The Novel
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The Letters of Amabed (Les Lettres d’Amabed, 1769). An epistolary novella set in 1512–13 in which the Brahman Amabed and his bride exchange letters with his father about their sleazy dealings with a Portuguese missionary, Father Fa tutto. When Amabed tells officials that the missionary raped his wife (and her maid), Fa futto counters by accusing them of apostasy, and all three are shipped from India to Rome to let the pope decide their case. During the voyage Amabed learns more about Fa futto’s religion—this novella is Voltaire’s most virulent attack on Catholicism—but after he reaches Rome and is feted by the worldly religious establishment—Pope Leo X slaps him and his wife on their butts after their audience—he succumbs to Roman ways and abandons his correspondence when he and his wife are invited to a bisexual romp in the country. (When in Rome. . . .) Again the author warns against spurious sequels.
The White Bull (Le Taureau blanc, 1773–74). In Egypt in the 6th century bce, 24-year-old Princess Amaside bewails her missing lover Nebuchadnezzar, whom the Jewish god metamorphosed into a white bull seven years earlier, and who now (unknown to her) follows her around, accompanied by many other magical animals from the Bible. Threatened with death by her father if she utters the Babylonian king’s name, Amaside accidentally blurts it out while the serpent from Genesis is telling her a story, and is saved from death only because the Egyptian gods want the white bull to take the place of their dead bull-god Apis. His seven-year-curse up, the bull metamorphoses back into Nebuchadnezzar, who marries the princess and returns to Babylon. In this Monty Pythonesque spoof of the Old Testament, the prophets Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah have cameos—they get drunk and complain prophesyin’ ain’t easy—before being metamorphosed into magpies.
Lord Chesterfield’s Ears and Parson Goodman (Les Oreilles du comte de Chesterfield et le chapelain Goudman [sic ], 1775). In England in 1773, Parson Goodman misses out on both a vicarage and a wife because his deaf patron Lord Chesterfield mishears his request. Goodman is impressed by his lordship’s physician, Mr. Sidrac, and abandons theology “to study nature under his direction” to console himself (M 94). Along with Sidrac’s world-traveler friend Dr. Grou, the three carry on conversations that might have been heard in Shandy Hall. A twist of fate allows Goodman to get the vicarage and the girl, and he “became one of the most terrible priests in England” (M 110).
Johnny’s Story (Histoire de Jenni, ou le sage et l’athée, 1775). A friend of a man named Freind tells another friend of the trouble Freind had raising his prodigal son Johnny: first in Spain in 1705, where he was almost roasted by the Inquisition, next in London, where he fell in with a gang of libertines, and then in Pennsylvania, where the gang went slumming. The second half of the novella is a theological debate between the deist Freind (expressing Voltaire’s views) and Johnny’s atheist friend Birton.163 Freind converts Birton and reforms Johnny, who accompanies his father back to England and marries the respectable girl Johnny thought his libertine girlfriend had poisoned.
Didactic, message-heavy novels—as these unarguably are—usually take conventional form; there’s nothing innovative or experimental about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, or Atlas Shrugged. What’s different about Voltaire’s fiction is that he pays as much attention to the medium as to the message, challenging and mocking the conventions of the novel while doing likewise with the conventions of society. Voltaire’s admirable message is obvious: In these novels, as in his other writings, Voltaire calls for an end to l’infâme, the outrages of his time:164 tyranny, oppression, injustice, corruption, censorship, warmongering, closed-mindedness, and above all religion, which (he demonstrates relentlessly) combines all of the above.165 It’s disheartening to realize that all of these abuses are in full force today—and, like the poor, will be with us always. His Ingenu identifies the true villains in the world’s theater of misery: “On such a large stage the vast majority of innocent, peaceable human beings continually fade into the background. The leading characters are invariably depraved men of ambition” (COS 238). Reading history “depresses him,” but it’s entertaining to watch Voltaire rage against the machine and invent clever new ways of getting his message out. What still delights us about these novels, what makes them both intellectually and aesthetically stimulating, is not so much their subject matter as their sardonic manner. Many of the specific controversies he attacks are old news, but his purpose is still valid: “to foster a spirit of irreverence and to instill in the reader a habit of mind with which he or she may embark upon the independent pursuit of wisdom” (Pearson, ix).
