SOURCE: Braun, Theodore E. D. “Chaos, Contingency, and Candide.” In 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 6, edited by Kevin L. Cope, pp. 199-209. New York: AMS Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Braun examines the themes of disorder and chaos in Voltaire's Candide.]

Voltaire has proven to be a formidable obstacle to many modern critical approaches; not impervious, but a kind of unmovable object successfully resisting an irresistible force. Few indeed have been the scholars who have applied to his works the methods of recent approaches such as structuralism, deconstruction, or chaos theory (of course, with the latter being scarcely a decade old, this is perhaps to be expected). Whatever the cause, the effect is clear, and in terms of chaos theory, Voltaire appears to be virginal: I have not found in the MLA bibliography any critic examining any work of his from this point of view, nor have I found it in recent books by Haydn Mason, Roger Pearson, or Thomas Kavanagh.¹

One of the problems to be faced in approaching Voltaire and Candide from the point of view of chaos theory is that with most authors—and in particular, most postmodern authors—chaos theory helps us to see the order in apparent disorder, to make sense out of texts that seem to lead nowhere. With Voltaire and with Candide in particular the problem is more complex: we must first look under the crystalline surface of the narration to find the murkiness that represents life in this tale, that is, we must find the disorder hidden beneath an apparent order, and then look for a different order, a kind of order that may surprise us, perhaps taking us away from traditional views but certainly towards greater depth and complexity than we have been accustomed to in Voltaire.

Chaos, as it is understood by modern scientists and mathematicians, is not used only in “the older sense of chance, randomness, disorder” that most literary and historical scholars are likely to associate with the word; chaotic systems all contain an order in the midst of disorder, they are “both deterministic and unpredictable,” they raise questions (when applied to human beings) of free will and determinism; “chaos leads to order, and order back to chaos.”² As Crutchfield, Farmer, Packard, and Shaw express it in their seminal article, “Chaos,”

simple deterministic systems with only a few elements can generate random behavior. The randomness is fundamental; gathering more information does not make it go away. Randomness generated in this way has come to be called chaos.³

Among the features of chaotic systems that we will examine here are nonlinearity (which can be seen, from one point of view, as a refutation of some Newtonian principles, such as the proportionality of cause and effect [a small deviation may sometimes have large consequences], and from another point of view as complexity rather than simplicity in design, which leads to “a new awareness of the importance of scale”); recursive symmetries between scale levels (recalling on the one hand, fractal geometry which finds recursive patterns in many natural phenomena in going from the large-event scale to the component-unit scale, as in studies of waves and flows, and exploring, on the other hand, minute fluctuations or differences in the events studied which might bring about unpredictable results); and sensitivity to initial conditions, which either are not identical or cannot be specified with infinite precision, in either case causing chaotic systems to become quickly and increasingly unpredictable. It should be noted, for the analysis that follows, that contingency (and therefore unpredictability) is implied by chaos, and that teleology (which, viewed in this manner, is a mechanistic, linear system) requires predestination. Candide argues consistently against teleological interpretations of human life and for a sense of the contingent, unpredictable nature of Nature.

The shimmering surface perfection and regularity, the limpid style that appears to so many critics to be the trademarks of Voltaire's style, the easy-to-grasp philosophical message that to many critics is not only the heart of a Voltairean conte but also its raison d'être, all make it easy to miss what Voltaire surely understood, that things are never as simple as they seem; that systems of thought never work according to their design because they are flawed and their flaws, once exposed, never cease expanding; that the turbulence that is often hidden by surface calm is nevertheless governed by rules or laws, that is by an order the exact nature of which we are not at present able to comprehend.⁴

