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ALMOST nowhere in the undergraduate French major can I think of a text in which the question of “forme et fond” ‘form and content’ is posed with greater insistence than in Candide. As undergraduates we learned that Voltaire's tale was conceived and written as a savage attack on philosophical optimism, the doctrine emerging from Leibniz's theory of monads and current in England during Voltaire's youth and exile. Further, we learned that it was written as a response to the Lisbon disaster, the earthquake that is said to have killed forty thousand inhabitants of the city. How could this be the best of all possible worlds when a natural catastrophe of that magnitude could cause nearly inconceivable suffering? Voltaire's sense of humanity and logic rebelled against the irreducible paradoxes suggested in the confrontation between philosophical discourse and historical fact.
At the same time, we learned that Candide's success as a work of art is one effect of its form. It is a masterfully told tale that engages the reader because of the author's genius as a storyteller. Voltaire virtually invented the philosophical tale to illustrate his point: that Leibnizian optimism is pure absurdity, a false way of constructing the relation of human life to the surrounding universe.
Now if Candide provides an excellent vehicle for introducing students to the form-versus-content controversy, it is doubtless because in the work there is a profound complicity between the two that traditional approaches have often failed to take into account. John C. O'Neal presents a clear and well-articulated exception in the recent volume Approaches to Teaching Voltaire's Candide published by the MLA. For O'Neal Candide is one of those works in which the “content and form reinforce each other; the two are virtually inextricable” (45). Using terms defined by Gérard Genette, he studies the complex network of interpolations responsible for much of the tale's characteristic texture, thus permitting students to apprehend both the necessity and the limitations of the form-content distinction.
In much the same way I have found that Candide offers extraordinary opportunities for guiding students through their first encounter with the theory of narrative. Too often they find the bewildering arsenal of technical terms overwhelming and are left with the impression not only that theory is impossibly difficult but that its practice requires a painful rite of initiation. To avoid the dangers of this first encounter and to give students a strong sense of the usefulness of theoretical concepts to the reading and appreciation of narrative literature, I propose an analysis of Candide based on story and discourse, terms essential to the practice of contemporary narratology.
The analysis that I describe here rests on two conditions. First, I use it only with students who have already read Candide and are familiar with the text and its historical and philosophical contexts. (For those teaching beginning students, the excellent volume edited by Renée Waldinger and mentioned above suggests the range and richness of pedagogical strategies Voltaire's text offers.) Second, I assume that most, if not all, of my students have never before systematically used the terminology of narrative poetics. I avoid the refinements of recent formulations, such as those by Genette ( Nouveau discours du récit ) and Bal ( Narratologie ), introducing story simply as the series of events taken from the work in chronological order. I then define discourse as the recounting of the same events in such a way that a particular meaning emerges. This meaning would not have been available in the story as such. Students often profit from Jonathan Culler's excellent, succinct discussion of the different uses critics have made of these terms (169).
In Candide , of course, the difference between these terms itself plays a role in the story, and it is for this reason that Candide provides such a good example for beginning students of literary theory. Starting with the last passage, I ask my students to contemplate the structure of Pangloss's thought:
All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle, by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here.
(114–15)
Here at the end of the tale Pangloss summarizes the series of horrors that have constituted the story. In other words, he is separating the story from the discourse in order to determine its meaning. For Pangloss the events that led up to the present moment are linked as causes to effects, or as Leibniz puts it, the events constitute the “raison suffisante” of the effects. That we are here speaking, reasons Pangloss, is ample proof that what preceded us caused us to be here, simply because our being here follows that which preceded it.
In a sense Pangloss's thought contains a theory of narrative, and it is essential to communicate to students this self-reflexive dimension in the work. We have said that when he highlights the major events of the tale in the passage above, Pangloss is separating story from discourse. This, however, is not an innocent gesture, for at the same time he is suggesting the priority of the former over the latter in order to illustrate his point: this is the best of all possible worlds, because the chain of events that led to our being here had precisely that effect. It is relatively simple for students to grasp the circularity of Pangloss's philosophical position. They must also understand that for his position to remain intact, the story must precede the discourse as a cause precedes an effect.
But there is a different way of looking at Pangloss's reading strategy. The philosophical discourse of optimism that he incessantly tries to demonstrate is present from the very start of the tale. In other words, Pangloss uses the events of the story to substantiate an idea that existed before the events themselves occurred. We may say that his interpretation of the events is thus determined by his philosophical ideas. He then calls on the events to justify the ideas after the fact. As we have seen, this justification is only possible if story precedes discourse as cause precedes effect. The second point of view, however, contradicts the first, for if the discourse of optimism precedes the events of the story that the events illustrate a posteriori, then the effect (philosophical optimism) can be seen as the cause of the causes (the events from which the philosophy is deduced). Voltaire's scorching satire thus shatters Pangloss's position by reducing it to absurdity.
At this point in the analysis it is essential to link the logic of Voltaire's satire to narrative organization by introducing another critical term: motivation. I use “motivation” as it was defined by B. Tomachevsky in his Theory of Literature , which appeared in Russia in 1925. For Tomachevsky the analysis of narrative involves a process of decomposition. He breaks down the literary text to a level of primary, indecomposable units that he calls the “motifs.” Motifs are then sorted into two categories, associated and free. Associated motifs are those that are necessary to the story (or “fable,” as the Russian formalists called it), so that if one were omitted, the causal chain of events would be irrevocably altered. By contrast, free motifs could be changed without modifying the succession of the story (269–70). Rather, they would create decisive shifts in the meaning the events of the story are supposed to convey. Thus the free motifs constitute what we are calling the discourse. A useful classroom exercise I often use here is to ask students to isolate some examples of associated and free units from Candide. Of course most will quickly see that Pangloss's philosophical ruminations are excellent examples of free units since they use the events of the story to illustrate specific meanings.
