Voltaire was the true source of enlightenment of the eighteenth century – it was he who, in a variety of forms and images, awakened in the modern generation the consciousness of the power and rights of the human mind. His own words can be applied to him, magnanimously said by him about his glorious contemporary, Montesquieu: “Humanity has lost the documents for its rights, and he has found and returned what was lost.” Eighty volumes written by him, having served as a means for a new revival to life, now represent a monument to this revival. There is hardly a single page among these countless sheets, cast into an ordinary form. There is no thinker who, to a greater extent than he, could be considered the real creator of his works.
In the field of pure fiction, Voltaire is one of the few great masters, and in style he still remains the supreme ruler. Voltaire was a terrible force, not only because his way of expression had no equal in clarity, and not even because his gaze was distinguished by extraordinary insight and foresight, but because he saw many new things that other people were looking for only by touch. In matters of art, Voltaire was not a revolutionary – in this area he remained faithful to the traditions of classicism that prevailed in France at that time, in the spirit of which all his tragedies were written. Of his fictional works, the most famous is the story “Candide, or Optimism”, in which he ridicules the vulgar optimism of school philosophers.
The story reflected the pessimistic situation of the Seven Years’ War and some disappointment of the author in the effectiveness of philosophy. His attempt to “enlighten” the instigator of the war, Frederick the Great, ended with the writer’s flight from the Prussian state. The reasons for the bloody conflict, which put millions of soldiers under arms in different parts of Europe and required them to kill each other, were difficult to explain.
By genre, it is philosophical with a touch of absurdism and cynicism, “disguised” as a picaresque novel. The heroes of the story – Candide, his girlfriend Kunigunda and mentor Pangloss – travel around the inhabited world, being present at the battles of the Seven Years’ War, the capture of Azov by the Russians, the Lisbon earthquake, and even visit the fairyland of El Dorado.
The wanderings of the heroes serve as an excuse for the author to ridicule government, theology, military affairs, literature, art and metaphysics, especially the optimist Leibniz with his teaching that “God would not have created the world if he had not been the best of all possible.” These words are paraphrased by Voltaire as “everything is for the best in this best of worlds” and sound like a sarcastic refrain every time new disasters fall to the lot of the heroes.
Philosophical origins
First of all, Voltaire’s “Candida” was influenced by the Leibniz-Wolf theory, which states that everything that exists in the world must necessarily be coordinated with each other, and “all events are inextricably linked in the best of possible worlds.” All the misadventures that Candide was involved in as a result represent a cyclical consistency – we can say that Voltaire depicts the so-called “boomerang effect”. For example, an episode where, after another shipwreck, Candide looks out for his sheep in the sea, which, along with all the riches from the country of El Dorado, was previously stolen from him by a Dutch pirate, who eventually went to the bottom. A similar effect can be observed at the moment when the aurelions wanted to eat Candida with his partner Kakambo, because they shot two monkeys with a gun, who were lovers of two girls. However, the savages, who do not tolerate the Jesuits, changed their minds when it turned out that Candide had killed the Jesuit baron Thunder-ten-Tronk.
Leibniz-Wolf also wondered about the place of man in the “best of worlds”. He believed that human individuality develops from animal unconsciousness to awareness of the idea of world harmony. Thus, human existence is somewhere between the animal world and the sublime world – the world of absolute knowledge. This theme is reflected in Voltaire’s metaphysical quest – the writer tried to find the edge where a person passes into a state of being able to think, that is, having a soul. Here he adheres to his sensualistic argument – the soul is mortal, since thinking (and the soul = the ability to think) comes from the ability to feel, which dulls with age and disappears completely after a person’s death.
A similar dualism in the story can be observed in the comparison of two types of love – caritas and cupiditas. The first type tends to love God, that is, spiritual love, when the second type is love, which is considered adultery. Presumably they are compared in the same way as Voltaire’s soul and sensations.
