[In this essay, originally published in 1979, Keener focuses on the characterization of Candide, contending that despite Voltaire's use of him as a marionette in the work, he deserves consideration as a character.]

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. … I do not have any need to think; if I can pay, others will take over the tedious job for me.

—Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”¹

That Candide the character is a marionette has become a commonplace in criticism of the tale, despite infrequent though recurrent statements to the contrary by some commentators.² Yet the primary meaning of the famous, iterated final words is “his” meaning, a matter of Candide's motives in speaking them. The nature of human motivation, the inner counterpart of the “chain of events” that increasingly occupied eighteenth-century thinkers, had, by the time of Candide, become a central subject for writers on ethics, politics, and the fledgling science of psychology. By mid-century, too, there was a new, developmental sense of change in embryology and physical cosmology.³ Was there a comparable new sense of the development of fictional characters?—of characters' not simply being changed but changing themselves, and of their doing so not ex machina but in relation to the tendencies, the inner processes, that characterize them? If there was—and I believe there was, as I have indicated with reference to the Lettres persanes—it was likely to be tentative and subtle, since representation of self-conscious development by characters would mark a distinct departure from the practices of romance writers and early novelists, and from what is typical of the romance and novel as genres.

“Motivation” is also a technical term in formalist analysis of narrative, indicating the propulsion of a plot toward its conclusion (not to be confused with the comparatively arbitrary “human” motivation of fictional characters, which serves to disguise, and ease a reader's acceptance of, a plot's necessities).⁴ A tale like Candide, however, presents problems to the formalist because the meaning of the ending is primarily a matter of what a character means to say, and the narrator does not tell us what that is; nor, definitively, does Candide. Those final words about the necessity of cultivating the garden are, according to Roman Jakobson's division, distinctly metonymical rather than metaphorical in their relation to the rest of Voltaire's tale, because Candide's statement differs considerably from, without directly contradicting, statements he has made earlier.⁵ Most notably, Candide insists that an action is necessary; he has not spoken so peremptorily before. Less obviously, he sets himself apart from not only Pangloss' way of thinking but also that of everyone else, including Martin, as I intend to show. Moreover, the clause “il faut cultiver notre jardin” may itself be metaphorical: the necessary cultivation of that garden may stand for more than agriculture. But that possibility, especially when elaborated, will seem more evident to the historian of Voltaire's ideas than to the critic mainly concerned with Candide as an example of eighteenth-century narrative fiction. What Voltaire may have meant by the clause is one question; what the character Candide, who is not given to poetry or eloquence, may mean in addition to what he says explicitly, is quite another.⁶

A reading of the conclusion of the tale thus requires a reading of Candide's nature, to discover whether what he says there is linked to what he says earlier. But modern criticism, in its nearly relentlessly a priori emphasis on the difference between the philosophical tale (or apologue) and the nascent novel, has usually been unhistorically neat, too quickly ruling out possibilities of significant characterization in the tale, even though a tale like Candide is obviously less about philosophy itself than about the hero's peculiar use of it.⁷

Candide's character is not so uninterestingly or insignificantly simple as it seems. Perhaps the comparison with a marionette has itself become too simple. There were other eighteenth-century models of near humanity that a critic might draw upon. Although Voltaire enjoyed marionettes, he was interested too in automata, such as the celebrated flutist, drummer, and duck manufactured by Jacques Vaucanson (“rival de Prométhée,” Voltaire called him in the Discours en vers sur l'homme).⁸ Automata, it is true, only seem autonomous, though they manage to perform without visible strings, but there was still another, still more lifelike artificial Adam to converse about in the years just before Candide, the awakening statue which Condillac, in the Traité des sensations (1754), employed to demonstrate the conceivable derivation of thought from sense experience—an example put to similar use by Buffon and Charles Bonnet. The statue come to life presents additional evidence of the new, mid-eighteenth-century interest in self-conscious, although general, psychological development. But I mention this series of progressively more lifelike models mainly to suggest historical analogues for Candide other than the marionette, so as to promote reconsideration of him as a character, not to argue that Voltaire probably had one or more of these models in mind.

In reading a narrated philosophical tale one should be attentive to the character of the narrator, who himself may change in some important way, and whose comments are not necessarily more dependable than evidence drawn from what his characters say and do. Though Voltaire's narrator says in the first paragraph that Candide has the simplest of intellects, Candide's mind is certainly not so simple as it seems or as Candide himself regards it. When, in the wilds of South America, he kills the apes pursuing two naked girls, and before he learns from his companion Cacambo that the victims were the girls' chosen lovers, his first response is of delivery from guilt: “Dieu soit loué, … si j'ai commis un péché en tuant un inquisiteur et un jésuite, je l'ai bien réparé en sauvant la vie à deux filles” (“God be praised, … if I have sinned by killing an inquisitor and a Jesuit, I have made up for it well by saving the life of two girls”). Immediately, he has another thought: “Ce sont peut-être deux demoiselles de condition, et cette aventure nous peut procurer de très grands avantages dans le pays” (“These are perhaps two young ladies of quality, and this adventure can procure us very great advantages in the land”).⁹ The main chance does not escape him. At a later, prominent place in the book, the point of his decision to leave Eldorado, he seems swayed particularly by desire to rejoin Cunégonde, but the sentiment as he expresses it is again not single-minded:

Si nous restons ici, nous n'y serons que comme les autres; au lieu que si nous retournons dans notre monde, seulement avec douze moutons chargés de cailloux d'Eldorado, nous serons plus riches que tous les rois ensemble, nous n'aurons plus d'inquisiteurs à craindre, et nous pourrons aisément reprendre mademoiselle Cunégonde.

(If we remain here, we shall be only like the others; whereas if we go back to our world, with only twelve sheep bearing pebbles from Eldorado, we shall be wealthier than all kings put together, we shall not have any more inquisitors to fear, and we shall easily regain Mademoiselle Cunégonde.)

That Cunégonde figures as the bread and not the filling in this sandwich of motivation, the narrator insists in the one passage of the book that directly criticizes his hero: “on aime tant à courir, à se faire valoir chez les siens, à faire parade de ce qu'on a vu dans ses voyages, que les deux heureux résolurent de ne plus l'être, et de demander leur congé à Sa Majesté” (18; “people love so much to run around, to pride themselves among their friends, to make a show of what they have seen in their travels, that the two happy men decided to be happy no more and to ask his majesty for permission to go away”).

