by Karel Čapek
In short, for three whole days (also counting my sleep and dreams) I tried to create the reality of a life that I shamelessly invented from A to Z. I shall not write that story just as I have not written most of the others; but to get rid of it. Besides you more or less manufactured my hero out of calico and cottonwool, and therefore I am returning him to you, not taking into account that you advised me to blow rainbow bubbles. This might have been very rainbowy; but they say that life is too serious for us to look at its flaming and changeable colours.”
The surgeon was distrustfully counting the pages of the poet’s manuscript when the door opened slightly; die sister of mercy appeared and made a silent motion with her head in the direction apparently of number six. The surgeon dropped the manuscript and ran. So it had come. He frowned a little, when he discovered the young, hairy assistant sitting on the side of Case X’s bed (those people from the medical block are spreading themselves too much here), and holding in his fingers the wrist of the unconscious man. A very young, nice nurse (who also didn’t belong to that department)—a novice very likely; she had eyes only for that hairy assistant’s mane.
The surgeon wanted to say something not very pleasant, but the assistant, who hadn’t noticed him, raised his head. “I can’t feel his pulse. Bring the screen sister.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE POET’S STORY
“LET US first recall the event that gave the impulse from which that further series of events was being developed; whether you like it or not, we must begin at this point if we are to construct our story.
On a hot, stormy day an aeroplane crashed; the pilot was burned to death, the passenger was gravely injured, and unconscious. You can’t get away from the picture of the people who run together to that heap of ruins; they are excited because they are witnesses of a catastrophe, they ache with horror, giving advice one over the other as to what ought to be done; but bound with fear and squeamishness no one makes any effort to help the unconscious man. It is only when the police arrive that the heap of chaos begins to get straightened out; the police bark at the people, and send this one there, that one somewhere else; it’s strange how, as a matter of course, unwillingly, but secretly glad, people obey orders with a sense of importance and relief. They run for firemen, for the doctor, to telephone for the ambulance, while the police write down the names of witnesses, and the crowd fidgets from one foot to the other in respectful silence, for it is present at an official act. I have never witnessed such a misfortune, but I am full of it, I am one of the onlookers myself, in heated agitation I run along the hedge, to be there as well, carefully avoiding some fields (for I am a country man), I am upset, I make suggestions, express my opinion that most probably the pilot hadn’t switched off the engine, and that the fire ought to have been put out with sand; all these details I invent with an unsparing hand, in a disinterested manner, for they do not fit into this or any other story; I cannot even boast to my acquaintances that I saw a great accident. You haven’t the slightest bit of phantasy; and so you said ‘Poor fellow,’ and in saying that the affair was settled for you (not taking into account what you did as a surgeon). What a proper and simple reaction, while I toss about with cruel and painful details which I imagine for myself. I often feel ashamed when I see you others react so simply and humanly to various incidents of life which for me are only themes round which to spin with my mulish cleverness. I don’t know exacdy whether in it there is an unruly playfulness, or, on the contrary, a strange and relendess thoroughness; (but to return to our case) I invested that man’s fatal fall with so many pictures, horrible and grotesque, that out of shame and penitence, withdrawing contritely the gimcrack of all outside circumstance, in my story I should like to try to describe it as the fall of an archangel with broken wings. It’s simpler with you; you say ‘Poor fellow’ as if making a holy mark on the scene of the disaster.
Perhaps this explanation strikes you as rather muddled. Phantasy for its own sake seems immoral and cruel, like a child; it indulges in horror and ridicule. How often have I led my fictitious beings along the paths of sorrow and humiliation so that I could pity them the more! Such are we, we creators of phantasy; to add glory or value to a man’s life we interfere and bring in a portentous destiny, and we overburden him with trouble and adversity. But after all, doesn’t it bring with it a special glory of its own ? To show that he hasn’t led a barren and empty life, a man nods his head and says: ‘I’ve lived through a lot.’ I say, doctor, let’s share our tasks: you as becomes your profession, and out of love for the man, take away his pain, and heal his weaknesses; while I out of love for him, and as becomes my profession, will hedge him round with conflict and mortification, and poke about in his wounds without so much as a touch of Peru balsam. You stroke the scar which has beautifully and clearly healed, while I with amazement will probe the wound. In the end it may perhaps emerge that I also relieve suffering by explaining how it hurts.
I try to excuse literature for its pleasure in jeering and in dealing with tragedy. For both of these are detours that phantasy discovered by means of which, and along their unsubstantial paths, it created the illusion of reality. Reality in itself is neither tragic nor ridiculous; it is too serious and infinite for either the one or the other. Compassion and laughter are only shocks with which we accompany and comment upon the events around us. Evoke these actions by any sort of means, and you evoke the impression that beyond you something real had taken place, the more real it is the stronger is the emotional effect. My God, what tricks and dodges we invent, we professionals in phantasy, to agitate properly and mercilessly the encrusted soul of the reader! Dear doctor, in your honest and conscientious life there isn’t much room for compassion and laughter. You don’t wallow excitedly in the frightfuiness of a man soaked in blood, but you wipe away the blood and do what is necessary. You take no pleasure in laughing at a man with soup on his clothes, but you advise him to get himself clean, at which the boisterous laughter of mankind is suppressed, and the event undone that gave rise to it. Well, we invent stories which you can’t undo, against which you can do nothing, they are as irreparable and unchangeable as history. Throw away that book, or allow yourself to fall to the shocks that are set like snares for you, and look beyond them for the reality to which they correspond.
