by Voltaire
The Editor
NICHOLAS CRONK is Director of the Voltaire Foundation and Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford. He is General Editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire, the first scholarly edition of the entirety of Voltaire’s writings, and also President of the Société des études voltairiennes. He has published widely on French literature of the Ancien Régime, and in particular on Voltaire.
A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION
Voltaire
CANDIDE,
OR OPTIMISM
THE ROBERT M. ADAMS TRANSLATION
BACKGROUNDS
CRITICISM
THIRD EDITION
Edited by
NICHOLAS CRONK
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
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Contents
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Cover
About the Editor
Title Page
Introduction
Preface to the Second Edition
The Text of Candide, or Optimism
APPENDIX:
Voltaire • Letter on the Subject of Candide
Backgrounds
Richard Holmes • Voltaire’s Grin
Adam Gopnik • Voltaire’s Garden: The Philosopher as a Campaigner for Human Rights
W. H. Barber • [The Question of Optimism]
Dennis Fletcher • Candide and the Philosophy of the Garden
Haydn Mason • [Gestation: Candide Assembling Itself]
Nicholas Cronk • The Voltairean Genre of the Conte Philosophique: Does It Exist?
Criticism
J. G. Weightman • The Quality of Candide
Robin Howells • Does Candide Learn? Genre, Discourse, and Satire in Candide
James J. Lynch • Romance Conventions in Voltaire’s Candide
Philip Stewart • Holding the Mirror up to Fiction: Generic Parody in Candide
Erich Auerbach • [Voltaire’s Style: Tone, Pace, Insinuation]
Jean Starobinski • On Candide’s Philosophical Style
Jack Undank • The Status of Fiction in Voltaire’s Contes
Bibliography
Copyright
Norton Critical Editions: Age of Enlightenment
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Introduction
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Candide has been delighting readers continuously for over 250 years. The work was an instant hit when it first appeared in early 1759, and that same year no fewer than three English translations were published in London. Never since out of print, the novel has been translated into every conceivable language and continues to feed our imaginations by being repeatedly illustrated, imitated, adapted. For the first book under its new imprint, Random House in 1928 commissioned Rockwell Kent to illustrate Candide (and his image of Candide’s house remains to this day the company’s logo). Leonard Bernstein’s “comic operetta” Candide, a collaboration with the author Lillian Hellman, premiered on Broadway in 1956 and continues to enjoy frequent revivals. In the 1950s the work was widely seen as a satirical response to the show trials of the McCarthy era, while 50 years on, Robert Carsen’s 2006 production, perfomed on both sides of the Atlantic, contained an explicit satire of the leaders of the invasion of Iraq: it seems that whenever we are faced by dogmatism and absurdity, it is to Voltaire’s Candide that we turn.
One reason, of course, is that this short novel is accessible—or seems to be. The sentences are mostly short, the story is funny, there are some good jokes, and the action moves fast. All this makes the book enjoyable and easy to read. But while it makes us laugh, it makes us laugh uneasily: this is also a book that sets out to provoke us, even to make us think. The subtitle of the novel warns us that this is a novel of ideas (Optimism is a philosophical term newly coined in the period), but what precisely those ideas are, and what we are to make of them, is by no means obvious. The background and critical writings collected in this edition cover a wide range of different approaches that will help deepen your response to this work. But first, here are some questions to consider as you read, and reread, this remarkable novel.
Do We Learn from Experience?
Candide tells the story of a young man setting out on a journey: this is an archetypal template much favored in the eighteenth century. Typically the hero (and it is usually a hero rather than a heroine) goes on a journey that is metaphorical as much as real, undergoing experiences that form him as a man. Behind this fictional model is the English philosopher Locke, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) taught empiricism, the idea that truth is discovered through experience and experiment rather than being something innate. This is perhaps the key concept in the eighteenth-century movement of ideas that we call the Enlightenment, the moment, as Kant put it, of man’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity: henceforth, he said, man should “dare to know!” In this perspective, Candide, whose name means “white” in Latin (candidus), recalls Locke’s blank slate (tabula rasa) on which experiences are notched up. But how much does Candide really learn from his experiences? Does he ever really understand what happens to him? There is one moment in the novel, only one, when he sheds tears, which might suggest a glimmer of understanding or at least empathy with another. And what of the other characters, in particular Pangloss? He endlessly, comically, parrots the idea that “all is for the best,” but how does this relate to his experience of the world? Or is it rather the case that we as readers can learn from experience because the characters in the novel cannot?
How Do We Achieve Happiness?
