Candide - Legacy

Legacy

Candide is the most widely read of Voltaire's many works, and it is considered one of the great achievements of Western literature. However, Candide is not necessarily considered a true "classic". According to Bottiglia, "The physical size of Candide, as well as Voltaire's attitude toward his fiction, precludes the achievement of artistic dimension through plenitude, autonomous '3D' vitality, emotional resonance, or poetic exaltation. Candide, then, cannot in quantity of quality, measure up to the supreme classics." Bottiglia instead calls it a miniature classic, though others are more forgiving of its size. As the only work of Voltaire which has remained popular up to the present day, Candide is listed in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. It is included in the Encyclopædia Britannica collection Great Books of the Western World. Candide has had a significant influence on modern writers of black humour such as Céline, Joseph Heller, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Southern. Its parody and picaresque methods have become favourites of black humorists.

Charles Brockden Brown, an early American novelist, may have been directly affected by Voltaire, whose work he knew well. Mark Kamrath, professor of English, describes the strength of the connection between Candide and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799): "An unusually large number of parallels … crop up in the two novels, particularly in terms of characters and plot." For instance, the protagonists of both novels are romantically involved with a recently orphaned young woman. Furthermore, in both works the brothers of the female lovers are Jesuits, and each is murdered (although under different circumstances). Some twentieth-century novels that may have been influenced by Candide are dystopian science-fiction works. Armand Mattelart, a French critic, sees Candide in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, three canonical works of the genre. Specifically, Mattelart writes that in each of these works, there exist references to Candide's popularisation of the phrase "the best of all possible worlds". He cites as evidence, for example, that the French version of Brave New World was entitled Le Meilleur des mondes (En. literally "The best of worlds").

Readers of Candide often compare it with certain works of the modern genre the Theatre of the Absurd. Haydn Mason, a Voltaire scholar, sees in Candide a few similarities to this brand of literature. For instance, he notes commonalities of Candide and Waiting for Godot (1952). In both of these works, and in a similar manner, friendship provides emotional support for characters when they are confronted with harshness of their existences. However, Mason qualifies, "… the conte must not be seen as a forerunner of the 'absurd' in modern fiction. Candide's world is full of ridiculous and meaningless elements, but human beings are not totally deprived of the ability tomake sense out of it." John Pilling, biographer of Beckett, does state that Candide was an early and powerful influence on Beckett's thinking.