A Film Canon

Candide epitomises the problematic status of the French philosophical novel. Philosophically, Voltaire's only sustained target is Leibniz's doctrine of optimism - and yet, his inane repetition of the phrase 'the best of all possible worlds' would be sufficient to denaturalise, demystify and ridicule it, without the surrounding narrative apparatus. Similarly, references to other philosophers are fleeting, and tend to be more in the nature of a personal joke; or, more accurately, to present philosophical conversation as little more than a series of jokes, grudges and ambitious rivalry. At the same time, it is difficult to know exactly how the form of Candide is meant to support this systemic assault on philosophers and philosophy. Most basically, it deals with a global quest that, generally, has enlightenment as its object and, specifically, has Leibniz' doctrine to test, its mouthpiece being the eponymous hero's picaresque sidekick. Whether Voltaire means to suggest a similar relation between himself and the philosopher is uncertain, as is the exact extent of his criticisms and jibes at others. In the end, it feels as if his critique is the attempt to create a philosophical picaresque, replacing the heroes of romance with the monoliths of the Enlightenment; or, alternatively, that the supposedly middlebrow beliefs of his contemporaries and progenitors are best expressed through the emergent medium of prose fiction, as evinced in his extraordinary prose style, whose sharp, punchy syntax and punctuation manages to make the most ludicrous cliches sound like a string of propositions, and imbues every position, however unlikely or impossible, with the finality of logical proof.