No newts are good news: on Karel Čapek’s great satire

[Did a version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Isaac Asimov is the writer you immediately think of when you hear the word “robot”, but Asimov was barely out of his diapers when the word was first used in a literary work – by the Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from “robota” which means mundane labour of the sort that’s better suited to machines than to thinking human beings, and it’s central to one of the big themes of Čapek’s writing – mass production as a vessel for dehumanisation.

Čapek's 1936 novel War with the Newts can be categorised as belonging to the still-nascent genre of science fiction, but it’s also one of the most incisive political satires I’ve read. This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and even to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways.

Soon secret temples for salamander worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches start bathing in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work, even creating a syndicate for huge engineering projects that will link continents and supposedly create a Utopia on earth. This in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; a German doctor proclaims the “ur-original German Salamanders” to be racially purer than other newts, an obvious reference to political developments of the time.

War with the Newts is narrated mainly in the third person, and in the style of anthropological reportage, but there are many tonal shifts and asides: from transcripts of newspaper clippings to a first-person account of the horrendous experiments conducted on the newts to a hilarious series of quotes from public figures of the time. (“They certainly haven’t got a soul. In this, they agree with men – G B Shaw”. “We can learn a lot from them, especially for swimming long distances – Johnny Weissmuller”.) The longest and most ambitious chapter “Along the Steps of Civilisation” has footnotes that are so elaborate they frequently take up most of the space on the page!

This is a very funny book in parts, and I have to admit that the humour was my first point of engagement with it (don’t miss the use of stream-of-consciousness in the chapter where a shallow young man named Abe - the son of a rich movie magnate - and his narcissistic girlfriend Li encounter the semi-literate newts on a beach). But it's also a far-reaching novel of ideas, a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others, the whimsical ways in which our civilisation – with its many differentiated races, countries, classes and communities – has been organised, and our complete disregard for (or inability to see) the lessons of history.

“Look here, Bellomy,” I said to him, “You are a decent kind of man, a gentleman as one says. Doesn’t it go sometimes against the grain to earn your living from what in actual fact is downright slavery?”

Bellomy shrugged his shoulders. “Newts are newts,” he grunted evasively.

“Two hundred years ago they used to say Negroes are Negroes.”

“And wasn’t it true?” said Bellomy. “Check!”

I lost that game. It suddenly struck me that every move in chess was old and had already been played by someone. Perhaps our history has already been played too, and we shift our figures with the same moves to the same checks as in times long past. It is quite likely that just such a decent and reserved Bellomy once rounded up Negroes on the Ivory Coast, and shipped them out to Haiti or to Louisiana, letting them peg out in the steerage. He didn’t think anything wrong with it then, that Bellomy. Bellomy never thinks anything wrong. That’s why he’s incorrigible.

As you can imagine, some of the content is polemical. I don’t think Čapek is attacking any single political, economic or social system (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for example), but War with the Newts can certainly be read as a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become over time. In one significant chapter, a philosopher named Wolf Meynert makes the cynical suggestion that heterogeneity is not conducive to happiness.

Nations, professions, classes cannot live together permanently without crowding in upon each other, getting in each other’s way to the point of suffocation. Either live for ever apart – something that would only be possible if the world were big enough – or in opposition, in a struggle for life and death. [...] We have created a fiction of mankind which includes us and “the rest” in some sort of imaginary higher unity ... It was magnanimous conceit. And for this supreme idealism the human race will now pay with its inexorable disintegration.

The range of ideas covered in this book is dizzying, and difficult to process in a single reading; so sharp and persuasive is Čapek’s examination of the human condition that when hostilities finally break out between the competing species and the Chief Salamander addresses humans with the words “Hello, you men. You will work with us in demolishing your world. Thank you”, it almost seems like a reasonable request. If human beings are diabolical enough to take an innocuous creature and reshape it in their own image – well, they may as well face up to the unpleasant results.

**** 

Speaking of diabolical, the following passage put me in mind of a generation that thinks and writes in SMS/Twitter jargon, as well as the general lack of regard for grammar that one sees even in newspapers today:

Their linguistic abilities showed strange shortcomings...it was with difficulty that they could pronounce long, polysyllabic words, and they attempted to reduce them to a single syllable, which they uttered sharply and with something of a croak...In their mouths every language underwent a characteristic change, and somehow became rationalised into its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is a point worth consideration that their neologisms, their pronunciation and grammatical simplicity were picked up rapidly, partly by the human wreckage at the ports, partly by the so-called better society, and from there these modes of expression spread to the daily Press and soon became general...

