Candide, by Voltaire
(We’ll get back to the other stories another time)
Trigger Warnings: Bestiality, Cannibalism, Rape, Violence, Murder, Torture, Slavery, Sexual Slavery, Cavity Searches, Child Genital Mutilation, STDs, Religion, Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Gardening
Voltaire’s Candide is justly famous, a brilliant and searing evisceration of the world’s mores and our feeble attempts to make sense of it all. You should read it. End of report.
But for those who need a little more, and who are not turned away by the Trigger Warnings above, I can sum up Candide by telling you two jokes. The first joke is usually told in some sorts of ‘up yourself’ movements, like recovery speakers or those life coaching or TED talkers or maybe the kind of ‘Christian’ churches where they’ll tell little stories they grabbed from some book of uplifting stories, maybe from that ‘road less travelled’ guy or the ‘traveller’ or something like that. Anyway, if you hang out with a certain sort of person who likes uplifting stuff, and you listen to any of it, you’re likely to hear this first joke, or maybe it’s just a ‘story’, though it’s obviously a constructed artifact, perhaps somebody can do a deep dive on its history, à la Robert K. Merton’s On The Shoulders Of Giants. I like to think of it as part of the late-20th-century ‘philosophy’ I call “The Banality of Feeble”. In any event, here is the joke:
Once upon a time in China, there was an old man who owned a beautiful white stallion. One day, the horse leapt over the rude fence around the old man’s property, and dashed away into the woods, and was lost.
All of the old man’s neighbors came to him moaning and crying, saying, “Oh, how sad! You have lost your beautiful white horse. What a bad thing to happen to you!”
The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a bad thing. I only know that my white stallion has run away.”
A short time later, the white stallion returned to the old man’s simple farm, and when he came back he was accompanied by five other beautiful wild white horses, whom the old man was able to place in his corral.
All of the old man’s neighbors came to him, laughing and shouting, “What great fortune! Your white horse has come back and has brought your stable five more beautiful horses. What a good thing to happen to you!”
The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a good thing. I only know that my white stallion has returned and has brought five more horses with him.”
Then the old man’s son was thrown by one of the new wild horses as he was trying to tame it, and when he fell his arm was broken.
All of the old man’s neighbors came to him moaning and crying, saying, “Oh, how sad! Your son has broken his arm, and you should curse the day those wild horses came to your farm. What a bad thing to happen to you!”
The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a bad thing. I only know that my son’s arm has been broken.”
Then the army came to the old man’s small village, seeking soldiers for the emperor’s army. They took away every able-bodied young man in the hamlet, but the old man’s son was left behind when the army departed, as the boy’s arm was still incapacitated from being broken.
All of the old man’s neighbors came to him, laughing and shouting, “What great fortune! Your son has been spared by the army, because his arm is broken. It was a good thing that he was thrown by that horse.”
The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a good thing. I only know that …
Well, you get the idea.
So, it’s not really a joke at all, unless the joke is that this sort of thing just (one assumes) goes on like this forever and ever, and that, after all, is the deep, deep spiritual meaning behind the … joke, or story, or tale, or whatever.
The teller will usually say at the end, just before I wrote “Well, you get the idea”, that the story just goes on like that. I have yet to hear the version where the army passing over his son because of the broken arm causes something objectively bad to happen. But there you go, in one nutshell: Candide.
Of course, that’s not all. Not by a long shot. Voltaire was no New Age follower turned pro in this ‘greatest nation in the world’. He had a lot more depth and nuance than that. And to capture this in this book report, we need another joke. Now this one is actually a joke, though there may be many out there who will not find it very funny. That’s okay, because you might want to avoid Candide if you are one of those people. Here’s the joke:
A priest was walking along a seaside cliff one morning, enjoying the brisk wind from the ocean, when he heard a plaintive cry. Rounding a boulder between the road and his path, he saw a very young boy weeping pitiably, sunk to his knees at the edge of the cliff, blubbering and sobbing, his whole body shaking and racked by his crying.
“Dear boy,” said the priest. “Whatever is the matter?”
“Oh, father,” said the boy, wiping away the tears with a tiny fist, “my mommy and daddy and me were driving in the car, and the tire blew, and we spun off the road, hitting this rock, and I was thrown clear, but mommy and daddy and the car went over the cliff and I think they’re dead!” The boy began to sob again.
“There, there,” said the priest, looking over the cliff. “Hush, now.”
The boy stopped crying once more, and looked up with pitiable mien, and now saw the priest had removed his coat, and was now taking off his belt.
“Son,” said the priest, “this just isn’t your day.”
The Moral of the story being: Every cloud has a silver lining … for someone. At least, that seems to be a theme in Candide.
These two jokes, taken together, sum up Candide pretty well.