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Brave Old World

I wonder how, if at all, it would be possible to measure the part played in our responses to individual books by the age at which we encounter them. Time enough for the eighteenth century later, observed Peter Currie, my excellent teacher of French literature, and he proceeded to focus, over the years of the sixth form, largely on the seventeenth century: on Corneille, Molière and Racine, seasoned memorably with La Fontaine and La Rochefoucauld.

In many ways this was an excellent decision, making for a lifelong enjoyment of the authors we studied: but it also meant that (‘et par conséquent’, as Voltaire might have written) it was not until I was at university that I first read Candide. I found it unforgettable, in tune as it seemed with the sprightly and largely uncompromised visions of youth. Over the ensuing forty-five years this wildly improbable tale of experiences which leave the protagonists foxed more than slightly has become a much-loved companion. It is that rare thing, a book which is both clever and wise, as well as hugely enjoyable.

For a work of novella length, Candide manages to include an astonishing number of strands. On one level it is a shaggy dog story, on another a consideration of matters ethical, theological and philosophical, on another a rumbustious romp, as if Kenneth Williams and Co. had decided to make Carry on Philosophizing. It could also be read as a parody of the courtly or romantic quest: there is a great deal of swooning.

Candide, our young and unworldly hero, finding himself expelled from the earthly paradise of a Westphalian baron’s château (which is then overrun by hostile forces), goes in search of the baron’s daughter Cunégonde, whom he loves. The story whistles through crisis after crisis, tumbling headlong via places as far apart as Portugal, Paraguay, Paris and Portsmou

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I wonder how, if at all, it would be possible to measure the part played in our responses to individual books by the age at which we encounter them. Time enough for the eighteenth century later, observed Peter Currie, my excellent teacher of French literature, and he proceeded to focus, over the years of the sixth form, largely on the seventeenth century: on Corneille, Molière and Racine, seasoned memorably with La Fontaine and La Rochefoucauld.

