Sinopse Companhia das Letras:

Até ser expulso de um lindo castelo na Westfália, o jovem Cândido convivia com sua amada, a bela Cunegunda, e tinha a felicidade de ouvir diariamente os ensinamentos de mestre Pangloss, para quem “todos os acontecimentos estão encadeados no melhor dos mundos possíveis”. Apesar da crença absoluta na doutrina panglossiana, do primeiro ao último capítulo, Cândido sofre um sem-fim de desgraças: é expulso do castelo; perde seu amor; é torturado por búlgaros; sobrevive a um naufrágio para em seguida quase perecer em um terremoto; vê seu querido mestre ser enforcado em um auto da fé; é roubado e enganado sucessivas vezes. Cândido só começa a desconfiar do otimismo exacerbado de seu mestre quando ele próprio e todos os que cruzam seu caminho dão provas concretas que o melhor dos mundos possíveis vai, na verdade, muito mal. Cândido, ou o Otimismo é um retrato satírico de seu tempo. Escrito em 1758, situa o leitor entre fatos históricos como o terremoto que arrasou Lisboa em 1755 e a Guerra dos Sete Anos (1756-63), enquanto critica com bom-humor as regalias da nobreza, a intolerância religiosa e os absurdos da Santa Inquisição. Já o caricato mestre Pangloss é uma representação sarcástica da filosofia otimista do pensador alemão Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). Antecipando o sucesso desbragado e a carreira de escândalo do livro, Voltaire, pseudônimo de François-Marie Arouet, assinou a obra com o enigmático Sr. Doutor Ralph.

. É Voltaire quem inicia a tradição francesa de resistência a Shakespeare em nome do neoclassicismo e das tragédias de Racine. A chegada tardia do Romantismo francês trouxe consigo uma forte influência de Shakespeare na literatura francesa, que foi particularmente vital em Stendhal e Victor Hugo, mas no final do terceiro terço do século XIX já se tinha esgotado a maior parte do entusiasmo por Shakespeare. Embora ainda hoje ele seja representado em França, quase tão frequentemente quanto Mo-84 O C Ã N O N E O C I D E NTAL liere e Racine, no essencial a tradição cartesiana voltou a firmar-se, e a França conserva uma cultura literária relativamente não shakespeariana.

Volta i re Zadig H á uma versão portuguesa, intitulada Zadig ou o Destino, da autoria de João Gaspar Simões, Verbo, Lisboa, 1972. Cândido Tradução de Maria Isabel Gonçalves Tomás, Publicações Europa-América, Mem Martins, 1 973. Cartas sobre a I n g l aterra O Desastre de Lisboa

(Harold Bloom, o Cânone Ocidental)

De dois estilos dispõe a língua francesa: do estilo analítico, seja de Pascal, seja de Bossuet, seja de Voltaire; e do estilo ativo, seja de Molière, seja de Stendhal, seja de Balzac. Flaubert fez a tentativa de reunir os dois estilos, tentativa irrealizável.

(Otto Maria Carpeaux, História Literatura Ocidental vol III)

Scope: Voltaire demonstrates how a single great author can embody the aspirations of an entire nation. Exploiting the machinery of international publishing, he wrote stage plays, histories, biographies, philosophic tracts, epic poetry, and literary criticism. But canon formation requires selectivity even within an individual writer’s career. Today Voltaire is known solely for his short philosophical novel Candide. Readers remain fascinated by the good-hearted young man buffeted from the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War to the earthquake-ravaged ruins of Lisbon, then to South America, where Europeans competed for plunder, always clinging to his old tutor’s confidence that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

We always carve out a “canon within a canon” from these authors’ works in ways that can be capricious and even cruel.

Of the 2,000 or so works that Voltaire published, there is only one, Candide, that is still widely read.

Voltaire emerges as a kind of latter-day Socrates, very much Europe’s gadfly. A. He devoted his writings to undermining pretensions and exposing hypocrisies wherever he found them, showering Europe with political pamphlets that outraged authorities across the continent. B. He wrote more than 20,000 letters, many of them to crown heads of Europe. C. He was idolized by the founding fathers of the United States, including Franklin and Jefferson.

Voltaire had an amazingly long career, living to the age of 84. A. His life story can almost be read as a latter-day Don Quixote, because he was obsessed with righting wrongs and correcting injustices, sometimes comically. B. For example, he was famous for fighting to exonerate men who had already been executed.

As a result of these characteristics, Voltaire became the prototype for the public intellectual, the one person who speaks for an age, who speaks truth to power. A. The 19 th century would have Émile Zola, who involved himself in the Dreyfus Affair by campaigning to free a man who he thought was innocent. B. The 20 th century would see the prototype repeated in Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.

There is an important scene in Candide in which the characters are admiring the library of a Venetian nobleman, Pococurante. A. They have sought this man out because it was said that he had never known a moment’s grief. Yet he turns out to be completely jaded about life’s pleasures and unimpressed by the beauties of the world. B. While they are in the library, they see one after another masterpiece of Western literature, which Pococurante proceeds to dismiss, criticize, and reject along with their authors. C. Toward the end of the scene, the nobleman says “Fools admire everything in a well-known author.” D. Voltaire seems to be implying here that the Western canon operates according to a kind of literary tyranny that tells you what books need to be read and respected. Since Voltaire was an enemy of any tyranny, he rejected the tyranny of the Western canon itself

However, Voltaire himself is fully invested in this literary canon, and this investment exposes itself in the final scene of Candide. A. The characters settle quietly in the Bosporus, the setting of the Trojan War, with the intent to “cultivate our garden.” B. In a sense, it is a return to the roots of the canon—the Garden of Eden and Homer’s Iliad.

While Voltaire trashes the Western literary canon throughout the book, he also assimilates it in some interesting, often satirical ways. A. Dr. Pangloss uses Aristotelian logic to prove the benevolence of the universe, but the construction of the story itself is a major assault on Aristotle’s principles of plausibility and logical cause and effect. B. Candide emerges as a work that thumbs its nose at the classics of the Western canon but also engages in a wonderful sense that things work out for the best.

XII. One wonders, what is it about Candide that makes it rise to the surface? A. Flaubert called it “a summary of all his works.” That is, if Voltaire spoke with the voice of an age, he spoke all of his most important truths in that one work. B. Candide also has posterity—it reaches out across generations to future writers. Voltaire’s naïve, good-natured main character is repeated in the characters of works by Stendhal, Tolstoy, Salinger, and Rushdie.

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