Great Authors - Neo-Classical and Romantic Literature - Voltaire, Candide

[Music] so voltaire's candide is one of the most entertaining and accessible of the great works of western literature it's an exceedingly funny piece of work it's brief it's pithy it's short and it's surprisingly pessimistic for a work of comedy for a humorous work now voltaire is living middle of the 18th century and he's riding the wave of the high enlightenment he's one of the great figures in the french enlightenment and what voltaire objects to is the optimism that is associated with many thinkers of the enlightenment for example example alexander pope or wilhelm leibniz leibniz's theodicy attempts to do what all theodicies do to justify god's ways to man and he's a sort of characteristic thinker of the enlightenment by the time we get to voltaire where voltaire wishes to argue against the idea that we're able to justify god's ways to man that human suffering and human existence makes sense that it's clearly a part of providence well the enlightenment is waning in others we're getting to the end of the enlightenment it's becoming rather bitter rather cynical rather too self-conscious it's lost its naive optimism that it had perhaps a century before now candide was published in 1758 and the immediate spur to writing it was the disaster that happened in lisbon in 1755 which was a tremendous earthquake which arbitrarily killed a tremendous number of people now in terms of something like alexander pope's idea that whatever is is best or whatever it is is right or leibniz's idea that god only sends evil and suffering into the world in order to create some greater benefit voltaire believes that suffering is inexplicable and arbitrary in other words voltaire's god is a god that is either indifferent or non-existent right voltaire who is known for his deism in other words he believes in god apparently believes in a god that has absconded the god that has taken off a god that is no longer concerned with determining the fate of individual human beings he's sort of the voltaire's conception of god is is the the creator who flips the first switch or pushes the first domino in the causal link that generates all the rest of the universe but after pushing that first domino god went off and did something else and as a consequence we're left to our own devices and our confrontation with the evil of this world is the theme that voltaire wants to talk about now surprisingly enough this very serious and deep and somewhat disturbing topic is given a very humorous treatment and this book candide has a deceptive lightness of tone it's very funny and the tone of it is so ironic there are ironies of of diction but also ironies of situation uh ironies of plot the the ironic tone lends to it a lightness that it wouldn't have otherwise and when you stop and try and get beneath the surface i think you'll find that this is anything but a light book in fact this is a bitterly pessimistic book this is a book that is often given to children or not your children but to high school students because it's the kind of thing that clever high school students can get access to it's 100 pages in and out it's kind of funny there are a few kind of mildly dirty jokes and it's kind of entertains seniors in high school the difficulty is is that when you kind of press beneath the surface and you think about the sort of philosophical positions that are being taken we'll find that this is a rather morbid book in some respects the lightness of tone and the ironies the kind of humorous ironies that are constantly found in it conceal a deeper pessimism talk about that when we finish up now candide the subtitle to it is optimism and volterra is wondering how is it you can be optimistic when every once in a while nature for no visible reason decides to drop the roof on everyone's head in other words it generates things like the lisbon earthquake of 1755 which kills thousands of people how can one maintain optimism in the sense of such senseless misery in other words why should we believe that god's in his heaven and all's right with the world when the human condition is blighted hopes is thwarted aspirations is arbitrary accidental pain and misery how is it we're going to find a way to adjust ourselves to the realities of the human condition voltaire thinks that alexander pope and wilhelm leibniz are on the wrong track if you believe in a god other than the deistic god that kind of is the kind of prime mover if you believe in a god that is truly providential that supervises all of human affairs then we have to give him the responsibility for what is evil in human life and there is so much evil and so much pain in human life that we end up with a very devilish kind of god and these sorts of optimistic constructions which suggest that in apparent evil is real we really find good and we really find god's providential plan only make the human condition less bearable that is a way of miseducating us and when we are miseducated to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds which is taken directly from leibniz well then we are forced to confront the fact that the world as we experience it doesn't make sense so when there's a discrepancy between our theory and our actual experience of the world our optimist our would-be apologist for god's providence ends up saying that what appears to be evil really isn't and voltaire thinks that that's a fundamental mistake the lisbon earthquake of 1755 was real evil it's not just apparent evil it's not the god manifesting himself mysteriously has decided to do something great by killing thousands of people in fact this doesn't show any sign of providential