Candide by Voltaire
It is doubtful, then, whether Candide becomes progressively wiser in philosophical understanding. Nor is it clear that he becomes morer sophisticated in his dealings with the world.5 Experience seems to make little difference. In chapter 22 we still read of ‘l’innocence de Candide.’ In chapter 23 he is still ‘si étourdi et si choqué de ce qu’il voyait’ (Byng); and in chapter 25 he is ‘fort étonné de ce qu’il entendait’ (Pococurante). His responses, that is, remain primary. If he is Lockean man, this cannot be in the sense of a progression of the mind (from simple impressions to complex ideas, to ‘attain several truths’). But it might still be in the sense that he continues to react to experience on a primary level.6 In relation to the doctrine of philosophical Optimism, he exhibits a certain development. We find a more or less consistently growing resistance up to the crisis of the encounter with the slave. A period of depression—‘une noire mélancholie’ (19)—follows, and a denunciation of mankind throughout history is posited in the most extreme terms. ‘ “Croyez-vous,” dit Candide, “que les hommes … aient toujours été menteurs, fourbes, perfides, ingrats, brigands,… ?”’ (21). Yet two chapters later he exclaims ‘Tout est bien, tout va bien, tout va le mieux qu’il soit possible’ (23)! And later still, ‘Mon cher Martin, encore une fois Pangloss avait raison: tout est bien’ (27). The proponents of development pass off these unconditional affirmations of Optimism as best they can.7 The contradiction can be ‘naturalised’ by the explanation that Candide is now entirely identifying the philosophical issue with the amorous pursuit.8 However, that account not only supports the view that his reactions remain primary and affective. It means that he becomes more self-centred rather than more generous in his concerns as the narrative progresses.9 Another and broader defence is to claim that it is such inconsistencies which make Candide and others not puppets but ‘real characters.’10 For the kind of inconsistencies (and the kind of writing) that we are talking about, I think this is a false argument, though it also raises fascinating and fundamental questions about the relations between art and reality.
In fact in this last third of the narrative Candide contradicts himself more directly, and repeatedly. In the same chapter 23 as he says ‘Tout est bien’ he rhetorically proposes the opposite extreme: ‘Quel démon exerce partout son empire?’ (23, my emphasis). In successive chapters he seems to affirm ‘le libre arbitre’ (21) and then say that men are determined to evil, ‘ils ne peuvent pas s’en dispenser’ (22). Later in successive chapters he says ‘Pangloss avait raison, tout est bien’ (27), then challenges him to maintain this doctrine after all that he has suffered (28). Even at this stage he poses the silliest questions. ‘ “Qui pensez-vous,” dit-il, “qui soit le plus à plaindre, de l’empereur Achmet, de l’empereur Ivan, du roi Charles-Edouard, ou de moi?”’ Even at this stage he affirms that Pangloss has the answers. ‘ “Ah!” dit Candide, “si Pangloss était ici, il le saurait et nous l’apprendrait”’ (27).
The explanation of course is that Candide scarcely develops, is not self-consistent, and is arguably not a ‘character’ at all in the modern (individual, psychological, realist) sense. Any element of personhood is subordinated to wider purposes within the narrative discourse. Candide continues to evoke Pangloss because it is his function to juxtapose the doctrine of Optimism and reality.11 The narrator tells us that ‘Candide … avait été élevé à ne jamais juger de rien par lui-même’ (25). This statement appears not near the beginning but near the end of the narrative—surely another embarrassment for those who maintain that Candide develops. But even if we do not, it seems to contradict a fundamental quality in Candide announced by the narrator at the start: ‘il avait le jugement assez droit.’ The explanation must be that his primary judgement—essentially affective and moral, in a word natural—is right, but he is also the vehicle for every kind of received idea of order, centrally that of Panglossian Optimism. His other fundamental quality of mind, ‘l’esprit le plus simple,’ ensures that he will continue to do his job of failing to understand either Optimism or the world. More exactly, he will only partially understand. The Fool utters the truth beyond his own awareness. Candide’s dislocated utterances function comically and satirically. They mime the incoherence of the doctrine and of the world.
But we must go back further. Candide is the innocent sent into the world. ‘L’innocence de Candide’ functions, prior to any thematisation, to show forth the world by contrast, and to keep him perpetually open to it. For satire, for comedy and for our sympathy he must continue to bear the world’s assaults. At this most basic level too he must fail to learn. His stupidity functions to invite or force the world to reveal its hand clearly. It is precisely because he fails to understand that he serves to unmask—for our benefit—Bulgar punishment, Dutch charity, ecclesiastical theft, female lust or primitive cannibalism.12 Even when protected by his new wealth—itself the result of a satirical Chance, not of his own abilities—he continues to function affectively in this way. (His name is, after all, a programme.) He remains open to what one might call moral and cultural assault. His stupid amazement endures—‘fort étonné,’ ‘si choqué’—to expose the inadmissibility of what we have learned to accept. These simple responses mark the second level of his inability to learn. Violence done to his moral and cultural sensibility belongs somewhere between violence done to his body (the rudimentary level) and violence done to the doctrine (the third level).