Since Voltaire didn’t take novels very seriously, he felt free to mix and match genres and to play havoc with their conventions. Nearly every popular genre of the time has a booth at his carnival: the faux-Arabian tale (Voltaire claimed to have read The Arabian Nights 14 times and enjoyed Anthony Hamilton’s tales), picaresque, bildungsroman, the sentimental novel, parody, allegory, learned wit, metafiction, epistolary fiction, the memoir-novel, fairy tales, romantic adventure, conte philosophique, the historical novel, utopian fiction, the fantastic journey, the historical novel, chivalric romance, Platonic dialogue, Menippean satire, and science fiction.166 There are no purebred examples of these genres among Voltaire’s works: they’re all mixed breeds. For example, The Ingenu—which is the closest thing he wrote to a conventional novel—begins with a spoof of hagiography, then sports with comic cloistral fiction (the genre of the outsider who disrupts a community), flirts with romance with risqué rimshots, turns into a serious philosophical bildungsroman as the Ingenu educates himself in jail, and finally darkens to sentimental tragedy when his fiancée trades sex for his release and dies. The Princess of Babylon starts off as a by-the-rules Oriental fairy tale with elements of chivalric romance, tosses out the rules for an allegorical, surrealistically anachronistic travelogue, returns to its genre roots for the traditional wedding, then concludes with some metafictional persiflage. The most formally inventive ones—Potpourri and The Man with Forty Crowns—defy genre classification. (If Micromegas is a mini Gulliver’s Travels, then Potpourri is Voltaire’s Tale of a Tub, which he admired as much as Swift’s more popular work.167)
Voltaire satirizes some of the games novelists play with their readers, like pretending a novel is translated from an ancient tongue (Chaldean in the cases of Zadig and The Princess of Babylon), or is taken from an incomplete manuscript (Zadig again and Letters of Amabed); at one point in Micromegas the narrator claims the Inquisition censored a portion (M 23). Five of the twelve novels are ascribed to fake authors, including a few of Voltaire’s critics. He mocks the incredible coincidences in romantic adventure novels, their interpolated stories, their coy pretenses to authenticity. Ignoring novelistic conventions, he gleefully commits glaring anachronisms, slyly cites his own writings, cracks inside jokes, upsets reader expectations, and indulges in learned wit that he knew would be over the heads of most readers, as this aside at the beginning of the debate in Johnny’s Story indicates: “On hearing these words of the infinite, space, Homer, commentators, the goodman Parouba [a Maryland Indian] and his daughter, and even some of the English, evinced a desire to go and take the air on deck; but, Freind having promised to be intelligible, they remained; and I explained in a low tone to Parouba some slightly scientific words, which people born upon the Blue Ridge could not be expected to understand quite as readily as the doctors of Oxford and Cambridge” (CT 1:146–47). As the last sentence indicates, Voltaire draws upon new findings in science—and their belittling implications for man’s place in the universe—as well as old arguments in philosophy and theology.168 Sometimes Voltaire includes footnotes in a low tone to help out his Blue Ridge readers with the encyclopedic range of his references, but most of the time they’re on their own, tightening their seatbelts as old man Voltaire joyrides through Novelland.
And the point of it all? To make us better readers, to turn us from Blue Ridge hillbillies into Oxbridge dons when it comes to reading, and to make novels worthy of the attention even of those (like
Voltaire) “who hate romances.” The Seal of Approval that makes that promise is followed by a dedicatory epistle from the Persian poet Sa’di (d. 1292) to Sultana Sheraa, recommending Zadig as “a work which sayeth more than it may appear to say,” alerting the reader to pay attention. Voltaire mocks the fad for Oriental fiction as Sa’di goes on to say:
It was translated into Arabic for the amusement of the celebrated Sultan Ouloug-Beg. This was about the time that the Arabs and the Persians were beginning to write the Thousand and One Nights, the Thousand and One Days, etc. Ouloug preferred Zadig; but the sultanas were fonder of the Thousand and One Nights. “How can thee possibly,” wise Ouloug would say to them, “prefer stories that make no sense and have no point?”—“That is precisely why we do like them,” would come the sultanas’ reply.