plan it appears that the world we live in is a kind of moral chaos a very modern sounding idea we see we hear the waning of the enlightenment it becomes kind of bitter much less optimistic than it had been in the past in a way you can say the candide takes up the problem of the book of job in other words why do good do bad things happen to good people all right and instead of adopting a position of rigorous and inflexible faith in god's providence the way job does candide or voltaire in this case ends up taking the position of job's wife if not quite curse god and die at least shut up and live until you happen to expire in other words stop suggesting that this is all for the best that pollyanna-ish attitude only makes things worse so candide who starts up being as his name would suggest are innocent naive miseducated optimist is ultimately going to conclude that we should cultivate our gardens which is to say we should live without philosophizing it is the only way that makes life bearable right a kind of negative very cynical comment on human beings confrontation with the evil in the world now let's think about the characters here because the characters are most entertaining first of all is candide himself he's a young man who lives in a castle which is of course the best of all possible castles and he encounters the best of all possible people because he has the best of all possible teachers which is pangloss pangloss meaning all talk or all speech right is in fact all talk right his wordy explanations of why everything works out for the best and why this is the best of all possible worlds and why this is the best of all possible coffee cups and why he's the best of all possible naive young men in fact miseducate candide so candide is a kind of youthful naive figure the image of a male-educated youth someone that's been brought up to be optimistic his optimism turns out to be catastrophic in many respects the moral of candide the idea behind it is that optimism makes the world worse and a kind of resignation if not quite pessimism is the best way of adapting yourself to the moral chaos of human life now in addition to candide we get candide's love kunaganda and she's the best of all possible women with the exception of the fact that she's vain faithless opportunistic and cruel but this is the best of all possible vanity cruelty opportunism in other words kunaganda has been miseducated as well it's just that she doesn't have the attractive virtuous qualities that candide has even in his naivete she's hypocritical she's proud she's aristocratic she's most of the things that candide himself is not with the exception of the fact that both of them have been miseducated by dr pangloss now dr pangloss is a real study everything he touches goes wrong he is a completely destructive figure and every time he says something you can bet that exactly the opposite is going to happen he's constantly explaining this is the best of all possible worlds they live in the best of all possible castles and that these are the best of all possible people and as a consequence immediately when he says that this is the best of all possible anything some terrible misfortune befalls them and this is entire is designed to suggest that optimism ill prepares us to meet the challenges of life and to meet these difficulties a kind of resignation as an alternative that would be a far better idea certainly you should shut up about what you don't understand whereas pan gloss who's all talk won't shut his mouth and insists on dogmatically adhering to this optimism throughout the course of his experiences which are quite varied and i'll get to the plot a little bit another philosopher in some respects the foil of pangloss the opposite of pangloss is martin martin is a philosopher and theologian who is who encounters candide in south america and he is as far as candide can tell the most unfortunate of men he's been persecuted by the church he's impoverished and wretched he lives in suriname and wants to get out wants to get back to paris and he is exactly the opposite of pan gloss in the sense that he is a pessimistic philosopher he always bets on the evil in human nature and in this novel anyway he always wins in other words when pan gloss and oh and uh martin and candide whenever they make a wager as to are these people happy or is this going to work out right martin says no these people aren't happy or no this is not going to work out right no your expectations are all going to be shattered i'm afraid your hopes are all going to be blighted you're better off not hoping at all and candide says no i've been educated by dr pangloss that can't be right and martin wins every bit all right a very na it's witty and wonderful the likeness of tone is deceptive here it's quite a pessimistic novel now in addition to that we get cacombo cacombo as a character is useful in furthering the plot doesn't have much of a character development but he's a kind of faithful servant that runs important errands for candide to move the plot along otherwise you wouldn't have a beautiful hundred page novel you'd have a kind of dreary 200 page novel in other words you can get away with this kind of unrestricted cynicism for about a hundred pages and still have the tone be light and still have it be funny if you had a kind of giant teutonic 300 page dinosaur no one would get to the end so one of the nice parts about french culture and french letters in particular is they have a sense of proportion and voltaire also has a sense of touch in literary terms he realizes that you can only make an argument like this within the parameters of a kind of novella with a really very short