Candide

• Engels
• Further Education (Key Stage 5)

Candide

Candide, or optimism 

Satire 

The simplest way to think about this novella is as a satire.

You will often see satire described as a genre, but it is more helpful to think of it as a mode which is applied within different genres.

Literary mode = manner/approach through which the narrative is delivered.

Satire e.g Animal Farm 

An example is Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the genre is allegory (with aspects of fable, or fairy story).

The approach however is highly satirical, since we see the portrayal of human behaviour in animal terms as deeply unflattering to the figures it represents.

• Napoleon = ? Snowball = ? Boxer = ?
  
• Napoleon = Joseph Stalin 
• Snowball = Leon Trotsky
• Boxer = loyal workers 

Reductio

Satire always involves an attack on a particular target.

This attack takes the form of a reduction – the target is belittled, demeaned, made to seem ridiculous, etc.

Typical techniques are caricature, irony, invective (or insult) and (usefully for us) reductio ad absurdum = reduction to absurdity 

What kind or target? 

Satire either attacks individuals 

or general attitudes – 

or sometimes both together:

Note how what is being satirised is 

Western people and attitudes, 

despite the caricature of Japanese…

Menippean Satire 

Satire of attitudes rather than directly of people is the more complex form, mainly because it makes use of a narrative (story-telling) format.

This form of satire is known as Menippean, after the Greek parodist Menippus.

Compare this from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide: Total Perspective Vortex