I flatter myself that thou wilt not be as they, and that thou wilt be a real Ouloug. (COS 123–24)169
Voltaire wants his readers to be like wise Ouloug, not like the silly sultanas, and dramatizes the point by introducing in his first novel a man who makes “a special study of the properties of animals and plants, and soon developed an acuteness of perception which revealed to him a thousand differences where other men see only uniformity” (COS 131). That acuteness of perception allows him to amaze everyone with his Sherlock Holmesian powers of deduction in chapter 3 (and of course, this being a Voltaire novel, religious people want to burn him as a sorcerer) and encourages the reader to watch for and analyze clues in the text to discover what more it may be saying than it appears to say.
Often this means seeing through the thin Oriental veil to identify Voltaire’s references to current European events and controversies—harder for us today than for his first readers—but more importantly he’s trying to encourage critical thinking in general, which can only come from academic study. Virtually every novel of his features a character not merely learning from experience, as in conventional novels, but deliberately educating himself (often symbolically paralleled by a quest or journey): Zadig studies nature; Babouc not only studies Persepolian culture but reads its books, including its latest novels (which he finds “devoid of imagination” and throws in the fire); Micromegas goes on a study-abroad program; the protagonist of Potpourri studies a puzzling text and reads theological history; the Ingenu educates himself in prison; the man with 40 crowns elevates himself by reading voluminously (including a novel called Candide); Amazan abandons the princess of Babylon for fieldwork in cultural anthropology; Amabed studies the Bible and Italian culture; Princess Amaside has somehow read Locke and Petronius, and likes challenging fictions that, “from beneath the veil of the plot, reveal to the experienced eye some subtle truth that will escape the common herd” (COS 304); Parson Goodman studies nature under Mr. Sidrac and is tutored by Dr. Grou; and Freind draws upon his own wide reading to tutor his son and all who will listen on the principles of deism. In a few cases, education isn’t enough to overcome a character’s innate weakness—Amabed is seduced by a religious culture he learned to abhor, and despite his studies Parson Goodman becomes a bad priest—and Voltaire’s novels are filled with well-read people like pedants, literary critics, and theologians whose prejudices cancel out the benefits of reading. But Voltaire makes it clear that book-knowledge is essential to understanding how the world works, and demonstrates that even novels can contribute to enlightenment when written by/read by a real Ouloug.
Voltaire’s most famous character is not a reader. As a servant in a provincial baron’s castle, Candide’s only education comes from auditing lessons intended for the baron’s gay nephew, unfortunately delivered by a ridiculously single-minded pedant. Unlike virtually every other Voltaire protagonist, Candide never supplements or corrects his miseducation with further reading or study, and eventually adopts a know-nothing, head-in-the-sand policy of ignorance toward intellectual matters. He ends up in Turkey, where a dervish tells him to repress his intellectual curiosity and “Be silent,” and where another Turk admits total ignorance of and indifference to public affairs. These two antiintellectuals inspire Candide to remain as ignorant as a Westphalian peasant tilling his small plot of land. Though it’s possible to argue that Candide has progressed “beyond disillusionment and despair to the re-affirmation of life in the community” (Bonneville, 145)—to pick one of several positive interpretations—everything Voltaire wrote implies Candide has failed. In Judeo-Christian mythology, Adam and Eve were cursed for eating of the Tree of Knowledge; in Enlightenment mythology, people “should gorge themselves on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,” as the serpent in The White Bull recommends. “Was the mind not created that it might enlighten itself, might improve itself?” (COS 285–86). Candide and his little band retreat to a life of antediluvian simplicity, cultivating a garden rather than their minds, and for Voltaire, that’s a step backward, not forward.
Candide is the epitome of what Bonneville calls “Voltaire’s experiments with the novelistic genre” (11). Like several of his other novels, it pretends to be a recovered manuscript translated from another language (“from the German of Dr. Ralph”) and is a mongrel of several other breeds of fiction: the picaresque novel, the romantic adventure (Candide’s devotion to Mademoiselle Cunégonde rivals that of any romantic hero), utopian fiction (chapters 17–18 are set in mythical El Dorado), outsider fiction (Candide is as baffled as Graffigny’s Peruvienne by other cultures), and Menippean satire. The styles are equally diverse: there are some fairytale locutions at the beginning, sentimental novelese during the scenes of separation/false rumors/reunion of Candide and Cunégonde, and Rabelaisian burlesque throughout. But its principal style is realistic, and radically so for French novels of the time: the battlefield scenes in chapter 3 exhibit a degree of brutal realism not seen in a novel since Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, and the desolate description of Lisbon after the earthquake is unflinching in its horror.170 There are multiple rapes, discussions of syphilis and slavery, thefts, beatings, executions, and even acts of cannibalism among other examples of dirty realism. These have a thematic purpose—to rub abstract philosophy’s nose in the world as it is—but Candide displays a commitment to realism most novelists of the time, in France as elsewhere, were not ready to make.