novel there's also an old woman who is a sort of foil to kunaganda she's the pope's daughter all right he's really gouging away at the papacy there right and she's undergone all sorts of miseries and trials she's uh she's enslaved and raped and one of her buttocks is cut off and eaten she gets cannibalized all kinds of bad stuff happens and yet she persists in affirming this life and saying yes i still want to live um she doesn't have any of the optimistic ideas that kuna gunder or candide start out with but she represents the kind of force of human experience and the insistence and and persistence and tenacity in the face of misery or unhappiness and the final character is poco curante he's a venetian senator who's something of an atheist he's an intellectual he's very widely read he's aristocratic he's wealthy and he's full of ennui in other words he's bored and he's very unhappy and he's very unhappy about the fact that the world is a kind of spiritual vacuum i strongly suspect that poco curante is meant to be autobiographical in other words voltaire who has at his disposal all the benefits of western european culture who has the patronage of influential political leaders who lives a fairly easy life who has access to the greatest works of western culture and is one of the important figures in western culture at the time is somewhat jaded he's seen a little bit too much this is obviously the kind of book written by someone that's seen a little too much who said a surfeit of and who can only get out the pessimism in this sort of a catharsis okay those are the most important characters worth thinking about there are a few others there's kunaganda's parents and kunaganda's brother who'll be brought in later on but they don't play especially large roles now the plot plot is amazingly complicated for 100 pages i mean there's an awful lot going on there they zigzag all across the world and find that not much changes blighted hopes shattered expectations optimism is constantly foiled pessimism reigns supreme the world is moral chaos it's a sort of anti-theodicy in other words where leibniz which or milton for that matter wish to justify god's ways to man voltaire intends not to justify anything because there's no justice in the world rather we live in a world that doesn't make any moral sense it's the opposite of a theodicy a god doesn't have much influence on the world he may have started it and created it we need him around as a kind of kind of throw in the first baseball the way the president does at the beginning of every baseball season but apart from that's all we're going to hear about god and so he appears to be indifferent to us into our sufferings in other in other words rather than justifying god's ways to man what we're getting here is is a statement that says god's ways cannot be justified to man god is indifferent to us we must take care of ourselves and the only way to take care of yourselves is to shut up stop talking about things you don't understand abandon optimism because that's for kids the best thing you can do is to cultivate your garden a surprisingly pessimistic novel i have some reservations about giving this you know to high school kids for that reason i don't i doubt very many of them will actually get underneath and figure out the philosophical implications but it's extremely bitter and negative all right let's go with the plot candide lives in a castle with the baron and his wife and the daughter is kunaganda and pangloss is their teacher he's the court philosopher i guess a figure meant to lampoon leibniz and what he does is he says this is the best of all possible worlds god runs things as a theodicy that we all understand and that we have good grounds for optimism as soon as that happens candide happens to notice pangloss involved in some sort of sexual tryst with one of the ladies in waiting having had his curiosity about sex kind of started he and kuna gunda get involved in a kind of small sexual liaison but since this is the best of all possible small sexual liaisons the baron catches them and he gets the best of all possible kicks on the backside out out of the castle so out they go immediately we have this ironic downturn of events right where our would-be intellectual or alleged intellectual pangloss is in fact turned out turns out to be a rather physical rather hypocritical figure as well as being destructive whereas dopey candide gets booted out on account of the fact that he doesn't know enough to separate what people say from what people do audi goes and immediately given that he's been kicked out into the best of all possible worlds he is dragooned and conscripted into the bulgarian army now there's all kinds of subtexts in this section about the bulgarian army the bulga the bulgarians of the bulgars are fighting the avars the bulgarians are meant to be the prussians and by calling them bulgarian there's a connection here in french to the idea of homosexuality the deep text is that he's accusing frederick the great of prussia of being a pederast as i said i have some reservations about giving this to 16 year olds that that's the deep text here but he gets dragged into the army and doesn't like the idea of being caught up in this miserable war that he has no interest in and no inclination to fight towards fighting and having been conscripted he runs away he gets caught gets brought back and instead of getting terrible mutilations done to him they're willing just to have him run the the gauntlet of ten thousand soldiers and get ten thousand stripes and of course he's beaten mercilessly because he gets the best of all possible beatings he holds on to his optimism right to the end