The narrator generally speaks of Candide as an unfortunate innocent preyed upon by evildoers. Such is often the case, it seems, but Candide himself also seems eager to accept that explanation. In the ninth chapter, when surprised with Cunégonde by Don Issacar, who shares her with the Grand Inquisitor, Candide—“quoiqu'il eût les mœurs fort douces” (“although he had the gentlest manners”), the narrator says—slays the interloper. Minutes later, with the Inquisitor's entrance, the narrator records Candide's thinking “to the moment”:

Si ce saint homme appelle du secours, il me fera infailliblement brûler, il pourra en faire autant de Cunégonde; il m'a fait fouetter impitoyablement; il est mon rival; je suis en train de tuer, il n'y a pas à balancer.

(If this holy man cries for help, he will unquestionably have me burned, he will be able to do as much to Cunégonde; he has had me whipped cruelly; he is my rival; I am already involved with killing, there is nothing to hesitate about.)

The selflessness he would think typical of himself is again mixed with less rarefied motives. He runs the Inquisitor through. How could he do it? exclaims Cunégonde, “vous qui êtes né si doux” (“you who were born so gentle”). Candide replies, “Ma belle demoiselle, … quand on est amoureux, jaloux, et fouetté par l'Inquisition, on ne se connaît plus” (“My sweet young lady, … when a person is in love, jealous, and scourged by the Inquisition, he no longer knows himself”). He does not readily acknowledge ordinary, unedifying feelings, and his reluctance persists. Five chapters later, he again looks down upon a man he has stabbed, again astonished by himself: “Hélas mon Dieu! dit-il, j'ai tué mon ancien maître, mon ami, mon beau-frère; je suis le meilleur homme du monde, et voilà déjà trois hommes que je tue …” (15; “Oh, my God! he says; I have dispatched my former master, friend, brother-in-law; I am the best of men, and already there are three men I have killed …”).

“Le meilleur homme du monde”—an epithet amusingly resonant in this tale about the best of worlds, chateaux, philosophers, and so forth. It begins to appear that, if there were no Pangloss, Candide would have to invent him. Invent him in a root sense, Candide through much of the book wishes he could do: to find or recover or resurrect him. It is a humorous obsession. Worlds burst; still Candide yearns to know what Pangloss' explanation would be. As late as the twenty-seventh chapter he is still insisting that Pangloss was right and that all is well. Candide the child keeps fathering that man. And Candide's having saddled himself with Pangloss is suggested also by the hero's manner of replacing him: Candide does not fall in with Martin, his alternate Mentor, accidentally.

After encountering the wretched slave of Surinam, after being robbed of his last two Eldoradan sheep, after being cheated by the judge to whom he complained, Candide feels the deepest melancholy. “La méchanceté des hommes se présentait à son esprit dans toute sa laideur, il ne se nourrissait que d'idées tristes” (“The wickedness of men loomed in all its ugliness before his mind, he nurtured only sad ideas”). But he cannot sustain such ideas by himself; he needs assistance of the sort he is used to, so he sponsors an odd contest to select a traveling companion, advertising for someone “le plus dégoûté de son état et le plus malheureux de la province” (19; “the most revolted by his own condition and the most wretched man in the province”); if it were practical, he would undoubtedly seek the unhappiest person in the world. From the throng that replies, Candide chooses twenty and hears them out, with gratifying misery, thinking of how embarrassed Pangloss would be, until finally Martin is chosen, not because he particularly deserves the prize but because, besides professing to be miserable, he is a philosopher. The logic is bluntly Hegelian: if this is not the best of all possible worlds, it must be the worst. Candide still wishes to believe Pangloss, but if Martin can convince him of the truth of the opposite position, Candide may assent. One way or the other, he will arrive at the absolute truth of the matter. Although constantly regarding himself as indivisible in his sentiments, he is not.

The action of the next chapter, the twentieth, should be seen as an oblique but telling commentary upon the procedures of “le meilleur homme du monde.” Candide is protesting to Martin that the world has some good when the noise of cannons interrupts them. They watch a naval engagement in which one ship suddenly sinks, all hands lost. Candide tends to agree with Martin that the event is diabolical—but, something red is floating in the water where a hundred men have just drowned, one of the Eldoradan sheep. Candide, we are told, “eut plus de joie de retrouver ce mouton, qu'il n'avait été affligé d'en perdre cent tous chargés de gros diamants d'Eldorado” (“was more delighted in regaining this sheep than he had been afflicted by the loss of a hundred sheep all carrying huge diamonds from Eldorado”). The drowned men, the lost sheep, the repetition of the number one hundred for them in so short a space, Candide's sympathy for the dead so quickly followed by joy at recovery of his treasure: he is rather more ordinary in his self-centeredness than he realizes.¹⁰ He fondles his sheep and supposes that, since he has regained it, he may also regain Cunégonde.

The parallel is apt. Cunégonde, and indeed the women of the tale in general, unblushingly reveal an animality that Candide and Pangloss have also but rationalize away. (Candide of course does not notice it in the women either). Though beautiful at first, Cunégonde lacks other Petrarchan characteristics. It is she who takes the lead in Candide's first encounter with her, and later she eagerly receives him in the Grand Inquisitor's house, typically not wondering about their safety together. She tells her tale: a Bulgarian captain, having killed a soldier who was raping her, made her his slave; she adjusted herself to the situation, for “il me trouvait fort jolie, il faut l'avouer; et je ne nierai pas qu'il ne fût très bien fait, et qu'il n'eût la peau blanche et douce; d'ailleurs”—she is telling this to Candide—“peu d'esprit, peu de philosophie: on voyait bien qu'il n'avait pas été élevé par le docteur Pangloss” (“he thought me quite pretty, it must be said; and I shall not deny that he was very well put together, and that his skin was fair and smooth; otherwise, not much brain, not much philosophy; a person could see very well that he had not been taught by Doctor Pangloss”). Later, at the auto-da-fé, she saw Pangloss hanged and she fainted.

A peine reprenais-je mes sens que je vous vis dépouillé tout nu; ce fut là le comble de l'horreur, de la consternation, de la douleur, du désespoir. Je vous dirai, avec vérité, que votre peau est encore plus blanche, et d'un incarnat plus parfait que celle de mon capitaine des Bulgares.

(Hardly did I regain my senses when I saw you stripped entirely naked; that was the extremity of terror, vexation, sorrow, despair. I will say to you, truly, that your flesh is still whiter and of a finer rosiness, than my Bulgarian captain's.)

