Voltaire: "Candide ou l'optimisme" (review)

REVIEWS 73 Quixote. The second novel, Columella; or, the Distressed Anchoret (1779), like Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, which Graves admired, is "an extended exemplum," exploring "the various ways in which people seek happiness" (p. 139). The third, Eugenius; or, Anecdotes of the Golden Vale (1785) is a Utopian story based on the optimistic thesis that the manners of the modem world are superior to those of the past. The final novel, Plexippus; or, the Aspiring Plebeian (1790), of which there are only two known copies, Tracy describes as flat in characterization and lacking in gusto. It starts out as a vindication of the status of a man of humble birth, but loses its point when the same man inherits a fortune and 'turns out to have good family connections as well' (p. 144) The common factor in all of Graves' fiction, according to his biographer, is the author's "comic outlook" which was, for him, "a God-sent means of preserving peace ofmind in a dark and frustrating world" (p. 145). While this statement may seem to invite comparison between Graves and that more celebrated novelistcum -parson, Laurence Sterne, Tracy would be the first to deny anything like equality of stature between the two. With this study, however, he has provided a fresh evaluation (the first since Charles Jarvis Hill's monograph, The Literary Career ofRichard Graves, published in 1935) of an important, if forever minor, contributor to the comic-idealistic novel of the eighteenth century. James Gray Dalhousie University André Magnan. Voltaire: "Candide ou l'optimisme." Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Etudes Littéraires 18), 1987. 125 pp. Fr 25. Candide continues to fascinate and provoke. A scholarly debate over "inside" and "outside" interpretations, touched off in 1969 by Roy Wolper's proposed ahistorical reading of Candide, "Candide, Gull in the Garden?", is still flourishing. In England another battle seems to be brewing over RJ. Howells' Bakhtinian reading. According to Renée Waldinger prefacing her 1987 volume on Candide in the MLA's "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" series, "Candide is probably the most frequently taught work of French literature" (p. ix). The twenty-four contributions to the volume range from Ralph Engelman's discussion of Candide's place in an eighth-grade history class, which discovered that their translation had been expurgated so as to be more palatable in parochial schools, to T.E.D. Braun's incorporation of the "inside/outside" argument into the teaching plan. Despite Candide's wide use, as Waldinger also notes, it is "not an easy book to teach"(p. ix). André Magnan's excellent essay will certainly not put the controversies to rest or make teaching Candide easy. In some respects the study seems to be conceived as an introductory guide, and indeed it could well serve such a purpose. 74 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION It contains certain basic tools: a selected bibliography, a chronology of relevant dates, a chapter on the historical contexts, an account of the publication, and a concluding section on its reception right down to the present—where we learn that French students did not have an unexpurgated textbook edition until 1969. Magnan's style, however, although lively and witty, does not aim for simplicity . His narratological analysis, following five parameters—temporalization, spatialization, function, disalienation, and action, the last itself subdivided into characters, causality, and events—by means of a chart full of strange symbols— "E (P2-P3): 0 Cacambo T", for example—seems intended exclusively for an academic reader of some sophistication. By contrast, the chronology, often a dull list of dates, is full of humour, including such items as the anecdote Diderot tells of catching his seventeen-year-old daughter reading Candide—"un livre infâme," he claims she said. The index, which lists the themes Magnan discusses and locates them in the tale (but not in Magnan's study), is both useful and provocative. Magnan is concerned to restore something of Candide's original impact, to overcome the effects not just of time passing but of a predetermined reading, directed and obscured by tradition, cliché, and the classroom. His goal is to help us "lire ou relire autrement" (p. 9). In the first chapter he makes...