SOURCE: Grieder, Josephine. “Orthodox and Paradox: The Structure of Candide.” French Review 57, no. 4 (March 1984): 485-92.

[In the essay that follows, Grieder studies the structure of Candide with respect to the technique of literary paradox.]

That critics should still continue to argue about Candide is scarcely surprising. To summarize it is well-nigh impossible; to isolate one idea is often to find that idea contradicted or betrayed further on. Underlying the apparent chaos, I would suggest, is in fact a venerable literary genre: that of paradox. In the epilogue to her distinguished study Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, Rosalie Colie concludes that by the eighteenth century the “epidemic” had, in general, run its course. Nevertheless, her analysis of certain of its characteristics is equally germane to Candide and provides an orderly structure whose function is to accommodate what appears to be defiant disorderliness.

In the literary tradition of paradox, which embraces a host of techniques—encomia upon unworthy subjects, double-bind propositions like that of the Cretan who declares that all Cretans are liars—two seem especially appropriate to Candide. The first is that of insolubilia, that is, in Professor Colie's words, “the problems arising from the conventional existence of two realms, one of experience and one of discourse; what is real in the second may not be real in the first, with all the intellectual and moral problems thereupon pendant.”¹ She also identifies another looser sense of paradox, “a formulation of any sort running counter to received opinion” (p. 9). She continues, “The paradox is always somehow involved in dialectic: challenging some orthodoxy, the paradox is an oblique criticism of absolute judgment or absolute convention” (p. 10).

Candide is, in effect, a synthesis of these two aspects of this literary genre. The insolubilia, the conflict of discourse and experience, may be phrased in other ways: order and disorder, or stability and changeability; most general perhaps, the opposition of the ideal (here defined as what we wish to believe or are told by authorities that we should believe) and the real (what we in fact see and in which we participate). Fundamental to Candide is the intrusion, or more strongly, the irruption of the real world into the ideal. In the process the paradox (the experience, the real) challenges the orthodox (the discourse, the ideal) by dislocating its equilibrium and calling into question its capacity to deal with the world as it is. Paradox is all too apparent in the work; a more subtle question is the nature of the orthodox which it insists on upsetting. I would suggest that orthodoxy is attacked in at least four forms: rhetorical, logical, sentimental, and psychological.

What is orthodox rhetoric? In one sense it may be interpreted as verbal embellishment designed to elevate the ordinary to another, ideal plane. But in Candide the ordinary subtly but stubbornly refuses elevation, betraying, by a tiny detail, that the rhetoric is no more than a pompous euphemism for commonplace activity. Pangloss most eloquently describes his entry into a mosque: “il n'y avait qu'un vieux iman et une jeune dévote très jolie qui disait ses paternôtres; sa gorge était toute découverte: elle avait entre ses deux tétons un beau bouquet de tulipes, de roses, d'anémones, de renoncules, d'hyacinthes, et d'oreilles d'ours; elle laissa tomber son bouquet; je le ramassai, et je le lui remis avec un empressement respectueux.”² The scene is decorous, the description of the bouquet lavishly precise, the philosopher's courtesy apparently admirable. But Pangloss's own casual, perhaps even unwitting vulgarism, the “deux tétons,” even though promptly overwhelmed by the catalogue of the flowers, defines plainly the “empressement” that animated him.

A scene in Chapter One, similar in construction, turns on the orthodox rhetoric of experimental science. Cunégonde, walking in the woods, sees Pangloss “qui donnait une leçon de physique expérimentale à la femme de chambre de sa mère, petite brune très jolie et très docile. Comme mademoiselle Cunégonde avait beaucoup de disposition pour les sciences, elle observa, sans souffler, les expériences réitérées dont elle fut témoin; elle vit clairement la raison suffisante du docteur, les effets, et les causes, et s'en retourna tout agitée, toute pensive, toute remplie du désir d'être savante” (pp. 138-39). Omitted from the quotation is, of course, the crucial initial detail: Cunégonde sees them “entre des broussailles.” What, limited to orthodox terminology, appears to be a laudable instructive endeavor is in fact the most elegantly discreet pornography.

