Candide by Voltaire
The parallel with music can be carried further. Candide, more clearly than the other contes, is written in such a way that the reader has to perform it mentally at a certain speed. As Pomeau says:
That this style is not everyday prose, the loose style of the marketplace, is apparent in the first lines of the text.25
Voltaire is by no means the only eighteenth century author who can write allegro vivace [quick and lively]. Lesage, in parts of Gil Blas, is almost his equal.26 Voltaire has Lesage’s main qualities: an overall rhythm, a euphemistically noble vocabulary and an ability always to imply more than is actually said. But he also has features not to be found in Lesage or the other gay stylists of the century. He uses repetition and recapitulation very effectively in Candide to produce a constant impression (which at first sight would seem difficult to achieve in a typically eighteenth century style) of the welter of chance events. It is astonishing that so short a book should create such a vision of the teeming multifariousness of incomprehensible Necessity. His elliptical expressions are more frequent and more startling than those to be found in the prose of his contemporaries, and so he jerks the reader again and again into awareness of a metaphysical perspective behind his apparently innocent recital of events. Each important character has his or her motif which sounds at appropriate intervals; less obvious, but no less telling, than Candide’s simplicity or Pangloss’s silliness are Cunégonde’s accommodating sensuality and Cacambo’s practical good sense. And the mixture of rapidity, irony, allusion, ellipsis, merciless satire of human nature and affectionate understanding of the human plight produces an unmistakable, singing, heartrending lilt, of which only Voltaire is capable in prose and that only Mozart, perhaps, could have transferred to the stage. Admittedly, there are passages in Candide that might have been written by Lesage, for instance, parts of the Old Woman’s account, in Chapter 11, of her sufferings at the hands of the pirates:
It’s a very remarkable thing, the energy these gentlemen put into stripping people. But what surprised me even more was that they stuck their fingers in a place where we women usually admit only a syringe. This ceremony seemed a bit odd to me, as foreign usages always do when one hasn’t traveled.
But in the more characteristic passages, Voltaire infuses feeling into this bright, eighteenth century melody, without falling into the sogginess of sensibilité, the usual weakness of eighteenth century writers when they try to be serious. Chapter I, in its deceptive simplicity, is no doubt the most perfect example of his style and one of the highest achievements in all French writing. However, practically every chapter contains what can only be described as unique, ironical prose poetry.27 I quote, at random, the description of the auto-da-fe in Chapter 6:
… Candide’s mitre and san-benito were decorated with inverted flames and with devils who had neither tails nor claws; but Pangloss’s devils had both tails and claws, and his flames stood upright. Wearing these costumes, they marched in a procession, and listened to a very touching sermon, followed by a beautiful concert of plainsong. Candide was flogged in cadence to the music; the Biscayan and the two men who had avoided bacon were burned, and Pangloss was hanged, though hanging is not customary. On the same day there was another earthquake, causing frightful damage
Candide, stunned, stupefied, despairing, bleeding, trembling, said to himself: —If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like? The flogging is not so bad, I was flogged by the Bulgars. But oh my dear Pangloss, greatest of philosophers, was it necessary for me to watch you being hanged, for no reason that I can see? Oh my dear Anabaptist, best of men, was it necessary that you should be drowned in the port? Oh Miss Cunégonde, pearl of young ladies, was it necessary that you should have your belly slit open?
He was being led away, barely able to stand, lectured, lashed, absolved, and blessed, when an old woman approached and said. —My son, be of good cheer and follow me.
