Still Life with Candide

Hyperbole is inherent to satire. Candide overflows with hyperbole, the plot is hyperbolic, the descriptions are hyperbolic, the dialogues are hyperbolic, even hyperbole is hyperbolic. With hyperbole's abundance in satire, it is safe to say that the nature of satire lies in exaggeration. 

After the first couple of pages of Candide, the reader is able to capture a certain feeling from the text caused by the incongruence from the severity of the events with the lightness of the narration, that subsequently make you laugh. 

This feeling seemed very familiar to me, of-course I've read satire before, but this time it had a name to it. 

It is a very amusing book I read last year called Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, and God does it resemble Candide. 

The first identifiable similarity is the unsettling feeling they both produce because of the outrageousness of what’s going on, and the children's book style narration it has.

The truth is, both the characters from Candide and Still Life With Woodpecker are always wrapped up in utterly exaggerated, unenviable situations. For example, Princess Leigh-Cheri from S.L.W.W quits school after being asked to resign the cheerleading team because she had a miscarriage in a football game. In the course of a few months she finds herself gaining a cocaine habit, falling in love with a tequila drinking bomber, which leads her to do stupid things like isolating herself in an attic with nothing but a pack of Camels, and then become engaged with a rich Arab, and she ends up locked in a pyramid with her outlaw lover, surviving only of wedding cake and champagne, and sadly dies immolated while attempting to free her man with a dynamite explosion. 

The hyperbole of it all is smothering, just as in Candide.

For instance:

"Just imagine a Pope's daughter, fifteen years old who in the space of three months had suffered poverty and slavery, had been ravished almost every day, seen her mother quartered, endured the horrors of famine and battle and was then dying of the plague in Algiers." (Pg.55)

Another trait they share is how exaggerated situations are used to represent things common of their respective times. For example, in Candide a Jew and a priest where killed by the same hand in a matter of two seconds, and then "The Cardinal was buried in a beautiful church, and Issachar (the Jew) was thrown on the dunghill" (Pg.46) It is Voltaire’s intention to make this huge contrast between both, for he lived in a time of great anti-Semitism among Christians, and he intends to critique it. 

S.L.W.W was written in the early 80's in America, where the Unabomber, UFOs, and ecology where major headlines. It’s not free that the author makes an outlaw bomber miss an ecologist convention because he was drunk, and explode a UFO conference, all of these happening in Hawaii.  There is some serious critique to the America in the early 80's and everything that was going on. 

Finally, and perhaps the most important similarity, is how the characters stand by naive philosophies, all the while life shows them the contrary. Princess Leigh-Cheri is an environmentalist, vegetarian, optimistic, celibate, who believes in making the world a better place. Oh and she loves Ralph Nader.

Candide is tirelessly optimistic, and believes all happens for the best. 

At this point nothing would be farther from the truth, same for Princess Leigh-Cheri.

But remember, in satire not one ironic comment, not one exaggeration is in vain, it's the details that make it work.