by Voltaire
Oddly enough, the true antidote for unverisimilar fantasies and abstractions based on negation is not the “real” world or verisimilar truths, from which they violently extract their symbols, but utopia. This helps explain why Voltaire has such difficulty articulating an anironic10 ideal within the action or flow of the story, why he has to force the ironic eruption of utopian islands: theatre and dinner parties that keep life at bay, Eldorados, prisons (L’Ingénu), private chambers (Les Oreilles), and even the precincts of the contemplative mind (Zadig, L’Ingénu). In a sense, as we know, these are all moments of thought essaying or celebrating its detached powers, powers often evident in the narrator’s voice from the start, but pausing at these times to take stock of themselves. They are ultimately dedicated to discovering their utopian separation from the real, so that as the mind contemplates itself or its relationship to the world it senses its impotence and sequestration. Et puis vous vous réveillâtes.
But chronology does matter in Voltaire’s fiction after all, and if we watch the progress of these privileged moments, we may be able to detect something else: a compensatory, growing desire for connection and communication. The suggestion is again and again that though the “dream” of explanation or resolution may be defeated and though the world may remain as fantastic as fiction, speech softens the blow and establishes a ground for civility and constancy. More than this, language defines our intellectual grasp and locates or even produces a community of intelligence. Like many of his contemporaries, Voltaire is awed by the very fact of discourse, its origins and abuse, and he too is involved in the ongoing Cartesian search for a stable, diaphanous language.11 But there is more at stake in the fictions of the sixties and seventies—and here again Voltaire’s case is only the most spectacular, largely because he lived long enough to have been able to allow submerged impulses to play themselves out in times that legitimated them. In fact what Voltaire’s work helps make plain are the desperate reasons for a vast cultural shift of sensibility. Once concerned with frustrations of connection and understanding, the stories begin to highlight successful acts of persuasion and even, in the case of Histoire de Jenni, display them theatrically, boxing them off like showcase abditories, exemplary specimens within the fiction. Yet nobody now is convinced by argument alone. Ordinary discourse and positive knowledge, always shaky at best, surrender in the end to a semiotics of “charm” and authoritative presence.
Amid the narrative and epistemological uncertainties of Micromégas, three beings—the Sirian, the Saturnian, and the narrator—manage to converse, using the same linguistic categories, in spite of enormous facultative differences. Just as the narrator’s voice remains strangely unanchored, of this world but somehow outside of it, neither puzzled nor vexed by its situation, so the celestial creatures are content only when conversing, outside their planetary sphere, away from slander and the treacheries of women, voices merely affixed to or rather limited by bodies, shadows of beings, neither living nor touching down. This projection of a commanding voice flows naturally from Voltaire’s search for a “disinterested” one many years earlier, in the Traité de métaphysique, a voice “hors de [la] sphère [de l’homme]” and sounding from a body “n’ayant point la forme humaine.”12 But it is only in the stories that the full implications of this willing sacrifice—if it is that—can be drawn. Memnon had already been visited by a “bon génie” whose happiness depended on the fact that he had no body like ours, required no sex, money, or food; and the angel Jesrad, who drew people to him “par un charme invincible” and “une éloquence si vive et si touchante,” was, of course, a hermit. Holy or angelic, supernal blessings grant a release from the confining attachments and identities of the flesh and, correlatively, an overpowering eloquence. As with Reason in the Eloge de la raison, incarnation can be achieved only with great difficulty and never permanently. In fact the mind appears to drain and absorb the body’s potency and to replicate the body’s separation from itself in its separation from the world. At the furthest end—or at the source?—of what might be called celestial envy is the desire to dematerialize, to take positions behind a mask, speaking by way of ventriloquism13 or impersonation, writing within a thicket of given tones and turns.
