Translated from German? By a Dr. Ralph?
Turns out not only the content of the book is satire, but the book itself is. I don't know how to explain it thoroughly, meaning there must be a term, a category, a name for a work whose content to only is fiction, but that the author has made it have fictional origins as well.
So according to this, that guy Voltaire had absolutely nothing to do with Candide, because the joke has certain wholeness to it. Voltaire created a reality for the book to exist in.
A foot note in page forty-nine confirms that, when Voltaire comments on his own work, as someone else and says "Notice how exceedingly discreet our author is. There has so far been no Pope called Urban X. He hesitates to ascribe a bastard to an actual Pope. What discretion! What tender conscience he shows!
This makes us wonder about the target of the book.
According to the first page, Candide is a serious German tale. Just like in A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, where he speaks seriously about the matter, this book is to be seen like that, but then as we know Voltaire wrote it, we apply that knowledge and it gives a twist to the mockery. These kind of subtle details give entirely a different context to the work.
Cristina,
ResponderEliminarI found your post very interesting and agree with what you say. Recently I started reading Don Quixote and found that the similarities between these books, as we discussed in class, were even more obvious. I noticed that in the prologue Cervantes shows Don Quixote as serious knight and mocks the way Spanish tales portrayed them. Even in its name, "El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha", mocks Spanish cavalry stories, similar to Voltaire's Candide.