In many ways this was an excellent decision, making for a lifelong enjoyment of the authors we studied: but it also meant that (‘et par conséquent’, as Voltaire might have written) it was not until I was at university that I first read Candide. I found it unforgettable, in tune as it seemed with the sprightly and largely uncompromised visions of youth. Over the ensuing forty-five years this wildly improbable tale of experiences which leave the protagonists foxed more than slightly has become a much-loved companion. It is that rare thing, a book which is both clever and wise, as well as hugely enjoyable. For a work of novella length, Candide manages to include an astonishing number of strands. On one level it is a shaggy dog story, on another a consideration of matters ethical, theological and philosophical, on another a rumbustious romp, as if Kenneth Williams and Co. had decided to make Carry on Philosophizing. It could also be read as a parody of the courtly or romantic quest: there is a great deal of swooning. Candide, our young and unworldly hero, finding himself expelled from the earthly paradise of a Westphalian baron’s château (which is then overrun by hostile forces), goes in search of the baron’s daughter Cunégonde, whom he loves. The story whistles through crisis after crisis, tumbling headlong via places as far apart as Portugal, Paraguay, Paris and Portsmouth, before reaching its conclusion in a Turkish smallholding on the Propontis. The incidents of the narrative depend on an outlandish implausibility which makes the most far-fetched of opera plots seem sober as a company’s annual report in comparison. The characters turn out to be india-rubber, cartoon animations able to bounce back from apparently certain disaster and even to survive hanging, burning, the pox or being run through with a sword. Meanwhile, historical facts happily (or more often unhappily) mingle with lively invention and outright fantasy: Eldorado borders on eighteenth-century France. At the heart of the book is a riposte to the tenets of optimism, represented by Candide’s tutor Dr Pangloss with his insistence that, come what may, ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. In the way of all effective satirists, Voltaire simplifies the thinking of the opposition, in this case the ideas of Leibniz and his followers, in order to ridicule it more tellingly. Pangloss, as full of blather as his name tells us, is as purblind to evidence as any of Molière’s comic creations. Like his naïve pupil Candide, the Doctor suffers every misfortune, highlighting the inadequacy of optimism when tested by the changes and chances of experience. The static inflexibility of such absolutism is in fact, Voltaire suggests, the enemy of hope. Its distorting logic drives Pangloss into some absurd corners. As early as chapter four, already by now one-eyed, he is arguing that ‘private misfortunes contribute to the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more we find that all is well’. And later on, when Candide’s sidekick Cacambo asks what optimism is, ‘“It’s the passion for maintaining that all is right when all goes wrong with us,” replied Candide . . .’ The objects of mockery in Candide, defined and tempered by Voltaire’s own rough experience of a despotic and bullying régime, are those authorities and professions which, often under the guise of serving the truth, serve only their own interests: doctors, lawyers, priests, pedants and snobs (the manipulation of language displayed by those with their own agenda would be the envy of any spin doctor). Nor are the arts immune: heartless critics, dull writers and, in the person of the Venetian nobleman Pococurante, the blasé and world-weary connoisseur (again, the name is a give-away), are all pilloried. Conversely, while the self-serving thrive, it is outsiders who help their fellow men, and then suffer for it. James the Anabaptist, for instance, who not only assists Candide but in the terror of the Lisbon earthquake saves a rascally sailor from drowning, is himself left to drown by the same sailor. Rereading the story over the years, I have been struck by the recurrence of this theme of futile sacrifice. An old lady, trapped along with her companions in a besieged city, allows a buttock to be cut off so that the defenders will not starve, only for the city to be surrendered immediately afterwards; in Surinam, slaves working in the sugar factory have their hand chopped off if a finger gets caught in the machinery, and a leg if they try to escape (‘C’est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe’, is the victim’s memorable comment); in England, Admiral Byng faces a firing squad ‘pour encourager les autres’. Most memorable of all is the chapter describing the war between the Abars and the Bulgars, in which both sides barbarously slaughter one another, do not spare hapless women and children caught up in the conflict, and celebrate victory with a Te Deum. Here the swift line drawing becomes fuller, infused with the colour of passionate feeling and the kind of unflinching detail that would not be out of place in a news report. It would be hard to over-emphasize the extraordinary topicality – perhaps universality would be the better word – of the subjects on which the story touches: as well as the cruelties of war, natural disasters (the Lisbon earthquake of 1755), sexually transmitted diseases, the trafficking of people, the abuse of women, arbitrary arrest by agents of the state, religious fanaticism, intimate strip searches, the decline of monarchy, the nature of authority, acts of individual and institutional violence, venality and exploitation of every kind. And such issues as how to reconcile natural disasters with any notion of a beneficent God, or how to deal with the damage inflicted by fundamentalist beliefs, are with us still. All this would seem to add up to a Hobbesian view of the world, yet the creature Plato defined (Voltaire reminds us) as one ‘without feathers but with two legs and a soul’ is seen to maintain a remarkable chirpiness in the face of it all. Paradoxically, illogically, given the nature of the world, people persist in a love of life, and continue to eat, sleep and hope. That Voltaire can point to this convincingly has much to do with the tone of his tale: all these weighty matters, which might combine in a grim danse macabre, are borne along on the lightest of linguistic currents, which has everything to do with the airiness not only of his style, but also of the French language. This is hard to recapture in English, as John Butt, translator (sixty years ago now) of the Penguin Classics version, freely admits in his introduction: ‘The difficulty of conveying the grace of the original arises from a difference of economy and rhythm between French and English. A Frenchman usually needs fewer words than an Englishman to convey his meaning . . .’ But much also depends on elements which can leap the gap with greater ease, such as the wit and sprung energy of the narrative structure, which darts to and fro in time as well as space, to enable the reader to catch up on what has befallen one or other character. At a more detailed level, the conjunctions (‘par conséquent’ indeed, ‘aussi’ in its sense of ‘therefore’) which delightfully link non sequiturs, encouraging our disbelief, have an important part to play. And the light erotic touches – after all, this is a story propelled at the outset by Pangloss giving a lesson in experimental physics to a willing maid, and by the moment when Candide and Cunégonde find their eyes meeting and hands wandering – offset the bleak correlation of sex, abuse and disease which surface all too often in the tale. It’s also striking that all the places which might offer shelter from the storms of experience are enclosures, whether the ‘earthly paradise’ of the Westphalian mansion, or Eldorado, or the smallholding where the story concludes (shades of Voltaire himself at Ferney, with a community of workers). But the best of these, the kingdom of Eldorado where there are no priests, lawcourts or prisons, only a Palace of Science, and where the roads are littered with precious stones, is out of reach of reality: beyond its Edenic frontiers, the new world is infected already with the corruption of the old. The story rounds to a conclusion which seems to chime with Pope’s assertion in his Ode on Solitude, written forty years earlier:
Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air, In his own ground.
Yet Voltaire will have none of the bucolic romanticism suggested here. There is nothing in Candide to match the ecstasy of Miranda’s exclamation, at the end of The Tempest. Mankind is not beauteous, the world not new. There is bravery, all the same, in the stoicism the characters display in coming to terms with what remains for them. André Maurois suggested that ‘the undisclosed title of every novel is Lost Illusions’, and certainly there are few illusions left by the time Candide and his companions have completed their unsentimental education. The beautiful Cunégonde has become a raddled crone; her brother remains so obdurate in his opposition to her marrying Candide, her social inferior, that the decision is taken to cart him back to the galleys from which he had been rescued; Cacambo is ‘quite worn out with toil’. Only Pangloss continues confidently to spout an endless stream of irrelevant causes and effects. Even at this juncture Voltaire adopts a middle position, refusing to allow the last word to Martin, the most pessimistic character in the tale. ‘But what was this world created for?’ Candide had asked as they journeyed back from Surinam to Europe together (voyages always provide time for discussions, of course). ‘“To drive us mad,” replied Martin.’ In the closing chapter, Voltaire offers what could be seen as alternative solutions. A local dervish suggests that the only sensible response to the world’s evils is to shut up; an old man whom they question about the fate of a judge refuses to take any interest in public affairs, preferring the peace and fruits of the twenty acres he farms with his children. Work, says the old boy, ‘keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and neediness’. The discussion would seem pertinent to our own time, with its welter of news and information. And so to the story’s famous final words, Candide’s retort to Pangloss’s continuing warbling: ‘“Cela est bien dit,” répondit Candide, “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.” ’ Of course, it might be argued that the idea of getting on with the business in hand and letting the world go on its way invites comparisons with the ostrich’s use of sand, and is hardly permissible in an age of globalization. But there is, at the least, the insight that effective action on a local scale is preferable to any amount of hand-wringing about the world’s woes. I sense, too, a kind of reconciliation, even mellowness. But perhaps I think that only because I am now close to the age Voltaire was when he wrote the story.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © Lawrence Sail 2006


About the contributor

Lawrence Sail is a freelance writer. He has published nine collections of poems, including Eye-Baby (Bloodaxe, 2006): in 2005 Enitharmon Press brought out Cross-currents, a collection of his essays. He lives in Exeter with his wife and twin daughters, close to some of the best of all possible seascapes and landscapes, and has had Candide by his bedside for forty-four years.

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