Puncturing orthodox rhetoric with realistic detail produces a fine comic effect; more serious in intent is manipulation involving those elevated ideas with which rhetoric traditionally concerns itself. Stylistically, it operates in two ways. The rhetorical vocabulary of the ideal world may be substituted for vocabulary normally employed in describing the real world, or it may be made to explain an inescapable, actual condition. The result in either case is a discreditation of the ideal world which orthodox rhetoric is assumed to express.

The discreditation arises, in the first instance, from the following: substitution of an ideal term for a real term necessitates its continual repetition, since the real occurs so frequently; and at last the repetition empties it of all its ideal sense. In Chapter Two, for example, the two Bulgar officers, identified in any case only as “Deux hommes habillés de bleu,” see Candide and remark, “voilà un jeune homme très bien fait, et qui a la taille requise.” After they persuade him to drink to the health of their king, “C'en est assez, lui dit-on, vous voilà l'appui, le soutien, le défenseur, le héros des Bulgares.” In effect, Candide has become a soldier—but the word “soldat” is never used at all, being replaced, as necessary, with the term “héros.” “Candide, tout stupéfait, ne démêlait pas encore trop bien comment il était un héros,” and quite naturally goes for a walk. “Il n'eut pas fait deux lieues que voilà quatre autres héros de six pieds qui l'atteignent, qui le lient, qui le mènent dans un cachot” (p. 140). In Chapter Three, fleeing after a battle designated only as “cette boucherie héroïque,” he passes through a village devastated by the troops and sees old men looking at their slaughtered wives and babies, and “des filles, éventrées après avoir assouvi les besoins naturels de quelques héros” (p. 142). What received opinion has been taught to accept as glorious is here, by compression and repetition, reduced to meaninglessness and, more serious, indicted as the cause of human suffering.

A variation on this is to explain a real effect by a rhetorically acceptable cause and simultaneously to surcharge the latter with such fulsome elaboration that its credibility is debased still further. Candide meets in Holland “un gueux tout couvert de pustules, les yeux morts, le bout du nez rongé, la bouche de travers, les dents noires, et parlant de la gorge, tourmenté d'une toux violente, et crachant une dent à chaque effort” (p. 143). It is Pangloss, in all his syphilitic misery. But how does he explain the cause of his condition? “c'est l'amour: l'amour, le consolateur du genre humain, le conservateur de l'univers, l'âme de tous les êtres sensibles, le tendre amour” (p. 144). The rhetoric of the ideal fails abysmally to ennoble the initial graphic reality.

Pangloss' rhetorical distortions are not unexpected because he is the established voice of the ideal world. His particular province, philosophy, introduces another form of orthodoxy: logic. As the spokesman for the laws of cause and effect, he is on perfectly sound, logical ground: there are no effects without causes. It might appear that his obviously faulty reasoning, which adds so much comic texture, can simply be dismissed as a display of the fallacy of false causes, e.g., post hoc, ergo propter hoc.³ I would suggest, however, that his errors are far more grave because they proceed from his essential conviction—rendered subtly by the passive voice—that each cause has been ordered, so as to produce a specific effect. We have spectacles not only because we first had noses but because “les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes,” and we wear breeches because “les jambes sont visiblement instituées pour être chaussées.” In short, as he says, “tout étant fait pour une fin, tout est nécessairement pour la meilleure fin” (p. 138). But made by whom or by what?

At issue here, by implication, is something far more profound than Pangloss' efforts to interpret the data of the world according to the logic of cause and effect. Consider his unshakable conclusion in the beginning that “Par conséquent, ceux qui ont avancé que tout est bien ont dit une sottise: il fallait dire que tout est au mieux” (p. 138). What is missing from this effect is its specific cause; and the cause, like the ordering principle which dictates that noses are made for glasses, would appear to be the deity.⁴ Pangloss' formulation would therefore seem to be that known in formal logic as modus ponens. His first premise may be phrased thus: “If God is all powerful and all good, then this is the best of all possible worlds.” His position, so often reiterated, is that indeed, this is the best. It might thus seem to support what is actually his essential and unquestioned second premise: God is all powerful and all good.

