Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity

Geometric characters, animated by a flickering mobility, stretch and twist in a saraband of precision and lightness: that was how Paul Klee illustrated Voltaire’s Candide in 1911, giving visual – and almost musical – form to the energetic brio which this book continues to communicate to today’s readers, above and beyond its thick network of references to its own epoch and culture.

What most delights us today in Candide is not the ‘conte philosophique’, nor its satire, nor the gradual emergence of a morality and vision of the world: instead it is its rhythm. With rapidity and lightness, a succession of mishaps, punishments and massacres races over the page, leaps from chapter to chapter, and ramifies and multiplies without evoking in the reader’s emotions anything other than a feeling of an exhilarating and primitive vitality. In the bare three pages of Chapter 8 Cunégonde recounts how having had her father, mother and brother hacked to pieces by invaders, she is then raped and disembowelled, then cured and reduced to living as a washerwoman, bartered and sold in Holland and Portugal, torn between two different protectors of different faiths on alternate days, and in this condition happens to witness the auto da fé whose victims are Pangloss and Candide himself whom she then rejoins. Even less than two pages of Chapter 9 are enough for Candide to find himself with two corpses at his feet and for Cunégonde to be able to exclaim: ‘How did you who were born so mild ever manage to kill in the space of two minutes a Jew and a prelate?’ And when the old woman has to explain why she has only one buttock, she starts by telling the story of her life from the moment when as the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Pope, she had experienced in the space of three months poverty, enslavement, and almost daily rape, before having to endure famine and war and nearly dying of the plague in Algiers: and all this before she can get to her tale of the siege of Azov and of the unusual nutrition that the starving Janissaries discover in female buttocks … well, here things are rather more leisurely, two whole chapters are required, something like six and a half pages.

The great discovery of Voltaire the humorist is a technique that will become one of the most reliable gags in comic films: the piling up of disaster on disaster at relentless speed. There are also the sudden increases in rhythm which carry the sense of the absurd almost to the point of paroxysm: as when the series of misfortunes already swiftly narrated in the detailed account is then repeated in a breakneck-speed summary. What Voltaire projects in his lightning-speed photograms is really a worldwide cinema, a kind of ‘around the world in eighty pages’, which takes Candide from his native Westphalia to Holland, Portugal, South America, France, England, Venice and Turkey, and this tour then splits in turn into supplementary whirlwind world tours by fellow protagonists, male and especially female, who are easy prey for pirates and slavers operating between Gibraltar and the Bosphorus. A huge cinema of contemporary world events most of all: villages wiped out in the Seven Years’ War between the Prussians and the French (the ‘Bulgars’ and the ‘Abars’), the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the auto da fés organised by the Inquisition, the Jesuits of Paraguay who reject Spanish and Portuguese rule, the legendary gold of the Incas, and the odd snapshot of Protestantism in Holland, of the spread of syphilis, Mediterranean and Atlantic piracy, internecine wars in Morocco, the exploitation of black slaves in Guyana, but always leaving a certain space for literary news, allusions to Parisian high life, interviews with the many dethroned kings of the time, who all gather at the Venice carnival.

A world in total disarray; nobody anywhere is saved except in the only country that is wise and happy, El Dorado. The link between happiness and wealth ought not to exist since the Incas are unaware that the gold dust of their streets and their diamond cobbles is so precious to the men from the Old World; and yet, strange as it may seem, Candide does find a wise and happy society in that exact spot, amidst the deposits of precious metals. It is there that Pangloss might finally be right, that the best of all possible worlds might become reality: except that El Dorado is hidden amidst the most inaccessible mountain ranges of the Andes, perhaps in a piece of the map that has been torn away, a non-place, a utopia.

