Candide

I think you once asked me whether people were working on Camus... lately there have been a series of talks on Camus at NYU by fairly important people, so I guess things are being done. I guess I just wasn't paying attention - plus there are my own prejudices, which lead me to assume that there isn't that much to say about him. I'm thinking of this right now because I'm supposed to be preparing to teach Candide, and I've always associated Voltaire, and particularly Candide with Camus, and particularly the Stranger. They're both short accessible books that you have to read in high school English classes, they're both among the very first things that are given to French students to read in the original because of the lucid, straightforward prose. They're both entertaining, and in a sense, because they're fun, quick reads, because they're lucid with nothing apparently mysterious about them, I tend to think of them as the sort of thing you read for fun and not the sorts of things you work on. I say this, and at the same time, I would probably scoff hearing it said by someone else, because I do think that any good literature should be enjoyable, and I guess almost anything worth reading is worth discussing... normally I'm more likely to hold forth on pop music or TV shows than a book that I breeze through in an afternoon. But then, I generally spend too much time talking about theoretical texts and not enough on straight literature.
For me, there's enough proof that Candide should be taken seriously in the fact that it pops to mind from time to time in relation to other things and almost always has. In the path to clear, I even slipped the last line of Candide into casual dialogue - "we must cultivate our garden" is one of the best last lines of any book I've ever read (and I admire good endings more than I do good openings... endings aren't done well nearly as often. Of course, it is a great last line in part because it is inseparable from everything that came before. It succinctly comments the rest of the book, and it isn't possible to separate the literal from the figurative meaning. It seems more straightforward than it is, and I'm always surprised to find other people can understand it differently than I do. It's intimately linked to the question posed shortly before, namely is it worse to be raped, tortured, kidnapped, press ganged and sold into slavery, or to be bored at ease in the estate we've acquired? Last week I was teaching St. Augustine's confessions - which I should do an entry on - and that question of which is worse makes me think of a small part of St. Augustine's discussion of memory (which takes a lot from the Meno), where St. AUgustine briefly considers why it can be pleasurable to remember unpleasant, or even horrible experiences, and why it can be sad to remember the happy ones. Experiences of atrocities are, nevertheless, experiences, movement, life. To suffer is to live - not in the sense that life is only suffering, but in the sense that suffering, like joy, gives content to life, shapes us, and the experience of suffering becomes part of who we are. To want to undo past suffering is to want to become someone different. While present and future suffering is to be avoided, past suffering becomes precious because it belongs uniquely to us. I don't know if Voltaire would necessarily sign his name to what I'm saying, but there is a strong ambivalence about all the atrocities viewed in retrospect. When saying we must cultivate our garden, Voltaire seems to me to be suggesting not so much that quietism should be embraced and we should mind our own business (the garden is the prime image of private space, and in the book there is mention of political strife and executions going on in Constantinople which Candide and his friends are willfully ignoring), but rather that whether we recognize it or not, fulfillment comes from remaining occupied, from doing something, and that a lack of action or experience will always be intolerable. We are always least happy when instead of going about life we are idle enough to ask ourselves whether we are happy or not. I realize this is a comment which, I am aware is problematic both in real life and in relation to Candide, a book in which the protagonist is obsessively asking both himself and others whether they are happy and whether the world is well ordered - a book in which slavery, war and oppression, though comically exaggerated are shown in the worst possible light. Nevertheless, what makes the book charming is precisely the ambivalence with which irrational, dangerous and contemptible actions may parody specific ideas, institutions and activities, but also exist without any contrasting or alternative behavior. Atrocities and inhumanities are very real and horrible, but there's a weird way in which they are almost... and not many people would agree with me I think... they're almost lovable as well. Not that rape and murder and mutilation are endearing, but the inevitability of people behaving badly - the fact that even Candide is implicated (stabbing a priest, a jew and the brother of his lover, selling his future brother-in-law back into slavery to get him out of the way so he can marry a woman he is no longer in love with for no personal profit). Voltaire seems ambivalent about free will. He's parodying Leibniz, but he doesn't really seem capable of whole-heartedly disagreeing with Leibniz. Though even Pangloss is said to no longer really believe what he maintains (that this is the best of worlds), and though Candide seems somewhat convinced in the end that his own optimism has been refuted by experience, the simple fact that the absence of atrocities is almost more unbearable than the atrocities themselves at the end, and that the greatest joy always comes from talking about horrible experiences, all seems to suggest that maybe he was always right.
I once read about half of the Theodicee, and a part of Monadology, and I always kind of assumed that Voltaire must have only had a second hand account of what Leibniz had written... though now I wonder. I just read - which I hadn't realized before - that Voltaire had himself earlier been a philosophical optimist, and the short article I read was by someone who seemed to recognize the ambivalence in Candide, and to want to show that both during and after the writing of Candide, Voltaire didn't fully move into the opposite camp (and that he was a surprisingly happy old man - not that this fact is particularly relevant). When Leibniz speaks of the best possible universe, he gives a clear definition of 'best'... and this is why he will be embraced by Deleuze, and why I connected him to Glissant as an opposite pole to a Segalen steeped in Schopenhauer (all this would take a lot more explanation) - 'best' for Leibniz does not mean leading to the most joy or least suffering, but containing the greatest possible diversity. This in no way means that all is as it should be here and now, that nothing can or should be changed or that everything is ordered for us to enjoy our lives, but rather that the universe is ordered so as to lead to the maximum number of events that might or will come about.
But I'm bumping up against another subject that I've written about in the past and don't feel like getting into here. Suffice to say, there is a moment in Candide where a character is asked whether he believes people always acted as badly as they currently do. The answer he gives is that hawks have always and everywhere preyed on pigeons if they could. Their nature doesn't change. Candide kind of lamely protests that it is different with people because of free will. Voltaire seems to be mocking Rousseau's romantic notion of a state of nature - and of course the savage tribes that are presented in Candide are far from idyllic innocents, they come very close to eating Candide and his friend and only let him off when they discover he's killed a priest. There's a belief that we should fight for change, but that things will always inevitably be chaotic, messy and unpleasant.
When I set out to write my own novel, I thought often of Candide, and realized I was more or less writing the same character.