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Part One
Histories and theories
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1
Imagining places
Literary Utopias and the far-away
Introduction
This chapter considers the literary Utopias of early modern Europe, focusing mainly on Thomas More’s Utopia (1516–17) and dealing briefly with Tommasso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1629). All three authors set their narratives in distant geographical sites, and More and Campanella use the device of presenting their narratives as tales heard from fictional others, while Bacon tells the story of a sea voyage from Peru to China in the first person plural, echoing the convention of the genre of travellers’ tales. Distancing allows a criticality which might in a more overt form have endangered the writer’s liberty. It also allows a distinct, imaginative realm to emerge in which to construct a counter-image of the reality of the writer’s own society. Yet the distancing of a utopian world from reality separates the ideal from the real, and this in time becomes a convention in which the utopian world is viewed as unattainable except in literary texts or visionary dreams. In reality, there was a parallel current of millenarianism and popular insurrection seeking to proclaim a new world in the here and now; so utopian ideals ironically become the reassuring foil to social rupture, in that the idea of a better world is set in a not-to-be-attained future that in turn tends, as a lost Eden or Arcadia, to be based upon the ideal of a remote and unknown place. This shift occurs over the modern period as a whole but appears inherent in the critical distancing that is a key characteristic of More’s text; it is a flaw that haunts the whole history of the utopian imagination and begins in what can reasonably be claimed as its foundational text, Utopia.
I approach these issues from a reading of More’s text, after outlining two contexts for its writing, one of upheaval in early modern England, the other of the evolution of the modern subject in early modern drama. I discuss More’s text, then Campanella’s and very briefly Bacon’s. Finally, I note a second genre of utopian writing in the eighteenth century in which an ideal state of society is projected not onto far-away unreal places but onto the real far-away sites of European colonization, such as the South Seas. In the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, earlier in John Neville’s The Island of Pines (1668) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), or later in Herman Melville’s Typee (1846), the far-away is represented as the site of an uncorrupted humanity, an Eden that never was and becomes a literary or aesthetic entity.
Insurrections
For More, the gap between narrative and reality reflected a need to negotiate a path between contesting factions of power in the English state. The early modern period in England saw repeated uprisings, usually beginning among a displaced rural poor in a period of land enclosures that dispossessed them of the common lands for grazing and foraging on which their marginal livelihoods depended. This current fed, and was in turn fed by, a growth of radical religious sentiment revolving around the personal, unmediated interpretation of scripture. The Lollards, for example, preached direct, personal reception of scripture and reliance on inward religious feeling rather than ritual observance. Such movements challenged the authority of church and state in an assertion of the rights of common people, for the most part when they had almost nothing left to lose and took to the road, and were ruthlessly suppressed. In 1417, a planned Lollard uprising was foiled when their leader, Sir Thomas Oldcastle, was arrested, brought to London and executed. This was 99 years before the publication of Utopia, but handwritten Lollard bibles were still in circulation in the 1500s, and the currents of this folk religion, so to speak, which was also an attempt to regain access to common land, continued to ebb and flow through the sixteenth century, eventually erupting in another form in the radical sects of the English Revolution in the 1640s. The point here is that this current forms part of the context for More’s writing. It connects medieval millenarianism, in which the new age was often associated with radical social transformation – as in the ending of toil and abolition of office and property – and the Peasants’ Revolt of the 1380s (Fremion, 2002:17–22), with the Diggers and the Levellers in the 1640s (Hill, 1975; Petegorsky, 1999), and perhaps even with nineteenth-century utopian socialism and anti-capitalist direct action in the 1990s. In the immediate context of More’s Utopia, what is often taken to be a medieval trend to uprising (Kohn, 1970) remained a real force, while popular anti-clericalism was harnessed by Henry VIII as useful to his own aim of autonomy from Rome (identified as the seat of corruption in the church). In fact, Henry’s appropriation of the lands and wealth of the monasteries exacerbated the conditions of the rural poor for whom the monasteries had provided a safety net, thus increasing the likelihood of revolt (Coates, 2001:12).