Yet, precisely what Candide as a work demonstrates is the impossibility of accepting Pangloss' position: a world which is subject to or condones injustice, treachery, brutality, and suffering cannot possibly be described as “the best.” Therefore, the formal logical equation passes to that known as modus tollens and the second premise is thereby invalidated: if God is all powerful and all good, then this is the best of all possible worlds; the work proves that it is not the best; therefore, God is either not all powerful or not all good. Paradox, paradoxically obeying orthodox logic, in effect challenges and refutes orthodox opinion about the nature of the deity; but such subversive calculation is discreetly left to the reader.

What is to be concluded about Pangloss and, by extension, about the ideal world whose spokesman he is? At the beginning, operating in the realm of pure logic, he succeeds only in justifying the unjustifiable: syphilis is essential to our enjoyment of chocolate and cochineal. At the end, he must explain the unexplainable: how he survived the auto-da-fé and has turned up aboard the Turkish ship. But when questioned by Candide on his views, he remains resolutely faithful to orthodoxy, “car enfin je suis philosophe: il ne me convient pas de me dédire” (p. 216). Yet, even he silently acquiesces in the bankruptcy of the ideal. “Pangloss avouait qu'il avait toujours horriblement souffert; mais ayant soutenu une fois que tout allait à merveille, il le soutenait toujours, et n'en croyait rien” (p. 219).

Both rhetorical and logical orthodoxy are situated in the text itself, either by characters or in commentary. Sentimental orthodoxy is broader in scope: it gives the work its shape and its hero his motivation.⁵ Consider, for example, the ideal roman d'amour: boy and girl meet, realize they are meant for each other, are separated by unavoidable castastrophes, are reunited, marry, and live happily ever after. Consider equally the character of its hero: devoted to Love and the Woman who embodies it; passionate but discreet, steadfast, courageous, triumphant. Candide the work corresponds exactly to the former definition and Candide the character to the latter. But it is reality—reality as sexuality in the form of Cunégonde and reality as the physicalness of the world—which, by intruding itself into this rather bloodless literary formula, gives the work its movement.

From the beginning Candide possesses “les mœurs les plus douces”; he combines “le jugement assez droit avec l'esprit le plus simple” (p. 137); he listens attentively to Pangloss' lessons “car il trouvait mademoiselle Cunégonde extrêmement belle, quoiqu'il ne prît jamais la hardiesse de le lui dire” (p. 138). Cunégonde, however, “haute en couleur, fraîche, grasse, appétissante” (p. 138), is already more palpable than the orthodox sentimental heroine ought to be. Aroused by Pangloss' demonstration in the bushes, it is she who takes the initiative: she drops her handkerchief, he picks it up, she takes his hand. Behaving impeccably, he kisses hers “avec une vivacité, une sensibilité, une grâce toute particulière,” but physical contact abruptly destroys any pretense of spirituality: “leurs bouches se rencontrèrent, leurs yeux s'enflammèrent, leurs genoux tremblèrent, leurs mains s'égarèrent”—until the baron puts a decisive halt to the scene, and, dislocating the equilibrium of the best of all possible worlds, “chassa Candide du château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière” (p. 139).

To say that Candide is forced out of the ideal world into the real is, as is paradoxically appropriate, simultaneously true and untrue. That this is the real world is verified in very orthodox fashion by places (Buenos Aires, Surinam, Venice), events (the earthquake, the execution of Admiral Byng), and people (the Jesuits, the six kings). That it cannot be the real world is due not only to the presence of mythical lands but also to the mythical talent of its characters to survive a disproportionate number of catastrophes.