Though Candide is Voltaire’s longest novel, its 80 to 100 pages (depending on the edition) are a fraction of the length of most novels, which points to his greatest innovation, what Bonneville calls the art of “distillation” (15) and what Italo Calvino calls “velocity”; what most “enchants us” about Candide, the Italian novelists claims,
is the sheer pace of the thing. With lightness and rapidity a whole series of disasters, tortures, and massacres scampers across the page, bounds from chapter to chapter, is ramified and multiplied, without afflicting the reader’s emotions with any effect but that of an exhilarating and primordial vitality. If the three pages of chapter VIII suffice for Cunégonde to relate how, having had her father, mother, and brother hacked to pieces by the invaders, she was raped, disemboweled, cured, reduced to being a washerwoman, prostituted in Holland and Portugal, and shared on alternative days by two “protectors” of different faiths, and in this way happened to witness the auto-de-fé of which Pangloss and Candide were the victims, and finally to meet up with the latter again, less than two pages in chapter IX are needed for Candide to find himself with two corpses on his hands. . . . And when the old servant has to explain why she has only one buttock, and starts to tell her life story from when, as the daughter of a pope, at the age of thirteen, in the space of three months, she experienced destitution and slavery, was raped nearly every day, saw her mother cut into four pieces, suffered war and hunger, and was dying in the plague of Algiers, all to get to the point of telling us about the siege of Azov and the unusual source of nourishment that the starving janissaries found in female buttocks—well, at that point things go on a bit longer: two whole chapters or (say) six pages and a half.171
If Prévost had been handed this material, the novel would be 700 pages lon
g—and in fact some critics have suggested Candide parodies Cleveland—but in Voltaire’s hands, it’s Around the World in Eighty Pages, as Calvino quips (177). (He kept his own novels Voltairishly slim.) In Candide and even more so in his other novels, Voltaire (even more than Crébillon) trimmed the fat from the conventional novel, inventing “minimalism” two centuries before that term came into use, though his novels have more wit and intellectual meat to them than than those skinny works usually possess.
In fact, modern fiction is where Voltaire’s innovations show the greatest influence. His contemporaries pretty much ignored the overheated vehicle he abandoned after his joyride, except for maybe Sade: in Letters of Amabed, Pearson suggests, “Voltaire comes closest to anticipating some of the calmer moments in de Sade’s Justine” (204), and in The Man with Forty Crowns, the geometrician advances an opinion that will be repeated almost verbatim by several of Sade’s philosophical libertines: “Nature concerns itself very little with individuals. There are other insects which live only one day, but of which the species is constantly maintained. Nature is like one of those great princes who reckon as nothing the loss of four hundred thousand men provided they accomplish their august designs” (1:245). Only a few 19th-century French authors followed Voltaire’s lead, such as Flaubert in Bouvard and Pecuchet. But in the 20th century he became the patron saint of American black humor, obviously so in Candy (1958)—Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s amusing homage to Voltaire’s greatest novel (though he would have cut its 224 pages in half)—and most successfully so in Kurt Vonnegut’s midcareer novels, Cat’s Cradle through Breakfast of Champions. His modern-sounding minimalist style has already been noted—though it’s closer to that of Firbank and Spackman than Hemingway and Carver—and his complex metafictions resemble those of Borges, Barth, and Coover. His “merry hissing” can be heard in the learnedly vituperative novels of Gaddis, Vidal, Gass, and Theroux. He is acknowledged as the prince of the Enlightenment, a humanist hero, a secular saint; but he should also be considered one of the fathers of the modern novel, even if he thought so little of the genre that he’d probably demand a paternity test.