Micromegas and Other Short Fictions (Penguin ed.) Read online

  The hero, as the change of title from ‘Gangan’ demonstrates, has acquired a new name redolent with possibilities. For ‘Micromégas’ is Janus-faced, looking out at once to the small (‘micro’) and the large (‘mégas’). As seen by space-travellers, human beings are literally microscopic, invisible without the aid of a magnifying glass. Not only are they physically small; they and their planet are pathetically so: ‘At last they made out a small gleam of light: it was the Earth. A pitiable sight, for people coming from Jupiter’ (p. 24). Yet this obscure Earth, it turns out, contains a race capable of noble work – not, as they themselves prefer to believe, in metaphysics but in the more modest, though far more useful, activity of scientific experimentation. The Saturnian giant sums up the paradox: ‘This atom has actually measured me!’ (p. 30). From which the sage Micromégas draws the proper conclusions: one must never judge of anything by its apparent size. For even the tiniest of creatures, seemingly worth naught but contempt, may possess a God-given intelligence.

  This conte, then, displays a general hopefulness more appropriate to Voltaire in the late 1730s than the 1750s. Humanity has a rightful place in the universe, provided it can recognize and accept that situation, and not pine for unattainable first truths. As Locke and Newton had shown in their different spheres of human psychology and celestial astronomy, the human animal possesses the unique capacity for empirical discovery of real knowledge about the world and subsequently for the rational processing of the resulting data.

  Even so, the story contains its darker moments. In his wide travels Micromégas has not discovered true happiness anywhere in the universe. As for death, it infallibly comes at last, whether one has lived 15,000 years or a mere earthly life-span: ‘Which, as you can see, is to die almost the moment one is born’ (p. 21). The remark anticipates Beckett’s trenchant statement that one gives birth astride of a grave.8 Indeed, Voltaire’s observation has been seen as the basic starting-point for the modern notion of death: material, scientific, a wholly natural event.9

  So it would be imprudent to establish a simplistic contrast between this story and the later ‘Candide’. But that said, one should recall that ‘Micromégas’ ends, not just in mockery of the pretentious little theologian but also with the expression of affectionate sentiments by the hero for the Earthmen he has encountered, while yet regretting their limitless conceit. The subtitle ‘A Philosophical Story’ makes clear where Voltaire is placing the emphasis. The tale is basically structured around two dialogues, the first between the two travellers, the second their ‘conversations’ with human beings. Apart from a cursory account of the personal troubles on Sirius that motivate the voyage, Micromégas is essentially a talking head, as is (even more so, though more fallibly) his Saturnian companion. Micromégas does not wish to be entertained with romantic fables; he wishes to learn (‘I want to be instructed’: p. 20). The discoveries made in this story are all related to man’s cosmic situation. The problematics of social and moral relationships are still to come.

  Voltaire has seized upon the use made of relative proportions by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, a work much admired by him, which appeared during the philosophe’s stay in England. But he steers his narrative in quite another direction. Except for some ludic treatment of the space-journeys and the different sizes of men and giants, Voltaire eschews the fantastic. In its place he creates a universe devoid of Christian values where humankind, subject neither to the sins of Adam and Eve nor to the possibility of divine redemption, can still find for itself a meaningful niche.

  The World As It Is

  Voltaire’s first conte to be published was ‘Zadig’ (1747). Thereafter, stories appeared regularly from his pen until the final years of his life. ‘The World As It Is’ (the title in French, ‘Le Monde comme il va’, may have been suggested by Congreve’s The Way of the World10) appeared in 1748, probably arising out of a visit by Voltaire to Paris in 1739, lasting over two months. He had not set foot in the capital for three years, so he was coming to it with fresh eyes. The conclusion to this story recalls a letter of 1739 where Voltaire compares Paris to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, ‘part gold, part muck’. The tale is clearly a parable of the contemporary French capital. However, the conte took several years to evolve, as references in it to later events demonstrate.