all right there's a war they fight a battle he's unable to actively participate and because in the confusion of the battle he does manage to get away and who does he encounter but a man covered with terrible sores now you may have read the bible before and you may remember a man covered with terrible sores in this case though it's not job it's dr pangloss who's gotten syphilis from his sexual tryst with the lady in waiting so now he is covered with terrible source i mean again the lampooning of optimism is unrelenting in this novel so he finds pangloss and says oh my this must be the best of all possible diseases and this must be the best of all possible conditions for you to be in and we're only like 10 pages into the novel right we're going to cover a lot of pessimistic ground here so he brings pangloss to the best of all possible cities where they are unable to get any kind of solace or help from other people until they meet a kind anabaptist and this anabaptist who is of course a member of a reviled religious sect right who's persecuted by both protestants and catholics right turns out to be a genuinely nice person in other words it's not that all the people in the world are evil it's not that people are constantly doing unkind things it's that there's no moral order to the world sometimes good things happen to good people sometimes bad things happen to good people sometimes bad people prosper sometimes they do badly the world is not the deck isn't stacked against good but rather the world this deck is stacked arbitrarily the cards of life have been shuffled god hasn't stacked the deck and goodness doesn't necessarily get requited so the anabaptist out of kind of christian charity which is of course a way of lampooning both the protestants and the catholics at this time turns out to be the only really kind person in this part of the novel he takes candide in out of his own pocket he pays for a cure for panglossa syphilis and he says i'd like to hire you guys give you a chance to earn your keep so he does they get on board a ship and they sail to lisbon which is just about to have an earthquake right which is going to kill everyone now just outside the harbor there's a terrible storm raging and one of the sailors falls off the ship and is drowning what happens the good natured good-natured kind-hearted christian anabaptist jacques reaches out and actually saves the sailor now in the process of saving the sailor all right he himself falls in the sailor clambers on board jacques the kind-hearted good-natured anabaptist is there and the sailor never gives a second thought and lets them drown see what happens to good people there's no moral order to the world nice people have that happen to them the evil sailor is along with candide and pangloss the only person that gets saved in the wreck of the ship good things happen to bad people bad things happen to good people that's the way the world is we have no grounds for optimism well they go to lisbon there's been a uh this earthquake tremendous destruction so naturally the catholic church kicks in and decides that this destruction has been caused by heresy so the inquisition hunts down heretics and decides to burn them the idea being that an infallible way of preventing earthquakes is to burn some people so naturally gloss and and candide are likely candidates for this wrap them up and burn them it turns out though that they don't get killed they are saved on account of the fact that kuna gunda who had been thought dead well she's back and she happens to be in a she's been she's been raped and taken into kind of concubinage by one of the soldiers she manages to i mean essentially prostitute herself all the way across europe and of course candida is still in love with her tremendously and he thinks that she's the paragon of feminine virtue and she manages to save him by influencing whoever it is that you know that has her as a concubine now well candide is saved and he finds and what we find is that uh she's the concubine of two men at the same time one is a cardinal right another gouge away at the church and the other is a jewish money lender all right a gouge of the jews in other words no one comes out of this looking good right except negative philosophers well candida is there but he gets caught you know in the act of being in her quarters the cardinal comes in candide kills him the jewish money lender comes in candide kills him now they have to take it on the lamb so what do they do candide and kuna gunda and the old woman who's been a kind of serving woman to kuna gunda decided they're going to go to the new world so they steal some jewels from the cardinal they take off they go to the new world and they go to buenos aires they go to argentina now in argentina it turns out that the military ruler of the colony takes a fancy to kunaganda and candide says it's about time for me to get out of here because the forces of law are out after me i'm a murderer i have to take off so he goes to paraguay to visit the jesuits the jesuits turn out to be rapacious evil men who are taking advantage of the kind good-natured good-hearted indians no one who claims to be holy or sanctified turns out to be at all good in this novel now kuniganda asks the old lady what should i do and she counsels opportunism so do something go ahead marry him what difference does it make if i were in your position i would certainly never hesitate to do that go right ahead so she does marry him no problem and candide goes up to paraguay and he finds that fortunately for us the leader of the jesuits there is in fact the brother of kunaganda who had been thought dead in the process of having the castle