Candide

The subtractive test bites less than the episodic shape suggests. Every station is a case, and the cases are chosen to cover the field of evil: war in the Bulgarian village, nature at Lisbon, the Church at the auto-da-fé, lust and the body in the old woman’s story, empire in Paraguay and Surinam, the polite world in Paris, the state in the shooting of an admiral, wealth and taste in Pococurante, power in the six dethroned kings. Remove El Dorado and the book loses its proof that a good society is possible only where no one can reach it; remove Martin and Pangloss has no rival system. Where the test bites: the reunions, a joke fully made by the second, and the Paris chapter as Voltaire enlarged it in 1761, whose card table and literary quarrels could go. Perhaps a tenth is surplus.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a system that declares the whole good is a way of not seeing the part that suffers, and most of the suffering it explains away is made by men, in war, church, trade and law. The sharpest single disclosure is the slave of Surinam, maimed of a hand and a leg, who shows the cost of European comfort in his own body, in 1759 (chapter 19); optimism is defined at that moment as the mania for maintaining that all is well when one is badly off. The answer, work without theorising, holds as a practice. Held a step down because the doctrine refuted is a caricature, Leibniz made Pangloss, and the garden is offered as a gnomic close rather than shown to be true.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The book refuses elevation by design, and the refusal is part of its argument: horror is told at speed, in a clause, in the tone of a report, so that the reader feels how a system skates over it. The burned village, the earthquake, the old woman’s catalogue of rape, plague and the half-buttock eaten at the siege of Azov: the dreadful is constant, and held cold. The heights come where the irony stops or turns: the slave’s sentence; the old woman’s wish to die a hundred times while still loving life; El Dorado, beautiful and comic at once; the dervish, indifferent as a universe that does not ask whether the mice in the ship are comfortable. They are few and brief, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the register is low across most of the book, as intended, and the axis counts height and frequency, not intention.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Myth built, and the structure carries weight: the book is Genesis rewritten. The castle is the earthly paradise and the first chapter a fall, Candide kicked out for a kiss behind a screen; the second opens on him driven from the earthly paradise. He wanders a fallen world, finds a second paradise in El Dorado and leaves it, from love and from the wish to be rich elsewhere, which is the Fall again by choice; he ends in a garden that must be worked, and Pangloss names the source in the Latin of Genesis, man put in Eden to work it. The innocent abroad, the fool-witness whose name became a word, is an archetype the book fixed. Held below the bar because the persons are figures in a demonstration: Cunégonde is a prize, then a burden, and Candide has almost no inner life to be transformed.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is threefold: the picaresque and the Greek romance, with their separations, shipwrecks, captivities and reunions; the philosophical voyage of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721); and Voltaire’s own contes, Zadig (1747) and Micromégas (1752). The turn is to make the machinery of romance the refutation itself. Providence in a romance is the novelist’s coincidence, and by driving coincidence to absurdity, the hanged and dissected philosopher alive at a galley oar beside the stabbed baron, the book makes the plot of providence ridiculous. The stake was real: the book was printed anonymously, condemned and burned, and its author disowned it. Held below the bar because the wager was placed on proven paths by a writer already famous and safe at Les Délices; the risk was reputation and confiscation, not the form’s survival or his own.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the argument goes. Told as a treatise, the case against optimism is a debate the optimist can answer; told as a breakneck romance it is a demonstration, because each refrain of “tout est au mieux”, all is for the best, is laid against the latest catastrophe, and the repetition does the refuting. Speed is the instrument: suffering dispatched in a sentence enacts the optimist’s indifference and makes it monstrous. The reunions are the second instrument: the plot’s providence is the doctrine, and both are shown to be contrivance. The ending changes the form at the moment the argument changes: the voyage stops, the book stops moving, and the last chapter is a fixed place and a few short exchanges. Held off the top because the persons are flat by necessity, which limits what the form can know of experience from inside.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: more than two and a half centuries of reading, and the questions remain open. What the last sentence means is still argued: “il faut cultiver notre jardin” has been read as quietism, as Enlightenment practicality, as a retreat from politics, as a programme of improvement and as resignation, and the text does not settle it. Whether the book refutes Leibniz or only a vulgar optimism is a standing question; whether Martin’s Manichaeism is endorsed or only allowed is another. Later readings have found new matter in the slave of Surinam, the colonial geography and the old woman, the book’s deepest witness. Held a step down because the comic machine, once understood, is largely known on return: the yield is concentrated in the ending and a handful of passages, and the middle chapters give back less than they did the first time.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is French prose and European satire of the eighteenth century. The force: the book made the conte philosophique a form of the first rank and fixed a template, the innocent driven through the world’s catastrophes against a philosophy the world refutes, and it showed that a short comic narrative could carry a decisive argument in metaphysics and ethics. Held below the top because it did not reorganise the novel’s possibilities as Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy did; its form was a dead end as much as a model, and its heirs are scattered rather than a line. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the name of Pangloss became the English word Panglossian, used even in biology, in Gould and Lewontin’s “Panglossian paradigm” (1979); the last line became a proverb; and Leonard Bernstein made the book an operetta (1956).

