NOWHERE IS EVERWHERE : Utopia at the New York Public Library - exhibit of rare books, manuscripts, etchings, etc

Commonweal, Dec 1, 2000 by Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill

Were Sir Thomas More (1478- 1535) to wander into the New York Public Library exhibit, "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," he would no doubt be astonished at what he hath wrought. More's "splendid little book, no less instructive than entertaining," as the description on the title page reads, not only bequeathed the term "utopia" to future generations, but also initiated a flourishing literary genre populated by the likes of Jonathan Swift and Ray Bradbury, and influenced historical events and political movements all the way from the American Revolution to Marxism to 1950s urban planning to the Internet. Or so the library would have it in its exhaustive, cerebral new exhibit, on view through January 27, 2001.

A collaboration with the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (where a similar version was on view this summer), this show boasts hundreds of books, manuscripts, etchings, architectural renderings, posters, maps, photographs, and album covers. It is rich fare, not quickly or easily digested. A warning: Do not attempt this in your lunch hour.

The exhibit states its intentions in its entrance tableau: two early printed versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses, open to the description of the Golden Age, stand against a backdrop of modern Plexiglas stairway bookshelves containing contemporary paperback versions of utopian works published between 1516 and the present. Actually, seven hundred years of Western history are under consideration here, and the exhibit stretches the definition of "utopia" so much that the visitor may be forgiven for wondering where the limits fall in an exhibit that includes a manuscript of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, a first edition of Robinson Crusoe (is a solitary utopia possible?), and record album covers from the 1960s. The show is a great advertisement for the library's magnificent collections, but as a clearly defined treatment of the search for utopia, it comes up a bit short, or more accurately, a bit long. The advantage of this approach is that there is probably something here for just about everyone.

Though More gets credit for entering the term into the lexicon of Western cultural history, the seeds of utopia existed in ancient and biblical sources, where the perfect world was known variously as the Golden Age, the New Jerusalem, the Land of Cockaigne, and, of course, the Garden of Eden. Illustrations of these constitute the first section of the exhibition, and there are many treasures here. I particularly liked the scene depicted in a fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish Book of Hours showing the expulsion from the Garden. A stooping, dispirited Adam and a wistful Eve walk slowly through a lush garden with gravid fruit trees and a profusion of animals, as a flaming red cherub, his sword raised, glowers against a possible return. Exquisite in color and detail, it conveys the poignancy of paradise lost.

If paradise had been lost, then surely it could be found, and medieval Christian writers developed the narrative of the quest for the perfect world to a high art. A delightful example of this literary form occurs in the Navigatio of Saint Brendan. A sixth-century Irish monk, Brendan made a seven-year sea voyage around the isles of Ireland in search of paradise. His travels were circular, he and his companions returning each year to celebrate the Easter vigil on the back of an enormous fish, Jasconius. The fanciful depiction of this celebration (in a seventeenth-century manuscript recounting the quest) features a fish with human eyes bearing an altar and several monks on its scaly back.

Thomas More gave these various traditions a local habitation and a name in his 1516 volume describing the island of Utopia, a society that lay "beyond the equator" and was characterized by justice, rational conduct, and economic equality. On view are various first editions of Utopia (the original in Latin, as well as later English and French versions). One is struck by the impact that such a slim volume, in quarto, has had on the world. Among the items flanking these printed texts are eighteenth-century etchings which give amusing incarnation to More's social pragmatism. For example, when More's Utopians sought a mate, they arranged for the prospective bride and groom to evaluate each other unclothed--professing surprise at how careless the rest of the world is about entering such an undertaking sight unseen. The etching "How engagements are made in Utopia," shows a bare and buxom female, draped discreetly where it mattered, and a similarly unclad and solidly fleshed male, coolly sizing each other up. It is as practical a mating dance as can be imagined.

The publication of Utopia coincided with an unprecedented wave of geographic exploration. Europeans viewed the New World as a tabula rasa on which they could project their own images of a perfect society. A plenitude of maps and engravings documents these commonly distorted perspectives and traces the development of a more accurate understanding of the newfound lands. A 1540 map drawn by the great cartographer Sebastian Munster illustrates both tendencies: while it is one of the earliest maps to show the Americas as a separate continent, it also indicates the presence of cannibals in South America by depicting a human leg roasting on a bonfire.