His openness or stupidity also makes him repeatedly the recipient of the experiential stories of others. He hears—on our behalf—the ‘histoires’ of La Vieille, Pangloss, Martin (more abstractly), Cunégonde, Paquette, Giroflée and the young Baron. Each is an abyme or double of his own. It is mainly a sequence, rapid yet random, of calamities. Its meaning—overwhelmingly the negation of Optimism—is more or less explicitly thematised. Like Candide, the subject of each story has been repeatedly assaulted by the world. Like him, each has stupidly persevered, to show forth more of it. Because they narrate, the discourse of these speakers is more extended than Candide’s. It exhibits greater understanding. But no more than his own discourse can it be read as the expression of character. It delivers too little or (more often) too much, foregrounding trivia or offering epigram. It distances us from events and individual responses, figuring or thematising dislocation.13 These speakers, unlike Candide, are clear about the meaning of their experiences—which makes them more wise but more limited than he. He debates their understanding with them. This allows us to see his interlocutors also allegorically, as aspects of himself or different views of the world. Optimism and ‘Manichean’ pessimism, perhaps also sexual desire, prudence and practicality, engage discursively. After much argument the speakers are, as the narrator confirms, none the wiser. It is of course the discourse of that narrator which runs through the whole. It is both epigrammatic and polemically incomprehending, continually drawing attention to itself and to meaning.14 That voice, which we cannot call Voltaire but might call Voltaire-in-this-genre, is heard through the voices of all the characters. As André Magnan excellently summarises it, ‘les personnages sont traversés par le discours’ (1st n. 2 above, p. 80).
We must nevertheless continue to differentiate between Candide and the other characters. He provides the title of the work, his adventures the narrative thread, his experiences and those told to him by others the object of interpretation, his voice the last word. He and the other main characters alike are comic, but he more richly and for more reasons. In common, he and they are caricatural ‘types’; all are launched on accidental trajectories through the world; all are repeatedly assaulted; all tenaciously persevere. All are thus the object of satire, but also of our sympathy and affection. (The only ‘bad’ character, the Baron, is expelled from the group.) Candide however differs from them in a number of ways: his naivety (both innocence and cultural deference); his vulnerability as innocent, youth and social outcast; his looks and the affection he prompts in others; his own sensibility, companionability and active goodness; his
Candide is at the centre of a narrative whose signification goes beyond him. He is the protagonist in not one but two quests: the quest for Cunégonde as well as the quest for philosophical understanding. The narrative is a satire on epic romance as well as on philosophy. But they are the same, because epic romance affirms Providential order, and Providential order is an epic romance. The dislocated plot, the series of disasters, the internal narratives and reviews, Candide’s eventual loss of belief in the ideal, are a satire on both. (At this level it is the writer who fails to understand how epic romance and philosophy should be written.)15 The status of philosophy and of literature as truth are collapsed through parody. Candide functions to ‘défabuler la fable’ (Magnan). All wisdom is ironised—mocked or maimed. The Contes are themselves ‘fallen fables’ (Pearson), ‘disabled powers.’ They mime ‘ce monde qui cloche’ (Starobinski). But Candide is unique in its breadth, force and focus. It shows forth the grotesque body of narrative and of philosophy, representing that of the world. Its microcosm is dislocation of the body of discourse, and its burlesque literalisation is the battered body social and human.
The competence to grasp the full meaning is not given to Candide. Nor does the narrative discourse (which deals wittingly in polemical stupidity, whereas Candide deals in it unwittingly) give it directly to us. But that discourse constantly—mockingly and flatteringly—prompts us towards it. The meaning is reserved for the reader. Can we say then that although Candide does not learn, the reader does? Is it the reader who is led progressively towards the truth? This seems to me highly questionable. As Carol Sherman thoroughly demonstrates, the Contes deal in massive redundancy.16 One might add that the ‘message’ which critics are wont to find is usually pretty trite. If the message of Candide is the contrast between ideal philosophy and a disorderly world, it is more than evident to us within half-a-dozen chapters. It certainly does not need thirty chapters. If the message is the necessity of practical action, it seems to have been forgotten—after Jacques and Lisbon—for the next two dozen. The shape of Candide, surely, is not the shape of a learning curve. It is the shape of a myth. Indeed it could hardly be otherwise, for the parody of all of our myths must be a parodic myth.