The flogging of Candide prompted her to recall all her misfortunes, which she summarizes in one of those pell-mell litanies of comically enchained events with which the book abounds—massacres, degradation, “et surtout [le] baiser que je vous avais donné derrière un paravent, le jour que je vous avais vu pour la dernière fois” (“and especially the kiss I had given you behind a screen, that day I saw you the last time”). “Vous devez avoir une faim dévorante,” she concludes, no non sequitur for her; “j'ai grand appétit; commençons par souper” (8; “You must have a ferocious appetite; I am awfully hungry; let us start by supping”).

The old woman has a similar history and personality, this once delectable daughter of a pope, beaten, robbed, mutilated, who wanted to kill herself a hundred times but still loved life (12). More resilient than Candide, the women have no need for a Pangloss or Martin. They have an amoral authority all their own because they claim no authority while simply doing as they like, as much as they can. They even readily fall in with the ways of the world that exploits them. Cunégonde resisted the first Bulgarian, she explains, because she did not know that “tout ce qui arrivait dans le château de mon père était une chose d'usage” (8; “everything that happened in my father's chateau was sanctioned by custom”). The old woman, stripped and probed by corsairs, was surprised, ignorant of the fact that everyone, even the Knights of Malta, acts that way; “C'est une loi du droit des gens à laquelle on n'a jamais dérogé” (11; “It is an article of international law from which no one has ever deviated”). Expostulating with cannibals, the somewhat comparably flexible Cacambo declares, “En effet le droit naturel nous enseigne à tuer notre prochain, et c'est ainsi qu'on en agit dans toute la terre” (16; “As a matter of fact, natural law instructs us to kill our neighbor, and it is thus that everyone behaves throughout the world”).

Candide, who never voices complacent classifications of this kind, whose penchant is for acceptance of metaphysical cosmology rather than custom, seems to occupy a place like that of Man in Pope's Essay, between the assertive doctors, his light and dark angels, and the libidinal if not brutal women. Even in respect to his feelings for Cunégonde, however, he is less simple than the narrator says, not readily quixotic. He has not simply envisioned her as a lady of romance, nor has he given disinterested attention to philosophical Optimisim. He gave Pangloss his credence, the narrator says at the outset, “car il trouvait mademoiselle Cunégonde extrêmement belle.” From the first, his motives are consistently double and mixed, his priorities transparent, to the narrator and the reader, not to him. “Il concluait qu'après le bonheur d'être né baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh, le second degré de bonheur était d'être mademoiselle Cunégonde, le troisième, de la voir tous les jours, et le quatrième, d'entendre maître Pangloss …” (1; “He determined that next to the good fortune of being born the Baron of Thunderten-tronckh, the second greatest sort of happiness lay in being Mlle Cunégonde, the third in gazing on her every day, and the fourth in understanding Master Pangloss …”).

Though Candide would be the last to admit it, his love for Cunégonde and his faith in Pangloss have, consistently, much to do with his wish to be the best man in the best possible world: to be discovered, for example, to be the Baron's nephew, like that other obscure youth turned out of paradise, the romantic, more single-minded Tom Jones. That this is so seems still more probable when one considers Candide's final reason for marrying Cunégonde at the end. To reverse his set of priorities, checked off by events: fourth, Pangloss has become tedious to Candide; third and second, Cunégonde is ugly, poor, and abrasive, now neither companionable nor enviable; but, first, her baronial brother opposes the marriage as beneath her, so Candide, with but not determined by Cuné-gonde's solicitations, makes a point of going through with it (30).

Thus, repeatedly, though Candide thinks himself exceptional for his unselfishness, he acts upon self-regarding motives which he resists acknowledging, and he avoids such acknowledgment, systematically, either by displacing the object of his desires from one thing to another somehow associated with it (despite the fact that, after Locke, the main trend in psychology promoted critical consciousness of mental associations) or by attaching himself to an authority, such as Martin, and thus displacing the subject of his desires. Repeatedly it is shown that Candide's concern about whether the world is for the best or for the worst is displaced concern about how the world will deal with poor Candide. He is really more an automaton, brother to Vaucanson's duck—moved by a concealed drive wheel, concealed from himself—than he is a marionette. Once in a while Voltaire ties a string to him and jerks it, as when Candide, thinking he has killed the Jesuit, worries about what the Journal de Trévoux will say (16). But most of the time Candide goes by his own spring, an adequately motivated comic character whose traits, while too thin for psychoanalysis, are not inhumanly mechanical. He moves the comedy, is not simply moved by it, and he does not simply carry about his favorite philosophical proposition; he embodies and enacts it. Odd as the statement may seem at first, Candide is, energetically, ingeniously on Voltaire's part, a trope.

Considered as a trope in the conventional sense, as a device of communication, as the equivalent of a figure of speech conceived by a rhetorician, Candide may seem a metaphor. His name would give that impression. But as I have tried to show, he is only partially candide (in one sense of the word), for he is not so with himself. He may be considered a figure of irony, and he is that much of the time, but he does not seem so definitely that when he speaks the concluding words. The other major tropes, besides metaphor and irony, are synecdoche and metonymy; and, broadly speaking, synecdoche is everywhere in the tale, but in saying that I use synecdoche not primarily in the common rhetorical sense, to indicate devices mediating between writer and reader. I use the term, rather, to indicate the way in which words are combined in sentences, ideas associated in the mind, by the characters and narrator. As we have seen, Cunégonde and other characters constantly explain (one might say naturalize) strange events by classifying them as species of general codes: custom, international law, natural law. The species-genus relation is especially synecdochic; the part-whole relation is usually regarded as synecdochic too. And, at least in the earlier sections of the tale, the narrator matches his characters in the production of broadly synecdochic associations, as in the particulars chosen to support faint praise of the Baron's chateau, exceptional in Westphalia: “son château avait une porte et des fenêtres” (1).

The grand architects of synecdoche in the tale, however, are the philosophical Optimists; “All are but parts of one stupendous whole,” Pope had written.¹¹ Part-whole classification becomes Candide's main occupation. His esteem for Pangloss derives, as that name suggests, precisely from the philosopher's ability to identify the whole of which Candide is a part, thus establishing rootless Candide as a part, deducing his estimable character and expectations from that best whole. The philosophy of Optimism, as Kenneth Burke points out, is essentially synecdochic:

The “noblest synecdoche,” the perfect paradigm or prototype for all lesser usages, is found in metaphysical doctrines proclaiming the identity of “microcosm” and “macrocosm.” In such doctrines, where the individual is treated as a replica of the universe, and vice versa, we have the ideal synecdoche, since microcosm is related to macrocosm as part to whole, and either the whole can represent the part or the part can represent the whole. (For “represent” we could substitute “be identified with.”) One could thus look through the remotest astronomical distances to the “truth within,” or could look within to learn the “truth of all the universe without.” Leibniz' monadology is a good instance of synecdoche on this grand scale.¹²

It may be helpful to emphasize that the use of a trope by a metaphysician in this manner is not rhetorical but epistemological. Instead of employing the trope to illustrate a concept distinct from, antecedent to, the trope, he employs the trope to think. The metaphysics is a synecdoche. But statements about the philosophy are synecdochic in linguistic and rhetorical ways. In Candide, the various synecdochic associations constructed by the characters and the narrator have a splendid parodic symmetry. For the most part, the trope of irony persists rhetorically and dominates the epistemological and linguistic synecdoches, as in Cunégonde's unconsciously ironic recourse to custom, the narrator's deliberately ironic specification of door and windows, and mainly in comic transformations of Optimism.