P.S. The Czech have a cinematic tradition of low-key satires or allegories, including such fine films as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Here’s an old post I wrote on the latter. And here's a post about John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, a "logical fantasy" that's similar to War with the Newts in some ways.

Ibn-e Safi's Jasoosi Duniya, now in English

I’ve been relishing Blaft’s English translations of four “Jasoosi Duniya” thrillers by the legendary Urdu novelist Ibn-e Safi. Will be writing a longer piece about these books soon, but briefly: the central figures in the series are the unflappable crime-fighter Colonel Faridi and his assistant Captain Hameed. The world they inhabit is an intriguing one – though Ibn-e Safi was living in pre-Partition India when he began the series (and in Karachi when he wrote these four books in the mid-1950s), the setting is highly westernised in many ways, with the action moving between posh nightclubs and harbours, skating rinks, the hillock-and-cave-ridden “Fun Island”, and so on. Notorious international criminals flit in and out of sight, and the original cover art features blonde women in flouncy skirts and archers who appear modelled on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.

Much of the likeability of these novels comes from the Hameed character who, though a resourceful sleuth when the stakes are high, is also a practical joker with a strange and inappropriate sense of humour. Some of his antics put me in mind of Amar Ayyar, the prince of tricksters in the Hamzanama.

At one point we are informed, quite casually, that Hameed has a pet goat named Bhagra Khan, whom he takes for long drives in Colonel Faridi’s air-conditioned Lincoln. Upon which I present you with the following mini-excerpts:

It so happened that around this time, pet billy goats had become very fashionable and the city was teeming with them. Many college students were now keeping billy goats, and they would walk them on the streets, equipped with all the latest modern accessories for billy goat keepers [...] Many respectable persons gave up wearing ties and felt hats, because they were simply unable to cope with the stylish ties and felt hats sported by the billy goats [...] Students would insist that their goats had just as much right to enjoy the silver-screen antics of Raj Kapoor as they did; that the goats were just as interested in chewing up and regurgitating the serious social messages addressed in these films.

[...] Hameed was of the opinion that if everybody in the world tried to study the newspaper with such concentration, at least half of them would go mad. Therefore, instead of reading the newspaper, he spent his mornings reciting ghazals to his billy goat, and lecturing it on progress and morals.

The critic and writer Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has done an excellent translating job. You get a sense of the spirit in which the original novels were written (and the spirit in which they must have been received by their readers), but these read like stories freshly written in English - transcreations rather than laborious sentence-by-sentence translations. (At the Delhi launch recently, Faruqi mentioned that he was reluctant to do the translations when Blaft first approached him, "because these books are so steeped in the local idiom and culture". He also made the very dispiriting proclamation that he wouldn't have the time to translate any more of the novels. Hope he changes his mind.)

More on the series soon. Meanwhile, here are some earlier posts about Blaft titles: Tamil pulp fiction, Tamil folk-tales, Kumari Loves a Monster. And here's a fine website on Ibn-e Safi's life and work.

"An essential moment, beyond all the formal planning"

[The full version of my Yahoo! film column for this week]

A few days ago I saw an old Alfred Hitchcock interview in a documentary titled “The Men who Made the Movies”. Among other things, the Master discusses his method of preparing such sequences as the shower killing – made up of 70 “pieces of film” – in Psycho.

“It has to be written out on paper,” he says, “You can’t just walk on to the set ... well, you can if you want to...” (disdainful shrug) “... but I prefer to do it this way. However tiny and however short the pieces of film are, they should be written down just in the same way as a composer writes down those little black dots from which we get beautiful sound.”

As you can tell, Hitchcock was fussy about getting a film ready long before the actual shoot took place – which makes sense of his famous remark that he never felt the need to look into the camera on the sets, and that he often felt bored and distracted during the actual filming. “I almost wish I didn’t have to go to the set and shoot the film, because from a creative point of view one has gone through that process beforehand... by the time the script has been finished, I know every shot and every angle by heart.”

