Two Classic Satires Reviewed

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathon Swift: B
Candide, by Voltaire: B+

Here are two classic satires, both good, both from the eighteenth century, and both inspired by two of my favorite bloggers, both of whom deserved better than my first drafts of these reviews. (You can find out more about my ‘project’ at my own blog, but for god’s sake, make sure you always stop at BTC News first! I would greatly appreciate a reading suggestion in honor of Weldon here, and I am in general need of some readable “chick lit” recommendations, preferably with discreet covers.)

I miss the Enlightenment. Sure, the world was (with the exception of some remaining nature and a laudably lower population) a miserable death-trap compared to what it is today, but you had to love the style of the thinking class, the irony and the individualism, from the philosphers to the pamphleteers. Both Gulliver’s Travels and Candide are timeless in their ways, and also are products of their times, and both were more difficult to review than I expected.

The conventional way to introduce Gulliver’s Travels as an adult is as a series of shocked revelations. Why, it’s not a children’s book at all. Oh my. Gasp, choke. I suppose that I got some of that eye-popping when I was twelve, but to be fair, thanks to my parents’ draconian television policies, I read Swift well before I ever caught wind of any terrible kiddified version. My memory is, I like to think, more along the lines of the sarcastic shock that Swift intended. I was interested to see how well the vitriol held up, and my adult opinion is mixed.

You could maybe forgive TV producers their tender renditions of Gulliver if they only read half of the thing (which I suspect gives their attention spans too much credit). Swift’s game throughout the book is as much to poke holes of honesty into various human fantasies (size, immortality, utopia) as into actual human institutions and character. It plays more for straight laughs than scathing ones, and while it’s funny enough to consider Gulliver fighting disgusting Brobdingnagian flies over scraps of meat (and so forth), the author is only knocking down houses of his own construction when he does that. The first half of the book isn’t empty of political satire, but what’s there is of a roughly Seussian sort, reduced enough into silliness that it doesn’t sting very much.

Swift’s pen gets sharper as the story progresses, however, and he gets consequently funnier too. His swipes at the Academy are priceless, whether it’s scientists attempting to recover food from excrement and sunlight from cucumbers, extorting funding, or engaging in the self-evidently futile pursuit of competent and just government, Swift’s in his highest gear driving across the kingdom of the floating island. If you were looking to skim this novel, I’d recommend skipping all the crap about the little people.

The deeper political satire progresses with arc of four voyages as well. The protagonist spends a lot of time treating with kings and nobles, and Swift doesn’t knock them very hard from Gulliver’s point of view, instead he treats them with a naive and likable narrative voice. In this mode, Swift’s probably at his best when he lets his character get indignant about defending some horrible human institution or other. I didn’t feel that he was painting monarchy as an evil in itself, merely a corrupted one, as all of our endeavors must be. Swift’s best angle is his vision of an essentially defective human nature, which suffuses every page. His worst is a tendency to sink into a sort of folksy wisdom underlying that killer observation. He’s an adorable sort of misanthrope.

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I imagine Voltaire to have been a great deal more adorable in person than Swift: puckish, charming, and brilliant, but found his writing in Candide to be more cutting and arch. Candide is not the abstract allegory that Gulliver is–it works at its most obvious level as a travelogue of eighteenth century woe, tracking real events and examples from Voltaire’s personal and political sphere, taking special care to offer a thumb of the nose at any concept of divine optimization, however ineffable.

The eponymous character starts his days in a cozy fortress in Germany, makes some eyes at the baron’s daughter, which earns him a big boot o’ exile. Things only go downhill from there for the poor bastard. Candide chases his beloved Cunégonde across the old world and the new, at various times conscripted, beaten near to death, taken sick, driven to murder, and bearing witness to the gravest misfortune of others. Voltaire tries to outdo himself with atrocity (looking, sadly enough, not very far at all), but his touch is so light, and his pace so quick, that, well, it’s not that you don’t notice it–that would entirely miss the point–but you can take the pain of life with a tremendous helping of humor.

You’d think the repetition of theme would get old too–for most of the novel, Voltaire doesn’t stray far from his idea that life is a miserable farce–but the tone is what keeps you engaged. It’s why satire, done well, is brilliant. Voltaire seems to take a poke at every stodgy and horrible artifact of the pre-Enlightenment society that he can think of, and while I’d be lying if I claimed a deep familiarity with the literature of his time, he seems to be structuring the novel as a mockery of the clumsy romance of his (or any) day, and the unreadable Puritanical allegory that infected the previous century. Candide, as his name implies, is an impressionable shell of a man, but, while luckier than most (he’s got to live through the hundred and so pages after all, if sometimes barely), he suffers the consequences of his naivete as such a creature might really be expected to.

Voltaire skims a wide range of current events to establish the futility of optimism. 250 years later, I was glad that there were some footnotes to provide context (and insulted at other footnotes, go figure). I picture some future generation of historians chuckling at America: the Book, as oblivious of as much of the contemporary relevance as I was for Candide.

Voltaire’s prose, even in English, is witty and enjoyable. It highlights my general hatred of translations: for the bit of wordplay I caught, it kills me to know how droll the thing was in its original French, and in its original context. But regardless of how heavy it leans on popular references, it’s the universal themes that keep Candide robust through the centuries. No one remembers whatever the hell Leibniz was on about philosophically, but that doofus Pangloss resonates to this day. Voltaire had a special place in his heart for the unlettered reviewers too, pecked out by “those vipers in literature who nourish themselves with their own venom, a pamphlet-monger…a writer of pamphlets, a fool.” I’ll leave the comparison of the blogosphere in general as an exercise to the reader.

No review of Candide is complete without a dissection of the ending metaphor, but I’ll keep it lean. It was a total cop-out, a future-is-what-you-make-of-it kludge, a coda as trite and necessary as Roger Waters brought us in The Wall or Mike Judge in Office Space. By the accounts I’ve read, Voltaire took some effort to cultivate his garden in life. Would he have been pleased to see the revolutions his ideas inspired?