This is, more than a matter of camouflage, a quest for voice as powerful and efficacious as the jaws that in the stories increasingly and emblematically tear at animal flesh—flesh of tender birds particularly, flesh of women. The strength of this voice is assured, paradoxically, by its compensatory displacement of sexual teeth, or it is inspired by the felt absence of those teeth. Mambrès, who is literally castrated, bears the thematized burden of an accumulated fear of the slicings and maimings perpetrated or threatened throughout the stories. He is, as Voltaire notably said of himself, “une ombre,” longing for the lost, restorative power of language. Chesterfield, whose ears are drying up and so precipitate the communicative failure that causes Goudman’s misfortune, presides over a story haunted by death and blockage (kidney stones and constipation) and celebrating the untrammeled, asexual exchange between men. Communication (or the lack of it) had always been a rather hidden theme in the stories, but in the sixties and seventies it swells into a major preoccupation among primary figures. Martin talks with Candide; there’s no agreement, “Mais enfin ils parlaient, ils se communiquaient des idées, ils se consolaient” (p. 188). Gordon and the Huron not only console, they “convert” each other: it is the central scene and turning point of L’Ingénu. After this it hardly matters that Mlle de St. Yves dies. Exchanges and conversions ricochet to the end in ways that grow less convincing, like the exhausted outer circles of a splash fully willed and believed in. Voltaire still pushes against resistant grain. The two rival princesses, Formosante and Aldée, unexpectedly thrown together in a distant land, “mirent dans leur entrevue un charme qui leur fit oublier qu’elles ne s’étaient jamais aimées” (p. 375). Sidrac invites Goudman to a dinner where, as he puts it, two “thinking faculties” will have the pleasure of signifying by means of language—“ce qui est une chose merveilleuse que les hommes n’admirent pas assez” (p. 554). And when they agree on an epistemological and linguistic matter that men have argued about for centuries, Goudman exclaims: “Et j’admire que nous soyons d’accord” (p. 555). In spite of the rather flimsy reason for this instantaneous agreement—the fact that both are “de bonne foi”—nothing can detract from the characters’ and Voltaire’s joy.
What has to be attended to in all these works is the way difficult problems and differences of many kinds are overcome in a gesture that turns away from earlier impasses. Thought, which once dwelt on irreconcilables, faced the enemy, attacked, and darted away, now, though still locked within small areas and moments of exchange, concentrates as much if not more on its mediative role—its function in the strictly human and interpersonal equation, its process of dissemination—than on content and truth. The purposes of union and consolation now win over the disjunctions of falsehood or vanity and the misapprehensions and misconceptions of language. Voltaire had prepared us for this triumph of an inescapable and conciliatory presence with characters from the “marchand de magnificences inutiles” and “l’homme judicieux” of Le monde comme il va to “le bon et respectable sage” in Candide and Pythagore in Aventure indienne, all of whom bring down to earth, in virile, lapidary speech, a wisdom as irresistible as the Word. But in the last decade of his fictions, these characters are lovingly and ever more amply tended. M. André, “l’homme aux quarante écus,” like Sidrac, uses supper as his bait, but he hardly needs Sidrac’s special learning or his powers of argument: “l’autorité qu’il se concilie n’est due qu’à ses grâces, à sa modération, et à une physionomie ronde qui est tout à fait persuasive” (p. 334). And finally, in what is fittingly one of the last of the stories, Freind, whose very name tells us what means even more than knowledge, is repeatedly described as “respectable,” “vénérable,” “grave,” “calme comme l’air d’un beau jour,” “sage et charitable,” “tolérant.
” When he speaks, he’s heard in silence; nobody dares interrupt: “Hear him, hear him,” they cry (p. 509). The natives of the Blue Mountains learn that Penn was his ancestor, and they feel immediate respect. In a single conversation, he wins them over: “c’était Orphée qui apprivoisait les tigres” (p. 520). Orpheus serves as a perfect metaphor: there is little need for language at all—and, incidentally, women whose names suggest nothing more than gashes and mounds, Boca Vermeja and Las Nalgas, are squarely routed to make way for the less exigent Miss Primrose. Freind refuses to lecture his son (“les exemples corrigent” [p. 571]) and, at times, to answer Birton head on. No matter. His long discussion with the atheist is surrounded by the breathless approbation of the Parouba family, Jenni, and the narrator himself, all exemplary readers in the text, inciting us to agree. The civilized and the uncivilized capitulate; narrative time hangs suspended as it had for Gordon and the Huron. The model is ecstatic, and in this prescriptive, self-congratulatory, and sentimental mood, truth comes as a quasi-divine, patriarchal revelation. It so saturates will and flesh (whatever remains of it) that, in the manner of Karl Jaspers’ “paradigmatic philosophers,” philosophy becomes a state of being, seizing its witnesses, forcing them sweetly and willingly to bend. Birton falls to his knees; he no longer thinks, he believes: “Oui … je crois en Dieu et en vous” (p. 548), he calls out to Freind. Nothing need rouse Freind from his “dream.” He is the dream, the magical solution to whatever resists explanation—or quite simply to whoever resists.