A trope may have a mind of its own, like Alice's corquet mallet. Although in rhetoric trope means a turn or twist given to speech (one says “a sail” and means “a ship”), the figure may twist in one's hands, the resultant meaning not quite what one intended. The vitality of a trope may spring particularly from its instability as a compound, its tendency to be resolved in another trope—its tropism. A metaphor may reveal an implicit set of synecdoches. In Burke's example, initially the part is related to the whole; then it can be identified with it. But once the part has been so fully identified with the whole that it can stand for it, a curious turning occurs: the part tends to become the distinctive part of the whole, the really important part, even in a sense the best part. The trope of synecdoche, a kind of metaphor, tends to become pure metaphor by transforming the species that can stand for a genus, the part that can stand for a whole, into a new, more economical, higher genus or whole.

If, to return to Candide, the not so simple hero is categorized as a trope, his desires are seen to turn that way. Establishing himself as part of the best of all possible worlds, he would demonstrate that, far from being a nobody, he is not a microcosm but the microcosm: “le meilleur homme du monde.” In the sense that Candide himself is synecdochic like Leibniz's noble synecdoche, the full title of the tale has its full significance: Candide ou l'optimisme, the philosophy and would-be philosopher are one.

But though synecdoche for the most part characterizes the hero and typifies much that the narrator says as well, the fundamental trope of the tale is metonymy, which, against some precedents, I should like to distinguish as much as possible from synecdoche as that term is usually understood.¹³ Synecdoche may verge on the metaphorical, as in Burke and in what I have said thus far. But it may verge instead on the metonymical. Whereas metaphor works with items that have an intrinsic similarity to or identity with each other, metonymy works with items extrinsic to each other: relations of before and after, above and below, cause and effect; relations often temporal rather than spatial. Metonymy is often a trope of movement and change, of calculus rather than algebra. It is also the trope of otherness, for each trope implies a point of view, the condition of the knower in regard to what is to be known; but whereas metaphor and the more metaphorical sort of synecdoche, by their predication of whole or partial resemblance or identity in the items related, tend to identify the knower with the known, metonymy tends to keep them separate. Synecdoche verging on the metonymical rather than the metaphorical will suggest that any resemblance between the part and the whole is slight, or that any predication of identity between them, even partial identity, is arbitrary. A person should be wary about the adequacy of any theory of genus and species. A person sees that this accompanies that but remains in doubt about relations of identity between them, beyond the notion that they “go together.” Hume's epistemology is thus fundamentally metonymical and extremely cautious: post quod is no more than that, and causes, important as they are to us, represent no more than the effects of one principle governing our association of ideas.¹⁴

It is into something like Hume's world that Voltaire has dropped Candide, arranging the tale so that it is from the basic, alienated point of view of epistemological metonymy that characters attempt to read the universe, that is, to associate events by general formulae. Throughout the tale Candide is assaulted by discrete, unassimilable, pressing events. He strains to read them metaphorically, to give them a teleology assimilating them to the grand pattern of a world deserving the qualification “best.” His reasoning is always really practical, not speculative, but in person or in spirit there is always at his shoulder, by his choice, one of his mentors to keep him in the dark. Pangloss radiates obscurity. “Remarquez bien,” he argues in the first chapter, “que les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes, aussi avons-nous des lunettes” (“Note well that noses were made to hold eyeglasses, so we have eyeglasses”). This reasoning, comically trivial on the surface, becomes sillier when looked into. In the first place, Pangloss has omitted the necessary middle term if the proposition that all is for the best is to make sense as philosophical Optimism, that term being the proviso of a perfect Creator, “Wisdom infinite” (An Essay on Man 1.44); it is because of God's nature that all must be for the best. Second, the given example begins to make sense only if employed to justify the existence of noses, but Pangloss wrenches the argument to justify what we do with our noses, anything we do.

It is not simply the position in which man has been placed that Pangloss is busy accepting; it is what man wants to do there, still clearer in a succeeding example: “les cochons étant faits pour être mangés, nous mangeons du porc toute l'année” (“pigs being made to be eaten, we eat pork all through the year”). Pangloss neatly, gratifyingly, confuses the theological and teleological sense of “end” with the personal and moral sense and thus can adduce the nature of the universe, implicitly the nature of God, to explain the rightness of whatever Pangloss wants to do. He attracts Candide by glossing everything, seeing resemblance in all that happens, and locating his desires in the nature of things rather than in himself. Through the whole argument there is a telling balance in the omission of the First Mover and the neglect of the human agent's motivation. Pangloss could seem rather cunning in all this, but he is not: though given to abstractions, he resembles the women of the tale in completely lacking critical self-consciousness.

It is in the nature of things, not of Pangloss, that he eats pork or gives Paquette a lesson in experimental physics. And Martin resembles him by similarly displacing motives, only shifting them to the devil's shoulders much of the time. Neither philosopher makes room for specifically human desires. And Candide, employing first one and then the other to think for him, establishes for himself the best of possible fools' paradises by successfully shifting judgment from his own shoulders onto theirs. Event follows event, detail is added to detail; the empirical relations are extrinsic, mere relations of contiguity. Why does event B follow event A? Will C, success, follow B? Yes, says Pangloss. No, says Martin. Such is the world, they say in chorus. Each thinks he is associating events by cause and effect when he is only, tacitly, correlating them with his own desires, and, like Candide, correlating his reasoning with a high opinion of himself. Each, to resolve the metonymy of experience, rashly makes the wrong tropic turn. Instead of inquiring into the relation between the whole of himself and the part constituted by his desires, he assumes he is a whole, all integrity, and concerns himself entirely with his relation to the whole universe.

