Candide's Pangloss: Voltaire's Tragicomic Hero

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY CANDIDE’S PANGLOSS: VOLTAIRE’S TRAGICOMIC HERO ARTHUR SCHERR PERHAPS the most celebrated character in Voltaire’s Candide, Pangloss, the ridiculous scholar and pseudo-philosopher, has entertained millions of readers with his incorrigibly stubborn optimism and unintentional humor. Indeed, several intrigued scholars have attempted to identify the real-world acquaintance who they assume inspired Voltaire’s ludicrous creation.1 But is the bumbling scholar evil rather than naive? Voltaire expert Haydn Mason argues that almost everyone in the tale is basically malevolent, “gratuitously murderous or deceitful” (10) – including Pangloss . He believes that the loquacious “all-tongue” (his name’s Greek transliteration), whose cognomen also reminds one of Pan, the Greek sexobsessed satyr and woodland god, is incorrigibly narcissistic. Noting that Pangloss has acquired a great deal of historical and philosophical information to no purpose, Mason regards him as “a hollow character,” “doomed” obstinately “to plough the same furrow over and over until he dies” (80). He points to the incident in chapter 5, when Candide is knocked down by flying stones during the Lisbon earthquake and begs his companion to procure “a little wine and oil” to revive him. Initially Pangloss, preoccupied with explaining the reasons for the earthquake in terms of philosophical Optimism, ignores his importuning. 1 For example, Dawson argues that Pangloss was modeled on a Prussian woman, Luise Dorothea, Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, who frequently corresponded with Voltaire regarding the brutality of war before he wrote Candide. Deloffre presents evidence that Pangloss’s persona was based on Johann-Heinrich Meister, also known as Jean-Henri Le Maître, a Westphalian tutor and religious instructor with whom Voltaire was only slightly acquainted, but who was familiar with Voltaire’s lover, Charlotte-Sophie, comtesse de Bentinck. YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 87 Finally, after Candide loses consciousness, he brings him some water, “a poor substitute worthy of that impractical philosopher,” Mason critically observes (65-66). Not only does Mason depict Pangloss as unconscionably parsimonious and self-centered, he also blames him for the drowning of the kindly Dutch Anabaptist Jacques, calling him “a menace when his recourse to quietist passivity results in Jacques’s death” (77). In Mason’s view, Pangloss’s facile, a priori optimism endangers humanity. “Pangloss represents the constant menace of the ivory tower intellectual who, for all his scholarship, works complacently within a preordained system of values,” Mason writes. “Abstract dogmas always carry the threat of intolerance and oppression, even if Pangloss himself does nothing worse than allow Jacques to die” (81). Mason’s judgment seems unfair. When Candide is injured, Pangloss never leaves his side, although he makes a rambling speech, in accordance with his persona as an “absent-minded” professor. Although Candide asks him for wine and oil, it is hardly likely that he would be able to find such relatively luxurious items during the Lisbon earthquake, whose cataclysmic violence and ensuing chaos this chapter emphasizes. Pangloss does bring Candide “some water from a nearby fountain” (Candide 11), which ought to be more efficacious in reviving him than wine, although it is perhaps less pleasurable. As for Jacques’ essentially accidental death, the brutish Dutch sailor alone is responsible for that. By convincing Candide not to jump overboard after Jacques in an attempt to save him, Pangloss probably saved our hero’s life. Mason incorrectly implies that Pangloss physically restrains Candide. But Candide has so far actually exhibited little courage, having during his brief career as a soldier fled from battle. In Voltaire’s famous words: “Trembling like a philosopher, [he] hid himself as best he could while this heroic butchery was going on” (5). Candide’s narrator describes the events following Jacques’ fall overboard : “Candide rushed to the rail, and saw his benefactor [Jacques] rise for a moment to the surface, then sink forever. He wanted to dive to his rescue; but the philosopher Pangloss prevented him by proving that the bay of Lisbon had been formed expressly for this Anabaptist to drown in” (9). Apparently, Candide required little persuasion to desist from jumping in after Jacques. Anxiously peering into the abyss-like sea, more in 88 ROMANCE NOTES fear than courage, he ostensibly has little inclination to act. That he even bothered to take the...