SOURCE: Mason, Hadyn. “Structure and Form.” In Candide: Optimism Demolished, pp. 93-111. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

[In the following essay, Mason proposes that, contrary to common critical opinion, Voltaire's Candide has a structure corresponding to the general progress of Candide through the story, and suggests that the seeming incoherence of the conte has purpose in formally expressing Voltaire's attack on old notions of “order.”]

It is commonly said that Candide is a loosely constructed, episodic work. To be sure, Voltaire was much given to composing the brief article, and there are innumerable examples in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) or his polemical works. In other contes, such as Zadig, Micromégas, and L'Ingénu, the chapters are usually quite short. So too in Candide, where at least half the chapters are under 1,000 words or barely exceed that number. Some, like chapters 23 (the Byng episode) and 29 (Candide's discovery of Cunégonde's ugliness), are under 500 words, while yet remaining among the most powerful in the story. Apart from the Paris chapter, which is almost double the length of any other, none exceeds about 2,000 words. Candide runs to under 15,000 words; Voltaire has divided up what is, in terms of length, only a long short story into no fewer than 30 chapters. There would therefore seem to be a case for arguing that the tale is bitty and fragmented.

We shall consider later to what extent there is discontinuity in Candide. Before doing so, however, we should not settle too easily for a belief that the tale, for all its apparent randomness of event, lacks a unifying structure. First of all, it has a geographical shape that matches the progress of the plot. Candide starts out in the Old World, which is revealed to be full of misery and injustice. He flees to the New World, which, Eldorado apart, turns out to be as bad, returns to the Old in a new guise because he is now a man of wealth, and at last settles in a country that is on the margins of Europe. Within this global voyage, Eldorado is given a special place, almost exactly halfway through; it is possible to read Candide as a two-act drama with Eldorado as the entr'acte. One may also argue that the 30 chapters observe a tenary form: the first 10, “Europe I,” see Candide through and out of Europe; chapters 11-20, “America,” deal with America and the two transatlantic voyages (after the Old Woman's tale on board ship, which takes up the first two chapters); and the final 10, “Europe II,” begin with Candide in sight of France and take him and Martin once again through and eventually out of Europe. There is certainly symmetry here. But it is somewhat abstract, depending upon chapter units rather than plot development, and as we noted, it requires the rather artificial inclusion of the Old Woman's tale in the American section. Besides, the average length of chapters increases, generally speaking, in the second 15, so that the blocks “Europe I,” “America,” and “Europe II” are by no means equal in size.

Various other structural patterns have been proposed, some more artificial and less useful than others. Perhaps the most helpful for an understanding of the story relates to Candide's companions. For the latter have their exits and their entrances carefully orchestrated. Only Candide is present in every chapter (albeit occasionally just as an audience to someone else's narrative), and he is only on rare occasions left on his own without someone to talk to. If then we look at the conte in this light, a clear line of development emerges.

The first section belongs to Pangloss, even though he is not present throughout it. He impregnates Candide with his values, which the latter has quickly to reassess in the light of brutal experience once he is kicked out of Eden. In these early chapters he encounters, at first or second hand, the phenomena of war, syphilis, and earthquake, three of the most devastating disasters in human experience. To these are added the gratuitousness of the auto-da-fé, whose horror is equaled only by its absurdity as a means of placating Providence. Candide, for his part, is beaten up twice by the time Cunégonde reappears. Voltaire stresses right away, once out of Westphalia, the various terrible experiences that obtain in the real world, so as to demolish from the start the falsity of Panglossian optimism.

The Inquisition effectively removes Pangloss from the stage until the closing section. His teachings linger on in Candide's mind, but Voltaire has by now begun to show up his ineffectuality. The appearance of the Old Woman at the end of chapter 6 inaugurates a period dominated by Cunégonde's presence in Candide's life. The return of his beloved signifies a momentary pause in the onslaught on Candide, while she tells her tale, followed by the Old Woman's. Here we discover a more specific reality: what man does to woman in a time of anarchy. Physically the weaker sex and an object of sexual desire, she must serve whatever needs her male captors require of her. However, Cunégonde has not only survived the atrocities committed upon her but even achieved a modus vivendi, however fragile. Not all women are so fortunate. The Old Woman must provide her own narrative explicitly to show, as she herself says, that women's sufferings can be much, much worse. Like Cunégonde, she has known what it is to be a sexual chattel, albeit with greater physical humiliations. In addition, she has witnessed the murder of her fiancé at the wedding feast, she has been betrayed by the Italian in whom she had put her trust, and she has suffered to the point of absurdity the horrible excision of a buttock. The awfulness of her tale permits Voltaire to introduce a more profound theme, on the meaningfulness of life. We have seen how her comments on suicide reach to the heart of Candide and its significance.