What makes these contradictory statements mutually compatible, what gives them their equilibrium, is the function of the work's movement from known to unknown to known in terms of the education of its hero. The expulsion from Thunder-ten-tronckh signals the beginning of a quest—a quite unwitting one on Candide's part but evident to the reader—for the philosopher's best of all possible worlds. Exposure to the real world into which sexuality has thrust him teaches a harsh lesson to Pangloss' pupil; nonetheless, he refuses to disavow his master's instruction. The measure of his intellectual progress can be assessed during the voyage from Europe to South America: “Car il faut avouer qu'on pourrait gémir un peu de ce qui se passe dans le nôtre en physique et en morale,” he tells Cunégonde; “C'est certainement le nouveau monde qui est le meilleur des mondes possibles” (p. 157). Reality being scarcely less rude in Argentina and Paraguay, however, Candide escapes into lands progressively more mythical: the country of the Oreillons (the state of pure nature), and Eldorado. Yet, when he at last discovers his quest's utopian goal—to which I shall return—he leaves it. The logic of the real world—exemplified by the one-handed, one-legged black slave who declares that “C'est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe” (p. 182)—is now comprehensible. “O Pangloss! … c'en est fait, il faudra qu'à la fin je renonce à ton optimisme … [cette] rage de soutenir que tout est bien quand on est mal” (p. 183). Accompanied by Martin, whose pessimism he is at present equipped to understand even while he combats it, he re-enters the real, known world, made incongruous only by the reunion of so many acquaintances missing or presumed dead.

Thus, Candide's education, or at least one aspect of it, has consisted in his learning to accept and deal with the reality which so irrationally irrupts into the equilibrium of the ideal taught to him by Pangloss; yet, the end of the work demonstrates a return to orthodoxy, compromised though it has become. Reunited with his mistress, Candide is confronted by the effects of reality on the long-sought ideal: “sa belle Cunégonde rembrunie, les yeux éraillés, la gorge sèche, les joues ridées, les bras rouges et écaillés.” Even he cannot fail to recognize what actually exists. “Le tendre amant … recula trois pas, saisi d'horreur”; but, stubbornly refusing to abandon the sentimental ideal to which he has so long dedicated himself, “[il] avança ensuite par bon procédé” (p. 217). He does indeed marry her, principally to spite her brother, but also because “Cunégonde le pressait si vivement qu'il ne pouvait s'en dédire” (p. 218). Like Pangloss, who is trapped by his commitment to logical orthodoxy, Candide is trapped by his own (and with the same verb) to the sentimental. Received opinion as to how the roman d'amour must conclude and its hero behave is obeyed; actual physical fact exposes the hollowness of the ideal construct.

However, in this confrontation between orthodoxy and paradoxy, there would appear to be one moment at which the ideal effectively triumphs over the real, maintaining its own integrity while the intruder shamefacedly skulks away. Eldorado, at the center of this work, is undeniably an Enlightenment utopia: an ancient civilization in which the arts are valued and the sciences esteemed, an undogmatic religion is respected, and government is benevolently organized to promote the general welfare of its citizens. Surrounded as it is by misfortune and disaster, the episode is a moment of tranquillity spent, as Candide recognizes, in “probablement le pays où tout va bien: car il faut absolument qu'il y en ait un de cette espèce” (p. 177). Yet he and Cacambo leave. Why?

In the context of orthodox and paradox, the answer lies in an opposition of mentalities. What animates Candide and Cacambo to depart is not necessarily admirable. Appropriately alleging his sentimental desire to recover Cunégonde, Candide continues more forthrightly, “Si nous restons ici, nous n'y serons que comme les autres.” Cacambo is pleased with the suggestion, because “on aime tant à courir, à se faire valoir chez les siens, à faire parade de ce qu'on a vu dans ses voyages” (p. 180). But the outlook of the Eldoradans is not necessarily enviable, either. “Je suis fort ignorant, et je m'en trouve bien” (p. 177), says the innkeeper to Candide; “nous sommes tous du même avis” (p. 179), declares the old man; and the king chides them for wanting to leave because “quand on est passablement quelque part, il faut y rester” (p. 180).

Reality, represented by Candide and Cacambo, is thus resisting and rejecting a new sort of orthodoxy: the psychological orthodoxy that accepts with equanimity the stasis that perfection necessarily imposes so that it will not be disrupted.⁶ Reality can confront, fight, try to give the lie to the other orthodoxies—rhetorical, logical, sentimental—constructed by man. Reality cannot accept immutability based on mediocrity and ignorance, no matter how beneficial its consequences, and voluntarily withdraws.

