by Voltaire
We should not reason excessively about a text that warns us precisely against excessive reasoning. We can think about Candide as a parable. But this book is only a parable in its general outline and in some of the questions and maxims that punctuate it. The caprice and even folly that flourish all around are not without a hidden link to the central message. How, for example, are we to interpret the paired figures, the ballet of minor characters who enter and exit in twos? This game of pairs is repeated indefinitely: two recruiting officers, two rival kings (the Abar and the Bulgarian), the servant of the Inquisition and his attendant, the Grand Inquisitor and Don Issachar, Cunégonde and the old woman, the two girls pursued by two monkeys, Giroflée and Paquette, the two girls in the service of Pococurante, the young baron chained next to Pangloss, the two sons and the two daughters of the good old man, and so on. This is only a summary list of these simultaneous dualities. We can identify other dualities that occur in rapid succession: the Protestant preacher followed by good Jacques; the Spanish kingdom, then the Jesuit kingdom; the Parisian experience, then the English experience; the dervish, then the good old man.… These games of pairs allow Voltaire to fall back sometimes on the comic effects of symmetry (when dealing with the companions), sometimes on the troubling effects of disparity (when dealing with more important characters and when there is a succession of episodes). Disparity, contrast, difference, all arranged as paired figures, bring to the fore the image of a world irregular in its regularity (we think of Pangloss’s one eye, the old woman’s single buttock), dedicated to the law of geometry while also denying it. Nothing is organized; nothing matches the harmonious pattern spoken of by the metaphysicians and theologians. To make the point, Voltaire must resort to excess, even frenzy: the Grand Inquisitor, who consigns Jewish converts to the flames, shares his mistress with a Jew; the priests, meting out sentences including hanging and burning, debauch young girls and boys; and not one woman who is not, willingly or otherwise, prostituted. No, Candide is not even remotely a representation of the world. The elements of reality it contains are caricatured beyond measure. But here the principle of disparity intervenes once more: Candide produces meaning by virtue of being paired with the world—a pair that is willfully asymmetric, in which the fictive image, reduced and preposterous, forces us to see better the perverse seriousness, the rigidity, the evil weightiness, the dogmatic intolerance that humans accept as the necessary order of their existence.
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† Originally published in French, “Sur le style philosophique de Candide,” in Comparative Literature 28 (1976), pp. 193–200. This translation, by Nicholas Cronk, is based on the slightly revised version that appeared in Le Remède dans le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 123–44. © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1983, 1989. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Editions Gallimard.
1. On the theme of passivity, see the pertinent remarks of Christopher Thacker in the introduction to his critical edition of Candide (Geneva, 1968), p.10ff.
2. Literary and pictoral aspects of this theme are explored in J. Starobinski, Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque (Geneva, Skira, 1970; Paris, Gallimard, 2004).
3. On the movement of the narration, see Geoffrey Murray, Voltaire’s Candide: The Protean Gardener, 1755–1762.
4. Nigaud is French for “fool,” hence the undermining comic effect [Cronk].
5. Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, trans. John Fletcher, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 2011), p.56 [Cronk].