Cunégonde, with the powerful assistance of the Old Woman, has served her purpose. The arrival in Buenos Aires announces a renewal of Candide's misfortunes, and by the end of chapter 13 he must flee once more. Bereft of his beloved, he has nonetheless acquired a new companion, Cacambo, who will dominate the New World section where he acts as Candide's guide and safekeeper through America. Here at last is a true and loyal mentor of sorts, at least where pragmatic matters are concerned. It is he who, when they have run the gamut of what the New World has to offer, justifiably sums it up for Candide: “You can see … that this hemisphere is no better than the other one” (182). Candide lives dangerously in this unfamiliar environment and twice comes close to death. But in this section the emphasis is much more firmly placed on absurdity than on danger. Voltaire, having comprehensively shown how cruel and heartless human behavior can be, is now intent on demonstrating that it can also be quite bizarre, even comically so. In Paraguay, for instance, the Jesuits wage war upon the kings of Spain and Portugal, while in Europe they act as confessors to these selfsame monarchs. The Baron himself is an exemplary case of such inconsequence, totally refusing to sanction Candide's marriage to Cunégonde despite the fact that his aristocratic snobbery has not the slightest relevance to any of their present situations. Shortly after, we discover from the Oreillons that it is possible for women to take monkeys as lovers, however curious that may seem to the reader, as it does to Candide. But the potential horrors of cannibalism are played down and reduced to the comic phrase that amused Voltaire's contemporaries: “Let us eat Jesuit” (179).

It is therefore fitting that the spectacle of such a topsy-turvy world should lead up to the strangest place of all in Candide: Eldorado. We have already seen that Voltaire uses Eldorado to point to certain values, but that the total meaning of the conte does not reside here. It is a resting place from the world's evils; it contributes to Candide's education; but it is not a place in which to stay. This is, as it were, the true New World, quite different from our corrupt way of life but ultimately unfit for human beings. However, its influence will be felt throughout the rest of the story, partly because Candide now knows of a certainty that Westphalia is not the best possible place in the world, but also because his way of life is assured against constant threats of poverty and starvation by the treasures he has brought out of Eldorado. He will no longer need the quick wits of Cacambo. With the emergence of the pair from Eldorado, Cacambo's special notribution is virtually at an end. A new order is about to begin, requiring a different kind of dialogue. The American experience, too, is virtually complete, save for the treachery of Vanderdendur (which could as easily have happened anywhere else in the world, as Candide has sufficiently made clear) and the episode of the black slave, itself a late interpolation.

Cacambo leaves Candide to rescue Cunégonde. Candide, left on his own, sinks into despair at the foul play of Vanderdendur and the chicanery of the law courts. He now requires a darker kind of temperament than Cacambo's to suit his black mood. Enter Martin, the last of his companions. The stage is set for a new testing of philosophic attitudes in the light of experience; but now the worldview on display is pessimism, which is not so easily disposed of as Pangloss's complacency. The naval battle in which Vanderdendur perishes is accompanied by a commentary from Martin that matches the terrible massacre (whereas the earlier land battle involving Candide had simply been recounted without the addition of observations by any character, Candide included). Martin's Manichean outlook will easily accommodate the frenetic sham world of Paris, the lunacies of the English (who are, he says, suffering from “a different kind of madness” [223]), the secret unhappiness of Paquette and Giroflée, the ennui of Pococuranté. For the space of several chapters Martin holds sway, Candide sometimes falling under his spell when he turns to Martin in his inquiries about the nature of things. But his limitations are decisively shown up when Cacambo reappears, contrary to Martin's confident predictions, and it becomes clear that he is no more in possession of a complete truth about the universe than anyone else.

So Martin's special role is at an end as the story transfers from Venice to Constantinople. Candide sounds him out for the last time on board ship about human unhappiness, to which Martin returns a characteristically gloomy answer. But the inquiry on which Candide had embarked with him is over. With the reemergence of Cunégonde the time has come for action. The structure of the conte is no longer based on a link between Candide and one or two others. He now finds himself liberating and leading a whole little community. Dismayed by Cunégonde, freed of the philosophic illusions purveyed by Pangloss and Martin, he is ready to absorb the advice of the dervish and the Turkish farmer and to put it to practical use. Candide no longer looks to any of his previous mentors. They all take their places around him. Voltaire has by now tried out a whole series of approaches and found them all wanting.

