Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines

by Thomas More

  J. C. Davis’s definition is very astute, and allows us to make clear distinctions between different kinds of ideal world narratives. It admirably clarifies the degree to which the utopia insists on ‘human’ solutions to ‘human’ problems; it enables us to raise useful questions about individual utopian narratives. But an emphasis on the utopian idealization of social organization can also mislead: the degree to which social organization—or indeed almost anything else—is ‘idealized’ in utopias is often far from transparent. The New Atlantis, certainly, idealizes the organization of academic learning into institutions of scientific inquiry, but Utopia and The Isle of Pines may well undermine almost everything they ostensibly represent as ideal. In those two texts, indeed, claims to the idealism of the communities they describe can, on closer examination disappear (like Gonzalo’s utopia in Shakespeare’s The Tempest) into ‘nothing’.6 The question of how ‘ideal’ a utopian community is really intended to be recurs frequently in our reading of utopian narratives (despite the everyday meaning of the word ‘utopia’, which takes for granted the exemplary character of the imagined community described).

  Thus far among critics it is Louis Marin, in Utopiques: jeux d’espaces, who has offered the most influential answer to such questions as these, and to their logical extension: what is the relation between the ‘real’ world out of which the author of a utopia writes, and the fictional—and purportedly ideal—world which he or she creates in the text? For Marin, whose intellectual roots lie in the Marxism of Althusser and Macherey, such questions can only be answered if we first think through the nature of our own relation to the ‘real’ world itself. That real world, and our relation to it, Marin believes, can never be apprehended by us clearly and thoroughly. Rather, we all experience it through the workings of ideology, which occludes social contradictions and ‘explains’ injustices in the real world in the interests of the dominant class. Some individuals may see through, at least partially, the haze of ideology to perceive to some degree the contradictions it obscures, but it is impossible to own a complete understanding of one’s social present—of the ‘real’ world—for to do so would mean to step outside the history through which all of us are constructed.

  What, then, is the relation between the utopia and the real world? For Marin, it is a very close one. Utopia for Marin is not ‘other’ to the ‘real’ world with which it purports to contrast itself: the two are not opposites, even if they present themselves as such in the text(s). Rather, the utopia is a reconstruction of its author’s reality, which displaces aspects of its own world into the fictional world it represents, and in so doing foregrounds the social and economic contradictions lived by its writer and his contemporaries. Such contradictions are betrayed in the utopia in the form of ruptures underlying its apparently smooth and seamless surface. In this respect, the utopia is a critique of dominant ideology, offering to its readers an imaginary or fictive solution to the social contradictions of its own time. But utopia’s critique, according to Marin, can never be total, for utopia too is a product of history and immersed in it, unable to stand outside it. Thus utopia’s critique must itself be ideological: utopia, for Marin, is an ideological critique of the dominant ideology.

  From Origins of the Utopia to the Utopia as Origins: The Utopia as a Precursor of the Novel

  Another approach to trying to make sense of the odd way in which early modern utopias negotiate the path between truth and fiction might be to understand the utopian narrative in terms similar to those recently used to explain the origins of a later form of prose narrative, the novel. In an influential argument, as complex as it is elegant, Michael McKeon claims that the novel’s eventual domination over other forms of literature arises from its ability to ‘formulate, and to explain, a set of problems that are central to early modern experience’.7 It is impossible to do McKeon’s argument justice in the limited space available here, but, very briefly, his claims go something like this: the problems that the novel arises to explain are divisible into two main types. The first manifests itself through the way in which early modern writers seem uncertain about how to separate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’, ‘true lives’ from romance, ‘history’ from ‘literature’, an uncertainty which, according to McKeon, denotes a major cultural shift in solutions to the problem of ‘how to tell the truth in narrative’. A second set of problems, McKeon argues, betrays a crisis of uncertainty regarding the relation of the external social order to the internal moral state of its members. Responses to those questions (about truth on the one hand and virtue on the other) followed two trajectories, both dialectical in nature. Insofar as truth is concerned, McKeon argues, the period moves from siting truth in traditional authorities (such as classical writers, for instance), through an empiricist challenge to this dependance on ancient authority which argues instead that truth is to be found in the immediately observable (such as travel narratives, for example), to a sceptical challenge to that empirical view, which returns, in part, to the original dependance on traditional authority. These epistemological developments, McKeon claims, have a political counterpart: the period begins with an ‘aristocratic ideology’, which is challenged by a ‘progressive ideology’, which is in turn challenged by a ‘conservative critique’, which returns, in part, to some of the opinions expressed in the original, aristocratic, ideology.

  Now to invoke McKeon’s argument as a way of perceiving the kinds of questions raised by the utopias in this volume is in some respects a dubious move, at least, and especially, as far as Utopia itself is concerned. For McKeon sees these changes beginning (at least most dramatically and extensively) in 1600, whereas More’s text was written almost a century before. It will nevertheless be apparent that his argument has much to say about Utopia, which so conspicuously raises questions concerning authority and truth, social behaviour and individual virtue, and so systematically juxtaposes very different epistemological and ideological ‘answers’ to those questions. A couple of examples will suffice to illustrate this claim.