The eighteenth century was much preoccupied with the idea and pursuit of happiness. After many centuries during which the tenets of Christian belief had shaped absolutely all areas of knowledge in European culture, there was now a growing move to put man at the center of intellectual endeavor. This does not necessarily mean that religious belief suddenly disappeared, far from it; but religious teaching was now subject to public scrutiny in a way it had not been before and, equally important, man was put more squarely at the center of human enquiry. It is this strand of Enlightenment thought that culminates in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: the “unalienable rights” given to all human beings by their Creator, which governments are created to protect, are there described, in a famous phrase, as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The question of human happiness is therefore a new one in this century, and the chapters set in Eldorado at the heart of the novel pose a direct challenge to the reader: is the life described there really the height of human happiness? Or is it rather a spoof on eighteenth-century notions of luxury? It is at least surprising that Candide and his companions discover this place of ultimate luxury, only then to escape from it.
The existence of evil is the most obvious threat to human happiness, and the eighteenth century came up with a new solution to the age-old philosophical question of why a beneficent God allowed evil to exist on earth. What seems evil to human beings, so the argument goes, appears so only because of our limited perspective; from God’s point of view, the world we inhabit is actually the “best of all possible worlds”—in other words, evil doesn’t really exist when viewed in the larger context. This response to the problem of evil, which in the eighteenth century goes under the misleading name of Optimism, derives from the German philosopher Leibniz, and a somewhat simplified version of this idea is associated with the English poet Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man (1734) was widely read across Europe.
Leibnizian Optimism assumes a static worldview that has no place fo
r any notion of change or evolution; at its heart lies a Providential sense of order in the universe, where God is in his place. It was common in the eighteenth century to suggest that this underlying sense of structure was proof of God’s existence, the so-called argument from design. Voltaire liked to refer to “God the watchmaker”: when you look inside a watch, you know that the machinery was designed and assembled by a superior intelligence, the watchmaker. Thus the design or harmonious shape of the universe is proof of a divine designer or creator. This idea (refuted robustly by David Hume in the mid-eighteenth century) is akin to the notion of “intelligent design,” a concept much discussed since a key U.S. Supreme Court ruling of 1987 concerning the teaching of creationism in American schools.
Candide clearly plays with all these ideas. The character Pangloss is a mouthpiece for Optimism (albeit in a rather simplified version), and as he becomes increasingly a figure of fun, not least because of his spectacular inability to learn from experience, so the ideas of Optimism seem to be discredited. But is Voltaire’s main purpose to discredit Optimism? Or to make fun of Pangloss’s unthinking dogmatism? The question is not easy to answer because, even if it seems evident that Voltaire finds the Leibnizian solution to happiness rather doubtful, he does elsewhere seem to be in basic agreement with the notion of an underlying providential order in the world. The novel poses clearly the problem of evil; it is not so obvious that it posits a clear answer.
Where Is Voltaire’s Voice?
In the first paragraph of Chapter 1, an “I” intervenes to offer an opinion: the presence of such a first-person narrator in a novel is a standard technique, but what is odd here is that this “I” then disappears for the rest of the novel, leaving the reader to ponder the somewhat slippery nature of Voltaire’s voice. If there is one term forever associated with Voltaire’s style, it is irony. The traditional definition of irony is that it involves saying one thing while meaning another. This sounds simple enough, though in practice it is anything but simple. In his A Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth considers the complexities of reading a single sentence from Candide:
Our best evidence of the intentions behind any sentence in Candide will be the whole of Candide, and for some critical purposes it thus makes sense to talk only of the work’s intentions, not the author’s. But dealing with irony shows us the sense in which our court of final appeal is still a conception of the author: when we are pushed about any ‘obvious interpretation’ we finally want to be able to say, ‘It is inconceivable that the author could have put those words together in this order without having intended this precise ironic stroke.1
In other words, readers have to work hard at every stage to try to make sense of what precisely Voltaire might mean and to consider how we are being manipulated by the text. Does the irony create distance, as when the bayonet is described as the “sufficient reason” for the death of thousands, or generate empathy, as when war is described as “heroic butchery”? These two examples are both drawn from the opening paragraph of Chapter 3: the satire of war here is clear and devastating, but the complex and shifting ironies that underpin that satire are difficult to unravel. Faced by the multiple ambiguities of this novel, critics have often been tempted to take refuge in the final catchphrase about cultivating the garden: this, surely, must be the ultimate encapsulation of the work’s wisdom? But is it? Or is even the title of Chapter 30, “Conclusion,” to be treated with scepticism?
What Sort of Book Is This?
