Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England Aaron Kitch Christopher Kendrick. Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 382 pp. $85.00/£55.00. One of the main achievements of Christopher Kendrick's new book is that it moves us beyond the impasse of late twentieth-century criticism that was content to reinforce a false binary between utopia and dystopia. At the same time, Kendrick shares with many intellectuals on the Left an impatience with Marxism's outward rejection of utopia. He shares with his mentor and advisor Fredric Jameson an insistence on the multiple traditions of utopian thinking within Marxism itself, including Ernst Bloch's ideal of hope, Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogical thinking that ruptures a conventional bourgeois narrative of history, and the Frankfurt School's concept of "strong memory" that gives aesthetic texts revolutionary power. Jameson himself goes so far to suggest that "all class consciousness"—not just the ideology of the ruling classes—is "in its very nature Utopian."1 Kendrick attends more to the political ambiguities of utopia. He emphasizes that the utopian genre is necessarily bounded by history. Utopian texts may function on some level as thought experiments, but these experiments are founded in historically determined contradictions. Such contradictions ultimately remind us of the "impossibility of sketching a consequent vision of social happiness whole"—or, as Kendrick puts it in more colloquial (and, again, Jamesonian) terms, remind us that "thought in fact is not free" (10). Kendrick insists that Marxism has depended on utopian thinking all along. He locates in works like Marx's essay on the Paris Commune a particular type of utopia, one that acknowledges the "necessary and salient utopian dimension" of class struggle (24). Kendrick actually regards Marx's stated anti-utopianism as a characteristically utopian response, one that helped him and others to define abstractions like "mode of production" and "working class" which were so essential to his vision of the future. It is in the tradition of utopian fiction itself, beginning with Thomas More's Utopia, that Kendrick locates a notion of history as both progressive and epochal. Kendrick's hefty task in Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth is to trace in detail the origins and implications of such contradictions, not just in obvious places such as More but in a constellation of historically connected texts in the Renaissance, including Rabelais's Pantagruel and [End Page 215] Gargantua, the "commonwealth" tracts of Thomas Starkey and Thomas Smith, Thomas Nashe's Piers Penniless and Nashes Lenten Stuffe, and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Kendrick's resulting work of scholarship offers complex arguments and detailed readings of interrelated texts, something of a luxury for the reader at a time when academic presses (at least in the U.S.) seem to be taking their cues from Disney and Viacom in subordinating all aspects of intellectual production to the principle of profit maximization. Following Ernest Mandel's Trotskyist theory of late capitalism, Kendrick locates a key source of contradiction within Renaissance utopias in the historical process of "uneven development," which Marx defined as the overlap between modes of production manifested in the disparity between economic and social power of the ascending yeoman class. Kendrick's definition of uneven development (which he labels "archaic") includes a specific historical process by which a centralized Tudor monarchy was both motivated and hampered by nascent capitalism (83), as well as a more general sense of the relativity of social forms. Far from reducing the works at hand to so many proto-Marxist manifestos, Kendrick uses the historical genre of utopia as a way to interrogate Marxism itself. He provocatively suggests that utopia itself "sketches the limits of a Marxist politics by foregrounding the difficult question of (especially working-class) culture and consciousness" (17). In the process, he embraces Ernest Bloch's assimilation of Marxism and utopia and rejects Louis Marin's arguments for a break between them (18). In his original readings of More, Starkey, Smith, Nashe, and others, Kendrick tries to retain the power of utopian fiction to remain situated in the "real" over and against Marin's restriction of utopia to a merely signifying practice. Kendrick defines utopian literature...