Candide (A Norton Critical Edition) (edition 1991)

i think i would have to read this one about five times to fully understand what's going on. Yet, i did really enjoy the sentiment of the ending. ( )

I'm guessing most people read this because of some kind of educational purpose. I read this because of Kristin Chenoweth. She starred as Cunegonde in Bernstein's Candide operetta for PBS and is one of my favorite performers. I loved the operetta (and I'm not anywhere close to an opera buff) - found it quite hilarious, in fact. So, I decided I wanted to read the original to see how it differed.

Thanks to the helpful footnotes in this translation, I quite enjoyed the classic. Yes, in comparison to the operetta, it differs on several levels, but I found it just as interesting and perhaps more so given the historical context and notes about Voltaire's personal issues with many of the figures he pokes fun at.

It's quite philosophical in nature - picking on several world theories of the time, with religion and politics as targets, too. I won't pretend to understand every level of this satire, but got the gist with Adams' notes. The story itself is ridiculous with people killed and then popping back to life and the main character a simpleton who doubts but continues to believe what he has been taught by an educator who at one point even (if memory serves) says himself that he no longer believes it: That this is the best of all possible worlds and everything that happens is for the best.

At one point, Candide even finds himself in El Dorado, which he begins to believe must be the real 'best world' as everyone is happy (partly because money - gold and jewels - is so commonplace as to have no value)...yet, he decides to leave to search for Cunegonde, the love of his life. He is the first person to ever find El Dorado and then want to leave.

So, he continues to travel and be cheated and have hardships, but his search for his beloved continues. I don't want to give away the ending, although I'll say it's a bit different from Bernstein's.

At a quick 95 pages (without all the histories and extra information provided), Candide is worth a read if you enjoy humor and history. If you want the 'light' version and still would like some humor, get your hands on the PBS concert presentation of Bernstein's operetta. ( )

"We live in the best of all possible worlds" was the answer to theodicy posed by Gottfried Leibniz. God hasn't unnecessarily let bad things happen (then God wouldn't be good), and it's not that God was unable to stop them (then God's not all-powerful). Instead God has this grand design, and even all of the tragedies that occurred were ultimately for the best.

Voltaire thought this was a load of shit, so he wrote Candide to mercilessly satirize this philosophy. (It worked, by the way. Leibniz was so humiliated, he got laughed out of philosophy and had to go be a mathematician instead.) Voltaire had been deeply affected by the Lisbon earthquake and fire of 1755, which resulted in an estimated 30,000-40,000 casualties, and furthermore was horrified by accounts of the treatment of slaves and other human rights abuses.

So these horrors get magnified into a string of tragedies which befall the sweet and sincere Candide after he has learned Leibnizian optimism from his tutor Pangloss. His unflagging cheerfulness renders absurd the scope of human tragedies and abuses: Candide gets flogged by a thousand men as an auto de fe, Pangloss proves that his New World syphilis was necessary to also obtain New World chocolate, and the daughter of a pope is (fortunately!) not killed to be eaten but instead negotiates to only have one buttock carved off. Thank God for buttocks, and having them in duplicate. Candide endures most everything before concluding that optimism "is the mania of saying things are well when one is in hell."

It's difficult to say who or what Voltaire's satire takes aim at. Leibniz and his bird-brained philosophy, to be sure. But there's satire against religious institutions, satire against academics, satire against theology, satire against religious hypocrites. Satire against God? Voltaire was irreverent to the extreme, and even if the string of tragedies about which he writes served to point out the logic fail of Leibniz, nevertheless these were tragedies with a historical basis. Natural disasters do happen, slaves really did get abused terribly, people really were killing each other over religious differences. It ends up a bit too pointed to leave God out of the picture.

A professor of mine called Candide "satire with a flamethrower," because the scope of satire was so wide and so delightfully biting. But Voltaire's bitterness about the problem of evil has to transcend mere poking fun at Leibniz. It's too hard-hitting; ultimately at some level God must be implicated too. And while satire is more interested in tearing down ideologies and platitudes than rebuilding philosophies anew, the solution which Candide comes to is a gentle and diligent humanism: "we must cultivate our garden." ( )

"The best of all possible worlds" . . .
I greatly enjoyed this book--just the right length so that the cynicism kept its bite without getting tedious. A classic for a reason. ( )

This book does not stick so well in my memory in either a negative or positive way, but I think this comes from the book being a mixture of two things which I could not feel more differently about: allegory and satire.

The first I find to be as silly and pointless as Aesop or Passion Plays, and is part of the reason that The Wizard of Oz has always felt stilted to me. Characters in an allegory are oversimplified symbols, and so cannot comment on the nature of actual human beings. The style is already so firmly affixed to cultural states and norms that it cannot really say anything beyond the dichotomous, and dualists are blinded by their egos.

I do love satire, but that is generally because of the wit and skill it takes to subvert and re-imagine. Unfortunately, once one has drawn so deeply on hyperbole in a work, it loses its ability to find that necessarily uncomfortable 'grey area'--that rift between assumption and observation.

Voltaire is witty and funny, but his condemnation and praise falls only on unrealistic absolutes, and hence becomes only political rather than philosophical. In this, he becomes in many ways Shakespeare's opposite; whose characters were so vaguely sketched that they could be held representative of many disparate identities.

It is too easy to force and distort arguments when the accepted givens are so strictly defined and counterpointed. This problem should be evident to anyone in America today who sees how opposition to ideas is transformed into meaninglessly pejorative identities. The temptation of thought-terminating cliches grows ever more in the face of such opposing forces as Voltaire presents.

No doubt much of Voltaire's popularity stems from the fact that he is so narrowly applicable and divisive. In this way he almost works like a philosopher since his ideas are so forcefully professed. However, unlike a philosopher he represents his opponents in a state of utter ridicule, he is less convincing than polarizing.

The other part of Voltaire's popularity comes from his empty century. The Seventeenth had Shakespeare and Milton. The Nineteenth showed the ridiculously fecund blossoming of the Romantics. The Eighteenth, however, has Fielding, Voltaire, and Pope. Fielding has escaped as wide a reading because his satire was more social than strictly political. Pope was another satirist, but is of such a fanciful nature as to escape more simplistic and contentious forces. This leaves us with the more accessible Voltaire, who may be used to attack ideas, but not to build upon them. ( )