Avoiding Reality

You’re probably familiar with the terms Collateral Damage, Money Laundry, Physically Challenged, Pacification, and Enhanced Interrogation. These are euphemisms and they make a reality that may cause discomfort or insult some people a mild inoffensive phrase. Euphemisms are hyperbolic in nature, because they reduce something aggravating, to mere emotionless words. That hyperbole leads to irony, because the new phrase misleads the reader from its true definition. Isn’t it ironic to call Collateral Damage the death of innocents and the destruction of their property?

Euphemisms therefore are wonderful in satire, yet I have noticed that in Candide, quite the opposite is applied. In Candide, descriptions are very raw and direct. The reader doesn’t expect for the author to be so literal when reading satire. In page 80, Candide asks "Do you mean to say you have no monks teaching and disputing, governing and intriguing, and having people burned if they don't subscribe to their opinions?" There is neither irony nor hyperbole in this passage. Candide is describing what he has seen just as it is. Irony and hyperbole are unnecessary to critiquing these things because they speak for themselves. If Candide's question would have been "You mean there are no monks or the Inquisition here?" then our attention would not be focused on what he really is asking, and there would be no contrast between the utopic civilization of El Dorado, and the seemingly dystopic civilization of the Old World. 

If we were to speak of things as they really are, surely many would be outraged and distressed. Voltaire means to do just that, he explicitly describes things as they are in order to create contrast and make us realize of how stupid some traditions are. “…Cacambo asked one of the lords-in-waiting how he should behave in saluting His Majesty; should he put his hands on his knees or should he grovel, should he put his hands on his head or his behind, or should he lick the dust off the floor; in short, what was the procedure?”(pg.81). It’s very tempting to say there’s a lot of hyperbole in this passage, but often reality needs not the aid of exaggeration to be outrageous. In our world, reality is never confronted, and we find shelter in euphemisms to hide ourselves from the terrible nature of our acts.