ABSTRACT
By proposing a new interpretation of The War with the Newts by Karel Čapek, this chapter demonstrates that resisting the anthropological machine depends first and foremost on the practices of reading. My intent is to challenge previous readings of the novel, most of which remove the salamanders as a referent, recoding them through an allegorical key. However, before being an allegory of colonised people, the working class, Jews, and in the end, even Nazis, the Salamanders should be considered, in narrative terms, as concrete living beings that humans treat as if they were merely natural resources to be studied and exploited. This chapter demonstrates the extent to which traditional interpretations are reductionist and symptomatic of a failure and inability to think beyond humanity, insofar as they persist in placing humans at the centre of the plot, even when confronted by a radically anti-anthropocentric novel that stages the catastrophic consequences of the Anthropocene. I ground such an interpretation on the analysis of the intertextual references left unexplored in previous readings (Darwin and Kafka), and of two stylistic features neglected by other interpreters, to wit, the frequent inversion between the centre and the margins of the text, and the “surprise effect” created by the concatenation of the narrated events.