In this light it’s notable that one of Hitchcock’s greatest champions, the critic Robin Wood, admitted late in his life that for all their artistry, Hitchcock’s movies “went dead” on him more easily (when he re-watched them for the umpteenth time) than, say, the movies of Howard Hawks, who was much more open to improvising with his actors and crew.

But by that logic, Victor Erice’s 1972 Spanish film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) should be dead on arrival; this is a movie made so meticulously and self-consciously – with so much attention to the composition of nearly every frame – that it makes Hitchcock’s work seem laidback in comparison. While The Spirit of the Beehive is a very beautiful film to look at (especially in the Criterion Collection transfer), it also has a cold and detached quality that makes it easier to admire from a distance than to take to one’s heart.

Its narrative is a series of discrete episodes about the many terrors and wonders of childhood – beginning with a little girl’s discovery of cinema. In a makeshift screening room in her small village, six-year-old Ana watches the 1931 Frankenstein along with other children. “I would advise you not to take the film too seriously,” director James Whale warns the audience in the pre-credits introduction, but Ana is traumatised by what she sees– and her elder sister Isabel makes it worse by telling her the monster really exists.

Later, they play morbid games in an empty house that seems much too large for their small family. During a stroll in the forest, their father – a beekeeper – warns them about the dangers of poisonous mushrooms. And in one of the film’s most arresting vignettes, Ana and Isabel visit the solitary railway track that runs near their village and watch, petrified, as a large black train passes by, billowing smoke. (The almost primeval appeal of the locomotive is a reminder that one of the first true movie “monsters” was the Lumiere Brothers train that seemed to head straight towards a startled audience. But watching this scene, I also recalled another great movie moment that involved two fascinated children waiting to see a train – in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.)

The Spirit of the Beehive is a slow-paced film and Erice exercises tight control over his mise-en-scene and his symbolism. (For example, the bees – operating with mechanical precision – can be seen as representing an efficient yet emotionless society; Spain was under Franco's dictatorship at the time.) When I first watched it, it took me a while to understand the principal relationships, even though the family consists of just four people: the beekeeper, his wife and the two little girls. Soon I realised that this was because Erice deliberately avoids showing all the family members together, even when they are in the same room. One vivid scene with the four of them eating together at the dining table, but no two of them ever in the same frame, has the remoteness of the spacecraft scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey – it creates a distancing effect that’s central to the story.

And yet, this most carefully planned of films contains a single spontaneous shot, lasting just a couple of seconds, that shows us the precise moment when little Ana’s interior world becomes filled with dread. She is watching the scene in Frankenstein where a little girl offers a flower to Boris Karloff’s monster. Completely immersed, Ana leans forward slightly and moves her head for a better look; her mouth opens a touch.

How pleasing it is to learn that this wasn’t a rehearsed scene. Luis Cuadrado, the cinematographer of Spirit of the Beehive, was sitting on the floor in front of his young performer, holding the camera in his hand (and handheld shots are not the norm in this film!), recording her expression as she really watched Frankenstein for the first time. What he captured was a completely artless reaction: by all accounts, the real-life Ana Torrent (who played Ana) was just as affected by Karloff’s monster as her character was supposed to be, and the experience of shooting The Spirit of the Beehive remained a disturbing memory for the actress well into adulthood. In other words, that shot is a meeting point between film as a medium for fictional narrative and film as a record of reality.

In the documentary “The Footprints of a Spirit”, included as an Extra on the Criterion DVD, Erice says:

“It’s such a premeditated film, but what I consider the most essential moment in it goes beyond all that formal planning. It’s unrepeatable, something that cannot be directed. That’s the wonder and the paradox of cinema – it’s the best moment I’ve ever captured on film.”

Coming from a director who was known for his fastidiousness, I find this admission both moving and illuminating. It’s almost as if one of those worker bees broke away from its hive-mates for an instant and danced a little jig by itself, before getting back to its regimented work.

P.S. For all of Hitchcock’s careful pre-planning - and his occasional treatment of actors as chess pieces - it would be naive to imagine that his movies contained no improvisations or on-the-set additions. Watch the intense sequence in Psycho where Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is interrogated by Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) and you have a classic example of two Method actors improvising as they go along, playing off each other’s reactions in a way no director could possibly have foreseen. And despite Hitchcock’s supercilious attitude to actors (“they ought to be treated as cattle”), Perkins has said that the director was very open to his suggestions, such as the idea of having the nervous Norman perpetually chewing candy. Perhaps old Hitch wasn’t as averse to film sets as he would have us believe.