  The tale reads almost like a balance-sheet with ‘Assets’ and ‘Liabilities’. The rather mechanical enumeration makes it structurally less satisfying than some of his other contes; but it does testify to an earnest attempt by Voltaire to set a moral valuation upon Paris and, by extension, urban society in general. This enquiry is pursued with the utmost seriousness, for the basic question addressed by Babouc is, quite simply: does Paris deserve to be saved? The subsequent investigation is conducted across a wide range of moral and social issues. Its results are inconclusive, even contradictory. War, for instance, gives rise to appalling horrors; yet it is also the setting for astonishing acts of selfless heroism. The details given are often piquant. A rumour that peace is imminent leads, not as might rationally be expected, to an anticipatory détente but only to intensified fighting. (One is reminded of the intense firing on the Western Front as the truce-hour approached on the morning of Armistice Day, 1918.) As in war, so in everything else. Human beings are inexplicable, equally capable of utter baseness and sublime altruism.

  In the end, Babouc feels that he must not call down divine thunderbolts upon the human race. One has to be resigned to things as they necessarily are (rather more so than in later years, when Voltaire crusaded against at least some of these abuses). Babouc comes to feel a liking for the city, ‘whose inhabitants were civilized, gentle and benevolent, even if they were frivolous, scandal-mongering and full of vanity’ (p. 50–51). Evidently, the good qualities just about tip the scales against the bad; worldliness wins out over the temptations of retreat and seclusion. Christian pessimism, incorporating a belief in Original Sin, is irrelevant, as too is the Christian hope of Heaven. Men are, like the world around them, full of contradictions. Irregularity is inherent in our very nature; expecting people to be perfectly wise is as crazy as putting wings on dogs or horns on eagles.11

  Yet the sense of moral evil cannot be exorcized by this deliberately trite conclusion. War, injustice, oppression are existential realities. Babouc resembles Micromégas in being an observer from afar, of interest only for his reactions to our world. But the awareness of suffering and cruelty is now to the forefront.

  Memnon

  Written about 1748 (and published in 1750), this story has the same theme as ‘Zadig’: a naïve protagonist starts out full of confidence that he knows the right way to run his life and becomes disillusioned. In both tales an angel appears and offers advice. But the comparisons serve only to bring out how much darker is the tone of ‘Memnon’. ‘Zadig’ ends ambiguously; the angel may have talked in riddles about Providence, but he is helpful in practical terms and the hero profits from it. In ‘Memnon’ things are much less ambivalent. Memnon’s ‘little blueprint of wisdom’ (p. 52) is flawed from the outset by his total lack of self-awareness. If he eventually acquires some sort of enlightenment, it is at the irreparable cost of an eye and the loss of happiness which that represents.

  The fable carries a classical moral about the folly of aiming at perfect rationality. But any complacent acceptance of that lesson on the reader’s part is subverted by the discomfiting manner in which Voltaire narrates it. The angel is no more than a resplendent scarecrow: six fine wings, as tradition dictates, but devoid of head, feet and tail, and he ‘resembled nothing at all’ (p. 55). The world from which he has come is a weird domain lacking food, sex, money and even corporeal beings. It follows, then, that his message should be a satirical version of the Leibnizian doctrine of Optimism (which in a few years would be receiving its final quietus in ‘Candide’), that ‘All is well’. If, it appears, a perfect world does exist, that place is totally inaccessible – even to the angel, though his world is far better than our planet.

/>   However, the narration contains humour, even as it tells of Memnon’s despair. His downfall is recounted sardonically. He believes, of course, that he is not in the least affected sexually by the beautiful lady (‘he was quite sure he was no longer subject to such weakness’: p. 53), but only by his finer feelings for her. Be that as it may, the end result is the same. Crossed legs uncross, with devastating consequences. The tone of ‘Candide’ has entered on the scene, to take up from now on a regular place in Voltaire’s stories.

