by Voltaire
I use “Heliodoran novel” as a neutral label, suggesting rather that the works in this subcategory of romance display many of the formal principles that Renaissance theorists admired in Heliodorus’s novel. Similarly, I use the term “novel” simply to refer to works of long prose fiction. I use the term “romance” to describe the forms and rhetorical conventions of works such as the Heliodoran novel that present a wish-fulfillment world in which literary providence prevails. For a general theoretical discussion of romance as I use the concept, see Frye.
3. Bibliothèque de Voltaire (440). Voltaire makes reference to the Grand Cyrus in a letter to Charlotte Sophia (Correspondence 103: 121). His correspondence also suggests at least a passing knowledge of the Aethiopica. In a letter to the count and countess Argental, he is familiar with the legend that Racine had memorized the Aethiopica when his tutor threatened to take away his copy (Correspondence 110: 118).
4. All references to Candide are to Pomeau.
5. In the Aethiopica Theagenes and Chariclea pretend to be brother and sister to deceive Thyamis, a suitor of the heroine. Cervantes exploits the convention more fully in the Persiles; not only do Persiles and Sigismunda pretend to be brother and sister, but they assume different names (Periandro and Auristela). Much of the narrative tension of the novel, in fact, depends on this disguise: we recognize that they are actually lovers not siblings, even though many of the other characters they meet do not, and even though we are not aware of their real identities until the very end of the novel. In the Roman comique Scarron also plays with the conventionality of this device; Destin and Etoile (pseudonyms which curiously echo Periandro and Auristela) pretend to be brother and sister, much to the disbelief of the realist, Rancune.
6. In Tom Jones, for example, the hero’s quasi-picaresque journey after leaving Somerset becomes the mutual journey of separated lovers about midway through the novel. Sophia pursues Jones to Upton, where they nearly meet. He then pursues her to London. There—after many complications that oppose our expectations for a happy ending against our knowledge of Tom’s unheroic behavior—the two are reunited and finally married.
PHILIP STEWART
Holding the Mirror up to Fiction: Generic Parody in Candide†
For many of Voltaire’s stories there are rather evident models with regard to subject-matter, narrative form, or both. Micromégas owes of course much to Swift, Zadig to the Arabian Nights; Le Monde comme il va, La Princesse de Babylone, and even more Le Taureau blanc are parodies of the Old Testament. The model in each instance is copied only up to a point, as must be the case if the many ironies of Voltaire are to be immediately perceptible. But by the same token, parody is appreciable only when the identity of what is parodied is obvious to the reader. Gulliver, Scheherazade, and the Bible have remained rather more current in readers’ minds of all ages than has a kind of antecedent which seems to me relevant for a reading of the best-known of all the tales, Candide. I am referring to the long, heroic novel (or romance), which, although it had had its heyday in the seventeenth century, had not altogether died and was certainly not altogether unread well into the eighteenth.
I will centre this discussion on Prévost’s Cleveland (1731–1739),1 both because it typifies many of the commonplaces of such fictions, and because Voltaire certainly was familiar with it and arguably—though not demonstrably—had it in mind at some points in composing Candide. (The work’s true title was Le Philosophe anglais, but it was more frequently designated by Voltaire and his contemporaries by the name of its hero, a bastard son of Cromwell.) To a lesser extent, other novels of Prévost might also be invoked, particularly Manon Lescaut. Happily, it is possible to read Candide profitably without first having assimilated all the novels of Cleveland’s type; but the literary public of 1759 was familiar with them, and likely to be familiar as well with the derisive opinion in which Voltaire, resolutely classical in most areas of literary taste, held such manner of fictions. In any event, the narrative style of Candide would have sufficed, for them, to make this attitude clear. To pursue some of the informing parallels between Cleveland and Candide, therefore, may well add in some measure to an understanding of the latter’s processes of signification.