But if one were to talk only of the structural unity of Candide the impression left would be a distorted one. In this tale, it is the incoherence of things that is above all made manifest. Voltaire's attack is directed precisely at a metaphysical system of order in which everything has its place, in which a “great chain of being” accounts for the whole cosmos, in which causality can explain all things, if need be ever since the beginning of the world. The author replaces this vision, at first apparently consoling but ultimately destructive of all human initiative, with a harsher picture. The way the world acts, in particular the way human beings behave, defies rational understanding. Martin's Manichean system, because it too seeks to impose a transcendental pattern, is likewise proved fallible. In Candide teleological meanings are replaced by the aleatory. So far as Candide is concerned, it is chance that presides over the succession of happenings.

Even so, the conte must not be seen as a forerunner of the “absurd” in modern fiction. Candide's world is full of ridiculous and meaningless elements, but human beings are not totally deprived of the ability tomake sense out of it. As we have noted before, the dervish's little parable must be given its full weight. To the mice in the hold of the ship, the journey to Egypt makes no sense, and the Highness who decreed the journey pays them no attention whatsoever. But the ship is going somewhere, as the result of some obscure purpose. A cosmic harmony prevails; Newton's sublime discovery of the law of gravitation was for Voltaire the unshakable demonstration of it. Within that general arrangement, human beings have a function, as the ending of Candide or the lessons of Eldorado show. The good qualities of Jacques and Cacambo are intermingled with the evil Inquisitors or Vanderdendur. As we have seen before, Voltaire's vision is binary.

How then to portray it? Rational argument alone would not have made a masterpiece out of Candide. The Leibnizian system is demolished in its stead by, as René Pomeau puts it, “the obsession with a style.”¹ Style alone can convey the dual complexity. The tale must contain horrors. But it must also be resolutely comic; pathos or tragedy must be assiduously avoided. Since Candide is a tale about life and survival, death plays little part in it. Voltaire is totally indifferent to the notion that preparation for death and contemplation of it may bring dignity to a life. The “deaths” of Pangloss, Cunégonde, and the young Baron turn out to be false, permitting farcically miraculous recoveries in each case. When death actually occurs, it is peremptory, leaving no room for the flights of the human spirit. Jacques is dispatched in a trice; a sort of cosmic shrug of total indifference is shown by all save Candide. The death of Admiral Byng, which Voltaire had in reality made unavailing attempts to prevent by interventing in Byng's court-martial, becomes a black joke: “While chatting in this way they [Candide and Martin] arrived in Portsmouth: a crowd was overing the shore, paying close attention to a rather fat man who was kneeling, his eyes blindfolded, on the deck of one of the fleet's vessels; four soldiers, who had taken up their positions opposite this man, each fired three bullets into his skull, in the most peaceful manner imaginable, and the whole assembly went home feeling extremely satisfied” (223-24). Note the use here, as so often in Candide, of plain numbers for effect. An unjust and doubtless bloody death is reduced to an exercise in arithmetic. Each soldier dispatches his three bullets as neatly as if he were putting them into a box to make up a round dozen. Regimental order rules. Hence the paradox that a military execution is carried out “peacefully,” and the further sardonic irony that the mob was “satisfied” by this entertainment. Here is no room for tears. Byng is effectively distanced from us as “a rather fat man”; the mock-pedantic “rather” adds to the horror comedy.

To capture the tone he requires, Voltaire has recourse to parody. No single model serves, but intertextual echoes abound. For instance, Fénelon's didactic novel Télémaque (1699), widely read throughout the eighteenth century, can be discerned behind Candide's adventures. The hero Télémaque, like Candide, is on a quest. But whereas the former enjoys the benefit of his ever-wise guide-mentor, Candide learns fitfully, and often by negative example, from those who proffer him advice. Heroic romances like Prévost's Manon Lescaut also play their part. For Manon conveys precisely that sense of fatal destiny (whether or not the hero, des Grieux, is deemed to be a credible narrator) that Voltaire is eager to disrupt. Manon's beauty, even in death, is proof against all degradation. The contrast with the raddled, sour Cunégonde is all too obvious. A more subtle parallel may, however, be found in earlier passages from both novels. Des Grieux has been separated from Manon and, as he thought, has recovered from his passion for her, when she unexpectedly reenters his life: “Lord! what a surprising apparition! … It was she, but more lovable and brilliant than I had ever seen her. … Her whole face appeared to me an enchantment.”² The moment when the Old Woman leads Candide to rediscover Cunégonde, whom he thinks dead, bears some resemblances: “What a moment! what a surprise! he believes he is seeing Mademoiselle Cunégonde; he was, indeed, seeing her, it was she herself” (142). What was sublime in Manon has become the stuff of comic banality (“what a surprise!”). The stage is set for Cunégonde to tell Candide that, yes, she was raped and her stomach was split open by a sword; “but one doesn't always die from these two accidents” (142).

