Critical Evaluation
Early translations of R.U.R. gave the word “robot”—derived from the Czech word for forced labor—to the English language. Subsequent users have, however, shifted its meaning. Rossum’s robots are slaves manufactured from artificial flesh and blood, but the word is currently applied in industry to refer to machines that mimic the actions of a human limb. The shift in meaning was begun when Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) extended the term to embrace a humanoid creature made of metal. It was taken a stage further when some science fiction writers who wished to discriminate between humanoid machines and humanoids made of artificial organic materials—and who were more familiar with Metropolis than R.U.R.—chose to restrict the term “robot” to metallic humanoids while calling fleshy humanoids “androids.”
The fact that people associate the term “robot” with machinery led some commentators to interpret R.U.R. as an allegory about mechanization. It can, indeed, be decoded in this way, but that was certainly not what Karel apek intended. He used a very similar plot in the novel Válka s mloky (1936; The War with the Newts, 1937), in which the role played by Rossum’s robots is played by a newly discovered race of intelligent animals. A novel that does feature marvelous machinery, Továrna na absolutno (1922; The Absolute at Large, 1927), proceeds in a rather different manner. It is true that apek was suspicious of the march of technology, but he was far more suspicious of the follies and mistaken ambitions of human beings, as can easily be seen in Ze ivota hmyzu (1920; And So Infinitam: The Life of the Insects, 1923), a satire he wrote with his brother Josef shortly after writing R.U.R.
R.U.R.’s primary target is the attitude of mind that Harry Domin represents: that human beings are—or ought to be—eager to be released from the burden of labor, for which they are in any case ill-adapted by virtue of their appetite for play and other diversions. Labor, according to Domin, ought instead to be done by beings specifically adapted to that task: beings without ambition or distraction and hence without rights to enable them to pursue ambitions or distractions. This description can far more readily be applied to the attitude of the leisured classes toward the servant classes, whose labor supports the leisured classes’ lifestyle than it can to the relationship between humanity as a whole and machinery. The common view in apek’s day—as exemplified by the imagery of Metropolis—was not that machines were slaves but rather that the majority of people were in the process of becoming slaves of machinery.
If R.U.R. is seen as a political allegory, apek’s drama is a call for the recognition that those who are condemned to eternal labor actually have the same needs and desires as those who remain free, and a warning that willful blindness to those needs and desires will eventually provoke violent rebellion. Through the character of Alquist, the author adds to this proposal the further judgment that the leisured classes are mistaken in their assessment of their own needs, because people who do not labor at all are forsaking their own creativity; creativity is not expressed without work. Creativity, not idleness, is humanity’s most precious possession.
The “souls” that Dr. Gall imports into the robots at Helena’s request are metaphorical. What the robots are given is a means of feeling, not in the sense that emotions that were not there before are grafted on, but in the sense that a potential that was always there is now activated. While the robots remain robots (that is,...
(This entire section contains 941 words.)
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laborers), however, this release of feeling can only be turned to destructive ends. Ironically, the rebellion of the robots is hardly necessary, given that their masters—having forsaken their creativity—ceased even to practice the most fundamental creative act of reproducing themselves. The world within the play gets twisted so far out of shape that a new beginning is required before a new order may be secured. That new beginning is—as, in apek’s view, it must be—the rediscovery of the power of love by those whose feelings were previously channeled into hatred. It is the robots rather than their masters, according to apek, who retain this potential; Harry Domin’s love for Helena and hers for him have been wasted in secret conflict.
apek was active in politics for a little while after the creation of Czechoslovakia in the wake of World War I, but he preferred to make use of his talents and energies as a writer. He did not survive to experience the country’s annexation by Adolf Hitler, although his brother Josef died in a concentration camp. Answering critics, apek denied that his view of the world was entirely cynical and pessimistic, but such works as R.U.R. and War with the Newts—both of which feature the extinction of the human race—seem to some observers to undermine his denial. It is important to notice, however, that the “humans” who are swept away in these allegories are humans who lose sight of their own humanity, and that they are succeeded by other beings who discover the real meaning of “humanity” and therefore become human beings.
Seen in this light, apek’s worksR.U.R. in particular—are certainly awful warnings, but they are not despairing. After its fashion, R.U.R. seeks to help its audiences recover their authentic humanity which, as members of the leisured theatergoing classes, they may perhaps be in danger of losing.