For groups like the Lollards, or the Anabaptists of Münster in the 1530s (Midelfort, 1999; Kohn, 1970:261–71), the certainty that the new age, guaranteed in revelation, was about to dawn compensated for any material risk in insurrection. If the old world was soon to end, a belief likely to be strengthened by worsening material conditions, and if insurrection was the means to usher in the new (already present in consciousness, and perceived as soon to come), those who regarded themselves as the Elect were safe in their impending salvation and were required, as instruments of revelation, to revolt against those, usually in the elite, whose very presence stayed the new age. In July 1524, for instance, Thomas Müntzer preached, ‘Drive Christ’s enemies out from among the Elect, for you are the instruments … The sword is necessary to exterminate them … At the harvest time one must pluck the weeds out of God’s vineyard …’ (quoted in Kohn, 1970: 239). This was eight years after the publication of More’s Utopia, and seven after Martin Luther nailed his theses to a church door in Wittenberg.
More, as a state servant and loyal Catholic, had no dealings with insurrectionists. Nor could he make overt criticisms of church or state – such freedom of expression was not a known idea. Yet he sailed close to the wind, and his text was published in Louvain because, as Henry Morley says, ‘its satire was too direct to be misunderstood, even when it mocked English policy with ironical praise for doing exactly what it failed to do’ (Morley, 1887:7). In the end More was executed for putting faith before secular authority, but this does not mean Utopia is a radical text of a kind similar to the political pamphlets that circulated in the 1640s. It was, however, a critical text, and in one way Utopia might be read as a critical account of social disorder in England in the 1510s parallel to the undercurrent of unrest; while in another, to which I incline, it might be read as affirming that state of affairs by distancing its critical viewpoint to a traveller’s tale, an incidental, anecdotal yarn. In both cases, which are compatible, the society described at a geographical distance in Utopia is emphatically not a prescription for what England should become but, as I explain below, an oblique mirroring of what it was – through which representation to inform an incipient discourse of the English state.
Having said that, More’s text did inform later radicalism in which the aim was to introduce a degree of social equity that was unforeseen in More’s time. Christopher Hill describes how Tyranipocrit Discovered, an anonymous text printed in the Netherlands in 1649, echoes More’s text in denouncing the rich who hang the poor when it is the acts of deprivation perpetrated by the rich themselves that force the poor into theft in the first place (Hill, 1975:116). The image of thieves hanging from the gibbet is a motif in More’s story, presented with an almost identical argument in the opening section of the text: a seafarer called Hythloday whom More meets in Antwerp criticizes the disorder of a society in which people are forced into theft and then hanged by the dozen while others, equally poor and deprived of livelihood, in turn become thieves while, all the time, the true thieves, as it were, are the rich who steal the poor’s livelihood. More, of course, must distance himself from such scenarios, setting Utopia in a far-away place and putting the narration in the words of a traveller whom he meets inconsequentially, the conversation that ensues being an informal exchange incidental to, almost a distraction from, More’s service as a diplomat and state servant (in which role he went to Antwerp). To play with voices, though, indicates a reflexive idea of a speaking subject.
Context – the modern subject
Utopia begins in More’s text as an image of somewhere else, used as a critical device through which to write about the author’s society by other means in a time of censorship. Set in the author’s own time but not the author’s place, displacement of the narrative to the words of another person further removes the text from present reality. Utopia, that is, exists only in verbal description. More clearly uses this as a safety device, combined with wit and, as I outline below, a coded aspect designed for an elite readership among his own milieu. But the narrator also relays other voices, just as the structure of the text contains stories within the story. This reflects, and is part of, the development between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries of the idea of a human subject (self), the author whose thought is articulated as literature. The idea of a self which speaks itself is tentative in Utopia. Its modernity lies primarily in the way that More relays an original story rather than interprets previously received knowledge (as in the medieval tradition of scholasticism). The story is not his own but someone else’s, which he retells from interest or amusement. It might even be a joke or a joker’s tale, if need be. The self that relates the tale of a tale has now become complex by reflecting on its own location, able to move at will from one character to another.
