The River and the Garden: Basic Spatial Models in Candide and La Nouvelle Heloise

Abstract

THE GARDEN REPRESENTS one of the oldest, most elementary, and at, the same time, most versatile spatial structures in art and literature. In its basic form it constitutes a closure containing a rationally controlled system surrounded by an often amorphous wilderness. Throughout history the garden and, by implication at least, the space surrounding it, have been invested with the most divergent significations. It appears as the locus of virtue, piety, harmony, lust, and gluttony, to mention but a few examples. It has served as a symbol of man's civilization and, in other cases, as an insular refuge for nature in a threatening ocean of civilization. But the closure of the garden is never complete. In order to relate the inside world to the world outside, in order to demonstrate the marked qualitative difference between garden and wilderness, man must be permitted or obliged to pass from one to the other. In fact, the possibility of passage is a necessary condition of the binary division of the world into order and disorder, harmony and chaos, the garden and the non-garden. Thus every garden has a gate.' And in most cases the function of the gate is narrowly restricted: it serves either as entrance or as exit. Indeed the function of the gate is of such importance that we may classify gardens according to whether their gates are entrances or exits. Thus the most widely treated garden model in Western culture, the garden of paradise.