However, metonymy forbids these flights and retaliates by promoting recognition of the most down-to-earth causes. In this respect the tale plays with the mechanistic explanation of human motives common in Swift. Cunégonde, spying Pangloss in the bushes with the chambermaid, “vit clairement la raison suffisante du docteur, les effets et les causes” (1; “clearly perceived the doctor's sufficient reason, the effects and the causes”). Descartes is being stood upon his head: men are machines, mechanically rationalizing animals. Given Cunégonde's regular animality, it follows that she would immediately find an opportunity for applying Pangloss' physics. Given Candide's innocence of natural rather than selfless human motives, he is particularly vulnerable to both manipulation and criticism in this mode.

Now it would seem that the tendency of metonymy is toward perception of chains of events as mechanical (the vogue of naturalistic fiction a century after Candide might seem the historical realization of that tendency, the empire of realism's metonymy). It would seem so, that is, if metonymy did not imply the point of view I have mentioned, that of extrinsicality. The would-be knower perceives one thing going with another; he may forge a causal link; but he does so, at his most self-conscious, with recognition that he has created the association, perhaps delusively.

There is definite movement in Voltaire's tale, in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas too, from the hero's expectation of full understanding of the world to fear that there can be no understanding of it, at least none warranting any contentment. At the beginning, Candide cheerfully accepts the notion that all is for the best with the implication that all shall be for his own personal good. Despite frustrations, he persists in seeking suitable evidence. “Isn't everyone happy?” he asks. Then, having discovered in the first third of the tale that everything European seems far from being for the best, and in the next third that the New World is little better, by chapter 19, Candide, near despair, hirres Martin to prove that all is for the worst. Candide does not want to make that judgment, but his question has now become, “Isn't anyone happy?”—that wealthy, educated senator, or that seemingly jolly cleric with the girl on his arm? Martin's pessimism is repeatedly vindicated, and the metaphysical question falls to earth in the process. Martin seems an expert reader of this world's metonymies—until he ventures to ridicule Candide's faith in Cacambo: “Vous êtes bien simple, en vérité, de vous figurer qu'un valet métis, qui a cinq ou six millions dans ses poches, ira chercher votre maîtresse au bout du monde et vous l'amènera à Venise” (24; “You are really a simpleton to expect that a half-breed servant, with five or six million in his pockets, will go seeking your mistress to the end of the world and conduct her to you in Venice”).

Candide could certainly profit from increased proficiency in reductive, mechanistic prediction of chains of human events, yet not in this instance, for of course his valet returns—without the money, it is true, but having acted in good faith and bringing news of Cunégonde's whereabouts. Martin's chain has broken. The tale moves inexorably toward an attitude of skepticism as explanation after explanation proves false, as metonymy outlasts noble synecdoches, yet there is no corresponding movement toward doctrinaire skepticism. The book moves toward skepticism conscious of and skeptical of itself. Explanations have failed but explanation itself has not been proven futile; what has, at most, been demonstrated is that explanation by unconscious wishful thinking is futile. Erich Auerbach's rather unsympathetic pages on Candide in Mimesis, summarized by the statement that “For Voltaire, it is a perfectly self-evident premise that no one in his senses can believe in … an inner justification for views,”¹⁵ seem badly in need of qualification, the addition to the statement of “without first considering whether he is deluded about that inner justification.” There the satirical stress falls; there Voltaire's ridicule comes to a point.

Candide may seem the helpless, passive object of a remarkable series of misfortunes. The misfortunes are remarkable, even an earthquake killing thousands, a natural disaster on a scale afflicting few fictional characters. The world seems Candide's nemesis. However, with the notable exception of that earthquake—which, for all its enormity, is an instance of natural evil virtually required in a work bearing on theodicy—the reader finds that Candide regularly, often actively, induces the world's nasty, morally evil reactions against him. As mimesis of probability in the objective world, the events loom unrealistically huge, frequent, and severe. Yet as mimesis of the probability of the world's responses to someone like Candide, the series of events comes to seem, at the least, less improbable; as mediated through a Candide the world takes on a different aspect. He invites misfortune at a rate very close to that of its occurrence, because, with Pangloss' spectacles on his nose, he insists upon secretly seeing “all things for my use,” despite that warning about the wrong Optimistic turn in An Essay on Man (3.45).

It must be for the best when the Baron's daughter makes love to him, or when the Bulgarian press-gang attracts him by appealing eloquently to the same expectation. “Les hommes ne sont faits que pour se secourir les uns les autres” (“Men were made only so that each one could help out the others”), they say. Candide says that is just what Pangloss thinks. Even when Candide chooses to desert the army, he does so not out of a natural desire to be free and safe but out of the belief that “c'était un privilège de l'espèce humaine … de se servir de ses jambes à son plaisir” (“it was a right of human beings … for a man to have the benefit of using his own legs as he pleases”). Candide is a rigorist.

There is always, as Johnson said of Richardson's Clarissa, something which he prefers to truth, the truth of acknowledged desire. Given the choice of the gauntlet or the firing squad, he chooses by the divine gift of “liberté,” and asking to be killed he is neither desperate nor angry but polite, requesting of the Bulgarians “qu'on voulût bien avoir la bonté de lui casser la tête” (2; “that someone would kindly be gracious enough to crush his head”). This comment nicely illustrates the positivity of Candide as a character; delivered in indirect discourse, it is obviously a sarcasm of the narrator's, yet the reader senses no sarcasm in what Candide seems to mean by it, and no improbability in his speaking this way. He has relative independence from his author. Having escaped, except mentally, Candide proceeds to deduce that the Dutch, being Christians, will take care of him, another Panglossian expectation to be frustrated, but he pays no attention to the anomaly presented by the kindness of the unbaptized Jacques; then, when Jacques is soon drowning, Candide allows himself to do nothing but look on, conveniently persuaded by Pangloss' assertion “que la rade de Lisbonne avait été formée exprès pour que cet anabaptiste s'y noyât” (5; “that the harbor of Lisbon had been shaped expressly for this Anabaptist to drown in”). And so forth; extremely unrealistic as Candide's credulity is, the chain of evil events, as significantly determined by his unrealistic longings, is not entirely without probability.