JACK UNDANK
The Status of Fiction in Voltaire’s Contes†
[Candide has been routinely described as a “philosophical fiction”: Voltaire is a philosopher, so the argument runs, and he uses fiction to “sugar the pill,” to wrap up his philosophical truths in an attractive fictional cloak. But what if the fictions themselves are the “message”? Or to put it another way, what if Voltaire is using the complexities of fiction to say something that simply cannot be said in any other way? Examining Candide alongside Voltaire’s other tales, Jack Undank shows here that Voltaire’s fictions are highly self-conscious constructs. These works call attention to their status as fictions, foreground the processes of narration, and perhaps even critique the idea that a fiction can encapsulate a straightforward truth. Undank calls these tales “visionary structures,” which seem to offer a solution to problems by means of an escape into fantasy—Candide on two occasions declares that his life is a dream; but the fantasy is typically brought to an abrupt end that leaves readers wondering how to make sense of what has happened, as with the concluding chapter of Candide, which, Undank claims, is “violently yoked to the bruised body of the rest.” Employing what are called here “ironies of disjunction.” Voltaire in telling his tales challenges us to stand back from the narrative to think about the processes of tale-telling. In so doing, he finds a language and a structure that can communicate the intricacies and ambiguities of his thinking.—Nicholas Cronk]
What kind of dreaming is it that Plato managed to produce in visions like those of The Republic or Timaeus? His work is not all “rubbish” (“galimatias”), Voltaire reassures us; it contains “de très belles idées.”1 And one knows that Plato’s “dream” in Voltaire’s Songe de Platon is something of both: beautiful rubbish. A faintly Leibnizian and Popean explanation of the imperfect Creation, this dream was once, for Voltaire, beautiful; by 1756 it has become a damaged thing. Why is it worth repeating? Above and beyond its value to Voltaire as a structure for equivocation (justifying God and subverting this justification), it seems to suggest that a Platonic dream is not far different from a Voltairian one, that the equivocation to be found in the message is also present in the question Voltaire very guardedly raises about the efficacy and purpose of certain kinds of fiction—or “dreams”—not merely Plato’s beautiful rubbish but his own. The fact that Plato uses an apologue, a cosmological fable, a deliberately archaic genre, ought not (though Voltaire encourages it) draw attention away from the way fiction here, as elsewhere in Voltaire’s works, speaks of its own processes with mixed comfort and contempt.
Already as the Songe opens the narrator hedges every bet, and form begins to predict and imitate the uneasy condition of what will be the substance of Plato’s “dream.” Plato, he warns us, dreamed a lot, “et on n’a pas moins rêvé depuis.”2 Like Mambrès in Le Taureau blanc, he claims that dreams used to confer great reputations; in these enlightened days they no longer do. We’re prepared not to believe a word of what Plato says. But all the same: “Voici un de ses songes qui n’est pas un des moins intéressants” (p. 473). The frame advises distance and discrimination; it also simultaneously produces an illusion of historicity or authenticity and so invites us to become absorbed. Irony suddenly flags, Voltaire disappears behind Plato’s voice, and the dream begins. We have moved from the narrator to Plato to a dreamwork, which takes us, in turn, from the words and deeds of Démiourgos, the eternal Geometrician, to Démogorgon, who is directly responsible for the Creation. We slip not only from reflections on mind to the inner matter of those reflections; we seem to be advancing through a series of Chinese boxes or frames toward an inner sanctum in which truth is held and displayed. What in fact we pass through is a series of voices, each with its own authority—making it seem as if the “dreaming” mind were searching within its own substance, its dream (or fiction), for the simulacrum of truth and explanation. The recessive progression of the structure suggests a metaphor (would in fact be a metaphor, if we allowed that the plasticities of whole works could constitute one) that houses and also replicates several other metaphors: for thought turned probingly back upon itself; for a movement back in time; for a pursuit not merely of what is but of all causality and origins. Yet to any retrospection and “dreaming” there must be a stop. The path leading in and back also leads out, and as we leave Démogorgon, we again hear, in sequence, the voices of Démiourgos, Plato
, and the narrator. The concluding sentence, however, is a nasty jibe by one of Plato’s disciples, and it is also Voltaire’s final comment, a kind of coup de grâce performed, as I’ve suggested, with a double-edged sword: “Et puis vous vous réveillâtes” (p. 475). The metaphor of a dream with which the narrator began is used to crush Plato’s message but this time from within, issuing from a voice that finds its place in the narration itself. The disciple’s words break the scheme of the narrative progression as I’ve traced it. The entire tale, which toys with formal symmetries—rhetorical, semantic, structural—abruptly collapses into a swift, unbalanced, unframed, italicized line. The narrator appears briefly before it to say, “Voilà ce que Platon enseignait à ses disciples” (p. 475). But his words cannot serve as a counterweight to his introductory remarks; and the story now protrudes briefly beyond what we had taken to be its frame. It is as if the disciple’s lethally silencing “pointe” had to disrupt the carefully laid strata through which it surfaces, just as Plato’s “awakening,” or any intrusion upon an effort so strenuous, is necessarily rude and seems to violate what precedes it. It is the awesome contradictions of different fields of consciousness that Plato (and Voltaire and we) must now face—outside the story. The dream, having ventured several improbable solutions, subsides into its originative perplexity.