A girl, a monster and an unrehearsed shot

In the Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive, a little girl discovers something about cinema...and watching her, so do we. My latest Persistence of Vision column is here.

They also served: Navin Nischol, Farley Granger

The past month has seen the deaths of many film performers, most famously Elizabeth Taylor, who was everyone’s idea of what a Movie Star should be: someone who is the natural centre of every frame she appears in. Stories about Taylor’s screen presence – right from the time she was a little girl, in films like National Velvet – are the stuff of legend, and her most high-profile film as an adult, the bloated, forever-in-the-making Cleopatra, often seemed to be more about the actress and the media carnival surrounding her than about the Egyptian queen.
 
But two honourable “sideshow performers” also left us recently: one was Navin Nischol, who had a short stint as a leading man in the early 1970s – even playing the inconspicuous hero in the film Parwana, where Amitabh Bachchan had the (more interesting) negative role. [The poster on the left tells a story: Amitabh - looking nothing like he did in Parwana - occupies centrestage, and there is even space for Shatrughan Sinha, who made a guest appearance in the film. But Nischol, the hero, is missing.] The other was the American Farley Granger, a good-looking man (with somewhat exotic and effete features by classical Hollywood standards) and a competent actor if well-cast and directed, but best remembered today for films that didn’t rest on his shoulders.

The “Best Farley Granger Film” (defined as a judicious balance between the importance of his role, the quality of his performance and the overall quality of the film itself) is probably Nicholas Ray’s film noir They Live By Night, about a couple on the run from the law. And Granger did play lead in a couple of other notable movies, such as Luchino Visconti’s Senso. But the two best-known films he appeared in were directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and in both he was an effective second fiddle. In Rope (famous for Hitchcock’s use of long unbroken takes), he was the more passive of two young men who commit a murder “for kicks”, and in Strangers on a Train he was the limp-wristed Guy Haines (just your regular Guy) – the perfect foil and chump for the film’s charismatic bad boy Bruno. In my view, both films benefit from his casting: Strangers on a Train is particularly disturbing and effective because the villain is more interesting than the hero, and because Granger isn’t the strong Hollywood leading man who takes control of proceedings and compels the viewer to root for him.

It’s harder to make something out of Nischol’s older movies. To be honest, I don’t even remember most of them well: apart from Parwana, there was the atmospheric Dhund – where Danny Denzongpa stole the show as a sadistic, wheelchair-bound murder victim(!) – and the Ramsay Brothers’ quasi-horror movie Hotel. By the 1980s, it was more typical for Nischol to be cast in a 10-minute part as "Doctor" in a star-studded film like The Burning Train (a.k.a. The Turning Brain). 

Still, he did have one intriguing late-career role in Nagesh Kukunoor’s amusing but trite Bollywood Calling, about an American actor coming to India and getting involved with an assembly-line Bollywood production. Here, he played an ageing, megalomaniacal superstar named Manu Kapoor, pointedly addressed only as Manu-ji by the fawners around him, and there was something poignant about this casting – for Manu was exactly the kind of star that Nischol never became in real life (and the kind of star that the man who played a supporting role in Parwana DID become).

Though star power has been central to cinema’s mass popularity almost from the beginning, the movies could scarcely get by without their side-heroes: the comic foils whose double takes could make the lead comedian look even funnier; the supporting actors who tried to be stars but fell back into stock character roles; the players who managed leading parts in B-movies but never quite crossed over to the mainstream. Granger and Nischol are among the countless performers who shone for a brief period (even developing small cult followings along the way) and then faded, or turned to smaller roles or television shows. Their careers are a reminder of the inscrutable nature of movie stardom – how, for reasons beyond our full understanding, one personality might light a spark with an audience in a particular place and time while another simply doesn’t.

Speaking for the tribes: Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon

The General and his son looked steadily at the official. At last, the son spoke. “How is it possible for us to be treated as belonging to Afghanistan? We stay for a few months and a few months in Pakistan. The rest of the time we spend moving. We are Pawindahs and belong to all countries, or to none.”