burn down well he stays there a while has a falling out with candy with uh the brother and runs away to the jungle captured by cannibals savages the epitome of enlightenment degradation and evil they turn out to be pretty nice which is kind of what you would expect as soon as the as the savages find out that candide and his servant cacombo are not uh jesuits they say okay in that case we're not going to eat you we all need jesuits around here they actually have it coming so candide and cacombo move from the jungles of paraguay from the jungles of central america and they managed to get to el dorado el dorado is the only example of utopian society here it represents the acme of social achievement of political order and el dorado is wonderful it's a kind of it's voltaire's idea of heaven all right all the people are kind everything is available gratis everyone is virtuous and are as good as human beings can ever expect to be science is respected learning is pursued wisdom and virtue reign everywhere el dorado is a kind of this worldly heaven el dorado is just wonderful and kokombo and candide get a chance to go to meet the king and the king turns out to be an ideal king and the society turns out to be beautifully organized and they've got all these scientific inventions and technological advantages just a wonderful place also the the dirt in their country is gold and the stones are gems so this is a real nice place the people that live in el dorado are carefully tucked away so they're very inaccessible as utopias generally are and in particular the very few visitors they have have always really liked the gold and the rocks which the visit which the inhabitants of el dorado really don't understand so you want our mud you want our stones well look take it with you we got plenty we don't really want it these people that live without um avarice right people that live virtuous lives now this is such a wonderful place this is such a heaven on earth this is such an idyllic existence that cacombo and and candide have to leave in other words this is a very important idea here i think this is one of the pivot the pivotal point of the novel if we were able ever to get to a utopian society if we were able to actually find the good world the perfect world the heaven on earth that we all long for human perversity would drive us from it combo and candide leave eldorado for the same reason that adam and eve left eden all right human perversity the drive towards experiencing the world is its own downfall it requites itself and it causes us to find even paradise intolerable now if paradise is intolerable wait and see how intolerable the world is going to turn out to be this is that is one of the most perverse decisions in any novel and it's a very very negative indictment of the kind of questing element the unsettled element in human nature in other words if you were able to get to the perfect society that you claim you want you couldn't stand it human nature is such that we cannot make ourselves happy in the long run even the thing even getting the things we want is as unsatisfying as not getting the things we want now they're in el dorado and they decide they're going to leave but they ask if it's okay can we i mean they asked the king well we'd like to take off and he says well look i think that's stupid from what i've heard about the rest of the world i don't know why you want to go but okay you want to take some mud and stones with you okay everybody that comes here wants to leave takes mud and stones i don't know what the problem is with you people must be some lack of them where you come from and he also takes some red sheep with him which are kind of an entertaining oddity and packed up the inhabitants of el dorado being the kind people they are and being the highly sophisticated technological people that they are find a way for these for combo and candide to get out and they lose some of the treasure on the way but they have a substantial amount of it and they end up in the dutch colony of suriname central america and what happens is that they try and find passage back to europe now at first of course they're defrauded as soon as they go back to the regular elements in the world the first thing that happens is the fool in his money are soon parted and candide uh puts most of his treasure on board ship where he's been told he's going to get passage and instead the captain decides i'm just going to take off smart move right he gets to take off with the red sheep he gets to keep the gold dust he gets to keep the gems it's just wonderful candidate still has kept her a few dollars around for his own personal use and when he sees that go out he says i've left el dorado there goes my treasure i know where i am now i'm back in the real world and he decides that he's going to try and make this the best of all possible worlds he has a kind of charitable streak candida is basically a sympathetic character and he says i'm going to look around here in suriname for the most wretched person i can find for the person who is the most unhappy so he has a kind of unhappiness contest and of course there's plenty of that to go around so there's a long line all right of unhappy people out his door again another rather negative comment about the status of the human or the human condition itself well he finally settles upon martin remember our pessimistic philosopher martin says well i'm a searcher after truth i've done my best to be religious and and to be virtuous and as a consequence of that i've been constantly hounded by the inquisition and they're going to kill me as soon as they get me here i am i'm poor i'm wretched i'm stuck in this god forsaken