I've been looking for a reason to revisit Voltaire's Candide for quite a while now. I haven't been back, in earnest, for a read in 50 years, not since the 70s, when The War was still in play for frog-like men with "twenty pounds of headlines stapled to their chest"), the same ilk who are at it today for the same reason (see LBJ), and I can't say that the world is a better place today for all the freelovin' back then and Pentagon levitatin' and mind-freein' acid-takin' and Dylan tellin' his Ma not to worry about the thought-dream thieves (wait, maybe that was the 60s), and, what's more, we're all discoverin' it ain't no way (no how) the best of all possible worlds. So, Candide is still relevant.
Warbler Classics has just released a new edition of the timeless lampoon of optimism. It's got two things going for it right away: Paul Klee illustrations -- 26 of them, including the cover, which is a reprise of his drawing for a 1920 edition of Candide; and, a short and trenchant introduction and translation by the late great, Donald M. Frame, a scholar of French literature and Columbia University professor. The book comes out just in time for Black Friday shoppers, wondering what to get the wo/man in their lives who has every possible thing they could need in their life already -- except, perhaps, laughter.
What people don't realize is that history was different back then. I read a lot. I read a lot, being as how my main occupation these days is readin'. E-books, highbrow magazines, pushy pamphlets, poems, sadomasochistic advertisements, emoji-fortified childish tweets, idiotic comments left by half-wits on drugs or who should be. I write reviews. That's my game. I opine. One of my favorite stories coming out of the last two 365s is the one I came across involving Isaac Newton. Boy, what an a**hole; didn't see eye-to-eye with anybody, it seems. He fought with Robert Hooke over opticals devices -- territory which Newton foamed over like an alpha dog in a maximum security prism. Hooke said, The world's not black-and-white, Isaac; you'll discover that when you get paroled. And Isaac kicked him in the family jewels. I'm paroled, he said.
Newton had an even bigger problem with Gottfried Leibniz, a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat, who was accused of meddling with Isaac's calculus -- stealing his chalk elegance! Plagiarist! Fisticuffs were called for; one pace, turn and punch, looking for the kill stroke. Bobby DeNiro, in a scrapped tryout to play the part of Leibniz (who Newton, ironically, had nicknamed "lugnuts") told us how he felt about Newton.
They punched and missed and pulled at each other's wigs (down there). Then poor Newton had a "nervous breakdown," and when he recovered, he resigned from his Cambridge University lectureship, and was given a sinecure at the Royal Mint as Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he took the titular post so goddamned seriously that he saw to it that at least 12 men were hanged, drawn and quartered for the treasonous act of coinage, i.e., forgery. f*ck with the coin of the realm and the abyss looks back into you. Heads might be the real experiment in gravity Isaac's famous for and not apples.
But then Voltaire, a contemporary (he's still contemporary, if you ask me) came along, twisting his mustache. And started making inferences about Newton's fig and sexual orientation. He accused Newton of a near-treasonous "action" -- fatal for a gentleman: virginity! Said Voltaire, his mortician could tell he'd never done the dirty with a woman. (How? historians ask, how could he know?) Voltaire spread the word that Newton had never spread his seed and the defamation was so outrageous that even hundreds of years later Carl "We Are Star-Stuff" Sagan had a thought on the subject, in Cosmos: "Newton was"so tiny that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived," even if his balls never dropped.
Just think of Time Square, New Year's Eve; all the ganglia is there, excited, the countdown to manhood, and then the ball never drops, some kind of technical problem. What a downer. You'd spend your life wondering about gravity, too. Science came to rescue centuries later and refurbished his genius by suggesting that the Einstein of his day (although not in sexual prowess) was probably suffering from Asperger's. All the trouble Voltaire caused Newton's reputation. How do you like them apples?
Voltaire was (is) renowned as the upstart of the Enlightenment, a quintessential man of letters. Plays, poetry, witticisms left on toilet stall walls (in palaces). He was even seen to have changed history -- directly, if unintentionally and unawares. In the depiction of love-hate relationship between Peter and Catherine -- two foreigners fighting over the crown of Russia -- Catherine is about to ice Peter when he announces he has a gift for her and introduces Voltaire who Peter has thoughtfully imported from France to talk shop with Catherine. She's pleased, but breaks the news to her friend and confidante, Marial, who has a different read:
It's as if Marial were channeling Newton and responding to Voltaire's wry post about his frizzle-grizzled untested havoc-wreaker, when she calls Full Volts "a bookish little sh*t from Paris."
