by Voltaire
In Le monde comme il va, written at approximately the same time as Le Crocheteur, the confluence of narrator and protagonist is complete. Though it is subtitled “vision de Babouc, écrite par lui-même,” its narrator, oddly enough, does not speak for himself but is spoken about. This is because he deliberately walks between first and third personhood, conveying the perfect emblem of a vision (or dream) now over but lingering as an object of thought. At the close of the tale, when the audience giggles to learn that the “lui-même” of the subtitle is Voltaire, it is overjoyed to discard what it now takes to be a mask and to hear itself praised. Babouc, commissioned by the celestial Ituriel to decide whether to exterminate Persépolis (Paris), eventually offers what is a not unusual conclusion to Voltaire’s fantasies: a recapitulation, in conglomerated form, of the already evident—here, a symbolic statue composed of “tous les métaux, des terres et des pierres les plus précieuses et les plus viles” (p. 80). This is as much as “visions” can produce: a suspensive testimony, an eloquent but inert lump of pros and cons, the very same that provoked the vision to begin with. But Babouc does decide to let Persépolis stand. Why? Generations of readers have given what is actually Ituriel’s interpretation of the statue: “si tout n’est pas bien, tout est passable” (p. 80). Babouc, his story-vision told, has other reasons, only obliquely congruent with his dialectical narrative and its artistically frozen complement, the statue: he is happy (“de si bonne humeur”), physically, morally, not simply with opera, theatre, and delicious food, but—we have to suppose—with having to think no more. Unlike Jonah (the narrator’s example), trapped in the dark intestine of his mind, Babouc-Voltaire opens his eyes to crystal and candlelight, a bright island of civilized, untroubled, and no doubt adoring company. Thought is a cloud passing over “la jouissance du présent”; it ends up celebrating not a solution, but its own artfulness and, ultimately, a place, which happens to be a place of origin as well as repose. Babouc-Voltaire, facing his audience, exorcized and smiling, manages to include that posture, as flattering as it is witty, in the message of his story.
We can recognize in these visionary structures a prefiguration of Voltaire’s general manner, his style of argument and disengagement. Thought or imagination continually goes down, self-consciously and publicly, to defeat. What we are left with at the end of Micromégas, for example, is a book opening onto another book, the first, an imaginary voyage, the second, a book of whys and wherefores which is supposed to resolve the issues raised in the first. If only the Sirian who wrote the second and disappeared (as dreams disappear), leaving it as a legacy to the Académie des sciences, had been able to write something in it, we might be convinced that this “philosophical” fantasy could engender irrevocable and stable truths from within itself. But it can’t. After the usual sparring of opposites, the familiar dance, all riddles and visions blank out; worse, they confirm their chronic anxiety and so encourage repetition, another search, another fantasy. Instead of a narrator explaining his book, we have one who cannot read it; and this incapacity is not weakness but truth. In Zadig, Jesrad is there, like Babouc’s statue, symbolically to encapsulate the episodic action of the whole—and to provide his inadequate explanation. Immediately after Zadig’s “Mais” and his submission, as it were, to fantasy, the rude awakening is not the protagonist’s but the narrator’s, at the protagonist’s expense. The happy ending, like Candide’s, is violently yoked to the bruised body of the rest. So violently in fact that it cannot adhere and is not meant to. Both Zadig and Candide, after surviving the fantasticated, parodic yarns of their lives—Candide actually says, twice, that his life is a dream—the heaving to-and-fro of good and evil, are packed off to live in other moral climes. Neither Zadig nor Candide have any longer to be involved with the Lebenswelt of the initial fantasy. Life for both of them, as if its fever had subsided, is a matter of rational control, something firmly within their grasp and unlike what it had been heretofore: a thing assaulted from within and without. It is hard to imagine Candide, in the heat of sexual and occasionally metaphysical pursuit, wondering, as he does in the end, what to do about boredom or vice; and harder still to imagine that his garden, had it come into existence a few chapters sooner, would not have been trampled or seismically convulsed.5 The wakeful, disenchanted garden of Candide and Zadig’s enchanted Babylonian court are emphatically not solutions to the swirl of shifting problems that generate now one narrative move, now another. Both tales come to rest in a domesticated and domesticable space. Zadig’s doesn’t escape Voltaire’s ironic sense of the inadequacy of his ending; Candide’s, which more closely approximates the sense of the social space of the earliest tales, offers itself not as a solution to the worst of all possible worlds but, once again, to the mind that cannot read its own book—as an end to the search for answers. But this end, as we know, is perpetually a beginning, just as surely as nagging questions follow us into the most fertile or blissful of gardens. The instabilities of these conclusions are not unlike the instabilities of the swerving, evasive explorations within the stories.
