After reading Michael Wood's excellent and exhaustive introduction on Voltaire's satirical masterpiece, "Candide", I've got no cause to write some retread interpretation. Instead, I offer my exhilaration upon my first of many readings of this novel, and what it means to my own work.
First of all, I sit in stream-of-postmodern-conscious and reel out all my anxieties, and I call it writing (which it is). Yet, I see Candide and his friends, who have been beaten, torn to shreds, tending their garden, and I forget to tend mine. I see Voltaire tending his for 94 pages and shredding the art of philosophy he made his legend off of, and I forget to *laugh* as he laughs at humanity.
To see Candide go through the the horrors, lie on a bed of philosophy and hope, travel the lands only to find perfection and deny it by some strange nature expelling himself from a land not natural to himself, all in the name of refuting Optimism, may be of the darkest joys I have ever partaken of. Even as he comes about his lovely Cunegonde, she is exposed as hideous and he marries her out of duty -- and I like the thought that this is reality realized through the previous ideal of marrying Cunegonde, or the idea of her.
No character leads a pointless existence, no episode drags, the pace of writing is extreme and refreshing to my eyes. There is an inkling of sentimentality toward the end, an existential nuance amidst the absurdity, even if it's the absurdity of destiny (a stylized contradiction in my reflection only). I love that Voltaire can even tease himself through Pococurante, and his pickiness toward literature, which the melancholy philosopher Martin chides when Candide suggests he's happy for his ability to criticize ("Which is to say...that there is pleasure to be had in not taking pleasure"). I can't say enough of the two day experience in reading "Candide", and how it reminds us that 1) Everything is indeed not OK and it's OK to confront this, and 2) Laugh at it, it's absurd.
Perhaps then I write my satire. Or just read more of them. Or, at the simplest and most useful, I walk around town and remember to laugh, that it's chaos and no one knows what to do and, indeed, we are asses. And I just laugh.
PS: The packaging with the various comics including the front cover of the opening of the novel and how Candide is thrown into his horrors, as well as the maze to discover the origin of Pangloss's social disease, are awesome, as well are the apt appendices (including excerpts from Voltaire's philosophical encyclopedia, a poem on the earthquake at Lisbon and its use toward refuting Optimism, and an alternate opening to the Paris chapter).
PPS: I also learned what an auto-da-fe is: When heretics were publicly charged and invited to make an "act of faith"; though in the circumstance in "Candide", Pangloss was hanged and Candide flogged in this horrid world.
"'What is Optimism?' asked Cacambo - 'Alas!' said Candide, 'it is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.'"
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