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Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England.

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Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England

By Christopher Kendrick Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004

It is almost twenty years since the publication of Christopher Kendrick's last book, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form, in 1986. However, as Kendrick notes, his new book on utopia is part of "an on-going, long-term project" (vii), and his earlier work on Milton gives the reader a clear idea of what to expect from his new book on the utopian impulse in the early modern period, both in terms of its Marxist approach and in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. Both books are, of course, based on the presupposition that literary texts, and the critical process itself, are forms of political engagement and are also interested in the relationship between communal and individual identities, between humanist learning and action, and between genre and historical process. Most striking, perhaps, are the ways both books extend and refine our understanding of the relationship between text and context, although Kendrick's approach to this issue in his new book is even more responsive to the complicated, discontinuous, and self-canceling potential of this relationship than it was in the book on Milton. Marxist readings of these issues can be crude, but Kendrick is never crude.

Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth is both more exciting and more disappointing than Kendrick's work on Milton, and these two observations are linked. It is exciting because of its theoretical and historical ambition, because it is nothing less than an attempt to renovate utopia and renovate Marxism, making both these things available to us in new ways so that analyses of utopia and Marxism need no longer be the battleground on which old cold war battles are played out. At the same time what can make this book exciting also makes it disappointing, as the ambition often leads into abstruse, generalized, unsubstantiated theorizing. This long book is in no sense an easy read. Kendrick's wit only occasionally comes to the fore, and it is simply too complicated to appeal to any undergraduate, and even most graduates. It quotes very rarely and presupposes a great degree of knowledge both of texts and of the critical debates that have developed around them. The book on Milton had a tighter focus and concentrated on Areopagitica and Paradise Lost, and Kendrick is at his best when he is unpicking the problems in a specific critical approach or analyzing the nuances of a specific passage. He is a brilliant literary critic, and there is, as always, a very great deal to be gained by reading Kendrick, but his strengths are sometimes obscured by tendentious generalization and confusing theorizing. It would have helped a lot to have had some kind of thesis statement at the start of the book, some outline of purpose, both at the beginning and even at the end of the book, to help the reader keep up with Kendrick's intellect.

Kendrick's approach to utopia is strongly influenced by the work of Fredric Jameson and Louis Marin, and, like Jameson and Marin, he is very interested in the chinks in the representational surface of the varied utopias he discusses. Kendrick sees utopia not as the straightforward realization of an ideal society but as a process. In other words, utopian texts set out various ways of manipulating reality and offer a set of mental operations to be performed on a batch of raw material that is contemporary society itself. Topical allusions are fundamental building blocks of utopias because they introduce the material that is to be manipulated by the genre. These allusions can serve to identify text and subtext, or...

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