What was your favorite section of Candide. What’s one of the themes in the work? How does your section relate to central theme in the work? What was the aesthetic reading experience like for you? Explain/reflect at length on each and use support from introduction to Voltaire/Enlightenment.

Description

Reading: Voltaire’s Candide

Candide is a most vivid and often absurd tale revealing the immorality in a fair number of moral presuppositions. There is little the often macabre comedy does not mock, including fiction and comedy, themselves. Significantly, Candide reveals the underside of claims for “a rational universal order,” a claim Alexander Pope, by the way, held firmly. Particularly, Candide skewers arguments that the universe is rationally ordered and blind faith: “the artificial order posited by philosophic optimists…: ‘Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds'” (Spacks 375).

Thankfully, and perhaps even in spite of itself, Candide can be very funny. And it works as fiction quite well in that fiction offers rich context and textures through which the subtleties and complexities of philosophical ideas may be explored in a series of little fictional stories without first having to master the discourse of philosophy. To attempt to honor the spirit of the satire, the following experimental task is yours.

TASK 1:

As you complete each chapter, carefully select one sentence from each of the 30 short chapters of Candide. Having thus selected, string those sentences together. No transitions are needed, though some paragraphing might be considerate. For example, here is my first paragraph drawn from the first six chapters, which as you will see, highlights and satirizes rational, rational order, and philosophic optimism.

Notice in those sentences selected below the rational words like cause, effect, best, right, the Columbus logic, and the satire woven into them–well, you’ll have to have read the sentences in the context to get the satire:

He [Pangloss] proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in the best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses. “You are right,” said Candide; “this is what I was always taught by Mr. Pangloss, and I see plainly that all is for the best.”

The orator’s wife, putting her head out of the window, and spying a man that doubted whether the Pope was Anti-Christ, poured over him a full…Oh, heavens! to what excess does religious zeal carry the ladies. “Not at all,” replied the great man, “it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds, for if Columbus had not in an island in America caught this disease, which contaminates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.

“For,” said he [Pangloss], “all that is is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon [an actual earthquake that killed about 100,000 people in 1755] it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what then are the others?”

Task 2:

What was your favorite section of Candide. What’s one of the themes in the work? How does your section relate to central theme in the work? What was the aesthetic reading experience like for you? Explain/reflect at length on each and use support from introduction to Voltaire/Enlightenment.

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