Although I have suggested in passing that Candide occupies a middle state between his doctors and the women, that vertical scale, that microcosmic Chain of Being, is illusory. Pangloss, Martin, Cunégonde, the old woman, all are in an important sense variations on the same theme. They think about different things, but the ways in which they think about them are fundamentally identical, for all these characters take the events they observe and mechanically reduce them to uniformity. To Pangloss they are all for the best; to Martin, for the worst; to Cunégonde, they are acceptable. (Belonging to a Bulgarian captain, or to Candide, or to a South American governor; it is all the same to her; at the end she does not recognize the change in her own appearance.) Each ancillary character processes experience as if by an assembly line. Each proceeds without introspection. Thus each, though enduring innumerable crises, inhabits a serenely uniform mental world, a world without change, all events linked by similarity. Toward such secure simplicity of world and mind, particularly as represented by the confident, authoritative philosophers, Candide is constantly propelled by his uneasy combination of self-esteem and self-regard. But at the end, whatever else he means by his closing remarks, he refuses to join his companions in continued mock-philosophizing.

In this late turn of events the hero is subtly but definitely seconded by the narrator (there is a parallel development in Rasselas). At the beginning of the tale the narrator had made himself prominent with continual, insistent irony, often sarcasm, but he plays a much subdued part as the tale progresses, particularly after the entrance of Martin in the nineteenth chapter. The narrator's earlier, extreme irony had made a witty, critical foil for the naive optimism of Pangloss and Candide, and for the complacency about cruelty and stupidity exhibited by most of the other characters. Martin, when he enters, is occasionally ironical (it is he who says, in chapter 23, that France and England “sont en guerre pour quelques arpents de neige vers le Canada”—“are at war for a plot of snow near Canada”), but in the main his is a direct critical voice, and he is in addition a pessimist. By contrast with this role, the narrator's, for much the most part toward the close of the tale, is that of an uneditorializing introducer of speakers and straightforward describer of actions. Directly or indirectly, the narrator of the latter part of the tale offers very few opinions, with the result that the irony lodged in his comments earlier now continues almost exclusively in the plot, and his earlier criticism is replaced by Martin's. Yet valid as Martin's criticism often is, he overreaches himself in his pessimism, which turns out to be similar in its affected omniscience about the chain of events, in kind if not in degree, to the optimism of Pangloss. When Cacambo defeats Martin's prediction by returning to Candide, the plot defeats Martin's philosophy too.

One rhetorical effect of the change whereby Martin takes on himself the judgmental responsibilities of the narrator is some attenuation of the tale's satire. The narrator's satirical reflections had worn the absoluteness and invulnerability of irony. Martin's criticism becomes vulnerable because based on a stated, then overstated doctrine; his point of view, unlike the narrator's, remains distinctly limited—formally, but also by consequences in the plot, by the limitations of his nature as fully revealed in the end, and perhaps even by one of the narrator's rare late judgments, the reference to Martin's “détestables principes” (30). That is, part of the satire which continues in the tale after the narrator steps down from the bench qualifies Martin's utterances. And the narrator, who at the outset had taken the reader into his confidence, offering him the absolute assurance that only an omniscient narrator can provide, an assurance like that which Candide sought from Pangloss and metaphysics, toward the end ranges himself less closely with the reader and more closely with Candide, whom the narrator resembles increasingly when Candide finally refrains from explanation, from commentary.

In the final pages, the hero, the narrator, and the tale resist commentary as misreading, likely to be the product of covert egotism, like the philosophies of Pangloss and Martin. In the last page or so Candide says, twice, “il faut cultiver notre jardin.” The narrator, who had earlier made such a point of uncovering the true motives of his blind, compulsive hero, does not explain these declarative, in effect imperative statements, but presents them to the reader as final, seemingly discrete items in the series constituted by Candide's words, thoughts, and actions throughout the tale, presents them to be motivated in meaning by the reader. To be interpreted, Candide's final statements must be associated with his history, and virtually the only way that can be accomplished is to construe them as negation. As part of the tale, not as a historic statement by the historical Voltaire, the clause in context resists all but the most elementary commentary. So often duped by unexamined, grandiose, metaphorical habits of thought, Candide here speaks as unmetaphorically, as literally, as possible.

In the history of interpretation, it is true, the resistance of the text has often been resisted itself. The image of cultivating one's garden is so historically poetical, so pregnant with iconic potentiality—one may even find it in a passage Leibniz wrote about the necessity of universal progress¹⁶—that a scholar is hard put not to explode with learned associations. Surely, however, it ought to give an interpreter pause when he considers that the import of the remark in context, the final time Candide makes it, is precisely to rebuff Pangloss' Optimistic assimilation of events up to this moment;

Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles, [Pangloss exclaims] car enfin, si vous n'aviez pas été chassé d'un beau château, à grands coups de pied dans le derrière … —Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.

(All events are enchained in this best of possible worlds, for if you had not been turned out of a fine chateau with strong kicks in the rear … —Well said, answered Candide, but it is necessary to care for our garden).

That bien dit, implying the gap between words and things: has Candide come full circle, finally emulating the narrator's former sarcasm? Pangloss' last speeches compose a brief grammar of facile interpretation, a Panglossary: philosophical, as in the comment just quoted; historical a paragraph before, as he enumerated unfortunate rulers, prompting Candide's first “il faut cultiver,” prefaced by the suspect “Je sais aussi”; mythological and typological in Pangloss' reply, “Vous avez raison, dit Pangloss; car quand l'homme fut mis dans le jardin d'Eden, il y fut mis, ut operaretur eum, pour qu'il travaillât …” (“Correct, says Pangloss; for when man was placed in the Garden of Eden, he was placed in it ut operaretur eum, in order to work. …”). At this point Martin cannot forbear affirming, as he thinks, what Candide has said: “Travaillons sans raisonner”—without arguing, also without reasoning or even without rationalizing in the manner of Pangloss. Yet Martin, being Martin, also cannot resist interpreting and revising Candide's statement and giving a reason for not reasoning, yin for Pangloss' yang: “c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable” (“it is the only way to make living bearable”). Candide says nothing.

There is now in Candide a resistance to potentially delusive naturalization of decisions. He is, one might say colloquially, more realistic about the world and himself. But there is a way, though a quite special way, in which he is a rare example of literary realism in this respect. The two philosophers persist to the end in providing absolute reasons for life as they would have it. Candide seems to have learned something from the old Turk with a modest farm and isolationist views, but Candide does not seek to attach himself to that philosopher and he does not parrot his reasoning” (“le travail éloigne de nous trois grands maux, l'ennui, le vice et le besoin”—“work keeps three great evils away from us: boredom, vice, and want”), just as Candide does not echo Martin's reasoning. Candide's final words are most unusual for him in omitting concern for reasoning, while the motive for his behavior that the narrative suggests is, he has come to regard the metonymical from the point of view of metonymy; that is, with recognition that he perceives external events from the outside and that they remain in large measure unknowable except insofar as he can give them modest, motivated, metaphorical meaning, of desire and attainable object, by attending to his own desires instead of resisting acknowledgment of them.