If Voltaire’s most remarkable accomplishment is the parodic harnessing of unseemly forms of fiction to provide an exact but hyperbolic metaphor for the forms of life; and if mimesis thereby becomes an impersonation of an imitation, the projection of Voltaire’s voice through exotic figures and structures, then no rhetorical gesture used to indicate a separation from his model can save him from being partially or wholly caught within its premise. Having erected the Byzantine world of Candide or the “Oriental” one of Zadig, how can he resolve it “philosophically”? Can non-sense be recuperated by sense? Every conclusion must come as a separation, a radical escape from or denial of the vision (fiction) itself—at least in those stories where resolutions exist. And there are further complications having to do with where Voltaire locates truth or thinking—never in the world but apart from it, in spite of it, an interruption in time and a consequent benumbing, blinding expansion in space.6 Lost in the stars or in the abstractions of resolutely remote Reason, solutions, resolutions, and critical thought itself turn away from the particularities and variousness of existence toward what is obvious chiefly to celestial travelers and “philosophers” alike: eternal, universal verities. Sub specie rationis, the world and its ways are—it is a spatial, temporal, psychological, and moral corollary—repetitious. And just as Voltaire’s impersonations are predominantly episodic, repetitions with variations, as one moves from story to story one becomes aware of a hectic reprise of theme and motif. When boredom arrives suddenly on the scene, at the end or even at the dinners of the wealthy, it sums up a condition not only of life but of a special kind of fixed, rational attention to life. Thought, impotent because it cannot stoop to conquer, anxious to create a distinction between itself and the world—both characters and narrators repeatedly insist on this disjunction—loses what Adorno refers to as its “field of tension” and maintains instead a “safety zone” from which it can ultimately only issue proclamations “relaxing the claim of ideas to truth.”7 The result is that the stories project a final, master symmetry within which disconnection from life, from what is below the mind, finds its mirror image in disconnection from what is above—the answer to what is below. A fullness of reason, the scaffolding of Voltaire’s “mediate”8 or satiric ironies, collapses into this avowal of weakness and emptiness, contained but partially obscured within his texts, in voices like Candide’s, Plato’s, Babouc’s, or Zadig’s or situated between the layers of story and irony or in the final, unexpected warp of plot or frame. In the contest (rather than interaction) between reason and the world, the world, paradoxically, proves “unreal,” a dream-fiction, an extravagant, violently attractive, often exotic fantasy, and thought takes cognizance of its limits. It returns home, to its place, its “Pénates”—or hidden, centering gods—as does Scarmentado, who invokes them when he too, obeying the dying, erratic swerve of his author’s will—a buried figure of the author’s mind—decides never to travel or search again.