If, at the end of the work, Pangloss and Candide continue to adhere verbally to the ideals in which they formerly believed, they do tacitly accept the real in which they must participate. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” is also a sort of stasis, but human-imposed and of undeterminable duration: the midpoint of a see-saw on which paradox and orthodox are at opposing ends. A glance at the minor characters confirms this. Those who have been most buffeted by reality—Paquette, the old women, frère Giroflée—move usefully into this community to which Candide's formulation gives a certain stability; the last “même devint honnête homme.” Relinquishing to a degree his orthodox pessimism, “’Travaillons sans raisonner,’ dit Martin;’c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable’” (p. 221). Only the baron refuses to abandon orthodoxy and he pays the price: the others spirit him away to the galley ship, to return to Rome, “et on eut le plaisir d'attraper un jésuite, et de punir l'orgueil d'un baron allemand” (p. 218).

This compromise between the real and the ideal has its rewards, even for the latter's two most doctrinaire spokesmen. “Cunégonde était, à la vérité, bien laide,” as Candide must acknowledge, “mais elle devint une excellente pâtissière.” As for Pangloss, it is only fitting that the work's final paradox should be that the philosopher is, for the first time, absolutely right: “car enfin si vous n'aviez pas été chassé d'un beau château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière pour l'amour de mademoiselle Cunégonde, si vous n'aviez pas été mis à l'Inquisition, si vous n'aviez pas couru l'Amérique à pied, si vous n'aviez pas donné un bon coup d'épée au baron, si vous n'aviez pas perdu tous vos moutons du bon pays d'Eldorado, vous ne mangeriez pas ici des cédrats confits et des pistaches” (p. 221). How is it possible that Pangloss can at last reason correctly? Because he is explaining the logic of a non-world: the work itself.

Notes

1. Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 13, hereafter cited in the text. Although some of my observations coincide with those of other critics, I have encountered none who interprets the entire work in terms of the tradition of paradox. See, for example, Jean Starobinski, “Sur le style philosophique de Candide,” Comparative Literature, 28, No. 3 (Summer 1976), 193-200; and particularly William H. Barber, “Voltaire's Use of Irony,” abridged in Voltaire's “Candide” and the Critics, ed. Milton P. Foster (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 97-101. The excellent article by France Vernier, “Les Disfonctionnements des normes du conte dans Candide,” Littérature, 1 (février 1971), 15-29, is a structuralist approach; while her opposition of the “conforme” and the “disfonctionnement du conforme” and mine of orthodox/paradox resemble each other, her premise involves conceptualizing the economically motivated, bourgeois eighteenth-century reader for the operation of the latter, an analysis which I admire while believing that the tradition of paradox explains the same thing in simpler terms.

2. Candide, in Romans et contes, éd. Henri Bénac (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1960), p. 216, hereafter cited in the text.

3. In “Le Comique par non-sens et faux sens dans les contes de Voltaire,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 9 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 477-87, Jean Sareil says that “Ce rapport de causalité stupide vient donc frapper de ridicule un système sans vraiment le discuter” (p. 481). I would suggest that the statement is accurate but that “discuter” is exactly the task assigned to the reader.

4. Frederick M. Kenner also notes this absence, without developing its consequences, in “Candide: Structure and Motivation,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 9 (1979), 405-27.

5. What I call sentimental orthodoxy by no means exhausts the possible literary categories into which Candide falls. Philip Stewart, for example, finds many parallels between it and Prévost's Cleveland; see “Holding the Mirror up to Fiction: Generic Parody in Candide,” French Studies, 33, No. 4 (October 1971), 411-19; Vernier seats it firmly in the tradition of the conte (as opposed to roman), as does Vivian Mylne in “Literary Techniques and Methods in Voltaire's Contes philosophiques,” Studies on Voltaire, 57 (1967), 1055-80. Jean Starobinski's observation seems most accurate because most comprehensive: “Le romanesque, dans Candide, est la caricature du romanesque, sa version outrée, qui récuse d'emblée toutes les conventions génériques—que ce soient celles du roman d'aventures (de provenance hellénistique), celles du roman picaresque, ou celles, encore plus accueillantes à l'invraisemblable, du conte” (p. 193).

6. For a discussion of this question on different grounds, see the views of Professors Bottiglia and Kahn, most readily available (in abridged form) in Foster's edition, pp. 144-61.