place which is very definitely not el dorado and if you want to start a wretchedness or misery contest i'm your man i definitely win that so candide says okay i'll pay for you to come back you'll be my my new guide now that i've lost pangloss and cacombo has gone down to south america to get kunaganda for me i guess you're the right sort of companion for me so with this remaining money he pays for their passage to paris now on the way across the atlantic remember that ship that had taken off with his money he gets to see that ship attacked by pirates and it's sinking so in other words the message here is not that good is always give is always results in evil that good activities are good people are always treated badly or that evil people always prosper the world isn't that morally organized not only is it not run by god it's not run by the devil it's totally chaotic so he gets the satisfaction of seeing his uh money and this you know kind of thieving captain go down to the bottom of the ocean and they see some of the red sheep floating around they bring them on you know up on shore and they're brought over to france the red sheep are ultimately donated to the french academy of sciences and someone works out an equation which shows they must be red and they must all die of whatever disease kills sheep right i mean it's a kind of a send up of french intellectual life which is a ripe for satire i mean if you think of the ponderous qualities but works out very nicely no one escapes criticism or almost nothing escapes criticism in this book well they get to france and immediately he gets to see the best element in parisian society which is to say thieves and swindlers and cutthroats who are mostly aristocrats in other words everyone is a hypocrite everyone is a liar everyone is out on the make except the stupid people who are optimists so we got we get the experienced evil people right who know what the deal is and constantly take advantage of dopey candide and we get optimistic people who constantly are the fodder for these kinds of folks so he's taken advantage of in a number of ways uh he loses 50 000 levers in his first 10 minutes at the card table because he doesn't know what card shocking is he meets a woman who seduces him and there's a it's a really funny passage because she says i really do admire that giant diamond ring on your hand and she admires enough she's going to take it i got lots of rocks from eldorado and she says usually i make my lovers linger for a full two weeks but why don't we just go to bed directly a kind of send-up of parisian society salon society and then of course there's another priest that comes back in and he's of course depraved and corrupt as well he wants to hear what candide's story is because he figures it's got to be a few dollars in this for him and he hears that he's searching for the wonderful kuna gunda who's the best of all possible women and he says well what happened to he said well i left her in in buenos aires and i haven't seen her since but i said cacom before she's supposed to be here any day priest is thinking okay we got a real live one here so he says fine kuniganda has just sent him a letter i happen to have a letter from kunaganda okay that's a good coincidence but dopey candide thinking the best of people says well this must be the best of all possible letters right and this is the best of all possible coincidences i happen to tell them this story and the letter shows up the next day it's beautiful it's not in kuniganda's hand but perhaps her handwriting has changed over the years or over the time okay so it turns out the kuna gun is deathly ill and is in bed and because she has a disease of the voice her voice sounds somewhat different and it'll be important for candide not to see her she's behind a veil in the in the bed and what she would like is a large part of candide's money candy gives it to her okay and then finds out that he's been taken but it's too late then the money's gone and so is kunagandu was never there and the priest absconds with the money constant digs but against organized religion so they come back and he says you know this is not the kind of country i want to stay in let's go to a good country like england well they set sail for england they get into the english harbor and the first thing they see is one of the things that actually happened to be happening in contemporary um in england at the time an admiral was executed for dereliction of duty now it's widely thought that he didn't deserve this execution but he was killed and while uh martin and candida still on the boat martin says look this is the way people act all the time see i told you what do you expect people are not the way pan gloss told you they are and they see this the admiral get killed and they say i don't even want to get off the boat here i don't want to encounter these people they killed that admiral for no good reason let's take off let's go to venice so they leave directly from england to venice and in there they managed to see a happy couple and the happy couple of chronicles turn out to be a and a priest i mean it's unrelenting we're only 60 pages into this right i mean it doesn't let up and he says finally a happy couple a and a priest isn't that adorable and martin says no they're not happy and candide says they're definitely happy and as soon as candy says they're definitely anything they're all they're always definitely not that and whenever martin says no they're not happy martin's always right being the pessimistic philosopher the opposite of pangloss and he says we'll invite them to dinner we'll have a little chat with him well the horror is wretched and