Candide by Voltaire
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† From Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 401–13. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
1. Voltaire’s involuntary visit to England lasted three years (1726–29) and put the finishing touches on his literary and political education. The Letters concerning the English Nation, which appeared in 1733, were powerful and important in themselves and laid the foundations of many of Voltaire’s future attitudes. The work appeared in French as Lettres philosophiques (1734) [Adams].
2. Keller, a Swiss-German novelist of the late nineteenth century, serves Auerbach as a contrast-comparison with Voltaire’s focusing devices in the Lettres philosophiques. The examples from the very recent past, to which Auerbach quietly alludes, were provided by the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Third Reich, which drove Auerbach himself into exile [Adams].
3. La Fontaine, who lived in the seventeenth century, is best known for his Fables, light, quick, charming poems that seemingly don’t take their moralities too seriously [Adams].
4. This is the married name of Suzanne Curchod, wife of the financier Jacques Necker and mother of the woman of letters Mme de Staël [Cronk].
5. The basic theme of the book of Ecclesiastes, supposed to be written by King Solomon, is “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” [Adams].
JEAN STAROBINSKI
On Candide’s Philosophical Style†
A narrative? Most certainly. But more than that, it is the simulation—a parody, a pale reflection—of a narrative. In Candide, the fictional is a caricature of the fictional, an exaggerated version that mixes up generic conventions, be they of the adventure story (of Hellenistic origin), the picaresque novel, or—most susceptible of all to the implausible—the fairy tale. If asked to pin down Candide’s literary genealogy, we would identify the tradition originating with Lucian and Petronius, and continuing with Rabelais and Cyrano de Bergerac. Events in Candide, especially in the way one follows on from another, fly in the face of probability; their random nature makes it clear that they are not trying to persuade readers, they are leaving them free. Announced deaths, unexpected meetings, accelerated turns of plot, fabulous lands, undreamed-of riches—everything indicates that we should not pay serious heed to the story itself; everything refers to literary commonplaces that one by one are deformed through mockery into a parable whose moral is that we should mistrust all morals.
So is this just a game? For sure. But a game of parody in which all the situations described reflect present reality: war, massacre, rape are taking place in Germany; heretics are being burned in Portugal; American savages eat their captives; and in Paris gamblers cheat and prostitutes rob unwary travelers. Candide is, in many respects, no more than a cover name, the minimal identity necessary for a person whose essential function is to encounter, and so reveal, the world as it is.
The hallmark of Candide is the multifaceted, the potpourri: this applies not just to the kaleidoscopic succession of episodes, but also to the mix of self-reflective fiction and unavoidable truth, to the unstable combination of the arbitrariness of the narrative and the intrusion into it of a climate of violence. The freedom of the story line goes hand in hand with obsessive, omnipresent evil. Wherever the individual turns, all freedom is crushed by ludicrous violence. Candide’s journey, by virtue of its implausible speed, reviews all the countries of the globe; this economy of narrative time ensures movement from one place to another, and makes possible multiple experiences of foolishness, intolerance, and the abuse of power. The narrative’s lack of realism permits journeys of every kind and allows horrifying realities to be described without their ever seeming doubtful or merely the result of authorial fantasy.
Through the systematic use of mockery, and thanks to the invulnerability of a hero who narrowly escapes all dangers, Voltaire is able to multiply evocations of the most appalling abuses, all in the service of a strategy of repeated denunciation. Voltaire’s writing progresses by means of cuts, ellipses, litotes—all forms of subtraction—whereas the expression of indignant emotion would have inflated the sentences, drawn out the complaints, taken up time for the “truth” of feeling to express itself. The time for feeling is thus cut short, and emotional impact is intensified. By playing deliberately off-key, Voltaire avoids the perils of overdone sentiment and failed eloquence. The evil of the world stands out all the more clearly and tenaciously in a dessicated atmosphere that leaves no room for feeling or consolation. Nothing atrocious is made up in Candide; Voltaire gives us a documentary account, admittedly somewhat simplified and stylized, but an anthology of atrocities that any educated European could have found in the newspapers. In Candide, we experience, perhaps for the first time in fictional form, that attitude which improved means of communication have today made common in the West: the sense that a nervous system extending across the face of the Earth allows us to suffer all the woes of humanity. Voltaire shivers at the world’s suffering; he knows, or thinks he knows, all the authors of injustice, all the parties making unjust demands: he details them, confronts them, and opposes them. He is too intelligent to denounce only the wrongs on one side; he sees the same crimes being committed by rival princes, by opposed churches, by “civilized” and “savage” peoples.