How we read a book depends very much on our understanding of what sort of book we want to read. The point is well made by James Thurber in his story The Macbeth Murder Mystery: a woman who only ever reads murder mysteries is given by mistake Shakespeare’s historical tragedy Macbeth; blissfully unaware of this generic blunder, she has no difficulty in reading Macbeth as a whodunit, and even finds the clues to work out who the real murderer is (not the person we suspected …). Similarly with Candide: if we are told at the start that this is a novel of ideas, then we read it as such (even though readers have never quite agreed on what those ideas are). If, on the other hand, we are told that this is a comic novel in the tradition of Don Quixote, then it is equally possible to read the work as an antinovel that draws attention to its own fictional devices. Modern fiction is born out of the parody of medieval chivalric epic, as practiced by the poet Ariosto (whose Orlando furioso was a particular favorite of Voltaire’s) and later, in prose, by Cervantes (Don Quixote); so when Candide, driven mad by love, starts carving on the bark of trees the name of his beloved Cunégonde (Chapter 19), he is mimicking precisely the crazed lovers in Cervantes and Ariosto. Candide brims with allusions to what we might call narrative prototypes, and the shipwrecks, chance meetings, and amazing coincidences are all, at one level, spoofs of earlier adventure novels: this is a novel of ideas, certainly, but it is also a novel about novels.
One constant in these different approaches to the novel is the tension between order and disorder. The disruptive comedy of Candide is radically subversive, and it gives the lie to the Leibnizian world view that presupposes order and harmony. As readers of Candide, we try to make meaning out of chaos and to find order in disorder: we laugh at the end of Chapter 1 when the Baron kicks Candide out of the castle, not so much because the scene is comic in itself but because it parodies the Fall of Man and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We use our knowledge of earlier fictions (and these include, in Voltaire’s view, the Bible) to impose order on the chaos of the narrative, in much the same way that Pangloss strives to impose philosophical order on the world that surrounds him. This is a novel that makes demands on the reader because it forces us to reflect on how we make sense of the world. And it is because the world seems always in chaos that the novel remains always ripe for rereading. The words of the English novelist Aldous Huxley, written a century ago, still ring true:
But read the book today; you feel yourself entirely at home in its pages. It is like reading a record of the facts and opinions of 1922; nothing was ever more applicable, more completely to the point. The world in which we live is recognizably the world of Candide and Cunégonde.2
NICHOLAS CRONK
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1. Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 11–12.
2. Aldous Huxley, “On Re-Reading Candide,” in On the Margin (London, Chatto & Windus, 1923), pp. 12–17.
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Preface to the Second Edition
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When Candide first set forth into the world, in January 1759, he did not do so under the aegis of M. de Voltaire, the well-known poet, tragedian, historian, philosopher, and friend of Frederick the Great. As illegitimale as its hero, the book Candide proposed itself as the work of “Dr. Ralph”; and if it had not been signed extravagantly between the lines with another and better-known autograph, would doubtless figure today only in Barbier and Billard’s labyrinthine listing of anonymous literature.
The little book made its way, in other words, on its own—was read because it was amusing, and for that reason alone, and has only lately started to appear on assigned-reading lists and enumerations of “the world’s great books.” Now that it is a classic, I suppose the first thing the startled student must be told is that it is still funny.
The other things about the story, and there are a good many of them, come a long way after this first article.
Candide is a cruel and destructive book as well as a funny one. Funny and cruel: the qualities go together more easily perhaps than we like to think. But they would not suffice for the peculiar vitality of Candide, unless something else were added. If all it did was demolish a long-outdated system of German philosophy, its fun might feel as antiquated and its cruelty as gratuitous as Shakespeare’s puns or Pope’s malignant hounding after dunces. But Candide’s cruelty is not sour, and its fun remains modern and relevant. Dozens of heroes in modern fiction are Candides under one disguise or another,1 as our standard heroine is a r
eworked Madame Bovary—who herself has more than a touch of Candide in her complexion. Why Voltaire’s little book feels so modern clearly has something to do with the things it destroys and the way in which it carries out that work of destruction. But it is neither necessary nor possible to be peremptory in defining its targets, for satire generally works more widely than even its creator realizes. There’s something in it for everyone. So the book’s exact import is evidently up to the decision of the duly informed and sensitive reader—for whose individual responses to the actual work of art there neither is nor can be any substitute.
Though its action scampers dizzily around the perimeter of the civilized world, Candide is an essentially European book in its passionate addiction to, and scepticism of, the reasonable life. It could easily have a number of subtitles other than “Optimism”; one good one would be “Civilization and Its Discontents.”
The present translation has aimed to be neither literal nor loose, but to preserve a decent respect for English idiom while rendering a French intent. It was made from the old standard Morize edition, still a classic despite its age, and especially useful for the dry, neat erudition of its notes. But in its late stages, the English text was read against, and modified to conform with, M. René Pomeau’s 1959 edition, which introduces a few recent textual modifications. The text of Candide contains little that is problematic; it is clean and clear with only a couple of unimportant and relatively unsuccessful afterthoughts. When and where exactly the first printing of the first edition appeared is still doubtful; Voltaire was both a master of publicity and a past master at covering his tracks. But these fine points are for the difficult determinations of textual scholars.
As for Voltaire’s prose, it is late in the day to pronounce in its favor; a translator, however, may speak with special feeling of its lucidity, lightness, and swiftness of tonal variation. It is a joy to experience.