Here are some technical conclusions which can be drawn from the above explanation: If I proceed by way of phantasy I shall choose some striking and unusual event; like a butcher appraising a beast, I shall see if, as a sensation, it is duly plump and substantial. See, here we’ve got a crash, a dreadful headlong turmoil, at the sight of which you can’t help but stop. Almighty God, what a hopeless heap of chaos it is! What can we make of these broken wings, and struts, how can we put it together so that it flies again, at least as a paper kite, whose string I can hold in my hand ? At this one can only look, dithering with fright, or like a decent man say seriously and respectfully, ‘Poor fellow.’ ”
CHAPTER XX
“ONE says of phantasy that it chops and changes; perhaps it does in some cases (which, however, aren’t found in good prose), but far more frequently it runs smartly and attentively, like a dog with its nose on a fresh scent; she just gasps with eagerness, she tears along the line, and drags us here and there. You are a hunter, and you know that a setter on her zig-zag course doesn’t run here and there, but on the contrary she sticks to the scent with sustained and passionate interest. I must tell you that well-developed phantasy is no uncertain dreaming, but an activity unusually relentless, and passionately determined; it is true that it halts and doubles, but only to make certain that that is not its prey. Where are you going you eager bitch; what are you after, what’s the line of your aim? Aim, what an aim; I’m after something alive, and I don’t know yet where I’m going to come across it.
Believe me, writing novels is more like hunting than, say, building a cathedral according to plans already drawn up. Until the very last moment we are continually surprised at what we come across; w
e get into unsuspected situations, but only because we are foolishly and persistently following that trail of ours of something alive. We are after a white stag, and while doing so, almost by accident, we discover new places in the world. To write is an adventure, and I shall say no more in praise of that occupation. We can’t go astray so long as we are faithful to our trail; even if our pilgrimage leads to the Crystal Mountains, along the fiery track of a falling star, our direction is good, thank God, and we haven’t lost the right way. (I’m not speaking here of our anxiety when we do lose the right scent; of our miserable and helpless attempts to get further; of our inglorious homecomings with that tired and ashamed cur crawling behind us, instead of running on ahead.)
By which in so many words is said: to the devil with phantasy; it’s no use to us, and it won’t lead us even to the tips of our noses if her muscles are not quivering with the fever of interest. I say, let her He down if she hasn’t before, her already marked out an invisible trail, and if her tongue isn’t hanging out with impatience to follow it to the end. What is called talent, is far the greater part interest or obsession, interest to follow something alive, the deer lost in the expanse of the world. Dear man, the world is wide, wider than our experience; it is made out of a handful of facts, and a whole universe of possibilities. Anything that we do not know of is a kind of possibility here, and every fact is a bead in the rosary of past and future eventualities. It’s no use, if we follow a man we must enter that world of guess-work, we must scent out his possible steps, past and future; we must pursue him with our phantasy if he is to appear to us in his invisible aliveness. It is absolutely immaterial to us whether he has been completely invented, or is completely real; an Ariel or a hawker selling tape; both are spun out of the pure and infinite material of possibility, which is the depository of everything, even of what actually was. What is called a real story, or a real person, is for us no more than one possibility among a thousand, and perhaps not even the most consistent and important one. All reality is merely a casually opened page, or a word read at random in the sibylline books; and we desire to know more.
I am attempting to show you that if we are led by phantasy we cross a threshold into some sort of infinity; the threshold of a world not bounded by our experience, wider than our scraps of knowledge, and containing infinitely more than is known to us. I tell you that we should not dare to step into those limitless regions, if we did not blunder there blind and headlong in search of something that is eluding us. If the spirit of the tempter whispered to us: Now invent something, anything you like—we should feel embarrassed, and probably we should shrink back in terror at the vanity and senselessness of the task; we should be afraid to embark without aim and direction on that Mare tene-brarum. Let me put a question: What right has a man who does not want to be taken for a fool or an impostor to invent something that is non-existent? There is only one answer, luckily definite and certain: Let him, he must; he isn’t doing so out of waywardness, he is being dragged into it, he dashes off after something, and his meandering course is the path of necessity. Ask not him, but God, what is necessity.
I am wondering why that man who fell from the sky got into my head; why not Ariel, or Hecuba? What is Hecuba to me! but it may happen to me that for a time she would be all for me that matters. I should fight with her until she would bless me like the angel blessed Jacob; and I might be given grace to find in myself the life and pain of an old despondent hag. God be with Hecuba; it is frivolous of me not to pay her more attention, but as I said I have on my mind a man who did not complete his flight. I think that you are to blame for that, for you said with that well-known cool manner of yours: Why the devil did he fly in such a wind ? Yes, why the devil; why all the devils; why all the accursed did he fly in such a storm ? What an overmastering and undeniable motive he must have had to undertake such a senseless flight! Isn’t that something for meditation and wonder? Yes, it’s a mere accident if a man gets killed; but it’s not a mere accident if he flies in spite of everything. It’s obvious that he HAD TO fly; and then over the ruins that looked nothing more than a broken toy, the huge edifice of an event arose made up of a mere accident and necessity. Necessity and mere accident, two legs of a tripod on which Pythia sits; the third is mystery.