With Le blanc et le noir and Le taureau blanc, life is once more, respectively, a dream and an enchantment vainly striving to understand itself. Rustan’s dream lives up to what has always been expected of dreams: taken as a whole, it has a message that must be deciphered. But inside the dream, the dreamer struggles, as he moves from sequence to sequence, to interpret oneiric omens and oracular pronouncements that intimate, as they structure themselves repetitiously into the familiar binary oppositions, that all would be well if he could understand. The questions we’re left with after dreams end are here, as in Plato’s fable, injected into the dream itself—a kind of second degree of interrogation that makes the very procedure of questioning a central theme. Only when he is dying does Rustan have the paltry satisfaction of hearing, still within his dream, and more clearly now, what he (and we) had already guessed: that destiny is good and bad, white and black, and that God’s ways are mysterious. Though this message is hardly worth dying for, it allows Rustan to wake up, abruptly and in a sweat, to the “real” world around him and, more importantly perhaps, to the wonder of what he—or rather Voltaire—has done. Wisely, Rustan-Voltaire chooses less to think of the content of the dream than to be amazed that so much has been compacted into the single hour of its duration. What in fact Rustan discovers is what Babouc had already found in his statue and what Amazan (of La Princesse de Babylone) will find reason to admire in an English map containing “l’univers en raccourci” (p. 386)—the miraculous astringencies of symbolic form, their capacity, as Rustan experiences them, to abbreviate an entire life of desire even to the moment of death. But just as Babouc’s statue sums up his mission and neither answers nor explains the gods, providing only a denser semiosis of his “vision,” so Rustan’s restless dream, for all his delight at its remarkable brevity, is oddly cyclical and redundant, issuing finally not in a responsive wakefulness but in this fascination with the act of telling. And as if further to contract what has already been suggested about the contractive power of discourse, a parrot, planted in the very last line of the tale, parts its beak, ready to divulge the entire secret of Time and—since it was born before the Flood—History. Again the whiteness of the page, which neither Rustan, Voltaire, the Academy of Sciences, nor celestial travelers can read. The final reduction or message would have been, we’re told, simple, unrhetorical, and unself-conscious (p. 128), that is, unlike Rustan’s dream or Voltaire’s stories, neoclassical in spirit—if that were possible (which it is not) within those stories or the texts they imitate. (The parrot sounds suspiciously like Gresset’s Ver-Vert.) Voltaire’s impersonations of the ways of the world long to shed their stylized language, to dissolve beneath a bright gleam of truth, making expendable the kinds of signs and portents that control Rustan. Instead that radiance turns out to be an unutterable blankness, an open beak. It is not that the truth does not exist; it neglects to come.
If we could disenchant the world, that is to say, our thoughts, our language, there might be an end to “dreaming.” Every voice would speak like the parrot, without wit and no doubt without metaphor; and there would be no such thing as the unverisimilar or the indecorous, no kingdom, in short, like the one described in Le Taureau blanc. Making their way through the messiness, the sheer density of this setting, the lists of creatures, smells, sounds, foods, most of it deliberately cacophonous, the characters suffer from the confusions and frustrations of the world. At the center of this enchantment, overwhelmed by it but also, paradoxically, responsible for it, are the linked energies of desire and curiosity (Amaside), reason (Mambrès), and narration itself (the serpent). The story, which probably began with the intention of constructing itself into a Biblical satire, ends up by appropriating fairy tales and Greek romances and by continually drawing its author’s consciousness into its web. It is not only, as critics have said, that the images of Mambrès and the serpent are, in part, self-portraits of Voltaire, but that Voltaire devises a way of speaking about himself and his reader in the specular scene of the serpent telling his tales to the Princess Amaside. Her response has become famous: she’s bored and yearns for a story “fondé sur la vraisemblance” (p. 594): “Je veux … qu’il ne ressemble pas toujours à un rêve” (p. 594). She is of course entangled in a “dream” as unbelievable as the stories she’s heard; and when the serpent aims for something more seemly or rational, a parable of jaded prophets, she misses the point and couldn’t be less interested. What is a serpent to do? Amaside’s (the reader’s) needs, her unflagging attention to the bull, eroticize Voltaire’s (the serpent’s) fictions; her need for consolation in view of the interminable postponement of love provokes the kind of imitation, fantastic and digressive, that corresponds to her predicament. She is no happier with the serpent than she is with the life Voltaire has meted out to her. What she actually longs for are lies—the magical clarification and dematerialization of world and body so that when Mambrès asks the serpent to tell her tales, he adds, knowingly, that “ce n’est que par des contes qu’on réussit dans le monde” (p. 592)—“contes,” stories; “contes,” lies.