Prevost makes eloquent use of the first-person narrative to describe the effect of Manon's reappearance upon des Grieux; we share directly with des Grieux what he feels. Voltaire, by contrast, employs the third-person authorial technique, with equally devastating but totally different results. For he separates reader from character, interposing himself: “He believes he is seeing … he was, indeed, seeing her.” It is as if one were looking through the wrong end of a telescope at the slightly ridiculous reactions of our hero. Des Grieux is struck dumb by an overpowering vision; Candide, on the other hand, is simply bewildered. From beginning to end in Candide, the authorial presence is unremitting. Candide may be onstage the whole time, but behind him ever looms the narrator. From the very first words we are told what to think: “There was in Westphalia, in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, a young boy on whom nature had conferred the sweetest manners. His physiognomy revealed his soul. He had quite a good sense of judgment, along with the simplest of minds; that is why, I believe, he was called Candide” (118). Compare this with the beginning of Voltaire's Zadig: “In the time of King Moabdar there was in Babylon a young man called Zadig, born with a fine natural disposition that had been strengthened by education. Although rich and young, he knew how to temper his passions; he was never affected; he did not wish to be always right, and he knew how to respect men's weaknesses.”³ Though he has much to learn about human malice, Zadig is a conventional hero from the start. But Candide is right away placed at a remove. As with Byng's execution, the word assez (“quite a good sense”) is subversive. Candide may have a promising sweetness of nature, but we are invited immediately to beware of his capacity for judgment and his simple soul.

This comparison with Zadig shows that Voltaire is ready to parody his own works as much as those of others. In Zadigas in Candide the opening sentence contains il y await; the same is also true of Voltaire's Micromégas, like Zadig a forerunner of Candide. In Candide the phrase il y await is give pride of place as the very opening of the conte, the author seeking to exploit full value from the fairy-tale atmosphere of “once upon a time” before rudely shattering it in the very next phrase with the wholly unromantic name of Thunder-ten-tronckh.

Parody permits of a whole range of hyperbolic devices. Voltaire indulges himself in superlatives, for instance, when the occasion warrants it. Once again, the opening chapter will serve well as a case in point. Everything in Thunder-ten-tronckh's garden is lovely, or at least appears to be. The Baron is “one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia” (118). His wife has acquired “very considerable esteem” (119) (but because she is very fat!). The chambermaid is “very pretty and very docile” (120). Cunégonde, after witnessing the sexual encounter between her and Pangloss, is “all agitated, all pensive, all full of the desire to be well informed” (120). Candide kisses her hand with “a quite special graciousness” (120). The reason for these high-flown descriptions is already clear; in the fourth paragraph of the tale Pangloss announces that this is “the best of all possible worlds” (119). This is because the Baron's château “had a door and windows” (118). As we have seen, the dogs running about the yards become a hunting pack when it serves his purpose; the village curate is promoted to the Baron's Grand Almoner. Everything in the château is based on sham except for sexual desire and the brutality of Candide's expulsion. Even the pretty, docile maid turns out later to have infected Pangloss with veneral disease. Reality quickly destroys this façade of pretense and ostentation when Candide is ejected. The word all returns to close out the chapter and give ironic counterpoint to the earlier romantic sentiments: “And all was consternation in the finest and most agreeable of all possible châteaus” (121).

Here is a typical example of mixed registers: a smoothly classical style, full of bland compliments, masks a profoundly satiric intent. Similarly, characters are given enough rope, through their own utterances, to hang themselves. Pangloss, for example, definitively establishes the madness of his philosophy in that first chapter when he argues the finality of all things by pointing out that legs were made for breeches and that noses were made to hang spectacles on. But Pangloss is an easy target. Voltaire's treatment of Candide needs to be more subtle if Candide is to retain any credibility in the denouement. After the atrocities of the auto-da-fé, we witness his total distress: “terrified, dumbfounded, distraught, all bloody, all palpitating” (139). Voltaire goes on to report his anguished soliloquy: “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what then are the others? … Oh my dear Pangloss, the greatest of philosophers, did I have to see you hanged without knowing why! Oh my dear Anabaptist! the best of men, did you have to be drowned in the harbor! Oh Mademoiselle Cunégonde, a treasure among girls, did you have to have your belly split open!” (139-40). The gentle reader who starts out in sympathetic harmony with Candide during this impassioned speech will find himself betrayed before the end. Pangloss has been hanged and that is awful, though one may reserve judgment on “the greatest of philosophers”; Jacques is drowned and that is worse; but the lament for Cunégonde plummets straight into total bathos. In French it is clearer yet, as the monologue highlights the vulgar word ventre by ending with it. Besides, Candide lapses into sexual innuendo by his unfortunate remark. The change in tone is disconcerting. Until the last phrase, the language and the phraseology have both been of impeccably classical pedigree: the dignity of the invocations, the descriptions in general and the superlative terms, the inversion (faut-il), the purity of language—until we are toppled from the sublime heights into the vulgarity of a slit belly.