Let us begin our examination of chaos in Voltaire by a brief examination of nonlinearity and recursive symmetries between scale levels in the story, which because they overlap in this tale can be conveniently explored together. The narrative seems to proceed in a linear fashion, picking up Candide's life at the time he is about 18 or 20 and following him for an undeterminable span of years, probably in the order of 5 to 10 years, through many adventures in Europe, in South America, and back in Europe. His adventures tend to begin in a rosy manner only to end in disaster—thus his life at Thunder-ten-Tronckh, his life as a soldier, the war he describes, his career with Jacques the Anabaptist, his rescue by Cunégonde, his trip to Argentina, the Eldorado episode, the 100-day trek to Surinam, the Parisian and Venetian interludes, and the Constantinople episode until the end of the last chapter.⁵ This recurring pattern, like waves breaking on a shore, gives the story not only depth but also a gradual darkening of spirit: the early chapters seem far more suffused with the light of hope than the later ones, and the experience of Candide certainly gives the reader, if not the central character, a tragic sense of life. The story seems to move forward, but in fact keeps starting over again, only in a different spot, like a huge spiral pulling its characters down and around as well as forward. Far from being simple, it is revealed as complex, unpredictable, nonlinear.

Candide's American adventures, covering about one-third of the book, can serve as a model of the workings of non-linearity and recursive patters. They begin when, by chance, he finds a ship ready to sail from Cadix in need of an officer to train the troops who will fight the Jesuits in Paraguay. Captain Candide sets off for Argentina a hunted man, it is true, the killer of the Grand Inquisitor and of dom Issachar, moneylender to the throne of Portugal. But he cheerfully travels with Cunégonde, the Old Lady, and (we learn later) a part-Indian, part-Spanish valet, Cacambo. He is looking for a new life in a new world: “Tout ira bien,” he says in chapter IX; “la mer de ce nouveau monde vaut déjà mieux que les mers de notre Europe; elle est plus calme, les vents plus constants. C'est certainement le nouveau monde qui est le meilleur des univers possibles.”⁶

At this point, the Old Lady tells her story. Daughter of a Pope, Princess of Palestrina, about to begin her adult life by entering into a fairy-tale marriage, her ordered, calm, predictable world falls apart, the contingent nature of life erupts and reveals the chaos beneath the surface. Her fiancé is poisoned; she is captured by pirates, repeatedly raped, sold into servitude, partly cannibalized; she works her way into old age across Europe, her life progressively more miserable, until she becomes a maid to Cunégonde. An accessory to two murders, she is now sought along with her mistress and Candide. She has often contemplated killing herself, and finds that every single passenger aboard ship has also at least once in life thought of suicide.

The same downward spiral is evident when the stories of Candide's friends are examined: Pangloss, Cunégonde, Jacques, the young Baron, Martin, Cacambo, Paquette, Frère Giroflée—all their adventures follow the same pattern, extend the geographic bounds of the story to North Africa and Asia Minor and Eastern Europe, include religious, political, ethnic, and moral backgrounds of the greatest variety, and come together at the same place. They are like smaller eddies that become absorbed for a time in a large whirlpool while somehow keeping their identities and at times breaking off from the main vortex in one or more cases never to return.

In the case of Candide, this pattern, like a fractal, continues on even as we see shorter pieces of his life. He is in Buenos Aires for a few scant hours at most. The high hopes he had had on board prove to be groundless: for when don Fernando d'Ibarra, y Figueora, y Mascarenes, y Lampadouros, y Souza sets eye on Cunégonde and learns that she is not Candide's wife, the downward spiral takes hold of the young man again and is made more dangerous by the unexpected and unpredictable arrival of the Spanish authorities, who wish to seize him. He is forced to flee with Cacambo, and finds himself in a Jesuit compound in Paraguay where the Indians are virtually enslaved. Unpredictably, he finds that the baron had not after all been killed; but he does the job himself when in a heated argument the old friends draw swords, and then flees with Cacambo towards the north and west. The fugitives are captured and—in a scene that recalls the barbarity of the Turks against the Old Lady and her companions, another recursive incident in the story—are themselves almost cannibalized. When they finally reach Eldorado, seemingly by miracle, their lives seem to start anew, their fortunes mount, their dreams of peace and happiness are about to be fulfilled. But soon they long for the life they have left behind, and their misadventures begin again. Thus, all but two of their llamas die during their 100-day trek to Surinam; they see the horrors of slavery; the friends part; Candide finds people even more miserable than he; he is robbed by the Judge and the Courts as well as by an evil slave-owning Dutch sea captain.⁷

The apparently linear, forward-moving pattern of the story is interrupted by countless flashbacks to other times and other places, where different but uniformly tragic adventures enrich the readers' understanding of the complexities of life, and where ever-renewed patterns, like waves endlessly crashing onto the shore, display in the differences in detail the chaotic nature of human experience and where simplistic notions of the nature of Nature or of evil or of God are shown to be deficient.

