Featuring commentary from Philip Kitcher and Salman Rushdie
On the afternoon of June 16, 1904, in the Wandering Rocks episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Father John Conmee walks past a tobacconist's in the north of Dublin and reads a newsboard. Philip Kitcher, in his Rebind commentary on Ulysses, follows him there, reading Joyce: the newsboard "told of a dreadful catastrophe in New York. In America, those things were continually happening. Unfortunate people to die like that. Unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition." The catastrophe was the General Slocum, a steamboat that burned in the East River the day before with a Lutheran church outing aboard, more than a thousand dead. Kitcher supplies the numbers and sets the fire beside the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, "an event that prompted serious theological reflections at the time."
The reflection Lisbon prompted was Voltaire's, and Salman Rushdie, in his Rebind commentary on Candide, reads it aloud, the poem Voltaire published within a year of the earthquake: "Say, will you then eternal laws maintain, / Which God to cruelties like these constrain?" Candide came three years later, in 1759. Kitcher's verdict on the priest is one sentence, and this essay is built on it: "Father Conmee, however, is no Voltaire. His failure to raise questions is casual and automatic."
Neither commentator mentions the other's book, so the pairing is mine. But Kitcher names Pangloss himself, and once he has, the two novels look like the same experiment run a century and a half apart: a man who turns every fact into evidence of design, set beside a mass death the doctrine can't absorb, and in each book a drowned ship with a theology attached. In Candide it is Candide's companion Martin's: "God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest." In Ulysses it is Conmee's: God granted a thousand Lutherans perfect contrition as they went under. The two optimists fail in opposite ways. Rushdie's Pangloss reasons too much, because the doctrine is who he is, and Kitcher's Conmee reasons not at all. And the two readers draw different conclusions from the chance that is left when providence goes. Rushdie's Voltaire ends in the absurd, since "fate is another way of saying meaning." Kitcher's Joyce ends in a sentence I keep coming back to: "Anarchism is not always grim."