War with the Newts

Intertextuality is a narrative strategy that intentionally draws upon other texts—including fiction, historical events, and cultural phenomena—to create meaning. Authors anticipate that readers will recognize references to texts beyond the physical bounds of the text in their hands. Intertextuality is accomplished through parody, allusion, quotation, or other modes of reference. It is often a characteristic of postmodern literature, which is often cited as a literary movement of the post-World War II era but with origins that are evident in literature as early as the turn of the 20th century. Karel Čapek’s novel War with the Newts is an early example of intertextuality that would inspire writers later in the 20th century.

Čapek draws upon, and parodies, several different genres in War with the Newts. Captain van Toch and his interactions with the newts resemble the elements of adventure novels, such as those written by Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne. The captain himself denies being an adventurer but, after his death, Bondy refers to the captain’s story as “the adventurous story of the pearls” (150). Bondy, then, shifts the narrative into the utopian genre, literature that explores an ideal world. Again, reference to this genre is made explicit when Bondy says that the newts’ enslaved labor will “achieve Utopias.” One significant and well-known book in this genre is Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which coined the term “utopia.” Speaking directly to the reader, the author of the novel even lists other authors of utopias, such as Paul Adam, H. G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley as influences. Readers of the time would be familiar with these highly popular literary genres and would recognize the way that Čapek’s novel invoked and then poked fun at their narrative conventions.

More specifically, War with the Newts draws upon the convention of utopian designs becoming, or being revealed to already be, dystopian. While utopian writing often presents blueprints for idealized society, with less emphasis on narrative plot, dystopian writing puts those blueprints into action to illustrate the ways in which attempts to achieve high social order often devolve into chaos and oppression. This same narrative pattern is particularly pervasive within science fiction and can be seen in the mid- to late 20th century, such as in the literature of Ursula Le Guin, and into the 21st century, as in the popular novels and films of The Hunger Games (2008) and Divergent (2011) series.