The sinuous line, with its suggestion of surprise and caprice, is one of the hallmarks of rococo taste, and the journeys of Candide, of the old woman, and of Cunégonde clearly trace such a line on the map of the world: chance, desire, persecution all provoke endless detours, to the point where nothing seems like a detour and no particular direction seems privileged. Fully present here too—another aspect of the rococo—is an appetite for the new and the piquant.
Play, parody, satire, the denunciation of violence in the modern world, philosophical enquiry: together these form not just a composite work, but a text without precedent, a text seeking a purely polemical relationship with its predecessors. Through its diversity, through the unexpected and scabrous nature of the adventures, through the unforeseen itinerary, through the succession of surprises, through the efficient brevity of each episode, Candide brings together all the causes of the piquant, to produce the supreme stimulus of novelty. The visit to Pococurante’s library (chapter 25) reviews the models of the past, encompassing the literary world in its entirety: the disabused amateur speaks of all this with disdain. Literature seems to have come to an end, and Candide is the supplementary volume that catalogues the past and follows on from the catalogue. This is a book beyond literature, beyond philosophy, that mocks literature and philosophy, and that in its turn can of course do nothing but propose a different literature, a different philosophy. “It’s a great pleasure,” says Cacambo, “to see and do new things” (chapter 14).
Yet it is not difficult to assimilate Candide to an age-old type: that of clownish narration or pantomime deploying enormous virtuosity to conjure up its very opposite, misfortune and clumsiness.
There is no need to insist here, in the wake of so many other critics, on the gaiety of this light and weightless writing, nor on the stylistic agility—with its supreme command of repetition, contrast, and ellipsis—that can manipulate at will the beat of the sentence to create or disrupt effects of balance. This mastery, which does so little to hide itself and which shows its own mechanism so openly, does not of itself generate comic effect; it becomes comic, in taking nonmastery as its subject—that is to say, the story of a boy without malice who is unable to control what happens to him and who runs from one misfortune to another. His adventures, like those of so many clowns, begin with kicks in the backside: we laugh, while he weeps, sighs, and despairs.
The writing of the narration is supremely active; it calculates and governs all its effects; and one of its principal effects is to represent its contrary, in dedicating Candide, almost until the very end of his adventures, to passivity1 and
To be precise, this is a destiny where desire misses and loses its object only to recover it degraded, forever different from the image that had been kept alive. For if, after the visit to Eldorado, Candide avoids vexation, he remains fundamentally frustrated; he misses Cunégonde and dreams only of finding her again. And when he does finally find her, it is to discover that she is so ugly that he reels back “three steps in horror.” A Gilles or a Pierrot is frustrated in the same way: everything conspires to deprive them of what they think they are on the point of possessing: they remain empty-handed, their hearts heavy. Candide’s only memory of the first paradise in Westphalia is of a furtive caress behind a screen (a caress, it should be remembered, initiated by Cunégonde). This “appetizing” fruit, offered without resistance, will be defended as it passes through the most brutal hands: violated, stabbed, sold, pimped, humiliated, profaned in every way possible, Cunégonde, before being bought back by Candide, will find her flesh marked by all the stigmata of “physical” and “moral” evil, the sign of an evil world and the mark of the destructive passage of time. The feminine being whom Voltaire makes the cause of all Candide’s peregrinations—expulsion, wandering, quest—is no more than the lure of freshness and youth, qualities liable to deteriorate: desirable only as long as she is missed and because she is missed, once she is found again, Cunégonde is no more than an ugly shrew with whom life would be intolerable were it not for the garden to be cultivated, the productive refuge of hard work. Candide is tricked by love: foremost among the ideals that the narrative is determined to destroy is the myth of passion. Candide is the object of an experiment: he is motivated by an illusion that vanishes at precisely the moment that the loved one ceases to be an image and a name and appears as a “real” person. The comedy derives from the fact that this final possession, so long deferred, is doubly disappointing.
An author who is clairvoyant, omniscient, and free; a hero who is naïve, clumsy, deluded, and under the sway of violent men: this relationship between author and hero is grounded on irony. It is marked from the start by frequent recourse to what classical rhetoric narrowly defines as irony—that is, destructive antiphrasis, the use of words to say the opposite of what they mean: “a beautiful auto-da-fé.”