Toward the end of his career, utopian moments—gaps within the gaps I mentioned earlier—overwhelm Voltaire’s landscape. Slowly, not fictional models but outrageously fantastic forms of fiction disappear and with them, ostensibly,14 Voltaire’s habitually subversive and perplexed accompaniment. His final stories spell out the victory of will and desire over the unverisimilar world. These shroud themselves in a “discours ferme et serré” (p. 508), the language and sign of stoic authority, marmoreal but tender, no longer persuading in the old way (perhaps weary of it) or “invoking” laws and testimonies, but providing them, insisting on them: “il les attestait, il les citait, il les réclamait” (p. 508). Truth descends through charmed and perfected vessels, and oracles—or Démiourgos’ final words—are no longer quite so ridiculous as once they seemed. In the end, speaking or writing in order to think, “dream,” exorcize, and survive matters less than the power, evident, like so much else, in even the earliest stories, to create a spiritual home for the speaker, a theatrical climate of worship and accord within which his voice can at last gain the strength to govern.
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† From Degré second: Studies in French Literature [Blacksburg, VA], vol. 6 (July 1982), pp. 65–88. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.
1. Essai sur les moeurs, ed. R. Pomeau (Paris: Garnier, 1963), vol. 1, 94.
2. Romans et contes, ed. H. Bénac (Paris: Garnier, 1960), p. 473. Henceforth, references to the stories, all drawn from this edition, will appear parenthetically in the text.
3. See Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h, “Genèse d’un conte de Voltaire,” SVEC, 176 (1979), 7–36. I read this article after I had completed my own and was delighted to discover that she refers to “le halo onirique” of an impromptu composition. Mme Hellegouarc’h’s “conte” is Le crocheteur borgne, and her analysis is superb; I do not however agree that “le Crocheteur est différent de tout ce qu’a écrit Voltaire” (p. 36), and it does not seem to me, as it does to her, that “la morale annoncée se trouve illustrée” (p. 31).
4. See A. Kibédi Varga, “Le burlesque: le monde renversé selon la poétique classique,” in Image du monde renversé et ses représentations littéraires, eds. J. Lafond and Al Redondo (Paris: J. Vrin, 1979), pp. 153–160.
5. This is to concur wholeheartedly with the work of Roy S. Wolper, especially with the analysis of Candide in “Candide, Gull in the Garden?,” ECS, 3 (Winter 1969), 265–277.
6. We have all been struck by two passages, one in Zadig, the other in L’lngénu, both commonplaces of baroque contemplative literature, in which men, thinking in extremis, experience a beatific exhilaration. Zadig gazes at the vast expanse of the heavens and his misery disappears; his soul “s’élançait jusque dans l’infini, et contemplait, détachée de ses sens, l’ordre immuable de l’univers” (p. 23). And Gordon and l’Ingénu, “par un charme étrange,” diminish their pain and the noche oscura of their ignorance by contemplating the great network of calamities spread throughout the universe (p. 251).
7. Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1978), p. 127.
8. See n. 10 below.
9. The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), ch. 8; Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 30.
10. Distinctions between different forms of irony are brilliantly elucidated by Alan Wilde (Horizons of Assent [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981]), dealing principally with fiction of this century. The terms “mediate” and “anironic” are his. For Wilde, irony is not merely rhetorical form but a vision of things, and dwelling within this vision there is a pulsing desire or countervision: the anironic—which shapes the ironic and is shaped by it. Voltaire’s utopian hopes become, in this good light, the product of a universe marred by ironic disjunctions and by his narrators’ separation (another disjunction) from it.
11. See Maureen O’Harra, “Le Taureau blanc and the activity of language,” SVEC, 148 (1976), 117–118.
12. Ed. H. Temple Patterson (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2nd ed., 1957), p. 2; see also p. 31.
13. See Julia L. Epstein, “Voltaire’s ventriloquism: voices in the first Lettre philosophique,” SVEC, 182 (1979), 219–235. I prefer the notion of impersonation only because it implies the assumption of a voice, a partial merger with the object imitated, a reciprocity of influence.
14. Actually, it could be argued, he continues to cast doubt on the efficacy of thought and language even as he appears to be disenchanting the world. Is the world disenchanted or merely transformed into an endearing theatrical fiction?
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Bibliography
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The best modern biography of Voltaire is Roger Pearson’s Voltaire Almighty: A Life in the Pursuit of Freedom (London, Bloomsbury, 2005). On Voltaire more generally, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Cambridge University Press, 2009), provides an overview of modern readings of his works. On the historical, philosophical and cultural background, see W. H. Barber, Leibniz in France from Arnauld to Voltaire: A Study in the French Reactions to Leibnizianism, 1670–1770 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955); Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 1998); Steven Nadler, The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil in the Age of Reason (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008); and Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (Oxford University Press, 2013); and John Robertson, The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015).