Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.
For a slight change of pace this week, I’ll be reviewing a sci-fi classic. And by “classic” I don’t mean a Ray Bradbury novel from the 1950’s, or an Isaac Asimov short story from the 1940’s. I mean a 1921 play by Czech writer Karel Čapek, R.U.R, a play which happens to have introduced the word “robot” to the world. Strap in, everyone, we’re about to get literary.
First of all, robots as they appear here are closer to androids than the metallic electricity-powered creations in later science fiction. The word “robot” actually comes from the Czech word “robota”, which means “forced labor” The robots look human, but they’re artificially created: the Rossum’s Universal Robots Factory kneads skin in giant vats, cranks out intestines by the yard, and produces veins and nerves on giant spools. The factory is the brainchild of Old Rossum – a scientist who was obsessed with becoming God-like by creating life and eventually human beings in a laboratory – and his nephew Young Rossum – who figured out if you got rid of a lot of unnecessary items in the human body you could use Old Rossum’s formula to make an entire army of cheap labor.
All of this is explained in the play’s introductory scene, where the heiress Helena Glory visits the isolated island factory. The scene is something of a comedy of errors, since Helena at first doesn’t believe that Director General Harry Domin’s human-looking secretary and butler are actually unfeeling robots. Once Helena has been convinced she then reveals herself to be a member of the League of Humanity and passionately offers solidarity and support to her downtrodden robot “brothers”, Domin’s five fellow factory managers…who happen to be human. Much hilarity ensues.
Helena isn’t at all convinced by the human workers’ arguments that robots are better off being soulless, and that a cheap labor force that needs little and wants nothing is the best thing that could happen to humanity. But her zeal has done one thing; it’s caused all six men to fall very much in love with her. The scene ends with the horrified Helena being told by Domin that she can’t possibly leave, and she has until breakfast to decide which of them she wants to marry.
Act 1 jumps forward in time, when Helena has spent the last ten years happily married to Harry Domin.
(Hang on, wait, what? When did she decide she was okay with…)
(HAPPILY MARRIED, MOVING RIGHT ALONG)
Rossum’s Factory has been churning out thousands, maybe millions of robots. Countries are all purchasing robot workers (and not a few robot soldiers), robot-made goods cost less and less, cheap labor for all, everything’s going swimmingly. Except for the fact that there are fewer ways left for humans to make money to buy those goods, every year there are fewer children being born to humanity and, oh yes, there’s that little matter of a robot uprising that’s sweeping across the world.
It’s tough to figure out what Čapek would think of all the mechanization going on today, with robots gradually taking over the workforce. On the one hand, the argument about how robots “save” the common man from the tedium of working sounds like something a factory-owner would say to justify having more and more people lose their jobs. On the other hand, the argument about “the nobility of labor” also sounds like a way to rationalize the fact that one segment of the population has to toil away in the fields or the factories, while the owners of the fields and factories get to sit back and profit from all that noble labor.
Act 2 and 3 show us so many ways that people convince themselves that the things they’ve done to destroy the world were all done with the best intentions. It makes us so much money. It’s just filling a demand. People will automatically become the best versions of themselves if every single need is taken care of automatically. And on and on about how it’s fine to have an entire race of disposable people (hat tip to Star Trek: The Next Generation). In many ways it’s a showcase of how the wealthy and powerful make decisions that affect everyone except themselves in order to stay in power. At one point Domin and the factory managers even discuss a pie-in-the-sky idea of starting factories in dozens of different countries, making robots with different races and languages, and then stopping the robots from taking control by convincing them that it’s the robots in the other factories that are the real enemy. (*cough*current political discourse*cough*)
The robot uprising reaches the island, and poor well-meaning Helena destroys the one bargaining chip they have left. Everything falls into chaos, Helena’s doomsaying Nana rushes onstage to wail a frantic I-told-you-so and rushes off again. The humans briefly become a Greek chorus, mourning the end of humanity and its works. The generator fails, the lights dim, and the humans die one by one, some bravely, some cowardly, mostly off-stage. Helena had hoped that the robots wouldn’t hate humanity if they could learn how to be like humans, but the robots ended up learning the wrong lesson.
Helena: And so I thought…if they were like us, if they could understand us, that then they couldn’t possibly hate us so much…if only they were like people…just a little bit…
Domin: Oh Helena! Nobody could hate man as much as man! Give a man a stone and he’ll throw it at you…
We’re left with just one human in the world, and an entire race of robots who no longer have the ability to make more of themselves. I possibly could have waited to review this play when I do my “spooky books” reviews in October, since in the final act things get very close to horror, with the off-stage screams of a robot being dissected alive.
The curtain falls on human kind, done in by its own folly. It’s a theme that’s been done many, many times before (Battlestar Galactica is just one of the more obvious examples), and yet the ending is still oddly hopeful, with a moment of kindness and two young robots who show that they’ve learned a different way to see the world and their part in it.
Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like dry leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds.
Huge thank-you to my Dad for suggesting this play!