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in the revision of 1761 that Voltaire made himself; nothing is lost. Presence is wide and continuous: read since 1759 despite its condemnation, taught in every French curriculum and everywhere in translation as the standard text of the Enlightenment, and translated into most written languages. The span is two and a half centuries, and the figure stands in the middle of what that span allows, below the texts of millennia. The charge is the rubric’s own, a surface fixed to its moment: Admiral Byng, the Jesuits of Paraguay, the Seven Years’ War, the Lisbon disaster, Fréron and the Paris quarrels of chapter 22 are topical satire, and a reader now needs notes for some of them. The book has outlived them all: the argument stands without its targets.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Command of the medium is of the first order. The prose is the model of French ironic narration: clear, fast, deflationary, the sentence turning in its last clause, as when an admiral is shot now and then “pour encourager les autres”, to encourage the others (chapter 23). The control of tone across horror and farce never slips. The syphilis traced from Columbus to Paquette, the “métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie” of the first chapter and Pangloss’s noses “faits pour porter des lunettes”, made to wear spectacles, show a comic precision that serves the argument, and the chapter titles keep a parody going through thirty heads. Held below 9.0 because the construction is loose by design and the looseness sometimes shows, in the grudges of chapter 22 and the stock reunions of the second half. The French is judged at the passages known; its sound beyond them is neither credited nor charged.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One physics governs: every event is a case against the claim that all is for the best, and every person is a position in the argument. Take the two most distant elements: El Dorado, where no one prays for anything because all have what they need and the king embraces his guests, and the Turkish galley of chapter 27, where the philosopher and the baron row in chains. They obey the same law, since El Dorado is good only because the world cannot reach it, and Candide leaves it for the world. The range is wide, from Westphalian farce and Lisbon horror to Paraguayan satire, Venetian ennui and the final peace, and the tone holds across it. Held off the top because chapter 22 obeys a smaller law, literary score-settling inside the larger argument, and because the garden’s turn from irony to counsel changes the register with little prepared for it beyond the old Turk’s few lines.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Many orders in thirty short chapters, held in one structure, the argument about evil: war and the law of nations; the Church and the Inquisition; the Jesuit state; colonial slavery and the sugar trade; commerce and fraud, in Vanderdendur; the nobility and its quarterings; sex, disease and the body; the literary world; the monarchies of Europe; the natural order of earthquake, storm and shipwreck; the sacred, in theodicy itself; and labour. They are integrated, not listed: each is a case for the same verdict. What the book does not hold is consciousness. No person has an inner life, the family is a joke about quarterings, and each order is held in outline, in a page. Short forms cannot reach the upper bands, and the figure describes the form and its outlines.

Score: 7.9 / 10