on the week-by-week syllabus, but… finish the Bulgakov novella Heart of a Dog (we move back to the Russian tradition) by next Tuesday’s class—and take the Canvas quiz on it. Our second guest speaker, Dr. Anna Tumarkin (who some of you know), will lead us in a discussion of it.