But this is to simplify the Songe. The fact is that remnants of the wakeful mind are already operative in Plato’s dream. Even before the smart aleck student calls a spade a spade, a dream a dream, we get some sense of the critical threat that inheres in the troubled conscience of the dreamer dreaming, that is, telling his tale. As soon as Démogorgon reveals his world, a group of querulous genii question the form and purpose of the Creation that this dreamwork has constructed. Their protests in fact take up the largest portion of the text. Démigorgon betrays his own misgivings; and all these celestial beings are brought to heel only by the return of the Démiourgos himself and by his (as it turns out) not fully adequate explanation. If this is a dream, it is one that reaches vainly for its own subliminal, dialectical exegesis—and fails. As an imaginative fiction, it ends up describing the law of limits, limits not only of knowledge—one of the themes of the work—but of poetic and metaphorical supposition. As long as the restless dream lasts, it generates, in spite of its internal problems, at least the compelling satisfactions of invention and absorption. But the final pinprick, Et puis vous vous réveillâtes, rouses the dreamer and the reader to see in this art of storytelling a process of gestation comparable to the production of imperfect but self-sustaining worlds, or dreams, that partially subvert their own figurative supports and aims.
There would appear to be no need in the Songe or elsewhere in Voltaire’s stories for the usual kind of narrative frame to score the ironic point, since negativity saturates the narration itself, most obviously through parody but also through many other casually embedded ironies of disjunction. These opening and closing frames, wherever they occur, speak eloquently and, at first glance, rather repetitiously, of what the stories make abundantly clear: that right reason and metaphysical understanding are incompatible with life as it is perceived or lived. But they also allow Voltaire to represent more overtly than elsewhere the complex and ambiguous moods he must have experienced while thinking—thinking while writing. The two are emphatically connected in more than the ordinary sense: like so much of the literature for and about salons and social life in the early century, Voltaire’s stories promote the illusion of an oral, impromptu performance.3 They digress, forget their direction or earlier intention, and end either abruptly or with the promise of a sequel; they exist, in short, as much if not more for the momentary pleasure of the segment than for the concerted harmony of the whole. Like all performances of this kind, they are spiritedly self-conscious, and, however modified, the sense of an audience and of a special milieu persists, affecting and often confounding sense and meaning.
A story like Le Crocheteur borgne, one of the earliest, which undisguisedly betrays its wayward impulses, gives us some notion of how Voltaire’s mind dances with its thoughts and some idea of its characteristic rhythms. As it happens, something altogether typical occurs in the very first sentence: “Nos deux yeux ne rendent pas notre condition meilleure; l’un nous sert à voir les biens, et l’autre les maux de la vie” (p. 602). Two statements apparently joined in a symmetry of apposition turn out, on closer inspection, to have been forced together for the sake of rhetorical balance. The first clause invites the conclusion we find elsewhere in Voltaire that one had best not look at things around us, or at ourselves; the second takes flight on the notion of two eyes and, while pretending syntactically to modify the first, actually sets up a vague contradiction and produces still another binary structure. Once this self-impelling, self-adjusting two-step has begun, Voltaire succumbs as much to its playful beat as Mesrour, his protagonist, to alcohol. The opening paragraphs virtually sway with contrasting pairs of clauses, eyes, people, human conditions, etc.; and at the end of the first, the narrator exclaims that those people are fortunate who see only with the eye that perceives the good. Mesrour, he tells us, is an example. We expect to discover a character morally and psychologically blind to evil; but in fact the metaphor is used, quite literally, to put out an eye! And none of us, says the narrator, still playing with his polarities, is so blind that he will not see that Mesrour is one-eyed. Mesrour is so happy that, to express exactly how, Voltaire sets him up as a conventionally primitive “philosopher,” an impoverished porter who lives not, as we would say, from hand to mouth, but from moment to moment, in a “jouissance du présent,” untroubled, like the wealthy Epicurean who serves as his real model, by thoughts of the future. Yet all of this, as Voltaire takes his next spin, is totally irrelevant. The story turns out to be not at all about a one-eyed man who can see no evil, and even less about the pleasures of living with bare but satisfied necessities. Poor Mesrour, we find, was maimed for no purpose at all—except the whimsical, antithetical, momentary jouissance of the writer. What really inspires Mesrour’s bliss and saves him from evil is liquor, not philosophy, not a missing eye—even though, in an attempt to bring his performance to a matching, unifying close, Voltaire reminds us, pointlessly now, that Mesrour had no eye for evil.
