CHAPTER 1
THOMAS MOREâS âPENINSULA MADE AN ISLANDâ
There is a history in all menâs lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, 3.1.80â85.
[T]he suspension of the present form of production relations gives signs of its becomingâforeshadowings of the future.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 461.1
In 2006, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies assembled a special issue titled âUtopias, Medieval and Early Modern.â In the introductory essay, the medievalist Patricia Ingham advances the following statement of purpose: âwe are interested in understanding why, despite repeated testimony to those âmedievalâ inspirations that survive in [Thomas Moreâs Utopia], the narrative of Moreâs revolutionary newness still seems to be unassailable.â2 Ingham goes on to question the tendency toward supersessionary thinking within utopian studies, especially the variety that represents the early modern utopia as a newly secular mindset, while caricaturing the medieval as irredeemably religious. Ingham counters this periodization by asserting that invention, play, and worldly wonderâdefining characteristics within her definition of utopia3âare as common to medieval literature as they are to Moreâs text.
The case for medieval utopianism is made just as emphatically by Karma Lochrie in her contribution to the same journal issue and in her recent book Nowhere in the Middle Ages.4 Lochrie takes aim at the literary tendency to ghettoize utopia to the realm of mere genre, calling on Ernst Blochâs theories to assert the higher purpose of a more timeless utopian function. She claims, âThe scholarly master narrative of More as the father of all utopias worries me for its circular way of reinforcing the novelty of Moreâs work, the epistemic break between the medieval and the early modern, and the narrowest concept of what utopia is and does.â5 As their remarks indicate, Ingham and Lochrie gesture toward larger problems of method than period turf wars: the question of how to define utopiaâas form, content, impulse, or functionâoccupies this special journal issue throughout, but their critiques zero in on the narrative approach to literary historiography. In particular, they suggest that the modern and, mainly, Marxist tradition of utopian studies has chronically overemphasized Moreâs novelty, rupture, and difference at the expense of survivals, seams, and continuities within the history of utopian thought.
Lochrieâs and Inghamâs theses should themselves be contextualized within a larger movement in medieval studies that owes a great deal to James Simpsonâs influential Reform and Cultural Revolution. Simpson probes the passage from the medieval to the early modern, troubling dominant periodic terms and the contemporary scholarâs tendency to draw too sharp a line between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But if Simpson critiques the âconstrained memoryâ of periodized thought,6 he also to a large extent reproduces it, despite his own venture beyond the frequent chronological riftâthe coronation of Henry VII in 1485. For example, he begins his massive study by advancing the claim that the sixteenth century was not a period of literary innovation so much as one of generic narrowing and simplification. In the introduction, he goes on to maintain that early modern literature was organized by âunityâ and ânoveltyâ as measures of cultural worth (a shift in some ways traced to the development of the printing press), as opposed to the heterogeneity and âcomplicationâ which characterized medieval cultural production. In Simpsonâs account, historians and cultural critics who study early modernity tend to misguidedly reproduce these same neat divides, the same desire for a âcleanness of lineâ and âoriginal purityâ in cultural traditions7âor in a word, for cultural revolution rather than reformation. When he reckons with Moreâs fictional society (an imagined commonwealth based on âdraconian repression of the body politic in the name of centralized reasonâ), he treats Utopia rather straightforwardly as a textual fantasy of the âend of history.â8 Simpson here poses a question that arises again in Lochrieâs and in Inghamâs work: âCan More slice across history so cleanly?â9
The question seems pointed, but in reality, it is loaded; Utopia in all these studies becomes a symbolic text of early modernity. It sets the cultural standard of novelty and revolution (in Simpson) and the generic, utopian literary standard (in both Lochrie and Ingham). Ironically, Moreâs little book again emerges as a uniquely pivotal, seminal text even as this status is denied it. Here, Iâll argue that Utopia is moored in a transitional moment, looking both backward and ahead, internalizing its transitional, transformative context as content. The work is certainly perturbed by past survivals and adapts older forms, then, but it also signals historically novel circumstances and initiates a culturally novel form.