Which is to say that Candide is a story that is nonlinear and characterized by recursions that can be seen at every narrative scale. The novel itself, the overall adventures of any of the numerous characters, the individual adventures they have, all display a pattern that recalls what fractal geometry shows in nature. Furthermore, the disproportionality in Candide between cause and effect (another marker of nonlinearity) is apparent from the very first chapter, when Candide is driven from the château for having kissed Cunégonde, and when his absurd deficiency in quarterings makes it impossible for him to pretend to her hand. The harshness of the punishment meted out to Pangloss and the Baron for their heterosexual and homosexual drives (Pangloss spends too much time, we remember, in retrieving a bouquet from an apparently willing woman's cleavage, and the Baron is arrested for skinny-dipping with a young Muslim), Admiral Byng's execution, and the huge fine imposed on Candide in Surinam for making too much noise knocking on the judge's door—further examples of the disproportionality of cause and effect—are among scores that appear in the book.

The recursive symmetries that can be found in Candide are of similar but not identical life stories. One of the reasons the stories vary in detail is, in chaoticist terms, the sensitivity to initial conditions that the narrator and the author present. Hayles notes that “unless the starting conditions can be specified with infinite precision, chaotic systems quickly become unpredictable” (p. 14). Now since the initial conditions of the characters are of necessity different and since it is not possible to specify the starting conditions with infinite precision, the life story of one character will be unpredictable even to a reader already familiar with the life of another character. For example, Candide and the young baron, apparently of the same age, brought up together in the same castle and educated by the same tutor, will have radically different life stories. The initial conditions set up by the narrator make it possible for them to lead similar lives but not to have identical futures.

Even if the baron had fallen in love with a clone of Cunégonde and kissed her, trembling, behind a screen, he would surely not have been driven out into a harsh winter without ceremony and without support: he is, after all, the heir of the Thunder-ten-tronckh family name and fortune, and the overweening pride that goes along with the title and the stereotypical characteristics of German nobility prevalent in the book. A second initial condition is eventually revealed, the differing sexual orientations of the two young men, which of course help determine the course of events in their lives. Yet who could predict that the baron would become a Jesuit? By chance a Jesuit priest finds him alive, is attracted to him, takes care of him, and arranges to have him enter the order; eventually he finds himself in Paraguay and meets Candide there.

Meanwhile, Candide's experiences have been quite different. Trained as a soldier but flogged for exercising his free will (as the narrator humorously puts it), saved from a sure death by the chance passing of the King who pardons him, experiencing in the midst of a terrible battle the evil that men visit upon one another and the hollowness of the Catholic religion, he escapes only to find that the Protestant religion is no less hollow; he works for an Anabaptist, is one of only three persons saved in a shipwreck, finds himself condemned to a second flogging for having apparently agreed with Pangloss's deterministic philosophy (and need I remind the reader that he had met Pangloss in an unpredictable state and under unpredictable circumstances?), is saved once more from a certain death, this time by Cunégonde who by chance is the mistress of the very same Grand Inquisitor who condemned Pangloss to death and Candide to a flogging … ; eventually, he meets up with the baron in Paraguay, and their stories, converging unexpectedly for a few hours, take separate but once again unpredictable paths when Candide “kills” his friend and future brother-in-law.

In short, the similar but not identical initial conditions of their lives lead to startlingly different results. As Crutchfield and his colleagues explain it, “In principle, the future is completely determined by the past, but in practice small uncertainties are amplified, so that even though the behavior is predictable in the short term, it is unpredictable in the long term” (p. 46).

