Candide and Other Stories (Oxfo Voltaire

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.Yet destiny itself is a book, which Jesrad can read but Zadig cannot.And it comes in two halves: the past and the future.Jesrad knows the content of both halves and so can explain and justify the past in terms of the future.Zadig blasphemes against Providence because he has read only, as it were, the left-hand side of the tablet of history.And what the story of Zadig teaches us is, as the narrator of Micromegas puts it, that ‘in this world people never know the half of it’.(Zadig was actually published in this dual manner.In order to limit the initial print run to 1,000 copies, and because he did not trust his printers to do this, Voltaire gave one half of the manuscript to one printer and the second to another.All he had to do then was have the two bound together.)CandideZadig thus returns an open verdict on Leibnizian Optimism: Candide, on the other hand, sentences it to death.Generally, Candide is said to be a satire on Optimism, but this is only partly true.It would be more accurate to say that it is a satire on systems.The philosophy of Optimism, nevertheless, is one such system, and it is the one most savagely attacked in Candide.Between writing the main part of Zadig in 1747–8 and beginning Candide in 1757, Voltaire cannot be said to have had the most Leibnizian time of it.His brief period of favour at court following his appointment as Historiographer to the King at Versailles in 1745 ended in November 1747 some two months after the publication of Zadig; Mme du Châtelet died on 10 September 1749, a week after giving birth to the child of another man (that Voltaire was by that stage in love with his niece, Mme Denis, made the event no less distressing); his stay at the court of Frederick the Great, begun in June 1750, ended in acrimony, and Voltaire and Mme Denis (who had come to meet him) were actually arrested in Frankfurt, beyond Prussian jurisdiction, by agents of his erstwhile patron, friend, and co-philosopher.Most especially perhaps, Voltaire’s faith in God had been severely shaken by the Lisbon earthquake on 1 November (All Saints’ Day) 1755, which killed 20,000 or more people; and his poem on the subject, published in 1756, is a devastating cri de cœur against Pope and Leibniz, not to mention the Almighty.Subtitled ‘An Examination of the Axiom: All is well’, the poem begins by asking, first, how such carnage can be in accordance with the eternal laws of a good and free God and, second, how it can be a punishment from God.Why Lisbon? Why not London or Paris? (‘Lisbon lies in ruins, while in Paris they dance.’) Did the volcanic activity that caused the earthquake really have to be part of the Creation? Is it any consolation to the people of Lisbon to be told that their ‘partial evil’ is contributing to the universal good? And, says Voltaire, it is no good talking about the immutable laws of necessity and the Great Chain of Being.The question remains: ‘Why do we suffer under a master who is just?’ Is God powerless? Or not beneficent? Is he punishing us? Or is he indifferent and letting his original decrees run their course? Is evil inherent in matter and not subject to God’s control? Or is God testing us? Seeking the guidance of others, Voltaire rejects Plato and Epicurus in favour of the scepticism of Bayle.Finally he admits defeat and submits:I can but suffer, and in silence.The poem ends with the brief story of a caliph who, after death, offers up to God all that he, in his immensity, does not have: deficiency, regrets, ill fortune, ignorance—and hope.This, the last word of the poem, shows Voltaire’s refusal to abandon himself to nihilism, but it represents an act of blind faith rather than the outcome of any reasoned argument.By the time Voltaire came to write Candide, his own personal circumstances had improved with the purchase in 1755 of a home near Geneva (called Les Délices: he acquired and moved into the nearby chateau at Ferney roughly at the same time as Candide was published) where he could settle down and indeed cultivate a garden.But the extensive work which he carried out in writing a history of the world, his Essai sur les mœurs (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations; published in 1756), had made him even more aware of the evils of the human condition.Given man’s inhumanity to man since the dawn of time, he was now even less ready to accept the philosophy of Optimism than before.In Candide Voltaire evidently satirizes Leibniz’s Optimism not only by the illogical travesty of it which Pangloss parrots throughout the story, but also by juxtaposing it with the various atrocities and disasters of which the story provides such a seemingly inexhaustible catalogue.Rape, pillage, murder, massacre, butchery, religious intolerance and abuse, torture, hanging, storm, shipwreck, earthquake, disease, prostitution: all is well.Yet it is not just the particulars of Leibniz’s system which Voltaire objects to, but even more so the belief, which he felt to be characteristic of the rationalism of his age, that logic and reason can somehow explain away the chaotic wretchedness of existence by grandly and metaphysically ignoring the facts.(Hence the name ‘Pangloss’.) After all, even Martin, whose views seem so much more persuasive than Pangloss’s, is said by the narrator to have ‘detestable principles’.They are detestable not because they are Manichaean, but because they are principles.Martin, no less than Pangloss, has a system, and he makes the facts fit the system rather than keep an open, ‘candid’ mind.Thus he predicts that the faithful Cacambo will betray Candide, which in the event he does not.As in Zadig, it is this human desire to impose order on experience which is the mainspring of the story.Where Voltaire had previously availed himself of the Oriental tale and its associations with Eastern fatalism and the philosophy of Zoroaster, here he exploits the traditions of chivalric romance [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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