The rhetorical effect of the narrative, here as elsewhere, is to deaden sensibility and stimulate the reader's critical awareness. Voltaire is much given to a reductionist technique of false naïveté, where things are voided of their usual connotations and therefore appear as pure phenomena; it had been a favorite weapon in his armory ever since at least the Lettres philosophiques 25 years before. The auto-da-fé is an excellent example. This ceremony, once divested of its sense of spiritual atonement to God for human sin, becomes a pure spectacle of ridiculous horror. The designated victims include two Jews, but Voltaire does not name them as Jews. He uses a periphrastic device. They are presented as “two Portuguese who, while eating a chicken, had torn off the bacon” (138). The reader is forced to reflect on this paradox and to consider the appalling injustice visited upon the pair. Once the associations surrounding Jewishness are reduced to a pedantic detail of harmless dietary habits, their essential innocence of any crime and therefore the awful nonsense of putting them to death become over-whelmingly evident, without the need for the author to make a single explicit comment on their behalf.

Similarly disproportionate to the terrible punishment are the offenses of Pangloss and Candide, “the one for having spoken, the other for having listened with an approving air” (139). But once an auto-da-fé has been ordered, the awful majesty of the Inquisition, with its long tradition of colorful ritual, can be given full play. Voltaire chooses to enhance the appalling cruelty of the whole spectacle by indulging in a pedantic description based on careful documentation. He deems it important to point out that “Candide's mitre and cloak were painted with flames reversed and devils without tails and talons; but Pangloss's devils possessed talons and tails and the flames were upright” (139). So too with the extra detail about Pangloss, that his being hanged was contrary to custom. Once again, the significance and purpose of the auto-da-fé are removed and the ceremony reduced to pure formality. In this way, it is less the horror that is stressed, for Voltaire does not go into any of the ghastly details, than the sheer stupidity of such barbarous, magical thinking. To clinch the point, Voltaire ends the paragraph with a statement of devastating simplicity: “That same day, the earth shook again with a terrible thunder” (139).

This brutal fact is set in counterpoint to the reason given, in the preceding paragraph of the text, for the auto-da-fé. The University of Coimbra had decreed it on the basis of an impeccably rationalist assumption, that “the sight of a few people being slowly burned alive, with great pomp and ceremony, is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes” (138). Here is causality gone mad. Causation, as we have already had occasion to observe, is a prime target of Voltaire's satire. Consider, for instance, the long series of events or names set up repeatedly by Pangloss to explain this or that. Voltaire makes much ironic play with clauses in Candide. In particular, his use of the little linking word car (for) is frequent and generally insidious. One of the best examples comes, characteristically, from Pangloss offering consolation to the earthquake survivors: “‘For,’ he said, ‘all this is the best that is possible; for if there is a volcano in Lisbon, it could not be somewhere else. For it is impossible that things should not be where they are. For all is well’” (137). It is a circular argument, demonstrating nothing at all, the car series relying ultimately on a blind belief in optimism.

Parody of the conventional novel also extends to the use Voltaire makes of space and time in Candide. Places are described in a skeletal way. What, for instance, does the philosopher make of England, a country much praised in earlier works, such as the Lettres philosophiques, as the home of liberty, tolerance, philosophy, and science? Here it is given scant treatment. It has become simply a country infected by the lunacy of the Seven Years' War. England is now reduced to Portsmouth harbor and the brutal execution of an admiral unlucky enough to have become a notorious example. Holland, apart from Jacques, is the place where a Protestant minister turns away a starving Candide while his wife pours the slops onto our hero's head. Even where greater attention is paid to cities, such as Paris and Venice, the notations mainly relate to exaggerated social conduct. Paris is the home of treachery, playacting (both literal and metaphorical), and social alienation, and Venice is a carnival for pseudomonarchs. As for Buenos Aires, we know nothing at all about it, except that in it resides a governor possessed of disdainful arrogance and an impossibly pretentious name, with lustful designs upon Cunégonde. This is a world of stylized fantasy, where a few details are brilliantly highlighted to stress the nonsensicality of human behavior.