Yes, Candide or Optimism, as the novella was originally called, is full of cheeky mischief for a humankind of whom he once said that If God did not exist, then it would be necessary to invent One. Well, here we are. Climate Change. Pandemics. War. Rolling Pearl Harbors. Everything about to go into freefall harmony, like at the end of Fight Club. In this new Warbler edition we're told that the novellas was translated from German by one Dr. Ralph, and a footnote tells us, "For some weeks after its publication Voltaire denied authorship of Candide, as he often did with works potentially dangerous to himself." Dissent can see you go missing. Dissent can be seen by the dark and swarthy henchmen of the "deep state" as a form of treason up there with klepto cryptocurrency. Newton would watch your head fall in "gravity" experiment. If you are seen as a conspirator with others who believe in conspiracies among government lizard people"Well, just don't. But, let's face it, we could use some moral order and housecleaning just about now. So Candide speaks to our time directly and bumspankingly.
You dive right in and get reacquainted and almost immediately you are delighting in French humor at the Royals expense. Voltaire's eye for caricature and subtlety at the same time:
My Lady the Baroness, who weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, attracted very great consideration by that fact, and did the honors of the house with a dignity that made her even more respectable. Her daughter Cune'gonde, aged seventeen, was rosy-complexioned, fresh, plump, appetizing.
There is the sense of the morbidly obese, of the proof being in the seventh helping of the pudding, of over-ripeness, of in the teenage girl's case, even, in the name, a whiff of STDs. And speaking of names, nothing is more candid than Candida vulgaris. Voltaire was, of course, steeped in Latin.
We're introduced to Pangloss (Leibniz/ Bobby DeNiro), "the oracle of the house," who "taught metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause and that, in this best of all possible worlds, My Lord the Baron's castle was the finest of castles, and My Lady the best of all possible Baronesses." In other words, if you are a One Percenter, the world's your oyster and you're feeling your oats (or someone else's). Totally relevant to our times -- especially the fat-fuckedness and a sense of no restraint on the impulses of hegemonic gluttony. All around us the sounds of snorkel-porklin' at the trough, and "the sounds of piggies leading piggy lives," as the Beatles would have it. The Manson Family was at that time living out of dumpsters day to day and that piggie lyric is said to have radicalized them.
Candide is a naif, trusting the beautiful (and best) logic of Pangloss in all matters; plus he's head-over-heels for Cune'gonde, whose unbelievably beautiful plumrose hams intoxicate him. We're informed that:
One day Cune'gonde, walking near the castle in the little wood they called The Park, saw in the bushes Doctor Pangloss giving a lesson in experimental physics to her mother's chambermaid, a very pretty and very docile little brunette.
She then wants to experiment like a mad scientist on Candide. As Voltaire tells it:
Since Mademoiselle Cune'gonde had much inclination for the sciences, she observed breathlessly the repeated experiments of which she was a witness; she clearly saw the Doctor's sufficient reason, the effects and the causes, and returned home all agitated, all pensive, all filled with the desire to be learned, thinking that she might well be the sufficient reason of young Candide, who might equally well be hers.
And so they go riding down the freeway in the pink Cadillac of love. Aretha was another genius. They are discovered and suddenly Candide is ass-kicked and "all was in consternation in the finest and most agreeable of all possible castles." Candide is now thumbin' down the autobahn.
Donald Frame tells us in the introduction that when Voltaire returned home to Paris in 1778, after 25 years in exile (he had many enemies among the enema set), to attend the premiere of his play, Irene, "Crowds cheered him in the streets." He was a hero among wits and nitwits alike for his cheek against authority, and for civil rights and the right to a fair trial. He had made many enemies among the classes he ridiculed and had been the recipient of many thrashings. Frame tells us,
The oppressive power of Voltaire's opponents must be kept in mind if his tales are to appear in their true perspective. Great satire creates the illusion that its targets are more comic than sinister. Imprisonments, exiles, a beating had whetted Voltaire's will to fight; the longer he lived the more constantly he used his wit to forge weapons of war. His tales, all written after he was fifty, are the weapons that have worn best. Their luster must not blind us, however, to the fact that when Voltaire died his long battle for liberty and justice was not won.