There are first the commonplace situations and events, the repetitive repertory of picaresque peripetaia, of adventure fiction in general. The most obvious of these are shipwreck, capture, and ensuing slavery. Cleveland, Fanny, and their party are capsized by a storm in the Channel, and later they are sold to traders by the Rouinton Indians who have taken them captive. Similarly, Candide and Pangloss are barely saved off the coast of Lisbon, and several characters in Candide are sold at one time or another into slavery. En route for the New World, Cleveland bares his soul to Captain Will, explaining, ‘les premiers jours qu’on passe dans un vaisseau s’emploient à lier des connaissances’ (p. 90); the setting for the old woman’s story in Candide is an ironic allusion to just such narrative devices (frequently a strategy for intercalations), as she too, with Candide and Cunégonde, is crossing the Atlantic: ‘Je ne vous aurais même jamais parlé de mes malheurs,’ she explains, ‘s’il n’était d’usage, dans un vaisseau, de conter des histoires pour se désennuyer’ (Chapter 12). Poison, the symbol of intrigue and passion, appears in both stories, killing the old woman’s fiancé as it would have killed Cleveland had he actually consumed it.2 Another such element might even be the downstream movement whereby the hero is swept from danger or captivity into a region of release and renewed adventure. Cleveland and Fanny are transported down the Alabama River to be sold, but then are liberated by the Europeans of Pensacola; Candide and Cacambo escape both Oreillons and Jesuits likewise: ‘jetons-nous dans cette petite barque, laissons-nous aller au courant; une rivière mène toujours à quelque endroit habité’ (Chapter 17). The toujours here can refer only to a context of novels, the pattern of which is thus characterized by their mechanical predictability within certain situations; Voltaire’s irony mocks such reflexes of narrative banality, much as do Diderot’s asides in Jacques le fataliste.3
The cataclysmic reversals of fortune which are equally basic to the themes of both Cleveland and Candide are not of course peculiar to either, although Voltaire, like Diderot, doubtless considered Prévost a prime abuser of systematic plot alternation. Perhaps the fear of Candide and Cacambo that they will be roasted on a spit by the savage Oreillons (Chapter 16) is a reminiscence of the frightful manner in which Mme Riding and Cécile, in Cleveland, were presumed to have perished; however that may be, the fact that the assassinated and re-assassinated characters of Candide spring irrepressibly back to life—Cunégonde after being gutted by soldiers, her brother who is first slaughtered and later run through by Candide himself, Pangloss who was ‘mal pendu’—is surely a satire on the kind of fictional recall through which Mme Axminster, thought like Cunégonde to have expired, recovers her breath, and Mme Riding and Cécile turn up years after their supposed death, in a village through which Fanny chances to be passing. Such rebounding and fortuitous encounters are a constant of paper characters from Le Roman de Renart to the comic books, and their concentrated over-use in Candide implicitly links melodramatic novels like Cleveland to that tradition. Even the naïve ‘optimism’ of Candide’s sub-title is an ingredient of novels as well as a philosophy, and contributes to the romantic theme.
All these are reinforced too by use of the fixed formulas of narrative staging. For instance, as Mme Riding’s story is introduced with the words: ‘Elle nous satisfit en ces termes’ (p. 536), that of her analogue in Candide, the old woman, is preceded by: ‘La vieille leur parla en ces termes’ (x). Similarly, there is the fictional licence which rationalizes the listener’s impeccable memory:
[Fanny] entreprit aussitôt cette intéressante narration, dont on ne sera pas surpris dans la suite que j’aie pu répéter ici jusqu’au moindre mot. [p. 380]
[Cunégonde] parla en ces termes à Candide, qui ne perdait pas une parole �
� (Chapter 7)
The way a story is told thus becomes as much the object of satire, or nearly so, as the elements of the plot.
Staples like these are referred to in Candide precisely as ‘ces situations qu’on trouve dans tous les romans’ (Chapter 22). But there may also be more specific relations between the two works, beginning with the philosophical association of the themes of each announced in their titles. Cleveland starts out as a ‘philosophe’ of much the same sort as Candide, that is to say, ‘[un] jeune métaphysicien fort ignorant des choses de ce monde’ (ii). As the earlier work is ‘traduit de l’anglais,’ so is the latter ‘traduit de l’allemand’; and the old yarn about a manuscript finally falling into the editor’s hands, used in the preface of Cleveland as in other Prévost novels, finds its ironic parallel in the sub-title Voltaire appended to Candide: ‘avec les additions qu’on a trouvées dans la poche du docteur [Ralph], lorsqu’il mourut à Minden, l’an de grâce 1759.’ Even the names of the heroes sound somewhat alike.