Like Plato, Mesrour dreams; both are victims of their own and of Voltaire’s imagination; and all three of them clarify or intensify desire in the process. The “present” of the dream, which complements the Epicurean, occasional present of Mesrour’s happy life outside the dream, is also the intoxicating, occasional present of the narrator’s dance—even as it leads Voltaire and the reader away from the ordinary logic of fiction. It is fiction, the making of it, that matters; and our narrator is willing, with typical sprezzatura, to acknowledge or to insist on his artlessness: “Mélinade (c’est le nom de la dame, que j’ai mes raisons pour ne pas dire jusqu’ici, parce qu’il n’était pas encore fait) avançait …” (p. 604). This is what we’re asked to appreciate—less a coordinated, relentless philosophical argument disguised as fiction than a story celebrating its own quick inventiveness (while speaking, thematically, of the inventions of the imagination). What is “philosophical” in Le Crocheteur is banal and confused. The narrator’s freedom momentarily to release his protagonist, the world—and himself—from disorder, and from thoughts of ugliness, poverty, and filth, is not. The frame returns at the end as Mesrour awakens and as the narrator faces his audience with a firmer (changed) grasp of the realities of Mesrour’s wretched life—that is, with the need for closure and a final “pointe.” The dream, the drunkenness of writing (or speaking) is over; there is no sagesse achieved, no connecting of the processes of mind with the ways of the world, only the miming of the two and of their disjunction.
Not all dreams are good ones, and, as I’ve suggested, consciousness and negativity usually engulf them. Even in the case of Le Crocheteur, the oriental narration sneers at itself. And, of course, not all of Voltaire’s fictions are concerned with actual d
reams. But where they are not, most of them evoke in one way or another the elements of the configuration I’ve been dealing with: an intransigent problem or situation that inspires a search; an illustrative fantasy (its form borrowed from a familiar genre or source—which serves both to isolate its discourse and to heighten its symbolic content); and a rude awakening. In this particular sequence—and not accidentally—one can find a grotesque version of Kenneth Burke’s Purpose, Passion, and Perception, the X-rayed soul of Aristotelian “action.” But this is not really as shocking as it appears. The reverse of tragedy is not comedy but burlesque or parody;4 and it would not be wrong to find in Voltaire’s stories the precise, dialectical extension of his theatre. In the stories, however, one has to contend with a shifting center of gravity, an identifiable murmur of consciousness that floats freely between narrators and protagonists, so that when the awakening or enlightening Perception occurs there is often a blurring of the distinction. Someone opens his eyes—literally or figuratively—and the fantasy together with its problems are abruptly erased in a formal closure that cannot pretend to resolve the issues raised. The closure itself often acknowledges this, thematizes its own impotence or misgivings, and frequently insists instead on the satisfactions of a debriefing—the movement not simply out of the dream or fantasy but away from thought itself and into the compensatory pleasures and urgencies of the reader’s world, which is precisely, when all is said and done, Voltaire’s world as well. Human presence returns, and with it the realities, the lingering present of the salon, the site and inspiration of the dream performance and of Mesrour’s “jouissance.”