What is the function of irony here? Its purpose is not to give the author (and the reader) an easy victory over an ignorant, narrow-minded hero. Nor is it to exalt, from the author’s perspective, a sense of freedom rising above finite reality—Voltaire does not aspire to that disengaged liberty with which, in Romantic irony, the spirit defines its separate realm. Irony in Candide works like an offensive weapon: it faces outward and spearheads the fight of reason against everything that usurps the authority that should properly belong to rational thought alone.
Usurped authority: this is how theological discourse, and its successor, metaphysical discourse, are made to appear, once the gap between the world as it is and the world of Optimistic theodicy has become clear. A critique of the contemporary world, Candide is also just as much a critique of the abstract assertions that smug theorists make about the world. In their singularity and relentlessness, the events of the journey inflict one defeat after another on Pangloss’s teaching. It’s hardly necessary to give voice to the opposing philosophies, those of the Anabaptist Jacques and of Martin the Manichean. Facts are responsible for Candide’s education, and the result is seen in the contrast between the first chapter, in which Candide gives his master a respectful hearing, and the last, in which he cuts him off. The irony of Voltaire’s narrative endorses the way the facts of the world give the lie to the euphoria of systems. The “point” and “shaft” of ironic diction joyously give succour to the cruelty of the real and confer on it a hyperbolic ferocity: refutations are conducted with the selfsame energy as the evil violence that Voltaire simultaneously condemns. All the affirmations of ultimate perfection are undercut, literally in human flesh, with mutilations, castrations, and amputations. Pangloss loses an eye and an ear, the old woman a buttock, and so forth. The devastation caused by illness, war, and inquisition is told with a narrative verve expressing delight in the destruction of the Optimist illusion: the characters’ bodies are subject to savage wounds, defects, and unreasoning brutality, and in its very style (what we have called a style of subtraction), Candide mimics the physical diminution that evil inflicts on whole human beings, and thus it mimics the world’s response to Optimism’s proposed solution. Against a metaphysical view postulating the eternal presence of an all-embracing view of the universe (poorly grasped by us), Voltaire imagines a reason that discerns inadequacy everywhere, and that, by this very fault, by this scandalous absence of sense, finds the spur for militancy.
But after identifying with the ferocity of the world to refute preconceived systems, irony then turns against violence and injustice. Despite the dizzying speed with which he demonstrates the victory of smallpox, tempests, Bulgarian heroes, black pirates, and inquisitors over the articles of faith of Leibnizianism, Voltaire is scandalized by the suffering inflicted. Despite the hint of Sadism detectable in the way he trumpets the victory of cruelty and intolerance, he does not share Sade’s belief that evil in all its forms is the expression of the natural order—put simply, he does not believe that natural law should be hailed as benevolent. The determinism that produces gallstones, smallpox, and earthquakes shows that Nature has no care for humanity. In addition to the unavoidable evils that must be painfully endured, there are the superfluous evils that people inflict on one another: how can these be described without revulsion? Voltaire cannot accept the miseries that he so joyously allows to rain down on his characters’ heads.
The irony is redoubled, the sharpness of the response reinforced. Having given free rein to the images of evil to counter Optimist dogma, Voltaire opposes evil because he hates injustice and fanaticism. Voltaire’s style—generally described as “witty,” “incisive,” “sarcastic”—owes its specific character to this double aggressive charge. Most of the events narrated in Candide are bivalent: they joyously demonstrate the inanity of Pangloss’s system; but once they have fulfilled their polemical purpose, they instantly become unbearable. These events that decry the Optimist illusion are in their turn decried on account of their violence. They belong to that category of events that invariably make Voltaire “shiver with horror” (the expression is frequent in his correspondence and his historical writings). The “grinding” that Flaubert rightly discerns in Voltaire is precisely the effect caused by the coincidence of this polemical verve with a shiver of horror; it is due to the fact that each of the “realities” that intrude to destroy Pangloss’s pronouncements is made in turn the object of a pitiless critique. The atrocious event designed to deny the preceding dogma becomes in its turn the object of moral, aesthetic, and emotional repudiation.
To deploy effects such as these, the act of writing must have been granted the privilege of last resort. Voltairean mockery presupposes hindsight: experience has run its course, and we know the final outcome. The game is played out, and irony reflects retrospectively on the world. Looked back on, Pangloss’s first speech is already absurd; as it is told to us, it is already marked by the superior mockery and wisdom resulting from the damage inflicted by reality on metaphysics and then on reality by the demands of practical reason. Think of the role played in Candide, after so m