From the outset, each is stigmatized and rendered vulnerable by his illegitimate birth. There is first, however, a period of security—Cleveland in Rumney-Hole and Candide in the château—coupled with an idyllic juvenile passion, Cleveland’s for Fanny and Candide’s for Cunégonde (who, like Fanny, is the legitimate daughter of the hero’s noble protector). Then the orphan is expelled from the adoptive maternal/paternal haven, and separated from the love without which he cannot henceforth conceive happiness. At this point both stories take on some of the traits of picaresque narrative, Candide’s career being more bouncily episodic, as the oft-lonely hero pursues a sinuous journey which is also a quest for a happiness embodied in the object of his first simple attachment. He roams self-obsessed through the mine-field of history, taking some note, but not much, of the major events which explode about him as he goes.
In each case too the vulnerability is compounded by that other fundamental trait already alluded to, naïveté. The green and credulous provincial had been common in picaresque fiction, and there are, for example, episodes in the early chapters of Gil Blas which parallel Cleveland’s being duped in Rouen by an ostensibly generous merchant. But Cleveland’s faith in the certifiable sincerity of others is persistent, and he never comes to doubt it more than slightly. In this Candide resembles him—‘l’esprit le plus simple,’ repeatedly deceived because of his almost incorrigible good faith. By having the recalcitrant Indian Moou executed in the name of public order (book iv), Cleveland becomes a murderer, albeit without losing his essential goodness and innocence; the same is true of Des Grieux (who slays a jail-house servant in Manon Lescaut)—and of Candide, a double and even triple assassin despite himself.
The crossing of the Appalachians by Cleveland, Axminster, and Fanny being pursued by Captain Will is comparable in function to Candide’s flight with Cunégonde and the old woman towards Cadiz (ix–x). The motivation for undertaking the voyage to America is similar too in the two stories, as are the circumstances surrounding it. Cleveland is enrolled in the service of Charles II against Cromwell, specifically to assure the submission of the American colonies; Candide is signed on to help to quell a revolt against the Portuguese king among his American subjects. If Cleveland for his part tries to make Mme Lallin pass as his aunt, Candide for his almost calls Cunégonde his sister: Voltaire mocks this commonplace whether it is found in the Bible (‘ce mensonge […] autrefois très à la mode chez les anciens’ [Chapter 13]) or in modern romance, which are thereby reduced to the same level. A spirit of optimism accompanies the liberation from European constraints. Candide’s confidence resembles that of Bridge, Cleveland, and Des Grieux at comparable moments:
[…] je me crus transporté dans un nouveau monde. (p. 103)
C’est au Nouvel Orléans qu’il faut venir, disais-je souvent à Manon, quand on veut goûter les vraies douceurs de l’amour.
(Manon Lescaut, p. 188)
Nous allons dans un autre univers, disait Candide; c’est dans celui-là, sans doute, que tout est bien […]. C’est certainement le nouveau monde qui est le meilleur des univers possibles. (Chapter 10)
Moreover, in each of the instances just cited there arises a serious complication owing to an obstructed or contested marriage. Bridge’s unofficial betrothal, though consummated, is not recognized by the authorities. Cleveland’s is performed in the wilds of America, also without the church’s benediction, so its status can later be disputed. The resemblance is even closer between Manon Lescaut and Candide, where the couple want to marry after disembarking, but see their plans frustrated by the colonial governor’s imposition of his own authority to marry the heroine to someone else. The old woman moreover advises Cunégonde to take advantage of this to ‘faire la fortune de monsieur le capitaine Candide’ (xiii), which recalls to mind the indelicate means Manon had been known to propose for assuring her own and Des Grieux’s financial security. Finally, Candide’s hiring of a valet upon arrival in Buenos Aires presents resemblances with both these Prévost novels. Cacambo is reminiscent of Iglou, an Indian servant; and this step by Candide suggests that he, like Des Grieux, who engages a valet and chambermaid in New Orleans, similarly pretends to live in the New World as a gentleman.