  Letter from a Turk

  First published in 1750 (and probably written in the same year), this is a work which did not appear in any edition of the stories during Voltaire’s lifetime; such is the diverse nature of the genre. In ‘Letter from a Turk’, Voltaire uses a first-person narration, thereby creating a precedent in his story-telling technique. It may well be that he is recalling his stay in England at the home of his host, Sir Everard Fawkener.12 At all events, the tale is set in an exotic world of crazy dogmatists, for whom godliness consists of solipsistic self-denial. The author casts a cynical eye over the women who flock to ‘consult’ the naked Bababec sitting on his bed of nails. Briefly converted to a happier way of life, the fakir discovers that nails in his bottom are preferable to loss of prestige with the opposite sex. The human penchant for masochism, mindless ecstasy and fundamentalist religion is depressing evidence of our readiness to take refuge from facing up to reality.

  Although ostensibly about Hinduism, the tale does not simply mock an Eastern religion but is meant also (and mainly) to satirize any cult which puts self-mutilation ahead of social benevolence. Behind the picture of the Indian fakirs, one may glimpse hints of Christian monks or Jansenist purists.

  Plato’s Dream

  Like ‘Micromégas’, this brief sketch has a cosmic dimension. But it goes somewhat further in its stress upon the question of evil, even though the final conclusion is along Leibnizian lines, that essentially all is well with the universe. It is true, however, that our own world is subject to every sort of physical limitation and peril. Meanwhile, that strange species the human race abuses the faculty of reason with which it has been endowed. Humankind is as much given to murderous aggression as it is vulnerable to plague and pestilence, some of it self-inflicted. Even so, the genie sent by ‘the great Demiurge’ to create our planet has a good line of defence: have the other genies done any better with their own worlds? It becomes clear that ‘the eternal Geometer’ alone has the capacity to make perfect things. Final pirouette: Plato awakes; it was nothing but a dream. Voltaire is clearly aware of the miseries of the human lot, but as yet in general terms only. The mood of the tale is speculative, the irony detached. This is not yet the tone of ‘Candide’; God is still being cleared of blame for the physical and moral evil in this world. Despite the nominally Platonic base to the narrative, the cosmos outlined here is founded on firm Newtonian principles of order and harmony.

  This story was not published till 1756, but there are grounds for thinking that it was at least begun, like ‘Micromégas’, during Voltaire’s years at Cirey.

  The History of the Travels of Scarmentado

  The pessimism implicit in ‘Letter from a Turk’ finds its most overt expression in ‘Scarmentado’ (published in 1756), the most ferociously dark of all Voltaire’s contes. In part it relates to the author’s mood at one of the worst periods of his life, 1753–4, when he was a refugee from Frederick’s court in Berlin and at the same time debarred by Louis XV from returning to Paris. This sense of exile was reinforced by Voltaire’s historical researches, which confirmed for him that the world is full of unmitigated horrors: ‘Candide’ without Eldorado or the final garden. Wherever Scarmentado travels, he meets with one disaster after another, cruel absurdities and the total collapse of moral values. Nor is this a fantasy scenario. The events recounted actually occurred around 1615–20 (Voltaire was engrossed in his world history, the Essai sur les mœurs, which gives full coverage to this period). In the end, our anti-hero is only too happy to settle for being cuckolded back at home. Derisive bathos is a fitting conclusion to a story that is throughout a series of savage demystifications. The first-person point of view heightens the sense of Voltaire’s personal identification with his protagonist. The authorial distancing of, say, ‘Memnon’ is replaced here by bitter satire.

  The Consoler and the Consoled

  Also published in 1756, this parody of a classical fable sums up the sad paradox of human bereavement and grief. Philosophical advice to others to show stoical courage proves useless for oneself when one is faced with the existential loss of a loved one. Time alone is a healer; but that is no consolation either. The tale of the unfortunate princess touches on the ridiculous by the sheer plethora of the disasters that befall her, while the notion that hearing such a story can comfort anyone else is comically mistaken. The exercise of pure reason is no answer to suffering.

