Voltaire's Zadig, Chaos Theory, and the Problem of Determinism vs. Free Will

Voltaire's Zadig, Chaos Theory, and the Problem of Determinism vs. Free Will THEODORE E. D. BRAUN It is tempting to look at Voltaire's contes (and for that matter, his theater) as consisting of simple, linear stories, moving straight ahead in time and presenting a moral lesson at the end. Voltaire even seems to simplify the task of identifying the moral lesson in some of his tales, giving them convenient subtitles which we can use to focus our attention while reading. Candide ( 1758) appears to be a story about Leibnitzian optimism, while Zadig ( 1747) apparently discusses fate, if we are to believe their subtitles; but if we look at the subtitle of Alzire, ou les Américains (1736), we have an inkling of a practice that was to become standard with Voltaire, that of misleading subtitles : the real subject of this tragedy is not the Incas (although the action takes place in sixteenth-century Pern) but different interpretations of eighteenth -century Catholicism and Voltairean deism.1 Nor is Candide's main subject—at least, not after the point has been forcefully made in the first few chapters—Leibnitzian Optimism, but a biting satire of human society, a dark comedy with a glimmer of hope for the future. In Zadig and Candide, the real subject is only partially what we are led to believe. What is the real subject of Zadig, and how can we discover it? In this essay, I will try to establish the nonlinearity of Zadig, which will open up the possibility of exploring the conte through the perspective of chaos theory. But if this examination does not lead to a new finding or resolve old problems in new ways, the theory will have been misapplied: not 195 196 / BRAUN every problem contained within a particular work, after all, can be illuminated by a particular theoretical approach, nor can any particular theoretical approach be used as a universal panacea, answering the many questions that older readings had posed. I believe that chaos theory can lead to fresh interpretations capable of clearing the critical scene of many old and dusty cobwebs . This article is a modest step in that direction. Still, there appears to be an oxymoronic relationship between the words Voltaire and chaos: the first word suggests not only a skeptical, anticlerical, and incredulous spirit of mockery (as the Petit Robert definition of voltairien indicates), but also a sense of order, reason, and clarity, which are at the antipodes of chaos. Chaos, as it is understood by modem scientists and mathematicians , is used not only in "the older sense of chance, randomness, disorder " that most literary and historical scholars are likely to associate with the word; in the modem sense, chaotic systems all contain an order in the midst of disorder, they are "both deterministic and unpredictable," they raise questions (when applied to human beings) of free will and determinism; "chaos leads to order, and order back to chaos."2 Chaos theory has, therefore, a somewhat different meaning from the meaning literary scholars tend to think of. Referring to dynamical systems and systems in evolution, Crutchfield, Farmer, Packard, and Shaw state in their article, "Chaos," simple deterministic systems with only a few elements can generate random behavior. The randomness is fundamental;. . . Randomness generated in this way has come to be called chaos.3 Randomness and contingency co-exist with deterministic order in such systems . Our task is to find, in a text that is both deterministic and unpredictable , signs of non-static disorder, random or contingent events, and the order that accompanies this disorder. With some authors, finding this kind of disorder is easy. A French scholar might think of Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste or Le Rêve de d'Alembert, or of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes; an English scholar might be led to works like Sterne's Tristram Shandy. With such books, the problem is finding the order that is somehow contained in the apparent disorder, or is hiding just beneath it: we must see how chaos leads to order. These works, and others like them, are not static or fixed from start to finish. They are stories in progress, always changing, constantly evolving. They...