Candide was of very bad cheer, but he followed the old woman.…
It is one of the mysteries of literary composition that the Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne should be so flat and unpoetical, whereas Voltaire’s treatment of the same theme in prose is at once rich, funny and deeply moving. Perhaps the explanation is to be sought in the fact that there is a philosophical ambiguity running through Candide, in addition to the contrast between vitality and awareness of evil. The Poème is a direct, but feeble, reproach to God, which ends with a still feebler hope that life will be better in the world to come than it is here. Voltaire was not, temperamentally, a God-defier. He invokes God convincingly only when it is a question of enlisting Him on the side of virtue, as in the Traité sur la tolérance. He was incapable of saying outright, with Baudelaire:
For truly, Lord, this is the highest gage
That we can offer of our dignity,
This ardent sigh, which rolls from age to age,
Dying on the shore of your eternity.
He can only criticize God freely when he does so, by implication, through human nature. It may be that the almost pathological violence of his onslaughts on the Church is to be accounted for, to some extent, by the transference of an unexpressed exasperation with the unknowable Creator onto a part of creation which is particularly irritating precisely through its claim to understand something about the Creator. At any rate, it is remarkable that, in Candide, the distinction between evil which is an act of God (and therefore from the human point of view gratuitous) and evil which is an effect of human wickedness or stupidity, is not clearly maintained. It is made, in Chapter 20, when Candide and Martin are watching the shipwreck, but in the form of a joke against Candide. God’s indifference to humanity is again stressed in Chapter 30 when the dervish slams his door in Pangloss’s face, and this time the joke—admittedly a rather sour one—is on Pangloss. It seems almost as if Voltaire were unwilling to come out into the open and accuse God, so much so that, from one point of view, the El Dorado episode can be seen as a logical flaw. That happy country, where the inhabitants never quarrel and worship God without a church, does not provide a fair contrast with the ordinary world; how would the people of El Dorado retain their serenity if their capital were shattered by an earthquake? The only way to justify the El Dorado chapters is to suppose that they are really a conscious or unconscious criticism of God. They occur as a sunny interlude between two series of disasters to show how happy and pious we might have been, had God not given us our ungovernable natures and put us into a world containing inexplicable evil. And the book as a whole, although so critical of mankind, tends to show human nature as a blind and passionate force driving helplessly on against a background of mystery. In other words, Voltaire, like Diderot, had not made up his mind about free-will, because the determinism/free-will dilemma is just another formulation of the God/no-God issue. The question is left open in Chapter 21:
—Do you believe, said Martin, that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they could get them?
—Of course, said Candide.
—Well, said Martin, if hawks have always had the same character, why do you suppose that men have changed?
—Oh, said Candide, there’s a great deal of difference, because freedom of the will …
As they were disputing in this manner, they reached Bordeaux.
Yet the whole weight of Voltaire’s emotion is obviously against accepting the parallel between men and animals. Candide throbs from end to end with a paradoxical quality which might be described as a despairing hope or a relentless charity, and which comes from seeing the worst steadily, without either capitulating to it or sentimentalizing its impact. Although, as Delattre says, no great writer wrote more often below his best than Voltaire did, in this short tale he managed to hold fundamental opposites in suspense and so produced, from the heart of a century that wished to deny evil, an allegorical prose poem about evil which is still perfectly apt, exactly two hundred years later.
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† From Essays Presented to C. M. Girdlest
1. “I can see no other merit in Leibniz’s Theodicy except that of having furnished the great Voltaire with the occasion of his immortal Candide.” Quoted in La Table Ronde, Feb., 1958, p. 111.
2. Correspondance, ed. Conard, 11, p. 348.
3. Candide and Other Tales, Everyman’s Library, 1937, p. xxiv.
4. The Novel in France, Hamish Hamilton, 1950, p. 189.
5. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, Yale University Press, 1957 edition, pp. 36, 37.
6. Le Taureau blanc, etc., The Hyperion Press, 1945, p. 5.
7. Librairie E. Droz, p. xiii.
8. Routledge, p. 16. My [Weightman’s] italics.
9. Leibniz in France, O.U.P., 1955, p. 232.
10. La Table Ronde, February 1958, pp. 111–115.
11. Traité de métaphysique, ed. H. T. Patterson, Manchester U.P., 1937, p. 16.
12. Discours de Métaphysique, 30, in Leibnizens Gesammelte Werke, Hannover 1846.
13. Voltaire’s incisive analysis of verbal circularity in Lactantius (above, pp. 85–86) illustrates sufficiently the character of Bayle’s more wide-ranging exposés [Adams].