miserable she doesn't like being a prostitute she just happens to be forced by necessity into this the priest says look i didn't ask to be a priest i'm a younger son of an aristocratic family there's no other way for me to live i can't get inheritance i'm you know prime minister rules here so i had to enter the church but i hate the church i hate this life i'm not a real priest i have no religious calling and i'm constantly consorting with there's nothing between us it's just she's a and i'm a priest and that's the way it is and of course candide pays off barton says all right you know i mean martin's thinking well look you know it's a shame this kid's so dumb on the other hand i'm gonna make a few dollars out of this because every bet i win constant pessimism constant negativity now fortunately while in venice they managed to meet a number of interesting people in the first case they meet cacombo who's back remember we left him inside south america on his way to get kunaganda well he's been enslaved and so is kunaganda and they're back in turkey now they're at constantinople and they happen fortunately for us or combo happens fortunately for us to be in venice and what happens there is he says fine we're going to go i have a little extra money we're going to go rescue all the captives who are held by the by the turks so that's one of their projects they send kakamba back to arrange that second thing that they encounter is six or yeah i think it's either six or ten dethroned kings in other words they've come to venice for the carnival and these men are completely wretched so amidst all the carnal atmosphere all the frivolity and all the hilarity and all the pleasure and all the joy we have wretched people all right which is a very bitter description of the human world beneath all our frivolity is a sort of forced happiness or rather just a veneer of happiness which covers over in fact the world is moral chaos and most of us are wretched or stupid those are your choices harsh well they also get a chance to dine with senator poco curante right the venetian a venetian senator politically influential exceedingly wealthy who lives a life of luxury and they say finally i mean candida is much relieved finally we have the best of all possible venetian senators and he must live the best of all possible lives because look at this beautiful house i mean if every anybody been to venice what a beautiful city i mean you can see how someone could really settle down there and think okay i mean this may be a chaotic world but this is kind of nice so they make a bet martin and candide say all right well here we you know i got somebody that's really happy who's you know deserves the pleasure that they get well no it doesn't work out that way pocahontas says well actually i'm bored to tears i've read all the great works of western literature and i suppose there are a few chapters in the iliad that are all right apart from that they're real snooze they're overdone and it's constantly repetitive and if i hear any more about rosie's finger dawn i'm just gonna go nuts i can't cope with this anymore i have great masterpieces of renaissance art hanging all over my building and i have wonderful classical sculptures and i followed all of them tedious in other words he's a jaded intellectual aesthete who has everything a man could want in terms of family life home life political power the ability to absorb beauty kind of highly sensitized highly developed aesthetic taste he's bored to tears as kierkegaard says boredom is the root of all evil well senator poco curante who i think represents the views held by voltaire himself this may be a way of alleviating his own boredom his own enemy turns out that martin's making a few dollars every bet that he makes it turns out we find unhappy people you scratch the surface you see human misery everywhere well off they go to constantinople they rescue kuna gunda and by now kuna gunda is pretty weather beaten she's gotten old she's become ugly she's really unattractive and now that candide has her he no longer wants her think about blighted hopes thwarted aspirations everybody gets what they don't want i mean harsh ironies here also they managed to find once again pan gloss is back this best of all possible worlds sends pan gloss back he's been arrested for uh making sexual advances to a muslim girl in a mosque which shows his great religiosity religiosity so he's been stuck on the galleys and also fortunately for us we had thought that that candidate killed kunaganda's brother but no he recovers from his wounds and he's in the galleys and it turns out the same galley that pan gloss is in except that he's in the galley for sodomy so our jesuit would-be ruler of paraguay who is in fact an aristocrat and candide's brother has not been killed he's just been brought back so that he can be accused of sexual transgressions as well well he decides to ransom them all you know after all money is cheap and easy for candy he has a few dollars to spend even though he's lost a good bit of it to martin and he decides fine let's take them all you know so he rescues the captives and he says uh i suppose now i'm gonna marry kuna gunda and he doesn't want kuna gunda anymore she's ugly she's old i mean she's been a prostitute and he's starting to get the idea that this may not be the best of all possible worlds he's not entirely sure and they happen to ask a muslim dervisher clergyman what's the word on god's providence is the best of all possible world to not and the dervish gives very great wisdom i think this is the voice of voltaire himself saying god is essentially indifferent to us the actual uh point he makes is what does