The verisimilar story exists, like the parrot’s explanation, as an hypothesis, wrapped in abstraction, that fails to find real or verbal substance. Where could it find these things—given the contravening vision that ties Amaside and the others into an inescapable, intertextual knot? The hope for verisimilitude, which Mambrès also shares—seeing, as he puts it, “une foule d’incompatibilités que je ne puis concilier,” and unable to find reasonable explanation for what has happened to him and for history in general—is ultimately, at its furthest reaches, a hope for a vast negation of the very conditions of existence, not simply of the metaphors that describe them but of the laws and procedures of nature itself: the foul proliferation of a flawed creation and of the violent predators that inhabit it. The wheels within wheels of time, as they are described in Le blanc et le noir, are drawn here into Voltaire’s vision along with the syncretisms of the Notebooks and the histories: all the serpents and white bulls of myth and fable, characters from different books, times, and places. They converge to provide some sense of the mind’s perennially irrational and reiterative response to the nature of things. This static flow, these recurring symbols also speak of the consoling and reductive power of abstraction, language, fiction, and “dreams,” their capacity to arrest proliferation and to draw time, event, and human presence or belief into the harness of symmetrized values: white, black, or any of the other terms of Voltaire’s favorite dualities. But in the last analysis, the exercise is useless. Mambrès-Voltaire wanders about like Quijote in the Cave of Montesinos, a magician sunk in a conflated, magical world he himself sustains, waiting for the final disenchantment. Yes, the white bull becomes a king, but his very metamorphosis and the entire ending—the feast, the abrupt and ironic enumeration of what happens to each of the characters—cannot and is not meant to dispel, any more than the voice of Démiourgos, the problems raised earlier.
Are there fictions of another kind, wakeful, rational, verisimilar, that might please the Princess—and Voltaire? She tries contemporary novels and stories, including some by Crébillon fils, Hamilton, and the Chevalier de Mouhy; like Formosante, that other Princess, she finds them inadequate and irrelevant. If life is, upon reflection, like a driving, preposterous fiction, authors and characters alike will have to tread their crooked way through plots that seem to pile up whimsically but insist, as if by reaction, on concatenations, flashbacks, and previews of things to come. The purpose of shunting between past and future is not, as in Heliodorus or Gomberville, to create suspense or to settle matters into a reassuring order; it is to call attention both to the blight of most temporal progressions, whether forward or back, and to underscore what other, so-called verisimilar fictions deliberately omit. In order, for example, to rouse the one-eyed porter from his sleep, Voltaire invents a typically elaborate arabesque of causes: an irreligious servant woman, whose master, too lazy to make the trip, has holy water delivered from the mosque, dumps the
used water unknowingly on the porter’s head. Explanations like these, even as far back as Le Crocheteur, offer virtuoso occasions for satire, but what they have more profoundly in common is their insistence on the base, physical events that force life forward, events that histories, tragedies, and ordinary novels tastefully pare away. And if I choose this one incident from among hundreds, it is in order to suggest as well that all origins for Voltaire are vile, including those two paradigms of origin, the Creation and human birth. In the accidental, watery drama of the porter, in the notion of being flushed into awareness or life with tainted water, even, I think, in the witless female intercession that brings it about, there is already, at this early stage, a striking emblem of Voltaire’s permanent and ever more aggravated and metaphysical disgust with all bodily functions but especially procreation—or with what amounts to the same: things slipping into or surfacing in the hidden crevasses of the body, life, or art. What Wolfgang Iser refers to as “blanks” or “places of indeterminacy” and Seymour Chatman nicely calls the unbestimmt, necessary “gaps common to all narrative”9—among which one must include secondary or unutterably offensive moments in the verisimilar, “historic,” or classical novel as it moves from one “significant” event or passion to another—become primary sources of interest, awe, and significance in Voltaire’s stories. A provocative mass of intermediate detail spreads into what were heretofore silent intervals, as “uselessly hidden” as that “stinking membrane” in which we all lay at the moment of birth, “entre de l’urine et des excréments”—according to Sidrac in Les Oreilles du comte de Chesterfield (p. 556). It is in these glamorless “gaps” that most of Voltaire’s narratives vengefully and self-consciously expand, so much so that all the rest is made to seem both a cause and an effect, a series of hinges connected not to larger, solid planks but to one another. And, as if to make amends for this loose suspension of material, Voltaire most frequently provides a firm armature of simple but overarching necessities, legacies of the past and inescapable commands from the future. Rustan, Cosi-Sancta, and Formosante obey oracles; others, like Adate, witness omens or, like Shastasid and Memnon, have presentiments or providential visions. These unverisimilar underpinnings, together with the episodes that prove their strength, are as fanciful as Plato’s “dream” explanation of the Creation—and as lawlessly lawful as all creations metaphorically constituted to resemble it. Voltaire discovers in this simulacrum of writing represented by the urgencies of impromptu composition and in the voices and genres that display them best a proximity to the divine “dream” and a distance from it that is an endless source of pleasure and revulsion.