So too with time. The very considerable amount of chronological detail is merely obfuscatory. It is a sort of jocular camouflage, for in reality this story does not evolve in a consistently linear way. The point has often been made that the reader goes directly from the fine weather of chapter 1, such that Pangloss is able to make love to Paquette out of doors, to the heavy snowfall of chapter 2, and it is always possible that Voltaire did not notice this apparent inconsistency. But whether inconsistent or not (and the Westphalian climate must have been quite capable in the eighteenth century, as it is today, of following a day of mild warmth with one of snow at certain seasons), it matters little. The château of Thunderten-tronckh is a “terrestrial paradise” where the sun, at least metaphorically, always shines. The surrounding snowy fields where Candide finds himself after being exiled accord well with the beginning of his personal fall from summer to winter. Thereafter, Voltaire follows Candide's career with many detailed temporal indications. In the period, for instance, leading up to his reunion with Cuné gonde, we know that there is some lapse of time before Candide, now well trained as a soldier, makes up his mind to desert his regiment, since he takes the decision to do so on “a fine spring day” (123). His subsequent punishment takes three weeks to heal, before the battle begins that leads to his flight into Holland. His stay in that country lasts two months, before he leaves for Lisbon. The earthquake and his arrest take just two days; the auto-da-fé occurs a week later; and within a further two days Candide rediscovers Cunégonde. It would seem that something like six months in all has elapsed.

For Cunégonde, however, the time seems to have had other dimensions. Her sufferings at the hands of the Bulgars appear to coincide with Candide's involvement in the battle, for we are told that this military engagement comes at the outbreak of war; the invasion of the château certainly does not precede it. But after that she spends three months with the Bulgar captain, and then at least six months (quite possibly more—there is some indeterminate interval between her being bought by Don Issachar and being spotted “one day” at Mass by the Grand Inquisitor) resisting both her protectors.

How does that square with Candide's two months in Holland and ten days in Lisbon? Not at all, unless one supposes that Candide's wanderings from the battlefield to Holland take him more than six months, an unlikely hypothesis. But this sort of chronological analysis, which might be of some value in, say, a novel by Prévost, is of no relevance here. Time, in the sense of evolution from an irrevocable past into the present, is largely absent from Candide. Death as a destiny does not exist. Where there is progression in the conte, above all in Candide's development, it is fitful and sometimes even contradictory. Cunégonde does not gradually lose her looks in some gentle aging process: in Buenos Aires she is still desirable, in Turkey her beauty has, quite simply, vanished. It is an action presented by the author as brutally as any other event in the story. Nor does the tale lead inevitably up to a closure in some promised land. Indeed, when the characters settle in the Turkish garden, at first they have no inkling that here is the end of their travels. There is no moment of epiphany to tell them, “This is it.” It is up to them to discover, from unpromising surroundings, what can be made of things. The story, it is true, charts Candide's apprenticeship in a general way until he achieves some sort of practical wisdom. To that extent it is a bildungsroman. But the nature of the journey, and the way it is described, make of it more a parody of the genre than an exemplary model of it.

For underneath the overall structure we noted at the outset of this chapter, discontinuity abounds in Candide. Voltaire strives throughout to surprise and often to disconcert. The massacre of the Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh's family is recounted variously by Pangloss, Cunégonde, and the Baron's son. Pangloss and Cunégonde agree that her mother was cut to pieces and that Cunégonde was stabbed. But Pangloss, with a capacity for exaggeration well in line with his penchant for fantastic explanations, asserts that she was killed by the stabbing, after “being raped as much as it is possible to be” (13). Cunégonde corrects this version to something less melodramatic: one knife wound, and one rape. Pangloss also recounts the rape of the Baron's son, perhaps more plausibly in view of the latter's homosexual propensities (was this perhaps where he first discovered them?); when the young Baron contributes his own version of the past horrors, he mentions that his sister was raped but fails to add that he was too. Once again, the reader will not expend useless energy in trying to decide who is right. Whether Cunégonde was raped once or often, whether the young Baron was raped at all, makes no difference to the essential fact of man's utter animality in such situations of war when all normal inhibitions have been destroyed.

Here is a case of casual inconsistencies undermining once again the conventions of orthodox narration. Voltaire is equally capable of exaggerating those very devices, not only by comic use of tragic discourse, as we have seen, but also by the use of plot. Coincidence, for example, is exploited with abandon. Characters are forever running into one another over and over, as though the world were a global village. One particularly absurd instance is Pangloss and the Baron finding themselves “in exactly the same galley and on the same bench” (250). Just to add to the similarity, they have received exactly the same punishment for their indiscretions. The Baron recounts: “A cadi [judge] had me given a hundred lashes on the soles of my feet and sentenced me to the galleys” (248). Pangloss undergoes a similar experience: “I was taken to the cadi, who had me given a hundred lashes on the soles of my feet and sent me to the galleys” (250). Very minor differences of language serve only to heighten the identicality in all other respects of these two statements. Why should Voltaire seek here to develop this apparently gratuitous parallel? Probably because he wants once again to satirize the belief in neat order and causation. This hypothesis is strengthened when we find Pangloss, at the end of his account, claiming to Candide that “the chain of events of this universe led you to our galley, and … you purchased our ransom” (250). As always for Pangloss, everything has a brighter side.