What is crucial here about the relation between associated and free motifs, however, is that the two motifs must constitute a unified system so that each motif contributes a specific function to the work as a whole. As Tomachevsky puts it, each must be “motivated” with respect to the role it plays in the whole construction (282). He cites Chekhov as an example: if there is a nail in the wall at the beginning of a story, at the end the hero must hang himself from it. The justification of the nail is the role it will play in what follows; it permits the death of the hero at the end. But when we look at the motif from the vantage point of the composition of the work, the writer clearly knew what would be required in order to bring about the desired sequence of events. For the hero to hang himself at the end, there must already be the nail in the wall from which he can do it. Thus from the writer's point of view (which is also that of the critical reader) the choice of the nail is determined by the hero's suicide at the end. In other words, what follows determines what precedes. To quote Genette's formulation, motivation is the determination of means by the ends , “pour parler plus brutalement, des causes par les effets ” ‘to put it more bluntly, of causes by the effects ’ (“Vraisemblance” 94). Motivation can therefore be understood as the systematic construction in a work of the means by which the artificiality of the composition is disguised. It is the strategy of discourse charged with the responsibility of maintaining the illusion of causation between the chronologically arranged motifs of the story.
Candide , of course, is a satire, and we can easily articulate Voltaire's method by using the terms of this analysis. His attack on philosophical optimism has proceeded through a flamboyant exposure of the illusion required in a motivational system. We can say that his method constitutes a sort of “antimotivation”: his denunciation of optimism operates through a denunciation of narrative fiction itself, since fictional structure requires the equivalence of causation and succession. Looked at in this way, our reading of Candide reproduces the paradox we earlier identified in Pangloss's thought. If the attack was successful, it was because Voltaire was able to write a good story. Thus the success of his satire depends on the well-constructedness of his tale. But, paradoxically, well-constructedness in fiction depends on the illusion of causation, and it is precisely the philosophical underpinnings of this very illusion that are exposed in his attack on optimism. In a sense, then, Voltaire is forced to engage in the same operations he denounces in order to denounce them, and this dilemma is at the heart of narrative logic itself.
We must here reintroduce the notions of form and content with which we began. If traditionally we think of the satire of optimism as the content of Candide and the philosophical tale as its form, we can now demonstrate both the necessity and the theoretical impossibility of this distinction. The content “needs” the form in order to do its work. But if it succeeds, the form is irrevocably damaged, put into question, by the content that inhabits it. Reading Candide obliges us to encounter this sort of incessant vacillation between two inseparable and incompatible points of view; it obliges us and our students to enter into the dynamic processes of literature and to participate actively in the construction of both its forms and its meanings.
The success of this approach in the classroom depends largely on the care with which one defines and demonstrates each category used in the analysis. The three binary pairs—from and content, story and discourse, succession and causation—and the procedure of motivation must be introduced strategically at exactly the moment their technical precision is required to solve a critical problem. In this way students learn these concepts not as abstract independent constructions but rather as practical, decisive, intellectual operations that can be used to control and enhance the process of reading and interpretation. But, as I mentioned earlier, this approach is also laden with dangers, not the least of which is that it gives students the overly facile impression that literary theory consists of the accumulation of recipes for whipping up term papers and theses. By insisting on the dynamic interplay of the literary text with the terminology invoked to describe it, we can manage to avoid at least some of the distortion that the teaching situation forces on us in the classroom.
As a final exercise in teaching Candide with theory, I require students to write a short paper mobilizing the arsenal of critical terms they have acquired to solve a specific problem. I ask them to describe the exact nature of the relation between narrative structure and the satire of optimism in Candide , in short, the relation of “form” to “content.” The approach through theory makes possible a systematic and careful response to this issue while it invites them to consider both the limitations and fecundity of this traditional opposition. In this way I encourage my students to experience writing and thinking about literature as a means of engaging in the solution to complex intellectual problems. In so doing, our collective work may begin to approach the model suggested by Paul de Man in The Resistance to Theory (3–20), in which students come to understand that literary studies are to be pursued with as rigorous and conscious a sense of methodology as studies in any other field.
The author is Director of Foreign Languages and Translation Studies in the School of Continuing Education at New York University. This article is based on a paper presented at the MLA convention, 27–30 December 1986, in New York.
Bal, Mieke. Narratologie. Paris: Klincksieck, 1977. Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP 1981.
de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Genette, Gérard. Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil, 1983.
———.“Vraisemblance et motivation.” Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. 71–99.
O'Neal, John C. “Interpolated Narrative in Voltaire's Candide. ” Waldinger 45–51.
Tomachevsky, B. “Thématique.” Théorie de la littérature. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1965. 263–307.
Voltaire. Candide. Ed. Norman L. Torrey. Arlington Heights: AHM, 1946.
Waldinger, Renée, ed. Approaches to Teaching Voltaire's Candide. New York: MLA, 1987.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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