Initial conditions, recursive symmetries between scale levels, and nonlinearity are all part of the structure of this story, and all contribute to what might be sensed as an implicit moral lesson. To date, only Roy S. Wolper and critics who agree with him seem to have had an intuition of this internally-generated moral (see n. 5. supra). Evil in Candide is regularly associated with stupidity (or Dullness, in Wolper's Swiftian vocabulary) and violence, and often also with greed. Part of the humor of the description of life at the chateau of Thunder-ten-Tronckh comes from the incredibly stupid philosophy of Pangloss, which masks the truth about the Baron's domain: he is in fact an impoverished minor nobleman living in an unpleasant world. And Candide's life in the chateau ends with a violent act on the part of the Baron, whose intellectual prowess we can infer by the fact that Pangloss is his children's tutor. The mindless violence that Candide encounters upon his desertion is magnified by that which he sees during battle. The Protestant preacher who, despite his hour-long sermon on tolerance, berates Candide and refuses to give him alms because he does not believe that the Pope is the Antichrist, and his wife who dumps a chamber pot on the young man's head, add a note of greed to the stupidity and violence of their actions. This association of stupidity and violence and often of greed with evil continues throughout the story and is indeed inextricably intertwined with it right to the end. It is difficult not to see this association and its implied opposite: wisdom and kindness and generosity are attributes of good. This moral (which has nothing directly to do with Optimism or with an interpretation of “il faut cultiver notre jardin”) is embedded in the very structure of the story, in the life history of every character, in every episode we read. It is revealed clearly by chaos theory.

But are we free to choose good or evil? Do we have, in other words, free will? The repeated patterns we noted earlier, the interactions of the characters and their experiences, the constantly changing tempo of the narrative, bring to the tale a sense of unpredictability, of anti-Providential design, of contingency. How different this is from Pangloss's summary, on the very last page of the novel, of Candide's life and adventures:

Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles: 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.

Pangloss, ever true to his philosophical beliefs, adopts the perspective of God, and gives to the chain of events that link the characters and bring them to their little tenant farm near Constantinople a teleological slant. He simply cannot accept a universe that is not planned in every detail by an all-powerful deity. His entire thought is essentially Providential, non-contingent, non-chaotic: in the great scheme of things, earthquakes, wars, rape, murder, crimes of all sorts exist in order to support a greater good, the stability of the universe. In this context, Candide's response to Pangloss's interpretation of the events that have led the small group to their little farm can be seen as a denial of teleology and an acceptance of contingency: “Cela est bien dit,” the words are fine, the logic impeccable if one accepts the premises, “mais” [sous entendu: “je n'en crois plus une syllabe”], if we are to escape boredom, vice, and poverty, “il faut cultiver notre jardin.” Only in this way can we be sure to remove some of the contingencies in this world, to reduce the disproportionality between cause and effect, and more importantly, to take on responsibility for our lives in this non-Providential world, that is, to exercise our free will. Candide might not yet be able to accept a chaotic world view, but he can reject a Providential one that seems to leave little room for free will.⁸

Had Voltaire lived another two centuries, he would have found scientific evidence through chaos theory that it is possible to conceive of free will existing even in a deterministic world; this, as we know, is one of the central problems that Optimism posed for Voltaire, the apparent irreconcilability of free will and determinism, of contingency and Providence, or more broadly speaking, of man in a God-created universe. Indeed, wedded as he was both to Newtonian mechanics and to the existence of God, while at the same time keenly aware of the existence of moral and physical evil in the world, Voltaire suffered throughout much of his career from the intellectual and moral disquietude that is so evident in such stories as Zadig and Candide. His knowledge of probability theory, described by Kavanagh in the first chapter of his book, would have brought him little comfort, for if anything it served to shore up the premises upon which Optimism was based.

On the other hand, what Crutchfield, Farmer, Packard, and Shaw conclude in their article on chaos would at least have given Voltaire some hope in resolving this central dilemma of his life:

Even the process of intellectual progress relies on the injection of new ways of connecting old ideas. Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be the exercise of will. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws.

(p. 57)

Optimism, as taught by Pangloss, is dead at the end of Candide. But even if the world seems deterministic, chaos theory lets us know both that we cannot predict events in the long term, and that the decisions we make are real. It lets us know, as a result, that free will and therefore individual responsibility may be alive and well in this best of all possible worlds.