Every effect has a cause, Voltaire would say in the Dictionnaire philosophique (“Chaîne des événements”), but every effect does not necessarily cause further effects.¹⁷ In Candide's final words, he concentrates on causing rather than being caused.¹⁸ The implication of his words is that, by possibly recognizing the automaton in himself, he may have enabled himself to be different, though what he may become we are not told. He does not grandly rouse himself and shake invincible locks. His repeated “il faut” could be more personal. This is no messianic (or Minervan) moment. But he would not abandon the habits of thought of his philosophical companions if he had not begun to cultivate his mind. In the garden he pauses; everything that has gone before in the tale indicates that he pauses to rid himself of disabling preconceptions, as Condillac's newly conscious statue stops to realize that he is not himself the scent of a rose that was his first sensation.¹⁹

Condillac's statue is meant to be taken as a fiction, a teaching model; but to understand it, the philosopher insists, we must share its point of view (as we must share Candide's). Condillac's prefatory “Avis important au lecteur” is urgent on the point: “J'avertis donc qu'il est très-important de se mettre exactement à la place de la statue que nous allons observer. Il faut commencer d'exister avec elle … : en un mot, il faut n'être que ce qu'elle est” (1:221; “I insist then that it is most important to place oneself exactly in the situation of the statue which we are going to observe. We must begin to exist with it … ; in a word, we must be only what it is”). Mental life being “une chaîne dont les anneaux sont tour à tour idées et desirs” (“a chain of which the links are by turns ideas and desires”), we have only to follow that chain “pour découvrir le progrès de toutes les connoissances de l'homme” (1:239; “to discover the progress of all the conceptions of man”). As in Locke, Gay, and others, a person must be very wary of, and curious about, the habits of thought he has formed, “Car, lorsqu'une fois nous avons contracté ces habitudes, nous agissons sans pouvoir observer les jugemens qui les accompagnent …” (1:298; “For once we have formed these habits, we act without being able to observe the judgments accompanying them …”). Amour-propre is the fundamental love felt by the statue (1:233); the mind has a certain natural bias, for example, whereby it tends to think that what pleases it intends to do so (“Elle pense donc que ce qui lui plaît, a en vue de lui plaire …”—(1:305). The mind is also very apt to imitate what it sees: “Nous sommes si fort portés à l'imitation, qu'un Descartes à sa place [in the condition of a wild child] n'apprendroit pas à marcher sur ses pieds: tout ce qu'il verroit suffiroit pour l'en détourner” (1:309; “We are so forcefully drawn to imitate that a Descartes in his condition would not learn to walk on his feet; everything he would see would tend to turn him away from doing so”). These hazards are to be avoided so that the statue, conscious of the chain of his thinking (1:310), may declare: “Instruite par l'expérience, j'examine, je délibère avant d'agir. Je n'obéis plus aveuglément à mes passions, je leur résiste, je me conduis d'après mes lumières, je suis libre …” (1:312; “Instructed by experience, I examine, I deliberate before acting. I no longer obey my passions blindly, I resist them, I go by my own lights, I am free …”).²⁰

The finally enlightened, liberated Candide is a rare and distinguished person in eighteenth-century fiction. A work such as Candide, or Rasselas, supports the seemingly paradoxical observation that the blatantly unrealistic philosophical tale tends to be more realistic, in what I have called realism of psychological assessment, than the “novel of worldliness” in France or the then-new English novel, because the tale promotes attention to the hero as assessor of his own sense of reality. In Candide, unlike most novels of the time, the hero is quite imperfect; there is considerable emphasis, as also in contemporary associationist philosophy, upon his preconceptions as obstacles to knowledge of himself and the “real” world; self-knowledge, including non-rigorist recognition of the hero's own desires, is requisite for whatever happiness may be found (marvelous coincidences finally solve no crucial problems for the hero); and the narrator, prominently and satirically distant from the hero at the beginning of the tale, has become unobtrusive by the end while his judgmental function has been assumed by a less authoritative person, Martin. The mentor or mentors engage the hero in productive exchanges of opinion, dialectic usually only said to be present in novels, and the ending thwarts novelistic absorption of the reader, rhetorical stress there remaining on the dangers of mindless idealization, not the allure of the ideal.

Notes

1. The Philosophy of Kant, Carl J. Friedrich, ed. and trans. (New York: Modern Library, 1949), pp. 132-33.

2. Much of the history of this question is conveniently summarized in William F. Bottiglia, Voltaire's Candide: Analysis of a Classic, 2d. ed., Studies on Voltaire (1964), 7A; esp. p. 70. For Bottiglia the characters are suddenly and mysteriously transformed into human beings at the end (p. 197). Critics tend to waver somewhat about how to take the characters, as I have indicated in chapter 1. Such wavering, however, is preferable to insensitive deductions about the characters based on heavy-handed preliminary classification of a mercurial work. Among critics who have paid serious attention to the characters, Henri Coulet makes several very useful observations, including the statement that Pangloss' doctrine was made for Candide. “La Candeur de Candide,” Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines d'Aix (1960), 34:87. And Jacques Van den Heuvel, taking Candide very seriously, says the tale is a sketch of a Bildungsroman, Candide coming to think more and more deeply. Voltaire dans ses contes: de “Micromégas” à “L'Ingénu” (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), pp. 289, 290.

3. A. O. Lovejoy writes, “One of the principal happenings in eighteenth-century thought was the temporalizing of the Chain of Being. The plenum formarum came to be conceived by some, not as the inventory but as the program of nature, which is being carried out gradually and exceedingly slowly in the cosmic history.” The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (1936; New York: Harper, 1960), p. 244. Chapter 9, “The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being,” explains Kant's early theory of cosmic evolution and refers in passing (p. 268) to the “evolutionistic” biological transformism of Diderot and Maupertuis, which Lovejoy had described in “Some Eighteenth Century Evolutionists,” Popular Science Monthly (1904), 65:238-51, 323-40.

4. See Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” Figures: Essais, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 96-99.

5. Metaphorical relations, for Jakobson, are based predominantly on “similarity,” metonymical relations on “contiguity.” See his “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 81-82. For a recent scholarly evaluation of Jakobson's theory, see David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 73-124, and my review essay, “The Metonymic and the Poetic,” Essays in Criticism (1979), 29:254-63.

6. Roy S. Wolper, at the conclusion of an illuminating exchange with Lester G. Crocker on the subject of an article by Wolper, urges that narrative point of view be given more attention by students of Candide. “Forum,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (1971), 5:152.