You let me see him, the man without a face or a name, the man without consciousness; this is the last passport of life, and anyone who cannot prove his identity with it is Unknown in the severe and forbidding sense of the word. Hadn’t you a tormenting feeling that we owe him his identity? I saw it in your eyes: to know who he was, and where he wanted to go in such a hurry; perhaps we might testify that he got as far as here, and so fulfil this human duty. I am not as human as you are; I did not think of his affairs of this world, I became obsessed with the passion of investigation. And now no one and nothing will detain me; fare you well, I must be after him. Since he is so unknown, I shall invent him, I shall search for him amongst his possibilities. You ask what business it is of mine ? If only I knew! I only know that I became obsessed with it.”
CHAPTER XXI
“I USED the phrase ‘The passion of investigation,’ and I feel that it is right; but that passion arose purely by accident, and through a circumstance so petty that I ought to feel ashamed of it. When they brought you that injured man you said that apparently his papers had been burnt, and that in his pockets there was nothing but a handful of small change, some French, English, and American money, and a Dutch dubbeltje. That collection of change surprised me; you may imagine that that man really had something to do in those different countries, and what was left in his pockets was the small change that he could not spend; but whenever I have travelled I have always tried in some way or other to get rid of all the small coins of the country which I was leaving, in the first place because I should no longer be able to change them, and secondly so that they wouldn’t be in the way. It has occurred to me that that man was familiar with those currencies, and that he had lived in those regions where they are in circulation. And at the same time I said to myself: Antilles, Porto Rico, Martinque, Barbados, and Curaçao—American, British, Dutch, and French colonies with the currencies of their home lands.
If I try to explain psychologically that mental jump from the handful of money to the West Indies, I find in my memory the following:
1. A strong wind blew which reminded me of Orcan. Association with the Leeward Islands, and the famous Caribbean region of cyclones.
2. I was put out, discontented, furious with myself, and with my work. Wandering images arose in my mind, and a desire for escape. Nostalgia for far-off and exotic countries; with me usually for Cuba, the island of my nostalgia.
3. An overwhelming and rather envious notion, that that man had flown from somewhere a long way off; an automatic connection of the present event with the previous disposition.
4. At last that event itself, that flying accident, an exciting and almost agreeable sensation, and at the same time the tendency to adorn it with romantic conjectures. It is a typical example, showing how strongly human catastrophies direct the course of our phantasy.
By means of all that the conjecture (as I realize now very superficial), arose in me that that handful of money pointed to the West Indies; just then I was almost enthusiastic about my perspicacity, and I felt that it was as clear as daylight that that man was coming straight from the Antilles; it satisfied and excited me greatly. When you took me to the bed of Case X, I went feeling certain that I was going to have a look at a man who had come from my emotional Antilles. I did not tell you of my discoveries because I was afraid that you might snort contemptuously, as is your disagreeable habit; I did not want you to doubt a notion with which I was just falling in love. That man was ghastly in his unconsciousness; he was inhuman and deeply mysterious in those bandages which lay on his face the mask of silence and the unknown; but chiefly for me he was a man from the Antilles, the man WHO HAD BEEN THERE. That was decisive. From that moment he was MY Case X, which I had to solve; I
set out in pursuit of him, and it was, my friend, a long and devious trail.
Yes, now I am through with it. Now it is clear to me that what I felt to be a brilliant, and likely interpretation was, strictly speaking, a mere whim of mine that gave me pleasure; and therefore I cannot write any more of my story. It might be shown, if it has not already been done, that that man was a commercial traveller from Halle-an-der-Saale, or an ordinary American trying to make himself believe that an enterprising man of business like himself has not time to wait twenty-four hours for better weather. How deplorable! I can invent anything I like, but only on condition that I believe in it myself. As soon as my confidence that it really might have been like that is shaken, my phantasy appears to me as puerile and deplorable bungling. Well, and now you are called off, you silly and eager bitch; in vain you have romped along over the fallen leaves with your nose to the ground, pretending that you have a trail that doesn’t exist, or which you lost long ago at the crossroads of possibility. You still pretend that you are on the scent, for dogs make a point of prestige; you still sniff at every mousehole, and you try to make me believe that our prey is still on the move. Well, leave it, it isn’t here; you look up at me with your canine eyes as if to say: ‘Is it my fault? you are the master, tell me where I am to go, show what you want!’ And now I must look for the trail, look for the REASONS why he set out in this direction and not in that. Good Lord, reasons! motives! verisimilitudes! what a mess! even that dog no longer has any faith in me or in herself, and cannot understand what I want from her; this? here? or something else ? Empty-handed master and dog return. Strange what a feeling of SOLITUDE there is in failure.
