The Letters of Vincent van Gogh by Grant Patrick

Author:Grant, Patrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Published: 2014-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

The Trouble with Pangloss

Van Gogh the idealist well knew his own propensity for building “castles in the air” (732/4:380; 736/4:388): indeed, his controversy with Gauguin about painting from imagination rather than from models is connected directly to his concern not to become abstracted (as he liked to say) from the immediacy of the material world. As we have seen, his sensitivity to suffering disposed him to melancholy, but in countering this disposition, he sometimes causes us to wonder whether he is indeed building castles in the air and talking himself into things he does not really believe. This is nowhere clearer than in his references in the later letters to Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss.

In Voltaire’s Candide, which Van Gogh read and admired, Dr. Pangloss supplies an optimistic interpretation of suffering that becomes, increasingly, the vehicle of Voltaire’s satire, as we see how superficial Pangloss really is by comparison with the disturbing facts that he offers to explain. Pangloss’s glibly rehearsed idea that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds is Voltaire’s ironically caustic commentary on the cruelty of easy optimism.

In broad terms, Van Gogh appreciated Voltaire’s satirical intent, as is clear, for instance, when he points out to Wil that, in Candide, “Voltaire dared to laugh at the ‘highly serious life’” (579/4:15).8 For his part, Van Gogh himself used laughter to counteract depression. As he confides to Theo, “I think I’d feel sad if I didn’t see the funny side of everything” (588/4:30). Humour plays a significant (and changing) role in the letters as a whole, a topic to which I will return in chapter 7. But for now, I will focus on Pangloss, whom Van Gogh cites as a counterweight to the painful reality of suffering.9 Yet the references to Pangloss occur without any acknowledgement of the role Pangloss actually plays in Voltaire’s satire: for the most part, Van Gogh cites Pangloss’s opinion about the best of all possible worlds as if it really is the case.

In a letter to Gauguin written after the traumatic ear-severing event, Van Gogh offers the following reassurance: “Trust that in fact no evil exists in this best of worlds, where everything is always for the best” (730/4:379). Admittedly, he is trying to put a good face on things, but surely, we feel, this remark is too facile for him really to mean what he says. Yet on other occasions, he makes the same point, and again, he is disconcertingly deadpan, providing no hint of irony. In April 1889, for instance, he advises Theo to “think of Pangloss,” and he regrets that some people “perhaps don’t know Pangloss” or else forget his message when they are afflicted by despair or pain (765/4:437). Later in the same letter, he expresses concern about having to conform to hospital surveillance, but adds: “let’s be aware that everything always happens for the best in the best of worlds” (765/4:439). He might seem at first to strike a different note when he writes to Theo,

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