The modern self made in its own perception of the subject is evident, as Catherine Belsey shows (1985), in early modern drama: first in the sixteenth century, performed on what was still a stage in the round; then, in the seventeenth century, extended in a move to performance on a proscenium stage on which actors remain driven by forces such as desire, power and the perceptions of others but seem to make choices that are their own. From this development Belsey identifies the subject of liberal humanism who possesses agency, emerging in the seventeenth century, the century of the English Revolution and as ‘an effect of the revolution … when the bourgeoisie is installed as the ruling class’ (Belsey, 1985:33–4). Belsey contrasts the medieval subject, having no unifying essence – body and soul, mortal container and immortal content awaiting the Day of Judgement – with the modern subject in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601), for whom the world is a stage on which to perform the self called Hamlet. Yet the binary model of the medieval subject persists – the actor ‘is another paradox: like a god and at the same time a quintessence of dust’ (Belsey, 1985:27). Hamlet speaks a choice between being and not being, in a statement of agency which includes the agency to silence the speaking self. Raymond Williams notes that the soliloquy – the speech to oneself characteristic of early modern drama – rehearses the potential for a concept of the individual (Williams, 1981:142, cited in Belsey, 1985:42).
Hamlet is not the only such character in Elizabethan or Jacobean drama. Belsey writes of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592?) that the soliloquies denote a genealogy, ‘rendering precarious precisely the unified subjectivity which it is its project to represent … [when] the repressed discontinuities of the allegorical tradition return to haunt the single voice which speaks’ (Belsey, 1985:44). She adds, citing Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1590) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), that a gap opens up now between the representation of a subject and the interiority presented in soliloquies: ‘the “I” cannot be fully present in what it says of itself’ (Belsey, 1985:49), to reveal an identity behind the words. If the liberal-humanist subject is ambivalent in its location, ‘the unified and unique subject of liberal humanism is forever tragically locked within its own silence’ (Belsey, 1985:52). All this post-dates More’s text but I make this apparent detour because it may illuminate the ambivalence of the speaking subject in Utopia, a subject establishing a critical distance that is itself one of the stories in the story, and a story of modernity.
Stories in stories
If More’s text is contextualized by an emerging concept of the subject as possessing agency in a period when power was in the hands of princes and prelates, then, and by the capacity of that emergent subject-self to reflect upon its own being, it is also an effort to deploy voices as elements of critical distance – a play on literary devices. The comparison of ideas in the narration is expressed through the voices of characters in the story, one of whom tells his own story but is not a real person while another, narrating this, is the real author who has no position of his own, only the story he passes on. Ernst Bloch glosses, ‘the dream of the best state is here once again presented as a kind of sailor’s yarn’ (Bloch, 1986:516), reading Utopia as a proto-bourgeois text. But Peter Carey notes (1999:38–9) that More allows doubt as to his seriousness by distancing himself from the text. Carey points out that the name Hythloday means dispenser of nonsense or windbag. Utopia means no-place, and if the society described is blissful this may be either, Carey argues, a way to consign it to the inconsequential or, as double-bluff, a simulation of a joke, ‘in a society where spreading new ideas could be dangerous’ (Carey, 1999:39). Satire was in fact not uncommon in the period, but More’s text is transgressive in two ways: the story told by Hythloday which More retells; and the implicit story of More’s own negotiation of a space in which to speak critically. The implicit signs of transgression include the fact that Hythloday is a seafarer who thus crosses the boundaries of states, his realm the free and formless ocean; and that More meets him in the port of Antwerp, a node of printing and trade where radical texts were known to circulate. More crossed state boundaries, too, as a diplomat and member of a new, literate, administrative class, one of the functions of which was to oversee the organization of trade and the collection of tariffs. More adopts a disguise, then, as the narrator of a story, and frames it such realistic detail that it becomes plausible. His independence from the story’s author meanwhile absolves him of the story’s burden of criticality.
The realism rests on accounts already published of voyages seeking to circumnavigate the globe. Hythloday’s voyage is a sub-category, then, of Amerigo Vespucci’s account of his voyages in 1499–1503 (published in 1507). Vespucci left 24 men at Cape Frio in 1504 – the starting point for Hythloday’s fictional voyage. The traveller’s tale became a literary genre in its own right during the ne...