It isn’t often that someone has a debut novel published at the age of seventy-eight**, and the sheen of Jamil Ahmad’s achievement is barely dimmed when you learn that he wrote the first draft of The Wandering Falcon in the 1970s and returned to it recently at the prompting of his family. We should be glad that he did. If it’s true that every author has one book in him that he alone can – and should – write, this is a clear case. Ahmad used to work for the Civil Service in Pakistan and served as chairman of the Tribal Development Corporation, which gave him an insider’s view of the struggles of itinerant people living near the borders of nation-states. More importantly, he has the good writer’s empathy and talent for observation – The Wandering Falcon is extraordinary for its intimate chronicling of lives that are all but invisible to most urban, English-language readers.

Most outsiders think of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran mainly in terms of the political conflicts that they have recently been at the centre of – events that hinge on their identities as countries with manmade boundaries and modern systems of governance. But for the tribes who lived in and around these regions for centuries, codes of honour and discipline had nothing to do with such concepts as statehood and citizenship. In the past few decades, the lives of these people have seen wholesale changes, and Ahmad’s book is about the passing of an old world, its gradual replacement by a world of documents and stamps (not to mention greed and betrayal), and the many dreams that are crushed along the way. (“The pressures were inexorable. One set of values, one way of life, had to die. In this clash the state, as always, proved stronger than the individual. The new way of life triumphed over the old.”)

This isn’t to say that Ahmad excessively romanticizes the ways of tribal people, who can be brutal in dealing with those who break their internal laws. In fact, the haunting first chapter (excerpted in Granta Pakistan) is about forbidden lovers who flee their tribe and seek shelter at a lonesome military outpost, where they live with their little son for a few years. Ahmad’s description of the hostile land, the brief period of grace available to the family – and the inevitability of their eventual fate – is both restrained and vivid, and the chapters that follow tell other gripping stories: about a group of people forbidden from crossing a border with their thirsty herds; a first-person account by a man returning from Germany to his tribal homeland of Tirah; the plight of a Gujjar girl married off to a cold-hearted bear-trainer. These tenuously linked tales cover the shift from a truly communal existence – where a family could easily pick out its own animals from a joint herd after a large-scale migration – to personal circumstances so dire that people might lose all contact with children and siblings for decades.

The jacket description of The Wandering Falcon gives the impression that the book’s protagonist – indeed, its rootless falcon – is an orphaned boy named Tor Baz, but this is true only to an extent. The doomed lovers in the first chapter are the boy’s parents and he stays in the reader’s view as he grows older, his path intersecting briefly with those of the other characters; we come to see him as an anchoring figure. But around a third of the way through the book, he recedes so far in the distance that he no longer seems particularly important to the narrative. (His role in one of the most fascinating chapters “The Guide” seems like an afterthought.) And thus, the ending – with this eternal wanderer musing that perhaps it is time for him to settle down – has the feel of a forced attempt at a summing up.

But while the unevenness of Tor Baz’s part in the narrative is a minor weakness, it doesn’t take away from the quiet, unshowy beauty of Ahmad’s writing and the wisdom of his insights. I think The Wandering Falcon works best if it’s read in the same way that one would read Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a collection of separate stories about the many faces of modern Pakistan, with occasionally recurring characters. Ahmad's book is a fine addition to the growing body of English-language writing set in the region.

** Perhaps Ahmad could get a blurb by the 95-year-old Khushwant Singh, proclaiming “this author is a young talent to watch”.

[Did a shorter version of this for The Sunday Guardian. Some earlier posts about contemporary Pakistani writers: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and a long conversation with Mohsin Hamid; outtakes from a story about Pakistani writing in English; Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Musharraf Ali Farooqi's translation of the Hamzanama; Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows; Bapsi Sidhwa's Lahore anthology]

TEDx talk about film writing

I'm giving a talk on film literature at this TEDx event at the Netaji Subhas Institute of Techonology on April 17, around 11 AM. Nothing very elaborate - it'll only be around 20-25 minutes - but it'll give me a chance to touch on some of the things I've written in the past about film reviewing and cinema books, and to briefly discuss Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 and The Popcorn Essayists. (I've also been tinkering about incompetently with Powerpoint - for the first time in more than 10 years - and it's a minor wonder my computer hasn't crashed. Yet.)

Anyone interested in showing up for the talk needs to register here. But the video will probably be online at some point anyway.