Voltaire got up, dusted himself off, and made another crack that enraged. This recalls Daniel Defoe over in England, another troublemaker, some say the world's first journo, making The Man angry with his pamphleteering and political activities. that they put him in the pillory and he prepared for the worst -- things thrown at him, his reputation tossed. In Crusoe and His Consequences, James Dunkerley tells us of Defoe's 1703 pilloring:
It looked bad; the rains were abnormally heavy that month, which, even though it was summer, would in itself pose a threat to the health of a person held tight in the stocks for a number of hours. At the same time, to enhance the disgrace associated with the pillory, Defoe was held on the first occasion in Cornhill, within yards of his family home. A man of over forty with seven children and a professional reputation seemed set for ignominy. But Daniel Defoe transformed the occasion into a triumph. According to legend, it was fresh flowers, not eggs and tomatoes, that were thrown in symbolic repudiation of the law.
This was the best of all possible pillories. Defoe had, typically, made fun of the possibility with an famous poem, A Hymn to the Pillory, which threw mad cream pies at the Royals to the public's delight -- kinda like today.
This episode, in turn, recalls Voltaire's stint in the Bastille in 1718, where he was tossed after accusing the Regent of having sexual relations with his daughter, and then followed that up with the push of his new play, Oedipus.
Candide is a tract that opposes the goofy abstract absolute-ism that a philosophy of hope and optimism can bring to the creaking table. Indeed, Voltaire lampoons any notion of a priori "goodness" in humans. The novella takes us on a journey wherein we a see a world of competing evils between Nature (plagues, earthquakes, volcanos, sinking ships, fires, pestilence) and Humanity (rape, murder, quartering, disembowelment, beheadings, war, poverty, master-slave relations, mafia, puns). It's easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred, as the Bard from Duluth tells us. Voltaire amps it all -- the violence of existence -- to pillory Optimism.
As alluded to earlier, the story begins with Candide and Cune'gonde and Pangloss representing excesses that need to be shaped by the violences we mentioned above; they each need to be manhandled and panhandled to test their mettle. Candide, the naif; Cune'gonde, effusive beauty; and, Pangloss, the happy logician. Thus, after Candide gets seduced by Cune'gonde and is caught performing natural philosophy experiments with her by My Lord the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh the who "seeing this cause and this effect, expelled Candide from the castle with great kicks in the behind." This is how he starts out, rogue of the road in search of good fortune; the world as a "gauntlet."
He survives the first night, underclad, in a snowstorm, falling among the Bulgarians, the entymology of which Voltaire immediately alerts the reader; "he had reason to think that Frederick was a pederast and because the French bougre, like the English "bugger," comes from Bulgare (Bulgarian)." This is not the common derivation: More recent information about the far past tells us that the word derives from Turkish and essentially means "troublemaker." Anyway, that first night Candide is taken in an inn by two men taken in by his battle-ready height (5'5") and they feed him, and then con him into soldiering, where he experiences "the horror, the horror" of a thousand Nams, limbs and gore and piles of bodies and signs of rapine and traumatic devastation. (Think eastern Ukraine, the Donbas). How does Candide report it? From the chapter How Candide Escaped from among the Bulgarians, and What Became of Him:
He passed over heaps of dead and dying and first reached a neighboring village; it was in ashes; it was an Abarian village which the Bulgarians had burned in accordance with the rules of international law. Here, old men riddled with wounds watched their wives die, with their throats cut, holding their children to their bleeding breasts; there, girls, disemboweled after satisfying the natural needs of a few heroes, were gasping their last sighs; others, half-burned, screamed to be given the coup de grà ce. Brains were spattered over the ground beside severed arms and legs.
He goes to another village, and another, and sees the same carnage. The best of all possible carnage.
