At one point in his Philosophical Letters on the English, in which he observed the culture and society of France’s rival across the Channel, Voltaire, that paragon of French neoclassical taste, summarizes Hamlet. This is 1733; Shakespeare isn’t considered some revered universal genius yet; Hamlet hasn’t been performed in France, or even translated into French. Voltaire is introducing his countrymen to a foreign author they aren’t familiar with.
Very dryly, with an edge almost of mockery, he explains how the hero goes mad in the second act, and the heroine goes mad in the third, and he kills her father under the pretense of killing a rat, and she throws herself into a river, and so on, and so on. It’s only when you hear Voltaire tell it that Hamlet’s basic absurdity is brought home. His countrymen, he says, would be forgiven for thinking this work the fruit of the mind of a “drunken savage.”
Christopher Reid’s excellent poem “The Confusions,” published in a recent New Yorker, plays on the basic absurdity of the Shakespearean:
Marcello is betrothed to Magdalena,
who believes that he is in love with Mirabella,
her identical twin sister. Both indeed
are infatuated with Marcello,
who, however, unbeknownst to them,
has forsworn the company of women
and resolved to take monastic vows.
Fleeing the city to avoid the wrath of his father,
the Duke of Mantua, who has arranged
the match with Magdalena for purely monetary reasons,
Marcello meets on the road a young monk, Fra Martino,
who is in fact his fiancée’s sister’s maid, Martina,
in disguise. Martina has a plan to bring Marcello
and her mistress together by means of a magic potion
brewed in the mountains by an old witch, Morgana,
the Duke’s half sister, banished there many years before.
Meanwhile, a malcontent courtier, Malcontento,
has been plotting the abduction of Magdalena
with two henchmen, Muffo and Mosca,
instructing them to carry her off to a cave
in the mountains, by chance not far from the monastery
to which Marcello and Fra Martino are bound.
During a thunderstorm, they seek shelter in the cave,
where they find the unconscious body of Mirabella,
whom Muffo and Mosca have mistaken for her sister
and kidnapped in her place. In Act II …
What carries across such silly stories—what but language? That is one measure of the power of a literary style: Whether stories in some way “bad” can be presented memorably well, so well that the reader forgets the story is “bad” and actually perceives it to be “good.” Shakespeare often (re)told stories on stage that sound melodramatic or ridiculous out of context. For a few centuries after his death, the literary smart set, generation after generation, thought he was a powerful writer with terrible taste and little sense of proportion. These were the neoclassicists and pre-Romantics, like Dryden and Samuel Johnson, and like Voltaire.
All of which goes to show that realism, naturalism, verisimilitude, balance, and proportion, not to mention mere believability, have little to do with artistic truth, or the “reality” we experience inside a book or play or poem.
In our time, great literary stylists may put across stories that are “bad” in the opposite way. Not very much happens in this or that finely crafted story of genteel people in Canada, but cast in Alice Munro’s style, it’s the stuff of literature. Margaret Atwood tells “better” stories, from a storyteller’s perspective—but she doesn’t necessarily, at least in the Nobel committee’s opinion, write better books.
Incidentally, Voltaire himself was a dramatist, and he wrote play after play today forgotten even by the French. As for over-the-top stories, though, Voltaire did tell a whopper once. The sequence of misfortunes that keeps Candide barreling along is quite unlikely to have “really” happened to anybody. Summarized, it’s quite absurd: One minute he’s in love, then he’s in the army, then his ship gets blown into the Lisbon earthquake (!), then he’s in Paraguay (?!), and meanwhile everybody has syphilis. Good thing Voltaire never summarized his own plot to himself.
Fortunately, the different conventions of the comic tale kept Voltaire from applying High Literary, neoclassically austere criteria of “good taste” to Candide. It was a comic tale, and some element of bad taste was paradoxically in good taste. Voltaire’s language carried Candide across in a way it didn’t carry across plays like Irene or Zaire. He wrote his best work when he composed, in elegant French, a tall tale worthy of a drunken savage.