Lust, that is, cupiditas, lowers a person to animal unconsciousness, a “subhuman” unable to think, while caritas elevates him to the rank of a “superman” with perfect consciousness. In Candida, Senator Pococurante can be a good example of a person who tends to the side of sensations, who is no longer attracted by the beautiful originals of paintings hanging in his house – he talks about them as garbage. Only a person who has never come close to understanding the soul can speak so negatively about art (“but I don’t find anything good in them”). At the same time, he praises two girls who work in his house, which only reinforces his correlation with the animal world: “They are pretty cute creatures,” the senator agreed. “Sometimes I take them to my bed.”
World Evil
The story clearly shows a contrasting picture of the world, parts of which, good and evil, collide in the faces of two life mentors of Candida – first Pangloss, an optimist philosopher, and then Martin, an atheist. It is noteworthy that the two types of worldview correspond in meaning to the composition of the story, which is a diametrically opposite construction. One of the strongest arguments opening the way to a change in Kandin’s worldview is the chapter in which he enters the country of El Dorado, since from that moment the hero has a sample of an ideal society with which he will subconsciously compare all the subsequent societies he meets.
Only now, having an example of the “best of the worlds” in his mind, the philosophy of optimism adopted from Pangloss will begin to develop in a completely opposite direction, until it reaches the axial event, the point of Martin’s consciousness in the episode where Candide directly refuses optimism: “Oh Pangloss! Candide exclaimed. – You did not foresee these abominations. No, from now on I will forever abandon your optimism.”
This development of Candida’s individuality corresponds to the duality of the concept of evil in Voltaire himself. In his story, especially in its first part, evil in most cases is presented as a natural origin (shipwreck, earthquake in Lisbon), which is gradually transformed into a social evil, reflected in the Avar village burned by the fault of bloodthirsty Bulgarians, and in the Negroes exploited by Europeans, and in the doctor who killed his wife.
Describing in detail this “theater of war”, Voltaire seems to refute Leibniz-Wolf’s position about a better world, because everything, including Candida’s renunciation of the philosophy of optimism, boils down to the fact that the human world is the worst of worlds.
Fantastic and grotesque
“Candide” is a synthesis of the grotesque and the fantastic in the sense that all the human torments and punishments described by Voltaire are shown to them in such an exaggerated way that they almost reach the point of fiction.
To reveal this exaggeration, first of all it is worth saying that Voltaire clearly traces the tradition of the French writer Francois Rabelais mixing festive and material-bodily principles. For example, the act of burning heretics in order to calm the natural anger and get rid of the earthquake in Chapter 6 itself is already based on the mythologization of the spirits and gods of nature, in honor of which in ancient times people held various rituals and organized holidays. In the same scene, one can observe another characteristic feature of such a synthesis – the carving of the main character in time with the chants and the burning of the Portuguese, who did not want to eat chicken fat. Using this example, one can observe how Voltaire develops the theme that festive fun, presented in the form of chants, adjoins the motif of the feast, which is close to her in character. The sign of the burnt ones’ refusal to consume food correlates with the rejection of the high symbolism contained in the act of eating and drinking, which, apparently, was the reason for the insult to the inhabitants of Lisbon.
Another sign of Voltaire’s combination of the grotesque with fiction can be observed in chapter 5, which can be called the episode of the feast on the bones, where Candide and Pangloss mourned the thirty thousand dead inhabitants of Lisbon under the ruins due to an earthquake. The feast is also important here, since eating and drinking was an integral part of the gatherings for the commemoration of the deceased. In this case, the heroes “watered the bread with tears,” which may indicate a combination of sensually sublime (tears) and material-bodily (absorption of food) sides.
Thus, Voltaire here focuses on extremely absurd things that are difficult for an ordinary person to imagine in real life, translating his grotesque manner of descriptions into a fantastic plane, which also reflects his ridicule of the absurdity and inappropriateness of the philosophy of positivism.
Author of the article: Varvara Kartushina