And then there is El Dorado, very much like the Nopande kingdom where Mme Riding and Cécile arrive after a year of peregrinations in the vague interior topography of Prévost’s North America. Voltaire’s pair of travellers survey ‘un horizon immense, bordé de montagnes inaccessibles,’ mountains ‘droites comme des murailles’ (Chapters 17–18): such terrain might have been suggested by descriptions of the Andes like those cited by André Morize,4 but equally well by any number of utopian fictions, among them Cleveland. The island colony in Bridge’s story is itself surrounded by cliffs ‘d’une hauteur qu’il ne me semblait pas possible de surmonter’ (p. 103), and Mme Riding finds herself before ‘un mur fort élevé […] qui s’étendait d’une montagne à l’autre’ (p. 543). The Nopande kingdom lying behind it has none of the surface glitter of El Dorado, which plausibly might derive from the fame of Incan wealth, but on the other hand could just as well have been inspired by an obvious literary model which no editor seems to have cited as a source: the new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, all encrusted with jewels, paved with gold, and spectacular in its dimensions. And Voltaire’s harnessing of the famous ‘gros moutons rouges’ parallels the entrance of Mme Riding: ‘On attelait à une petite voiture deux animaux dont l’espèce m’était inconnue’ (p. 544); in both cases it takes a ride of just four hours to reach the palace.
Each of the authors makes of the mysterious mountain refuge the sole society encountered by any of their characters where people are authentically happy:
[…] cette nation la plus douce peut-être et la plus polie qui existe dans l’univers […] (p. 543)
C’est probablement le pays où tout va bien […] (Chapter 17)
Yet ultimately in both instances they insist on leaving over the objections of the ruler, because happiness is perceived as reunion with persons who are elsewhere:
Je n’ai point d’autre vue que de chercher des personnes dont je ne puis supporter l’absence […] (p. 553)
[…] mais enfin mademoiselle Cunégonde n’y est pas […] (Chapter 18)
The departure of Candide and Cacambo by virtue of ‘une machine pour guinder ces deux hommes extraordinaires hors du royaume’ (Chapter 18) has been compared to a similar machine in Histoire des Sévarambes,5 but an equally plausible source is the moment where Mme Riding first sees the Nopandes atop their mountain wall: ‘Sur le champ je leur vis préparer une machine qu’ils laissèrent couler jusqu’à moi, et de laquelle sortirent deux hommes’ (p. 543). El Dorado and the Nopande land are both left behind forever, a memory of happiness which, once renounced, can never be recovered.
Cleveland, being English, is subject to that famous ailment, melancholia (Martin says the English are atrabilious [Chapter 23]); but so is Candide: the theft of his sheep ‘le plongea dans une noire mélancolie’ (C
hapter 19), and the same happens later in Venice (Chapter 24). Experience of course contributes to their gloom, especially since each of the heroes returns to Europe without the heroine of his quest, whom a traitor has stolen away. His philosophical and emotional depression leads Cleveland to imagine that suicide would be sanctioned by his Author:
En permettant que je sois tombé dans l’extrémité de l’infortune et de la douleur, il m’a excepté du nombre de ceux qu’il condamne à vivre longtemps. (p. 290)
Candide comes close to succumbing to the same desperate temptation:
A quoi me servira de prolonger mes misérables jours, puisque je dois les traîner loin d’elle dans les remords et dans le désespoir? (Chapter 16)
The evidential value of this comparison, in terms of possible allusion specifically to Cleveland on the part of Voltaire, is the stronger if one bears in mind that at this time suicide was hardly a common theme in novels: Candide appears before the long letters on suicide in La Nouvelle Héloïse; the first literary suicide I know of is in the Histoire du marquis de Cressy of Mme Riccoboni (1758).6
There is obviously a clear philosophico-religious theme in both stories. The minister’s insistence in Cleveland (book 3) that the fall of the dice—that consummate symbol of chance—in fact betokens the divine will has perhaps its analogue in Pangloss’s dictum that all is arranged for the best. Cleveland’s vague discussion of deism (book 4), and especially the arguments involving protestants, Jesuits, and Jansenists (books vi–vii), could be likened to the religious debates running through Candide. Bridge’s persuasion that he is plagued by ‘quelque puissance maligne’ (p. 147) is even worthy of comparison to Martin’s Manicheanism: God has abandoned the world, in the latter’s opinion, to ‘quelque être malfaisant’ (Chapter 20).