Storms & Natural Disasters

Salman Rushdie picks up Voltaire's Candide at the storm, the Lisbon earthquake and the arrival of the Inquisition, which Voltaire gets through in about four pages. The earthquake was real and killed tens of thousands, but it happened several years before the book's events; Rushdie calls that playful rather than messy, the first of many liberties Voltaire takes with the calendar. He also stops on the line where Candide first wobbles: "if this is the best of all possible worlds, what could the others be like?"

The hard part comes with the book's Jewish character. Rushdie, who admires Voltaire's tolerance and hatred of fanaticism, says plainly that this great figure of the French Enlightenment was also a world-class anti-Semite, and that there is no way of excusing it. Then he points to the trick the book will keep using, the story within the story, as the old woman who helps Cunégonde begins her own tale. You leave braced for what Rushdie calls the grandfather of all dystopian fictions.

Transcript

Hello, welcome back to the second part of Candide by Voltaire. It got off to a flying start, didn't it? A lot of action: expulsion from paradise, cruelty, slaughter, the dead coming back to life, the arrival of a good guy, and then a sea journey.

And now something really very dramatic happens. There's a storm, a bad storm, and as they arrive in Lisbon, in Portugal, there's a colossal earthquake, massive death, including the death of major characters, and the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition, all in the course of about four pages. So as you see, this book doesn't hang around. It moves like a rocket ship. The Lisbon earthquake, in which Candide finds himself caught up, it was a real disaster. The city fell down, basically, and tens of thousands of people were killed.

It actually didn't happen when it happens in the book, because the book is published in 1759 and seems to be dealing with events of around that time, but the earthquake actually happened several years earlier. So one of the things you'll find as we go through the book is that Voltaire messes around with the timeline. The things that happen are very often historical events, but they don't always happen when he says they happen. They can happen earlier or later. You may call that messy, but I prefer to call it playful. He plays with history in order to make his own story, anyway.

Yeah, they arrive in Lisbon when Lisbon is in a state of devastation because of the earthquake. And what happens is, from this point on, Voltaire portrays the age gets darker and darker, and as well as natural disaster, there is human cruelty. There's the fact that people faced with disaster become exploitative, rapacious, robbing what they want, to loot and rob and rape, and yet somehow the comic tone is maintained. You may think this is a hard thing to do, and it is a very hard thing to do, when you're dealing with horror, to do it with a smile on your face. And yet that's somehow, it's one of the miracles of this book, that it's funny about things that are not funny at all, including what the Inquisition called an auto-da-fé. The auto-da-fé was actually, classically, burning people alive, although in the course of this book it also includes hanging people and flogging people, all kinds of enterprises that the Inquisition enjoyed.

As the story gets darker and things go wrong more and more, there's a moment where Candide begins to question what Pangloss has taught him. And there's a line I like in which he says, if this is the best of all possible worlds, what could the others be like? And sometimes I think that's a feeling we all have in everyday life, as things seem to go from bad to worse around us. If this is the best there is, imagine the alternative.

So, on top of physical disaster, the earthquake, there is the disaster of religious fanaticism. You will remember that in the part we went through before, Candide and Cunégonde were separated, and indeed he believes her to be dead. He believes her to have been assaulted by enemy troops and ravished and killed. Don't be so sure, because what happens here, in the middle of tragedy, is again a moment of hopefulness, when the lovers are reunited, as you'll see, and the possibility of love and goodness reasserts itself.

Cunégonde is in a difficult situation. She's caught between two forces. One is the force of the Grand Inquisitor, the head of the Inquisition, and the other is the introduction to the Jewish character, the Jew Isaac. And here I have to talk about one of the areas in which it's very hard to go along with Voltaire, because here is this figure who we know, and who is revered, as one of the great figures of the French Enlightenment: liberal, open-minded, tolerant, anti-dictatorship, anti-fanaticism. But he reveals himself to be a world-class anti-Semite.

And his treatment here of the Jew Isaac, and later on in the book of other Jewish characters, is by our current standards appalling now. And we just have to accept that that's part of who he is. And how shall I put it? Nobody's perfect, but his imperfection is glaring, and it comes through in this section. I just wanted to warn you about it, because it's not nice, and there's no way of excusing it. But there it is. It's a flaw in the author, and therefore it's maybe a flaw in the book.

But this passage, as you'll see, also introduces a literary technique which the book will use a number of times, which is the technique of the story within the story, the nested story. And what happens in this section is that at a certain point, the old woman who is the helper of the rediscovered Cunégonde tells her story. And we have to listen to that. And it's also a way for Voltaire to say, you think this story is bad? Wait till you hear this other story.

And we live in a moment now where one of the kinds of books that are quite popular are what will get called dystopian fictions, fictions about dystopias. Well, if you think dystopian fictions are good, now this may be the mother and father, the grandfather of all dystopian fictions, where everything goes wrong all the time, and then some. That's what we are in for in this part of the ride. Enjoy.