The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Candide:

An Essay in Velocity

Preface to an Italian edition of Voltaire’s Candide with illustrations by Paul Klee, 1974.

Wiry figures, animated by an eel-like mobility, flex and writhe in a dance of whiplash nimbleness: it was in such a way that in 1911 Paul Klee illustrated Voltaire’s Candide, giving visual (I would almost say “musical”) form to the joyous energy that—over and above the dense web of references to an age and culture—this book still communicates to the reader of our times.

In Candide today it is not the “philosophical tale” that most enchants us, or the satire, or the emergence of a moral or a vision of the world: it is the sheer pace of the thing. With lightness and rapidity a whole series of disasters, tortures, and massacres scampers across the page, bounds from chapter to chapter, is ramified and multiplied, without afflicting the reader’s emotions with any effect but that of an exhilarating and primordial vitality. If the three pages of chapter VIII suffice for Cunégonde to relate how, having had her father, mother, and brother hacked to pieces by the invaders, she was raped, disemboweled, cured, reduced to being a washerwoman, prostituted in Holland and Portugal, and shared on alternate days by two “protectors” of different faiths, and in this way chanced to witness the auto-da-fé of which Pangloss and Candide were the victims, and finally to meet up with the latter again, less than two pages in chapter IX are needed for Candide to find himself with two corpses on his hands and for Cunégonde to exclaim: “However did you do it, you who were born so gentle, to slaughter a Jew and a prelate in the space of two minutes?” And when the old servant has to explain why she only has one buttock, and starts to tell her life story from when, as the daughter of a pope, at the age of thirteen, in the space of three months, she experienced destitution and slavery, was raped nearly every day, saw her mother cut into four pieces, suffered war and hunger, and was dying in the plague in Algiers, all to get to the point of telling us about the siege of Azov and the unusual source of nourishment that the starving janissaries found in female buttocks—well, at that point things go on a bit longer: two whole chapters or (say) six pages and a half.

Voltaire’s great discovery as a humorist was destined to become one of the sure-fire effects of comic films—the high-speed accumulation of disasters. And there is no lack of sudden accelerations of pace that carry the sense of the absurd to the point of paroxysm, as when the series of disasters already told so swiftly “in full” is repeated in résumé at breakneck speed. What Voltaire projects with his lightning “shots” is a great world-embracing movie, Around the World in Eighty Pages, that carries Candide from his native Westphalia to Holland to Portugal to South America to France to England to Venice and

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