  The Story of a Good Brahmin

  Brief though it is, this parable goes to the heart of a paradox fundamental to the period: how, if at all, to combine rational enquiry and happiness? Any complacent views on the matter are quickly swept away by the author. Though the pursuit of earthly happiness is one of the principles of the Enlightenment, the good Brahmin shows that there is a direct correlation between on the one hand intelligence and sensibility and on the other discontent. The only sure guarantor of happiness is imbecility. Thus the thinking person has only one path to take: dignified reason – which is itself a lunatic answer. The tale ends in an impasse.

  This story was written probably in 1759, the year when ‘Candide’ was published, and it springs from the same view, that the world is a mad place, though the conclusions of this story are somewhat different. The Brahmin, elderly like Voltaire (and Pococurante in ‘Candide’), lives a civilized life in a fine house and gardens, yet can make no sense of that life. The tale appeared in 1761: the crusading philosophe of the 1760S and 1770S had still to make his entry on stage.

  Pot-Pourri

  This is one of the strangest writings ever to come from Voltaire’s pen. The classicist apostle of rational order in aesthetic matters here produces a work of discontinuity as bold as it is bewildering. Its composition over a period of years (1761–4: it was published in 1765) is of a complexity such as to require the use of diagrams for its elucidation.13 There is no single unifying theme. The nearest approximation to that is furnished by the tale of the marionettes; and yet this stops at Chapter XI (out of fifteen chapters in all). Into this dense fabric are worked a wide range of other topics: inter alia, the fate of the Jesuit Order, persecution of the Protestants, the excess of religious festivals.

  Not only does the structure defy easy comprehension. The basic gist of the conte is not immediately evident either. But Voltaire has left enough clues in his other writings for us to see that the theatre fable is a covert attack upon Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. Punchinello, who like Christ rejoices in two quite contrary genealogies, is an illiterate whose companions are nomadic beggars. But the Church that he founded grows fat and powerful as the result of a trumped-up miracle of resurrection (Ch. VII); and religious wars follow in its wake. The meaning of this virulent assault upon Christ (the last one by Voltaire – he became more tolerant in this respect in later years) had necessarily to be concealed from the ordinary reader and made understandable only to the cognoscenti, after the manner ascribed to Rabelais in ‘Conversation between Lucian, Erasmus and Rabelais’.

  Was Voltaire inspired by Tristram Shandy? We know that he was acquainted with Sterne’s novel from 1760 and owned the first six volumes up to 1762, and also that he took an interest in its bizarre structure of ‘preliminaries and digressions’. Voltaire compared it suggestively to Rabelais as ‘une espèce de roman bouffon’ (‘a kind of farcical novel’),14 and it is possible that he saw a means by which Sterne’s grotesque levity could be harnessed to an all-out assault on l’Infâme.

  An Indian Incident

  This brief piece first appear
ed as the final chapter of a treatise, Le Philosophe ignorant (1766), further proof of Voltaire’s disregard for genre boundaries. The scene depicted is stark; everything devours everything else. The concluding words ‘Sauve qui peut’ (‘Every man for himself’) recur often in Voltaire’s writings, consistently signalling a mood of great discouragement. From spiders to human beings, all living things appear to be caught by nature in a web of internecine destruction, while good people like Pythagoras perish. Even so, this despairing picture is painted with brio. The hero, fortunately trained in the universal language of the animal and vegetable domains, learns that to the blade of grass, the sheep is nothing less than a monster. As the cosmic vision expands to embrace ubiquitous horror, the observation by Pythagoras that these barbarous animals are no philosophes sounds a note of the blackest humour through its savage understatement.

  Lord Chesterfield’s Ears

  Although Voltaire shared his countrymen’s dismay at their defeat by Britain in the Seven Years War, and despite the total hostility he came to show towards Shakespeare as a corrupting influence on French theatre, he retained to the end a benevolent feeling for the land he had visited in his younger days. Even so, England serves here in this late work (published in 1775) only as a background framework. There seems to be no good reason for the title, except perhaps to stimulate curiosity in the reading public. The death in 1773 of Chesterfield, whom Voltaire had known and to whom he had written a friendly letter only two years earlier, may well have triggered his imagination, since the English lord’s notorious deafness provided a springboard for the theme of fatality which is announced in the opening sentence.