14. Leibniz in France, p. 88.
15. Librairie E. Droz, p. xlvii.
16. Leibniz in France, p. 233.
17. Epicurus, the classical philosopher who made pleasure the supreme goal of life, had a famous garden, where he lived an impressively moderate and contemplative existence [Adams]. See the article by Dennis Fletcher here in this Norton Critical Edition [Cronk].
18. Librairie Nizet, 1956, p. 305.
19. Librairie Nizet, 1959, p. 70.
20. Mercure de France, 1947, p. 69.
21. Edition critique, p. 7.
22. Edition critique, p. 46.
23. Op. cit., p. 96.
24. Menasha, Wisconsin, George Banta Publishing Co., 1933, p. 55.
25. Edition critique, p. 55.
26. See the excellent ‘récit de Lucinde’ (Book 5, Ch. 1), which may have helped to suggest the stories of Cunégonde and La Vieille.
27. An exhaustive and useful analysis of Voltaire’s irony has been made by Ruth C. Flowers in Voltaire’s Stylistic Transformation of Rabelaisian Satirical Devices, The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1951. Dr. Flowers distinguishes (pp. 63 et seq.) eight varieties of ‘Satirical Detail Elements’ and nine varieties of ‘Compound Satirical Devices’ and concludes: ‘Unquestionably, Voltaire is the greatest master of satire by “small art,” a witty almost epigrammatic satire, a satire whose ironical impact depends entirely and exclusively on little things, strategically placed.”
It is ironical, however, that Dr. Flowers should not notice the emotion which governs the strategic placing of these little things. She says (p. 90) that Voltaire’s heart is ‘coolly detached, superficially moved.’
ROBIN HOWELLS
Does Candide Learn? Genre, Discourse, and Satire in Candide†
According to some critics, the protagonist of Candide develops. He progressively learns, finally attaining a form of wisdom. This view is argued at some length by Jacques Van den Heuvel in the ‘Notice’ to Candide in the authoritative Pléiade edition of the Romans et contes. Van den Heuvel calls Candide a ‘roman d’apprentissage’: ‘L’aventure de Candide, en effet, est essentiellement une prise de conscience.’ Moreover, ‘les étapes de son cheminement intérieur ont été soigneusement marquées par Voltaire, bien que sans insistance de sa part.’ The most important are the episodes of Eldorado (chs 17–18), the ‘nègre de Surinam’ (19) and his discovery that Cunégonde has become ugly (29).1 Roger Pearson, in his recent book treating all the Contes, agrees in the main. He too identifies the first two of these episodes as key moments for Candide, though adding the final chapter (30) as the completion of the third: ‘All the time he is turning [his] experiences to account so that his final comment that “il faut cultiver notre jardin” grows necessarily out of his past experience.’ Candide exhibits ‘the characteristics of what would come to be known as the “roman de formation,” or Bildungsroman. … Each narrative incident fits in to a carefully ordered “argument” running through the conte.’ In retrospect we observe ‘the Lockean “steps by which the mind attains several truths.” Movement through time means movement towards increased knowledge and wisdom.’2
I want to consider first how far the notion of Candide’s development is supported by the text. I shall then look at the wider question to which it is significantly linked by these critics—that of genre. How we read is affected by generic expectations and assumptions. My argument will be not only that the case for Candide’s development is rather weak, but that the evidence requires a different account. To understand what kind of text this is, and to make more satisfactory sense of it, we must read the ‘characters’ as well as their utterances within wider discursive systems.