He makes his way to Holland, where hungry for bread, a man asks if the Pope is "antichrist" and when he doesn't answer affirmatively, the man's wife pours sh*t and piss on his head from the second floor. The best of all possible sh*t and piss. He gets rescued by Jacques, an Anabaptist, who cleans him and feeds him and sends him on his way through his gauntlet adventure. More shock ahead:
The next day on a walk he met a beggar all covered with sores, his eyes dull as death, the end of his nose eaten away, his mouth awry, his teeth black, talking out of his throat, tormented with a violent cough, and spitting out a tooth at each spasm.
It's Mr. Optimism himself! Pangloss. He hears the story of what happened to the Lord and Cune'gonde. Despair at the account of:
"Cune'gonde is dead! Ah, best of worlds, where are you? But what illness did she die of? Could it have been for having seen me expelled with great kicks from the fine castle of My Lord, her father?"
"No," said Pangloss, "she was disemboweled by Bulgarian soldiers after being raped as much as anyone can be".
How can Candide hack this stuff, this world? Pangloss sees it as a test (to the extent he can see at all). Is the Hope-meister a f*cking moron? Candide takes Pangloss to Jacques, who sees to his mending (Pangloss loses only one eye and one ear. Phew! Close call.) Pangloss and Candide are brought to Lisbon by Anabaptist Jacques. Things are looking up, causing Pangloss to quip,
"All that was indispensable," replied the one-eyed Doctor, "and private misfortunes make up the general good; so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more all is well."
Then, almost immediately, as if sniggering, the sky darkens, the clouds bulk up, and a storm is thrashing them on the sea on their way to Lisbon. Fuckin' Pangloss. Unfortunately, Pangloss and Candide survive (the Anabaptist finally has his head dipped in Forever and drowns). They climb ashore, accompanied by a surviving sailor, get to Lisbon, and find it destroyed by an earthquake (1755). The query continues,now including the sailor's response:
Said Pangloss: "What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon?"
"It is the end of the world," exclaimed Candide.
The sailor runs headlong into the midst of the debris, braves death to find money, finds some, seizes it, gets drunk, and when he has slept it off buys the favors of the first girl of good will he meets upon the ruins of demolished houses and in the midst of the dying and the dead.
Voltaire's frantic disposition keeps one in stitches, even as this one imagines the end of the world to come with Climate Change. Guffaw? Laugh my ass off. What a miracle diet!
Nature has had a laugh with the earthquake and now Man must have an "auto-da-fe'" to assign blame and torture and to murder for "religious" reasons. And, of course, Candide is seized and flogged to canonical music, and Pangloss is hung. Nobody is an innocent bystander, and the story about a shipwreck doesn't hold up under the Inquisition's pressure. This is what Voltaire revels in; it is of the times; not yet out of the Dark Ages; not yet convinced of the marvel of the Magna Carta. We can't say that, 300 years later, we're entirely out of the Dark and committed to the Light.
In despair again after so recently having been reunited with the best of all possible philosophers, Pangloss, he is alone again, naturally. He wonders, as you do, "If this is the best of all possible worlds, then what are the others?" Glum? Chin hung low and walking, he comes across an Old Lady who takes him, cleans him up, sets him with some good sleep, and leads him to a new reason to live: Cune'gonde is alive! His gargantuan love interest: He "devoured her with his eyes." She tells him her story of survival through all the pillaging and rape she has seen and suffered, quipping with Panglossian stupidity, "A person of honor may have been raped once, but her virtue gains strength from it." Candide was probably in that one moment glad Pangloss wasn't there, as he may have added that it follows that more rapes would lead to more virtue. Aye, what a world, equally full of human malice and Gaia's sadistic streak.
She tells Candide that she was the Inquisitor's love interest and sat next to him and watched Pangloss hung and Candide flogged accompanied by "long miserere in droning plain song." Yes, his love, who once lived high off the hog, is now relating the tale of how she was herself stripped of one buttock, became the 'high off the hog,' so to speak, to hungry Janissaries defending Constantinople against sieging Russians. Wait, that was the Old Lady who lost a cheek! In all the confusion, limbs flying everywhere. I wooze. Thank Christ, I'm safely in the 21st century, without God and full of the milk of human reason.
