Blogs
A Cool Million vs. Candide
Upon reading Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, I couldn’t help but think of Voltaire’s Candide. Both books describe tales of extreme cruelty and injustice towards the hero and heroine to the extent where I had to physically put the book down and take a break from it all. The dehumanization is overwhelming. While Lem Pitkin is literally being ripped apart, Candide’s life wafts between bad and worse in his travels across the planet.
Both books portray worlds in which optimism barely manages to eek by, as it is always being squashed by greater powers. Candide and Lem start out as happy, optimistic, though naïve, characters, and they end up living a mediocre existence (Candide), or not living at all (Lem.) Their “optimism” is gradually chipped away, until they are forced to settle with reality.
Pessimist!
In Candide, it becomes clear that Voltaire believed only in a universal pessimism across which he perceived humanity, and perhaps we can muse that West felt similarly. However, there exists a counter argument to the one-sided philosophy of Voltaire in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau believed that all men are born honest and pure, and that it is the institutions of society that corrupts our inherent desire to do good. Without corruption, we could live in a world in which ignorance brings only happiness. Candide and Lem are presented as perpetually happy, and hopeful that things will change, creating a skewed notion of what happiness even is (much like that happiness survey.) Who is really happy anyways? Can we qualify Candide and Lem as happy or at least optimistic when their lives are essentially a joke?
Optimism is a fickle word. To some it is a positive thing, but for others it is a synonym for naivety and pure dumbness. So what are we meant to gather from this all? Clearly, life sucks, and injustice will always prevail if you’re the underdog. Fighting back is worthless because you’ll end up in jail, toothless, eye-less, leg-less, or dead.
How nice it is to be alive!
ps- in case you aren't sure how happy YOU are, here's a test.
According to the quiz you
According to the quiz you posted:
you are generally the type of person who believes in the goodness of humankind. You give nearly everyone the benefit of the doubt (at least until proven wrong), and will often accept what people say and do at face value instead of making conjectures about their motives. You will at least try to find the good in even the most difficult of people, and are willing to place your faith in others.
I guess I could end up finding myself in Lem's situation! I'd like to think that over the decades since the depression American's have learned their lessons though, even though the shiploads of illegal immigrants arriving in the US every year shows that not everyone has abandoned the dream. I believe that one should find the silver lining in every situation, yet we we should all learn from our mistakes and failures, something that Lem never seemed to do!
Actually, i hadn't thought of
Actually, i hadn't thought of Candide while reading West's story but the similarities are striking, although in Voltaire work Candide does end up learning something, no? "Il faut cultiver notre jardin" is how the story ends, a bright note to end it...? while Lem just dies. Anyways, talking about optimism, I bought a metro card the other day, and at the back of it there usually are ads for companies like fedex or other- on the one I had bought, it was just written OPTIMISM I thought that was kind of funny... propaganda? especially when you know the MTA is broke...