Implausibility

Abstract

The substance of tragedy, the raw material of the tragic, is rarely difficult to identify or describe. Most of us would agree with Arthur Schopenhauer that tragedy focuses our attention on the “terrible side of life”—“[t]he unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent” (252–54). But does such dire subject matter necessarily make a narrative tragic? Over the course of Candide (1759), Voltaire’s classic conte philosophique, the reader is presented with a litany of terrible calamities and “abominable things” (Voltaire 62), the vast majority of which appear to be inflicted on the most innocent and undeserving of its characters. Young girls are “raped until [they can] be raped no more” (10), sold into captivity, infected with the plague, disemboweled by soldiers, and partially cannibalized by starving janissaries. Old men are horribly disfigured by syphilis, hanged by the Inquisition, prematurely dissected, forced to serve as galley slaves, and subjected to a routine “twenty lashes a day” (88). Yet somehow, despite all this, Voltaire’s novel demonstrates none of the qualities we would typically associate with the tragic (gravity, profundity, dignity, etc.). Instead, with a kind of perverse glee, it forces these limit cases of human suffering to occupy the generic coordinates normally reserved for comedy or farce.