7. See my chapter 1. Jean Sareil comments that, in the conte philosophique, the ideas are quite sufficiently subordinated to, and a vehicle for, the fiction. Essai sur Candide (Genève: Droz, 1967), p. 40. Ira O. Wade's account of Voltaire's complicated attitude toward Leibniz, in Voltaire and “Candide”: A Study in the Fusion of History, Art, and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 50-61, prevents a reader from taking the tale's philosophy too literally.

8. André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson, mécanicien de génie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), p. 56. Bottiglia gives evidence of Voltaire's interest in puppets and the like (pp. 81-95). Hugh Kenner's The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968) proceeds by way of Vaucanson to consideration of Turing's Game, which hinges on the problem of proving the difference between a human being and a computer (oddly, there is no mention of La Mettrie).

9. Quotations are from Voltaire, Candide, René Pomeau, ed., Complete Works, vol. 48, William Barber et al., eds. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980). Because the chapters are short I give only chapter numbers in my parenthetical citations—here chapter 16.

10. Douglas A. Bonneville has noted Candide's initial selfishness. Voltaire and the Form of the Novel, Studies on Voltaire (1976), 158:48-50.

11. An Essay on Man 1. 267, Maynard Mack, ed., in John Butt, ed., The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 3-1 (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 47. Parenthetical references are to this edition.

12. Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” A Grammar of Motives (1945; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 508. See also Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 31-38.

13. Dumarsais' rhetorical definition is similar to mine: of synecdoche he comments that “il est facile de confondre cette figure avec la métonymie, … mais la relation qu'il y a entre les objets, dans la métonymie, est de telle sorte, que l'objet dont on emprunte le nom, subsiste indépendament de celui dont il réveille l'idée, et ne forme point un ensemble avec lui. Tel est le raport qui se trouve entre la cause et l'éfet, entre l'auteur et son ouvrage, entre Cerès et le blé, entre le contenant et le contenu, come entre la bouteille et le vin, au lieu que la liaison qui se trouve entre les objets, dans la synecdoque, suppose que ces objets forment un ensemble come le tout et la partie; leur union n'est point un simple raport” (“It is easy to confuse this figure with metonymy, … but in metonymy the relation between the objects is such that the object which is named exists independently of the object implied and does not make a whole with it. Such is the relation found between a cause and an effect, between an author and his book, between Ceres and grain, between a container and what it contains—as for example between a bottle and wine. In synecdoche, on the other hand, the relation between objects requires that they make one object, like the whole and the part; the union of the objects does not depend on merely one strand of relationship”). Les Tropes de Dumarsais avec un commentaire raisonné … par M. Fontanier, introd. Gérard Genette (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 1:130-31.

14. Hume's insistence that the mind associates ideas by only three principles, “Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause and Effect,” the third being utterly questionable—A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., 2d ed., rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 11—anticipates Jakobson's two polar linguistic relations, that based on similarity and that based on contiguity. See note 5, above. Nowhere should I be understood as claiming that Hume influenced Candide—only that the tale is written with informed sensitivity about empirical psychology in the tradition of Locke, whom Voltaire gives substantial praise in the Lettres philosophiques, Gustave Lanson, ed., 2d ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1915-1917), Lettre 13 (see my epigraph to ch. 2); at the end of “Micromégas,” Romans et contes, Henri Bénac, ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1960), p. 112; and elsewhere. The Lockean tradition of course includes Condillac; cf. note 19, below.

15. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), p. 360. Pierre Haffter, in an article that takes its origin from Auerbach's comments, notes that Voltaire's most trustworthy characters tend to be those who speak succinctly. “L'Usage satirique des causales dans les contes de Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire (1967), 53:27.

16. See Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, p. 257, for the quotation from De rerum originatione radicali (1697), about the progress “of the universe as a whole … just as a great part of our earth is already subject to cultivation and will hereafter be so more and more.”

17. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, Julien Benda and Raymond Naves, eds., rev. ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1967), p. 104. Jean Starobinski quotes from this passage while pursuing a point similar to, but not the same as, mine. “Candide et la question de l'autorité,” Essays on the Age of Enlightenment in Honor of Ira O. Wade, Jean Macary, ed. (Genève: Droz, 1977), p. 309. Cf. his remarks about Martin on the same page.

18. Explaining the “conative or drive-directed” aspect of Enlightenment thought proceeding from Bacon and Hobbes, Jeffrey Barnouw provides a comment exactly applicable to Candide's final orientation as I have described it: “The rationality of the New Science depends on the certainty of knowledge to be achieved where we are not left simply to infer or conjecture causes from apparent effects or phenomena but can know possible effects from causes in our own control.” “Active Experience vs. Wish-Fulfilment in Francis Bacon's Moral Psychology of Science,” The Philosophical Forum (1979), 9:93.

19. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, “Traité des sensations,” Œuvres philosophiques, Georges Le Roy, ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), 1:225. Parenthetical references in the next paragraph of my text are to this edition. As I have said, I do not claim that Candide was written with Condillac in mind, though the resemblance of the two names is tempting. Pomeau notes an uncommon word used by Voltaire with respect to both his hero and the philosopher (p. 29). In the Correspondence Voltaire speaks highly of Condillac, especially in a letter of 1756 inviting him to stay and work at Voltaire's home: “Il me semble que personne ne pense ni avec tant de profondeur, ni avec tant de justesse que vous” (“It seems to me that no one thinks so very profoundly and justly as you do”). Voltaire imaginatively elaborates the invitation in a manner that calls to mind the little philosophical circle in Westphalia: “… Vous seriez le maître chez moi comme chez vous; je serais votre vieux disciple; vous en auriez un plus jeune dans mad. Denis, et nous verrions tous trois ensemble ce que c'est que l'âme” (“… You would be the teacher in my home as in yours; I would be your elderly pupil, and you would have a younger one in Mme Denis, and we would, all three together, investigate what the soul is”)—D6998, Complete Works, vol. 101, Theodore Besterman et al., eds. (Banbury: Voltaire Foundation, 1971), pp. 319, 320; other references: D7603 (1758), vol. 102 (1971), p. 392; D12234 and D12288 (1765), vol. 92 (1973), pp. 239, 299; D15418 (1769), vol. 118 (1974), p. 236.

20. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Ronald Paulson usefully distinguishes between liberation and freedom, the former indicating a release from constrictions, the latter “creation of a new order from the bottom up.” “Burke's Sublime and the Representation of Revolution,” Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, Perez Zagorin, ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980), 259. When Voltaire's book ends, Candide has achieved liberation and is in the process of seeking freedom.