  One might read in the England that always hovers around the borders of Utopia an essentially aristocratic ideology. One might see the Utopians themselves as the embodiment of a progressive critique of this ideology. And one might then argue that that progressive critique is itself ultimately challenged in the figure of More himself, whose interventions within the text cast conservative doubt on the progressive solutions Utopian society would seem to offer to the aristocratic social evils Hythloday so fervently denounces. Alternatively, one might read in the text a dialectical approach to questions of truth and authority. Dependence on traditional authority is explicitly challenged in Utopia in Hythloday’s scornful rejection of the European belief that true wisdom resides in the authority of one’s ‘forefathers and ancestors’, and in his parodic rendition of the basis of their argument: ‘it were a very dangerous matter if a man in any point should be found wiser than his forefathers were’ (p. 17). In this view, Utopia’s claim to newness, its elaborate supporting apparatus of letters, maps, alphabets, and other attestations to the empirical truth of the island, serves as the empirical critique of this outdated dependance on the authority of the ancients: ‘now in our time divers lands be found which to the old geographers were unknown,’ Giles remarks in his prefatory letter (p. 126). That empirical challenge to the authority of the ancients, however, is itself contained in the text by the ultimate exposure of Utopia as a hoax, which exerts a sceptical check on the empirical claims of the ‘new’ geographers, and in so doing reaffirms, to some degree, the authority of the old.

  These are brief—and somewhat literal—examples of ways in which Utopia itself could be read as an early forerunner of the novel, or at least as a text which engages very directly with some of the epistemological and social questions which the novel has recently been understood to confront and to formulate. Similar questions might be asked of the New Atlantis and The Isle of Pines, and also of the texts together: might it be possible, for example, to see the New Atlanti
s as an essentially empirical critique of an aristocratic ideology? To what degree might The Isle of Pines represent a sceptical negation of an empirical ideal? These are difficult questions, and they have no easy answers. Nor, indeed, do questions which are apparently more simple: questions, for instance, about the way in which narratorial point of view affects the ‘meaning’ of these texts; whether ‘plot’ takes on an increasingly important role as we move from Utopia through the New Atlantis to The Isle of Pines; whether the texts are more—and perhaps increasingly—concerned with the individuals who visit these utopias than with the societies the texts purport to describe.

  Early prose narratives such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe are indubitably indebted to narratives such as The Isle of Pines: the relation between the two latter texts has long been recognized, even if the more general relation of the early modern utopia to the novel is still far from clear, and a matter of debate. But whatever this relation is, it seems true to say that if McKeon is right in arguing that the novel’s hegemony arose through its ‘unrivalled power to formulate, and to explain, a set of problems that are central to early modern experience’, the utopia is also grappling with some of the same problems, and, if not explaining them, encouraging its readers to attempt to understand them.

  II

  Utopia

  Thomas More’s was a life of paradoxes, even of contradictions, which find their continued expression in the conflicting views of those who write about the man and his work even today. No historical consensus has emerged on More. Some revere him as a saint (he was canonized in 1935); others condemn him as a religious fanatic who persecuted heretics and condemned several of them to death. He has been understood as a medieval traditionalist, unshaken in his defence of the Catholic church against the Protestant onslaught of Luther and his peers; and as a modern reformist, a prominent member of the humanist circle which was at the time the seat of liberal learning in Europe. He was both public statesman (famous as a counsellor to Henry VIII and responsible for enacting some of the severest of Tudor legal punishments), and private man (his household held up as a model of domestic happiness, his daughters educated to a degree extraordinary for the time, beyond the level of many men). All of these aspects of his personality and life have at various times been brought to bear on interpretations of Utopia, More’s most famous work, and perhaps his only literary masterpiece.

  More began writing Utopia whilst serving on a state delegation to the Low Countries in 1515. According to his great friend, the Dutch humanist Erasmus, he first composed Book 2 of Utopia (concerning the island of Utopia itself), writing Book 1 (a dialogue about the ills of England) later, when Book 2 was substantially complete. Quite why he chose to compose the books in this order; whether he conceived the bipartite structure of Utopia from the outset; what consequences this division into two books and the order of their composition have for our understanding of the work: all these have been matters of debate. It is certain that More was, at the time of composition, debating within himself the advisability of acting as a statesman to Henry VIII, and likely, therefore, that the conversation in Book 1 regarding the same matter had for More at the time a very personal resonance. It is also self-evident that More’s visit to the Low Countries directly influenced Utopia: More mentions that visit, as well as Peter Giles (one of the humanists he met whilst serving on this delegation) explicitly in his narrative. But other, deeper consequences of the addition of Book 1 to Book 2 remain enigmatic, and the relation of the two books is still one of Utopia’s many teasing problems. Does the criticism of England in Book 1 act to impress upon readers the ideal nature of the country described in Book 2, for instance? Or does it do the opposite, subverting the apparent ideal by making explicit criticisms of its untenability? To attempt to provide definitive answers to questions such as these is beyond the scope of this Introduction. But I hope that in the pages that follow I will at least be able to indicate why they remain so pressing.