Candide gives some appearance of development in that he becomes in the course of the narrative a stronger presence. In the story he becomes more self-assertive, and in the narration too—for a time at least—he acquires greater consciousness. In chapter 1 he is totally passive or reactive. He is assigned neither independent will nor an interior life at all. Both first appear when he deserts the Bulgar army in chapter 2: the account of his first positive act is preceded by the notations ‘il s’avisa,’ ‘il se détermina.’ His first verbal assertion of his own needs appears in chapter 3: ‘… mais je manque de pain.’ His first protest against Pangloss’s doctrine appears in chapter 4, when he is told of Cunégonde’s death: ‘Ah! meilleur des mondes, où êtes-vous?’ In chapter 9 he not only kills the Jew. He (rapidly) deliberates and resolves before killing the Inquisitor. And he briefly reflects upon these acts as an index of change in his own personality. ‘Quand on est amoureux, jaloux et fouetté par l’Inquisition, on ne se connaît plus.’
In chapter 10 he is assigned the capacity to identify the transition between stages in his own story, and to assess their significance. ‘ “Nous allons dans un autre univers,” disait Candide; “… on peut gémir un peu de ce qui se passe dans le nôtre en physique et en morale.”’ Similarly he identifies and evaluates the episodes in chapter 16 (the Oreillons: ‘la pure nature’) and chapter 17 (Eldorado: ‘le pays où tout va bien’). In chapter 19, confronted with the negro slave, he voices the famous and apparently decisive judgement: ‘O Pangloss! … c’en est fait, il faudra qu’à la fin je renonce à ton optimisme.’ He is now rich. This enables him to live, and especially to travel, as he chooses. He pensions Martin; he aids Paquette and Giroflée (24), and the ex-King of Corsica (27); he ransoms Pangloss and the Baron (28), Cunégonde and La Vieille (29). He acquires the ‘métairie’ (29). In the last chapter we are told ‘Candide … fit de profondes réflexions.’ It is then he who articulates twice, in contradistinction to the utterances of Pangloss, the famous closing formula on the necessity of cultivating the garden. Taken in the literal sense, his injunction seems to be being followed, to the collective benefit. Through experience and then through wealth, Candide goes progressively from passivity to self-assertion, while acquiring a modicum of mental life.
Even on this level however there are difficulties for the developmental account. The fundamental one, which we shall return to later, is that the utterances assigned to Candide resist a reading in terms of character. As in the examples above, they are too foolish or too wise, functioning to thematise and satirise beyond his competence. Then the supposedly key points in his development pose problems. Awkwardly, we happen to know that the ‘decisive’ episode of the negro slave in chapter 19 was a late insertion in the te
At the start of the final chapter all on the farm are discontented, and Candide has no more idea than anyone else what to do about it. It is the old Turk who furnishes him with the solution. And what of the famous last line itself? ‘ “Cela est bien dit,” répondit Candide, “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin”’ is often hailed as the demonstration that Candide has finally learned to abandon Pangloss’s abstract words in favour of practical deeds. But, firstly, that is not what he says. The latter clause qualifies rather than negates the former. Secondly, the last line is very similar to his responses to Pangloss’s harangues in early chapters. ‘ “Voilà qui est admirable,” dit Candide, “mais il faut vous faire guérir”’ (4). ‘ “Rien n’est plus probable,” dit Candide; “mais, pour Dieu, un peu d’huile et de vin”’3 (5). Practical concern, rendered rhetorically as the deprecation of abstract reasoning, is assigned to him from almost the beginning. Certainly there are differences. At the end we have a collective reference (not ‘me’ or ‘you’ but ‘us’). The formulation possesses epigrammatic and figurative force. ‘Cultivating the garden’ has considerable resonance within the text, and a vast resonance beyond it. Pangloss by his reference to Eden in the penultimate paragraph helpfully reminds us of this. But Candide seems not to have taken it in. There is no evidence that Candide himself understands the wider implications of what he says.4