Chaos theory, as we have suggested earlier, also leads us to an unexpected interpretation of the apparent utopia at the novel's end: the recursive patterns in the story—rosy beginnings in each adventure, rapid deteriorations, disastrous conclusions—should alert us to the fact that Candide ends but has no more a real conclusion than Zadig.⁹ We can predict (to the extent that prediction is possible, at least) that this utopian community will soon entropy and deteriorate, and that Candide and his friends will encounter unimaginable disasters. We are back, so to speak, at the beginning, the pattern is about to recur. Chaos will reign.

Notes

1. Haydn T. Mason, Candide: Optimism Demolished (New York: Twayne, 1992), and Roger Pearson, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire's Contes philosophiques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) present fresh views based on traditional methods. Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) approaches the analysis of Candide from the point of view of probability theory, a field invented by Pascal in the previous century and developed throughout the eighteenth. Chapters 1 (The Triumph of Prabability Theory) and 7 (The Ironies of Chance: Voltaire's Candide and Zadig) are most relevant to this study, but do not broach the question of chaos theory.

2. N. Katherine Hayles: Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 115, 14, 82, 128. See also the work of critics like Patrick Brady, who gives essentially identical categories for chaotic systems, as in his articles “Chaos Theory, Control Theory, Literary Theory: Or, A Story of Three Butterflies,” Modern Language Studies, 20 (1990): 65-79, and “Théorie du chaos et structure narrative,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 4 (1991), 43-51, among others.

3. James P. Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman H. Packard, and Robert S. Shaw, “Chaos,” Scientific American, 225 (December 1986): 46.

4. Theodore E. D. Braun makes some of these points in his chapter, “Interpreting Candide: The Anvil of Controversy,” in Approaches to Teaching Voltaire's Candide, ed. Renée Waldinger (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1987), 75, which is based on Roy S. Wolper's hermeneutic study of Voltaire's tale, “Candide: Gull in the Garden?” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 265-77. Since the bibliography on Candide is immense, and the interpretations of the ending of Candide are not only diverse but also the starting point of most critical studies of the book, I will refer the reader to Arthur Scherr's recent article, “Candide's Garden Revisited: Gender Equality in a Commoner's Paradise,” Eighteenth-Century Life 17 (1993): 40-59.

5. Indeed, in the light of this recurring pattern critics should have been on the alert, they should have been—and we should be—unwilling to accept the end of the story as the conclusion of the little group's odyssey but only the opening act of a new tragedy; but that is another problem with this book and the history of its critical reception.

6. Voltaire, Candide, in Romans et contes, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 169-259; the present quotation is found on p. 198.

7. In studies such as Manuel Moreno Alonso's “América española en el pensamiento de Voltaire,” Anuario de estudios americanos, 38 (1981): 57-100, the critical point of departure is a polemical interpretation of Voltaire's thought as it is perceived to be presented in the work(s) under consideration; in this case, Voltaire is seen as presenting a negative view of Spain and Spanish customs. Arguments are often—one might be tempted to say usually—supported by biographical data. In this Moreno Alonso follows the practice of most Voltairean scholars, whether they wish to support Voltaire or attack him. The villains in Candide, however, even those in South America, are not necessarily Spanish or Portuguese: they are also Dutch, German, French, English, Turkish, Arab, Russian, Oreillon, etc.

8. Rob Roy McGregor, Jr. presents a different point of view, finding in Pangloss's summary an irony missed by both Pangloss and Candide, but intended by the narrator (and possibly by the author). Unfortunately, McGregor himself falls into one of Voltaire's traps, brought about by the apparent simplicity of the story masking its underlying complexity. McGregor finds that a “great and preferable good has resulted from a series of physical and moral evils; namely, Candide has escaped the world of illusions …” (p. 364). Could he not have learned his lesson without countless deaths and other tribulations? This disproportion between cause and effect is one of the markers of nonlinearity, as we have seen.

9. Few contemporary critics have come as close to incorporating an intuition of this continuing pattern into an overall interpretation as has Roy S. Wolper in the work cited and others. Indeed, in his note, “Professor Wolper's Interpretation of Candide,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 5 (1971): 145-51, Lester Crocker reiterates without fresh examination generations of interpretations that see in Candide's garden at the end of the book a conclusion and a message; even Arthur Scherr's sensitive study fails to take into account the recursive character of the narration and the openendedness of the tale.