Candide is forced to become a killer. He loses Cune'gonde again, tearfully reunites with the presumed dead brother of his love, and then kills him in defense when the brother is insulted that he intends to marry Cune'gonde; and then she is left behind after he is forced to flee following his slaying of Jesuit, whose robe and role he assumes, and runs, with a mate, away, only to fall into the hands of cannibalistic Oreillons, who eat Jesuits. But Candide and his mate, Cocambo, convince them they are not Jesuits and there is big celebration, and girls are offered for their sexual delectation, but they're in a hurry and flee while the Oreillons celebrate their non-Jesuitness.
Next it's on to the fabled Eldorado where pebbles of gold mean nothing and the most lavish meal they are treated to there is apologized for by their host as inferior fare. On and on (deliciously so), intercontinental adventuring. Until he meets up with Martin, who, for a while, fills in as a replacement for Pangloss and provides the required dialectics for sorting out the world's apparent chaos. On a boat to France they converse over the human condition and the human character:
"By the way," said Candide, "do you think that the earth was originally a sea, as we are assured in that big book that belongs to the ship's captain?"
"I believe nothing of the sort," said Martin, "any more than all the daydreams that people have been trying to sell us for some time now."
"But then to what end was this world formed?" said Candide.
"To drive us mad," replied Martin.
Consciousness as madness. How about that? Who needs Pangloss? It gets better. Finding some reason to feel comfortable with his new soul mate, Voltaire ventures further into human being:
"Do you think," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other as they do today, always been liars, cheats, faithbreakers, ingrates, brigands, weaklings, rovers, cowards, enviers, gluttons, drunkards, misers, self-seekers, carnivores, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?"
"Do you think," said Martin, "that sparrow hawks have always eaten pigeons when they found any?"
In other words, does the Pope sh*t in the woods? Is a bear Catholic?
On and on it goes. Candide is that kind of tale. One thing after another. Rolling Pearl Harbors. Chomsky's laughing, saying it's not worth worrying about, as there are even greater worries ahead -- nukes, climate, disemboweled democracy. Chomsky's no Pangloss; he doesn't gloss pain, but rather points out, all the time, that this ain't no way, no how, the best of all possible worlds. Really, he's the Anti-Pangloss. Can't get the f*cker to lighten up.
Candide hailed from Westphalia in Prussia, a place often associated in historical references with the birth of international relations -- i.e., the modern European states system. In this sense, it strikes one as ironic now, because Candide knows virtually nothing but strife and calamity all around him during his journey, and anything but the restraint of a nation-state system. It's interesting that one of Voltaire's most interesting contributions to letters and legacies is his work on historiographies, which became a highly influential approach to writing the "facts" of history during the Enlightenment.
Today, despite the proclamations of Silicon Valley and updated versions of the AT&T ad from the 70s that The System Is The Solution, the global bio and eco systems are heading for disaster -- indeed, a "sixth extinction." Entropy seems to be on the horizon. While this is happening, "shiny, happy people," like former CEO of Google, are pushing a best of all possible futures, suggestion in The New Digital Age (2013) that "everybody" would one day own a robot and a holographic machine to transport us from privileged reality to venues of Othersidedness. More recently he wrote enthusiastically in The Age of AI, a tome he co-wrote with Henry Kissinger, of our growing intimacy with AIs and algorithms: AI "is altering the role that our minds have traditionally played in shaping, ordering, and assessing our choices and actions." But, aside from ultra creepy, it is more Pangloss. Schmidt could probably use a good Candidean beating to gain some much needed perspective.
Quite literally Earth is the only known place in the universe with life, a fact we seem to either ignore or forget constantly. Bio in a world of cold ass chemicals and darkness and cold; it should be the best of all possible worlds, but we're too busy literally tearing our miracle apart limn from limn. With the only ones escaping being the rapists, marauders, and psychos (unimaginable T2 cops who look uncannily like Tony Perkins inviting you into their roach motel). It makes you wonder about it all in strange new ways. (Already, I feel AIs are laughing at us -- look for a new DSM entry soon.)
Candide is as slap-face fresh and impertinent as ever. Step up for a chinchillin' skin bracing slap across your claptrap from straight out of the Enlightenment. You'll say, Thanks, I needed that. And when your Ideal Feminine metamorphosizes into the Fat Lady Singing, say, f*ck It, and keep on gardening your marijuana. Pass the bong among friends, but if they turn on you suddenly, and without provocation, don't be surprised, and don't let them disembowel you without a fight.
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