he say uh when the sultan sends a ship to egypt does he care about the happiness of the mice on board we are the mice on board the vessel of the world except we're not quite as interesting or significant as rodents an exceedingly harsh comment on the lack of moral order lack of kind of ethical structure to the world in other words this is an anti-theodicy now we're going to finish this all up what do we do with this because i mean they've been traipsing around the world for quite a bit now for 100 pages we've gotten quite a bit of geography done and they decide that they're going to settle down they buy they see a man who has a small farm he keeps working there and this work prevents him from the three main evils in human life and these three main evils are boredom vice and want he says look i have this little plot of land it's not a big farm but by cultivating my garden by not making general uh philosophical pronouncements about god's intentions for the world by not trying to redeem god's justice but not trying to understand god's purposes at least i can find a tolerable sort of existence i cultivate my gardens i grow oranges i like oranges oranges are the kind of thing that human beings can sensibly aspire to understanding god's purposes should be left alone anyone who tries to do that is likely to cause more problems for themselves than they manage to alleviate so we get this man who comes as close to human virtue and human happiness as we can imagine he has no ambition he has no horizons beyond the borders of his farm and that's about all you're going to get in life so voltaire buys a pla or not voltaire but candy buys a plot of land and says let's all live together we will cultivate our garden i will marry kunaganda and we'll make the best of what we have here well the brother who's very proud of his aristocratic lineage says under no circumstances are you going to marry my sister now remember who we have here he's a priest who's also homosexual who's just recently been been rescued from the galleys where he deserved to be by the kindness of candy he says back to the galleys with you that's all there is to that and the next thing he does is he marries kuna gunda but not because he desires her anymore he marries her out of spite oh man in other words a constantly negative interpretation of the human condition a constantly ironic set of turns of events and they get married and they decide to cultivate their garden and at the end of it what we conclude is that we must work without philosophizing it is the only way that makes life bearable in other words pangloss can stay as long as he shuts up and stops telling me this is the best of all possible worlds this world is just barely tolerable if we stop thinking about what it really amounts to now stop and think about what an ironic conclusion that is in other words the only way to make life bearable is not to think about it if you think about it you realize that it's a dead end that it's morally chaotic that you're whether you prosper or not has nothing to do with whether you're good or not that god is not in his heaven and all is not right with the world the conclusion of this is as pessimistic and assessment of the human condition as you're going to see the lightness of tone and the elegance of the writing in this novel is extremely deceptive the first time you read it particularly if you read it outside the context of what's going on in the late part of the enlightenment you can think of this as just a comic novel it's just kind of a bag of tell it's actually very very serious this is the sort of thing we might expect from poco curante right when he is in his blackest moods right voltaire then has a considerable amount of venom in this conclusion he not only wants to cure us of optimism the way candide is cured he also wants us to understand that the best human beings can hope for is a kind of oblivion a kind of constant work which at least takes up the time until you die elsewise it's only going to make things worse the attempt to say this is the best of all possible worlds makes this world as bad as it can be optimism or a pessimism in a way is its own reward optimism always gets its comeuppance or it gets its comeuppance often enough so that the best and most prudent and sensible and realistic approach to life is not to think about what life amounts to we must live without philosophizing at the time and i'll conclude with this by 1758 when this novel is published the enlightenment is clearly waning it's been on for a century or so at that time and the faith and optimistic hope that rationality will allow us to control nature and control ourselves has proven illusory this is the enlightenment kind of looking back on itself and on the optimism that is characteristic of the scientific rationalism we see developing which says no we should stop thinking we should kind of give up on these grandiose schemes which account for god's ways it's the only way that makes life bearable what we are seeing here is the gradual erosion in the faith that in the faith and reason that have been characteristic of the enlightenment that sustained the enlightenment thinkers and as that faith and reason erodes as this pessimism becomes more important we are moving towards a literary articulation of our dissatisfaction with the enlightenment and the result of that is going to be called romanticism

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 54,560

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Authors, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Voltaire, Candide

Id: sU3yB_mBSAo

Length: 46min 8sec (2768 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020