Variety, too, is a hallmark of Voltaire's style. The rhythm of the narrative never remains constant for long. There are new effects at every turn. Space does not permit a full appraisal of such contrasts in tempo, but one may point to a typical instance in chapter 20. Here Candide and his newfound companion Martin begin to discourse on the problem of evil. Voltaire provides a sample of their debate. It consists of four exchanges. The first two are brief. Candide wishes to know Martin's views; Martin replies that he is a Manichean. Candide registers astonishment; Martin says he cannot “think otherwise.” Candide replies: “You must be possessed by the Devil” (202).

That unleashes a lengthy indictment by Martin of this evil world. It is one of the most trenchant summations in the whole conte. The Devil must be in charge, says Martin, when one sees that almost every town wants to destroy its neighbor, every family some other family; the weak curse the strong as they grovel before them, the strong treat the weak like sheep to be bought or sold. A million licensed murderers in uniform roam across Europe for want of a more decent calling, and even where peace and culture seem to reign, men are eaten up with envy and anxiety. Secret sorrows are even more cruel than public misfortune. All this is developed with rolling periods, in six sentences, building up to a climax in the fourth, which runs to 73 words, before ending on two brief statements: the first, about secret sorrows (11 words), and then the clinching remark, “In a word, I have seen and suffered so much that I am a Manichean” (202).

Voltaire closes the paragraph at that point. The following paragraph is just two lines forming an ironic coda. Candide attempts to reply to this onslaught: “However, there is some good” (202). He is cut down scathingly by Martin: it's possible, he says, but I don't know it. So ends the theoretical discussion. Voltaire immediately illustrates it in the next paragraph, whose brilliance can be appreciated only if we quote it in full:

In the midst of this discussion, the sound of cannon is heard. The noise grows louder at every moment. Everyone picks up his telescope. Two ships are sighted, in combat about three miles away. The wind brings them so close to the French ship that one was able to enjoy watching the fight in comfort. At last, one of the two ships let loose on the other a broadside so low and accurate that it sent it to the bottom. Candide and Martin distinctly perceived a hundred men on the deck of the sinking ship; all of them were raising their hands to the sky and uttering fearful shouts; in an instant everything was swallowed up.

(203)

Note the urgency of this description. The passage, of just over 100 words, contains seven sentences. The first six are simple; two of them consist of only one clause. The final sentence is longer. But, unlike the more sophisticated phraseology of Martin's speech, it is made up of three uncomplicated sections, in a ternary structure that is quite commonly found in Voltaire's style. The last of these is devastating.

Here is Voltaire's narration at his most laconic, providing only the barest details of the action. The only luxury permitted is the sardonic comment about the spectators watching “in comfort.” The scene they are witnessing is one of horror; the wretched doomed men are praying and screaming, all to no avail. Again, Voltaire distances them from us. We are not to observe private tragedy or note the thoughts of a dying man. We are instead to look on at awful, collective horror, almost in the abstract, so to speak. (It is sometimes said that Voltaire anticipates cinematic techniques in Candide; here is surely a case in point, prefiguring filmed scenes of naval battle from the Second World War.) Nor is this the end of the episode. The spectacle is to be undercut by the ludicrous “miracle” that one of Candide's red sheep, stolen by Vanderdendur, escapes from the stricken vessel and rejoins him. Candide, despite what he has just seen, rejoices at the recovery of the lost sheep more than he had grieved over losing 100 of them—a clear parody of the New Testament parable about the lost sheep (Matthew 18; Luke 15)—and draws the pious conclusion that since the rascally Vanderdendur went down with the ship, crime is sometimes punished. The dramatic account of the naval battle is but the means to show up, before the episode is over, the abiding folly of human optimism.

To conclude this survey of the formal aspects of Candide, we must look more directly at Voltaire's language. This is best done by taking a passage and considering it in some detail; for even in translation one can gain some understanding of the particular qualities of Voltaire's prose. Let us, then, take the opening paragraph of chapter 3, where Voltaire memorably recounts the battle between the Bulgars and the Abars:

Nothing was as beautiful, as sprightly, as brilliant, as well ordered as the two armies. The trumpets, fifes, oboes, drums, guns composed a harmony such as never was in Hell. The guns first of all knocked over approximately six thousand men on each side; next the musketry removed from the best of worlds around nine to ten thousand rascals who were infecting its surface. The bayonet was also the sufficient reason for the death of a few thousand men. The total could easily come to around thirty thousand souls. Candide, who was quaking like a philosopher, hid himself as best he could during this heroic butchery.