  Like More’s life, Utopia itself is a tissue of paradox and contradiction, and since its first publication in 1516, More’s purpose in its creation has been a perennial problem for its readers. Utopia is the most slippery of texts: in no other literary work is the question of authorial intention at once more pressing and more unanswerable. Its playful juxtaposition of the real with the imaginary; the nature of Utopian society itself; the incongruence between ‘ideal’ Utopian practices and what we know of More’s own life and beliefs; the relation between Books 1 and 2 of the text: all these things encourage Utopia’s readers to ask themselves what More meant by this text, and simultaneously preclude attempts to answer that question with any certainty. The text has generated diametrically opposed interpretations from its critics, ranging from the dubious claim that Utopia describes a real historical community to the assertion that it is only a literary game; and from readings which maintain that it is a vision of an ideal Catholic society to those which see it as a proto-Communist text. More recent are the interpretations of those who have attempted with the help of literary theory to find ways of fusing the text’s ludic qualities with the seam of social critique that also runs through it, but before these contributions, most readings of the text essentially fell into two camps. On the one side were those who saw it as a grand joke at the expense of its readers; on the other stood those who claimed that the discourse of social critique within Utopia is at some level seriously intended. To what degree does Utopia offer ammunition for these variant strands of interpretation?

  A summary of the manifest content of the text is sufficient to illustrate why the impulse to read Utopia as a serious critique is so tempting. The book purports to relate the story of More’s meeting in Antwerp with a traveller, Raphael Hythloday, to whom he is introduced by his friend Peter Giles. The three men start talking, and enter into the prolonged debate on the social evils of sixteenth-century England which is the content of Book 1. In the course of this debate, Hythloday launches an impassioned attack on a number of abuses, especially on the English use of the death penalty and on the desperate poverty and degradation which was the lot of so many at the time. He is most concerned with the plight of the peasants. Dispossessed of their livelihoods through the enclosure of common land by rapacious landlords eager to profit from the wool trade, sixteenth-century English peasants had become economic refugees from their places of origin, and were driven into destitution. The unemployment created by this agricultural upheaval was swelled by the disbanding of private feudal armies, whose soldiers were released from their duties without alternative occupations to maintain them. In this context, Hythloday argues, theft and beggary are neither a matter of choice nor a consequence of innate immorality within the individual, but the necessary recourse of those from whom all choice has been taken away. To sentence petty thieves to death, he argues, is wrong, capital punishment being both impractical (because fear of it encourages a thief to kill his victim in order to preclude the threat of exposure to the law), and unethical (in that it transgresses God’s commandment not to kill).

  In the course of this debate, Hythloday invokes Plato’s Republic (one of the main literary inspirations for Utopia) to argue that the only way to overcome these problems is to eradicate what he claims is their fundamental cause: private property. ‘[S]o long as [property] shall continue,’ he claims, ‘so long shall remain among the most and best part of men the heavy and inevitable burden of poverty and wretchedness’ (p. 45). Thus is introduced the description of Utopia itself, invoked by Hythloday as the ‘answer’ to the problems raised in the preceding dialogues. The three men break for dinner, and Book 2 of Utopia then begins. With the exception of a brief intervention by More at the conclusion of the text, Book 2 consists entirely of Hythloday’s description of the commonwealth of Utopia: its social organization, the daily life of its people, its governors, laws, and religions. And on the surface at least, Utopia stands as the opposite of the England Hythloday has attacked. Where England has crime, Utopia has o
rder; where England has injustice, Utopia has equity; where England has hugely rich and desperately poor, Utopia has neither riches nor poverty. Instead, it has communist equality, in which ‘all things be common to every man’, and where no individual lacks anything so long as the larger community has enough (p. 119). At the close of Hythloday’s description of Utopia, More concludes the text by leading Hythloday into supper, and ‘thus endeth the afternoon’s talk of Raphael Hythloday concerning the … Island of Utopia’ (p. 123).

  It is important to recognize that the eradication of private property is the single most important aspect of Utopia. Utopian communism is ‘the principal foundation of all [Utopian] ordinances’ (p. 123), from which all else in Utopian society follows. And it is in part because of the absolute centrality to the text of this debate about the ethics and consequences of property ownership that critics have felt it imperative to decide for their own audiences the ‘meaning’ of Utopia. For critics of the right it is irksome that one of the most canonical texts in English literature appears to express so profound and explicit a critique of the economic system underlying all Western societies. Critics of the left have traditionally experienced the opposite impulse: the German Marxist and one-time secretary to Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, for example, celebrated Utopia as a communist manifesto avant la lettre. From what we have said so far it is clear how Utopia might lend itself to such an interpretation. What, though, limits this reading, and makes it dubious that More intended Utopia to be read simply as a manifesto?