Candide by Voltaire; critical edition by Nicholas Cronk (review)

Nicholas Cronk’s new edition of Candide offers a fresh look at Voltaire’s most famous literary work. With an updated Introduction and new critical and historiographical essays penned by scholars over the past two decades, Cronk brings to light the most important lesson in Voltaire’s Candide: that despite our desire ‘to impose order on the chaos of the narrative’ (p. xi), the meaning of the novel remains ambiguous, and therefore attractive, over 250 years after its first publication. Following the first two Norton editions of Candide, Cronk uses Robert M. Adams’s masterful English translation of Voltaire’s 1759 work. After presenting a short Introduction and Adams’s translation, Cronk organizes the various critical approaches to Candide in two parts: a ‘Backgrounds’ section with contextualizing essays from recent and not-so-recent philosophers and historians; and a ‘Criticism’ section in which Cronk has curated some of the finest literary analyses of Voltaire’s tale, from both past and present. He concludes the volume with a bibliography of English-language scholarship on Candide. Cronk has drawn on his extensive experience editing the Voltaire Foundation’s Complete Works of Voltaire to provide his readers with a holistic view of the context and textual workings of Voltaire’s novel. By pairing essays geared towards a general public, like Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article on Voltaire and human rights, with rigorous academic essays, such as W. H. Barber’s essay on Voltaire’s knowledge of Leibniz’s philosophy, Cronk implicitly shows the wide range of Voltaire’s influence. Of particular interest in the ‘Backgrounds’ section is Cronk’s own essay, a work from 2009 that overturns the often-thought and often-taught notion that Voltaire’s novel is just one example of the conte philosophique — a cumbersome category of literature that Cronk shows as more of a posterior invention than any real type of novel that existed during the eighteenth century. The ‘Criticism’ section includes various close readings of the novel, from Robin Howells’s structuralist account of Candide to a translation of Jean Starobinski’s famous essay on the self-referential and ‘kaleidoscopic’ (p. 231) elements of the narrative. While several essays might strike the modern reader as dated (for example, J. G. Weightman’s 1960 essay, ‘The Quality of Candide’), most readers will agree that Cronk has accomplished what so many critical editions fail to do: he has provided readers with short, readable essays from a diversity of disciplines, which inspire further enquiry — without seeking to convey impossibly comprehensive knowledge about Voltaire, Candide, or the Enlightenment. Norton’s previous edition of Candide dates back to 1981; Cronk’s third edition is thus a welcome attempt to bolster the visibility of the novel within an English-speaking public that reads far too few classical French works. Perhaps most importantly, Cronk’s edition offers English speakers a better understanding of, and the opportunity to participate in, a recent French phenomenon: the resurgence of Voltaire as a lucid social commentator on difference, tolerance, and humanity — as an intellectual point of reference in light of recent terrorist attacks and social discord.