(126)

This passage comes from the early chapters, where Voltaire is attacking Panglossian optimism directly. Hence the philosophical terms derived from Leibniz: “the best of worlds,” “sufficient reason.” These are exposed to the trenchant realities of war. Voltaire starts from a realistic account, then heightens it: artillery, infantry, bayonet. Only the cavalry is missing, perhaps because including it would have spoiled the ternary structure of which he was so fond.⁴ The language is impeccably classical, and often euphemistic. But it is shot through from beginning to end with antithesis and paradox. The first sentence seems to admire the beauty and order of it all. One could just possibly imagine a military historian, say, ignoring the human dimension for the tactical, writing that sentence without irony. But the second sentence makes all clear. It too, at first, paints an attractive picture with all the military music. But the enumeration on this occasion, echoing that in the previous sentence, is subverted by the last detail (a common Voltairean practice, as we have already seen), when the guns are added to the musical instruments and the harmony, which would have fitted well with the Panglossian vision of the world, finds its comparison in Hell, not Heaven. Then comes the use of precise numbers, as if Voltaire were performing (just as with the Byng execution) a careful arithmetical exercise, arriving helpfully at an indication of the total numbers of the killed. Here too the emphasis is on the general scene: no blood or guts (that would have been stooping to vulgarity), no suffering, not even the screams and terror of the naval battle. It is an overview, from a distance. In one sense, it is a cruel depiction; but here as elsewhere, the reader is to infer the scandal of such a massacre. Finally, Voltaire foregrounds Candide. Here too, all is expressed in a mirror-image way. He has been a coward, like a philosopher—a clever play by Voltaire on the word. For philosophers were traditionally supposed to despise fear, as the Stoics and the Epicureans in their different ways had demonstrated. Yet on this abominable battlefield, any sensitive, and sensible, philosopher would have done exactly as Candide did in putting self-preservation ahead of disinterested reflection. So the scene reverts at the end to the collective view once again, and to this “heroic butchery” in parodic-heroic manner.

No single passage will convey the full richness of Voltairean style. This one, for instance, devotes little attention to Candide, so we get only the briefest glimpse of how Voltaire treats his hero in a sort of benevolent but distanced manner. But in terms of ironic undercutting of noble deeds by the application of a wrong word or phrase, it is a masterpiece of concision. The emphasis throughout is on disjunction, as befits a work satirizing a totally fallacious concept of cosmic order. Here is Voltaire at his wittiest. One may say that with some confidence, since Voltaire had, many years before, given an invaluable clue as to what he understood by wit. He put it thus:

What is called wit is sometimes a new comparison, sometimes a subtle allusion; here the misuse of a word that one sets forth in one meaning but hints may have another; there a delicate link between two uncommon ideas; a striking metaphor; the search for what an object does not at first suggest but still effectively contains; the art of linking up two distant things or of dividing two things that seem to be united, or of opposing one to the other; the art of saying only half of what one thinks, so as to let it be guessed at.⁵

It is this view of art, laying stress upon disproportion, seeking ways to overturn received views of the world, and setting the thought at odds with the language expressing it, that underlies the paragraph describing the battle and, generally, the whole of Candide.

Notes

1. René Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire (Paris: Nizet, 1969) 369.

2. Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles, Manon Lescaut, ed. Fréderic Deloffre and Raymond Picard (Paris: Garnier, 1965), 44.

3. Voltaire, Zadig, Deloffre and Van den Heuvel, 57.

4. Cf. Pomeau, 126, n. 1; cf. pages 21-22 in this volume for a suggestion that Voltaire may have been influenced by a letter he received describing the battle of Rossbach.

5. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, art, “Esprit,” section première (Lettre sur l'esprit, 1744) in Moland 19:3.

Selected Bibliography

Deloffre, Frédéric, and Jacques Van den Heuvel, eds. Voltaire: Romans et contes. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. L'Ingénu, 285-347; Zadig, 55-123.

Moland, Louis, ed. Oeuvres complètes. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1877-85. Dictionnaire philosophique, vols. 17-21; Discours en vers sur l'homme, vol. 9, 378-428; Essai sur les moeurs, vols. 11, 12, and 13, 1-184; La Métaphysique de Newton, in Eléments de Philosophe de Newton, part 1, vol. 22, 403-37; Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, vol. 9, 465-80.