Gazing in Useless Wonder. English Utopian Fiction 1516–1800 by Artur Blaim

Artur Blaim’s Gazing in Useless Wonder. English Utopian Fictions 1516–1800, the thirteenth volume of the esteemed Ralahine Utopian Studies series, has already received praises as a must-read monograph from such renowned utopian scholars as Lyman Tower Sargent and Gregory Claeys—and indeed it challenges anyone who would dare state otherwise. And even though such flawless pieces of research are not that common, Blaim’s book definitely has the potential to set a precedent in that regard, being a thorough and cohesive analysis of rather sporadically interpreted utopian texts and novels from even less often studied historical periods.

Already the book’s composition reveals a direct association between the emergence of utopian fiction and the publication of Sir Thomas More’s De optimo reipublicae statu deque noua insula Utopia. The introductory chapter sets up a clear distinction between utopian politics—widely discussed in philosophical or sociological terms by such famous scholars and theorists as Fredric Jameson and Ruth Levitas—and so-called “self-referential texts” (2), combining a mimetic approach to real-world representation and a semiotic one toward fictional world-building. Having set the year 1516 as a terminus a quo for the development of the eponymous utopian fictions, Blaim proceeds thereafter with establishing a binary model for utopian text, dialogic or polyphonic (sensu Mikhail Bakhtin) on the rhetorical level and bipartite on both topographical and narrative levels. Therefore, Blaim’s reading of early modern utopias emphasizes their two-worldliness, involving at least two transitions: (1) from narrative framework (e.g., dulci et utile) to utopian description (e.g., ut pictura poesis) and (2) from the imperfect actual world to its utopian alternative (5–9).

It is no wonder, then, that the main part of the book begins with a comprehensive interpretation of the rhetorical and world-building ambivalences in Thomas More’s Libellus vere aureus—starting with the genological dichotomy of platonic dialogue and travel narrative that is so famously evoked by its title (“the best state of commonwealth and the new island of utopia”). Blaim sees the character-narrator Raphael Hythlodaues as a key embodiment of this underlying dichotomy meant to establish a simplified (if not simplistic) worldview comprising Imperfect Europe and Perfect Utopia and governed by a principle of rhetorical juxtaposition (all versus nothing, any versus no one, everywhere/anywhere versus nowhere, ever versus never, equality versus inequality, true versus false, wisdom versus folly, order versus disorder, community versus privacy, and so on) (30). And although Blaim does not refer here directly to Mieke Bal’s redefined concept of Genette’s focalization, it is evident that he sees Hythlodaues not as the third-person narrator but as a point-of-view character whose subjective account relativizes the worldview of Utopia—and, as such, may be evaluated by the other characters (including Thomas More himself as a fictionalized avatar) and readers alike. This reminds that even though More’s Utopia is quite often casually reduced to a travel or even a portal-quest narrative, it clearly utilizes a variety of rhetorical and narrative devices to undermine the credibility of the account and, thereby, also the legitimacy of any logocentric, totalitarian, or axiologically biased vision of the ideal city/society. And this discrepancy is considered the main reason for the, usually considered ironic, names and aptronyms (Achorians = Placeless People, Amaurotum = Ghost City, Anydrus = Waterless [River], etc.) used throughout the course of More’s narrative and dialogic devices as well (Platonic syncrisis and anacrisis used for, correspondingly, juxtaposing different points of view and provoking interlocutors’ sincerity). Finally, Blaim pursues Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of menippea as a combination of the fantastic and ideologically motivated adventure and derives from More’s Utopia a (pretty lengthy) genre description for early modern utopian fiction as the “two-partite composition … comprising the narrative frame and the descriptive [pseudo-ekphrastic] utopian section … corresponding to the axiologically charged division into the negatively evaluated author’s world and the...