But if this land of Cockaigne possesses vague and unconvincing touches typical of all utopias, the rest of the world, with its constant tribulations, despite the rapidity with which these are recounted, is not at all a mannered representation. ‘That is the price that must be paid for you to eat sugar in Europe!’, says the Dutch Guyana negro, after telling the protagonists about his punishments in just a few lines; similarly the courtesan in Venice says, ‘Oh, sir, if you could only imagine what it is like to be forced to caress, whether you like it or not, an old merchant, a lawyer, a friar, a gondolier, an abbot; to be exposed to all manner of insults and affronts; often to be reduced to having to beg the loan of a skirt just in order to have it removed by a repulsive old man; to be robbed by one man of what one has just earned from another; to have a price on one’s head set by those who administer justice, and to have nothing else to look forward to but a horrendous old age, in a hospital or a dungheap …’

It is true that the characters in Candide appear to be made of rubber: Pangloss is wasted by syphilis, then they hang him, they tie him to the oar of a galley, and then he pops up again alive and kicking. But it would be wrong to say that Voltaire glosses over the cost of suffering: what other novel has the courage to present the heroine who at the beginning had been ‘comely in complexion, fresh, plump, attractive’, later as a Cunégonde who is ‘turned dark in complexion, gummy-eyed, flat-chested, with wrinkled cheeks, and the skin of her arms red and chapped’?

By this stage we realise that our reading of Candide, which was intended to be totally external, a surface reading, has taken us back to the core of its ‘philosophy’, of Voltaire’s vision of the world. Which is not solely the polemical attack on Pangloss’s providential optimism: if we look closely, we see that the mentor who accompanies Candide longest is not the unfortunate Leibnitzian pedagogue, but the ‘Manichean’ Martin, who is inclined to see in the world only the victories of the devil; and if Martin does embody the role of anti-Pangloss, we cannot definitely say that he is the one who triumphs. It is pointless, says Voltaire, to seek a metaphysical explanation for evil, as the optimist Pangloss and the pessimist Martin do, because this evil is subjective, indefinable, and unmeasurable; no design of the universe exists, or if one does exist, it is God who knows it not man. Voltaire’s ‘rationalism’ is an ethical, voluntaristic attitude, which stands out against a theological background which is as incommensurate with man as Pascal’s was.

If this carousel-round of disasters can be contemplated with a smile playing around our lips it is because human life is brief and limited; there is always someone who can call himself worse off than ourselves; and if there was someone who by chance had nothing to complain about and had every good thing that life can give, he would end up like Signor Pococurante, the Venetian Senator, who turns up his nose at everything, finding fault where he ought only to find reason for satisfaction and admiration. The really negative character in the book is the bored Pococurante; deep down Pangloss and Martin, though they give hopeless, nonsensical replies to questions, fight back against the torments and risks which are the stuff of life.

The subdued vein of wisdom which emerges in the book through marginal spokesmen such as the Anabaptist Jacques, the old Inca, and that Parisian savant who so much resembles the author himself, is articulated in the end by the mouth of the dervish in the famous maxim to ‘cultivate our garden’. This of course is a very reductive moral; one which ought to be understood in its intellectual significance of being anti-metaphysical: you should not give yourself problems other than those that you can resolve with your own direct practical application. And in its social significance: this is the first enunciation of work as the substance of all worth. Nowadays the affirmation ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ sounds to our ears heavy with egotistical, bourgeois connotations: as inappropriate as could be, given our present worries and anxieties. It is no accident that it is enunciated in the final page, almost after the end of this book in which work appears only as a curse and in which gardens are regularly devastated. This too is a utopia, no less than the realm of the Incas: the voice of reason in Candide is nothing but utopian. But it is also no accident that it is the sentence from the book that has become most famous, so much so that it has become proverbial. We must not forget the radical epistemological and ethical change which this phrase signalled (we are in 1759, exactly 30 years before the Bastille fell): man judged no longer by his relation to a transcendent Good or Evil but in the little or much that he can actually achieve. And this is the source both of a work ethic that is strictly ‘productive’ in the capitalist sense of the word, and of a moral of practical, responsible and concrete commitment without which there are no general problems which can be resolved. In short, man’s real choices in life today stem from this book.

[1974]