Any attempt to define the genre of Candide must begin with the fact that it is a narrative. Having related it to ‘epic romance,’ we might opt for one of these two categories. Arguably (by breadth of narrative reference and fixity of heroic purpose) it is closer to epic. We have the eponymous protagonist (albeit young and handsome and pure as in romance), the faithful band, the world-journey and ideal quest, the reiterated terrible trials and the final attainment of the goal. But these are fools, precipitated through calamities at high speed, in very short chapters with mock-medieval titles, who eventually reach disillusion. Heroes, narrative scale, and achievement, that is, are all radically reduced. It is a comic (satiric, parodic) epic. The subtitle, the quest for understanding, the order of the story (its logic of theme not plot), and the discourse require us to add a third term: a philosophical comic epic. Setting it within contemporary history perhaps requires a further qualification; but one might subsume that, as an ironic modern transposition of epic, under the comic. The power of Candide does not lie in some worthy meliorism; still less in the message that we must replace words by deeds (for Candide itself is words, and a considerable deed). It lies in the rewriting of pagan epic, romance (including utopia), fable (exemplarity and moral), and of the Judeo-Christian epic (from ‘le paradis terrestre’ and expulsion to very modest secular hopes).17 They are rewritten—with amusement, derision and ferocity—against the hold that they still have on us and against the world which is so grotesquely inadequate to them. But Voltaire knew that he too would not learn.18 Neither will we.
Finally we might look at the Bildungsroman reading in historical terms. Its two main elements—that Candide progressively learns, and that his final formula about the garden is a wise and positive message—have not always been associated.19 To look for character and its development is perhaps a particularly British tendency, influenced by our tradition of realist narrative. (The lack of an English critical term equivalent to ‘Bildungsroman’ or ‘roman d’apprentissage’ implies that we see this category as natural rather than generic.) I think however that as a reading of Candide it belongs to the present century. The affirmation that the conclusion constitutes a call to practical action is certainly modern. I suspect that both, and the Bildungsroman reading itself, arose in reaction to the negative view of Voltaire and especially of Candide in the previous century. The Romantics and much of the nineteenth century—from de Stael to Flaubert and beyond, in differing registers—saw Voltaire’s tale as heartless and cynical.20 For much of our own century it was regarded as immoral and indecent.21 The humanist account (characters and positive message) has been a kind of corrective. It has served as a liberal and progressivist defence of Voltaire and of the Enlightenment in general. My own reading reflects the structuralist approaches, focussing on genre and discourse within a reflexive literary system, fashionable in the later twentieth century. It is unlikely in turn that this has finally established the right way to read Candide. But we go on trying. We will not learn.
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† From Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 4 (1996): 145–54. © Institute of Romance Studies, 1996. Reprinted by permission of Berghahn Books Inc. This article is based on a lecture given at the Institute of Romance Studies on 24 November 1994.
1. ‘Enfin, c’est la réapparition de Cunégonde vieillie et enlaidie qui achève de le former’: Voltaire, Romans et contes, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques van den Heuvel (Paris; Gallimard, 1979), 834–35. We may note that Van den Heuvel repeats here—often word for word—what he said in Voltaire dans ses contes (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), 289–91.
2. Roger Pearson, The Fables of Reason. A Study of Voltaire’s ‘Contes philosophiques’ (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993), 116, 119. Nevertheless for Pearson ‘the final, famous aphorism fails to hide much uncertainty and gives on to as much of a white page as Micromégas’ (123). Among other recent commentators, David L. Langdon seems to incline to development and final wisdom (‘On the meanings of the conclusion of Candide.’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 238 (1985), 397–432). Haydn Mason regards the conclusion as ambiguous, and is cautious about development (see below, note 5). On the other side, André Magnan argues for a non-realist, self-ironic reading (Voltaire: ‘Candide ou l’optimisme’ [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987]); so do I (Disabled Powers: A Reading of Voltaire’s ‘Contes’ [Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1993]).
3. On the importance of ‘l’adversative mais’ in the binary discourse of the Contes, see Jean Starobinski, ‘Le fusil à deux coups de Voltaire’ (1966), reprinted (as the latter half of a longer piece under this collective title) in Le Remède dans le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 144–63.
4. As the message of Candide—not of Candide—I think that one could call the final formula rueful but positive (a reduction of ambitions). To find here a call to action in the world though seems rather against the textual evidence of the preceding paragraphs. However it has also been shown that there is a message here to the initiés, from Voltaire-at-Ferney. In his voluminous correspondence Voltaire uses the language he will assign to the Old Turk and Candide (‘je ne m’en mêle pas,’ ‘cultiver,’ ‘[devenir] jardinier’) before the publication of Candide and after it (where he may actually attribute it to Candide—which also, remember, has nothing to do with him), especially in connection with the follies of the Seven Years War. An