While Ingham and Lochrie offer valuable reminders that a utopian impulse exceeds literary formations and that something akin to utopian wonder or collective dreaming was indisputably present in medieval culture and texts, and while Simpsonâs work needs no praise given the influence it exerts, I will here maintain that the study of the genre of utopia demands an approach that is uniquely attentive to historical shifts and departures within its history. The search for origins and ruptures within the study of utopiaâhowever fraught that project will beâseems a necessary one, given utopiaâs own probing desire for social difference and historical becoming.10 This is certainly not an attempt to fortify disciplinary boundaries, or to shut down conversations between literary critics who have much to glean from each other; instead, it is to defend and join two of the most lively, and to my mind, seminal sites of critical innovation on Moreâs work in recent decades: the New Historicist and postcolonial influenced strains of More criticism and the Marxist and Freudo-Marxist set of interpretations.
What these two already cross-pollinated fields shareâin the study of utopias and culture more generallyâis an interdisciplinary concern with cultureâs sociohistorical embeddedness. In addition, both strains of criticism suggest that Moreâs work is definitively âearly modern,â shedding light on the historical development of modern institutions, from the nation state and empire to the nuclear family and capitalism. Yet in the end, they arrive at remarkably different conclusions on the political nature of Moreâs book. In most new historicist, Foucauldian, or post-structural studies on More, Utopia is less than a radical text, emptied out of its good intentions by its colonial form and policies and its fantasy of instrumental rationality, state power, regulation, and repression.11 Alternatively, in the Marxist tradition of utopian literary studiesâanchored as it is in Fredric Jamesonâs elaborations on Louis Marinâs structuralist study Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spacesâthe form of Utopia tends to be celebrated (against the content of King Utopusâs social order) as a challenge to ideological thought.12 In Marinâs and Jamesonâs readings, Utopia is a kind of formal thought mechanism, orchestrating a radical play of perspectives that estranges the current social system and thus presents readers with a way of recognizing the limits of ideology and history. The Left, then, is no closer to a consensus on Utopiaâs political orientation than it was in the Cold Warâera debate with virulent anti-communists.13 By some accounts, Moreâs work is draconian; by others, it is saintly, much like the views in the debate about Thomas More the man.
What this chapter will attempt is a kind of reconciliation of these assessments, or a reading that draws from both critical practices to consider the complicated, overdetermined, and certainly multiple origins of Utopia within a historical process that was both regressive and progressive, or as Walter Benjamin would have it, barbaric and civilized.14 As is always the case with More, part of the difficulty of locating his politics is a matter of the bookâs dialogue form, its self-effacing neologisms, and its self-contradictions and satire. Yet I would like to propose that this difficulty is also a consequence of the bookâs effort to reexamine localized social upheavals in their abstract, non-placed relationship to transnational forcesâa circumstance of deterritorialization15 or displacement that is in tension and also in explicit debate with Utopiaâs nation-state formations. If, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue, the âproblem of the nation is aggravated in the two extreme cases of a land without a people and a people without a land,â (begging the question, âHow can a people and a land be made . . . a nationâa refrainâ),16 Utopia, in its dialogical encounter between a ânewâ continent and a kingdom of vagrants, offers a fiction that aspires to resolve this riddle.
Of particular concern in the first half of this chapter will be the combinatory, collisional discourses of late medievalism, humanism, and New World writing that structure Moreâs book and which formally encourage old and new, as well as internal and international, ways of perceiving land, labor, and community in a moment of class upheaval and continental discovery. Specifically, Moreâs parodic reworking of the medieval tradition of estates satire, as it combines with the philosophical-dialogical tradition of the ideal commonwealth and the emergent discourses of Atlantic travel writing, suggest that Utopia is an effort to reexamine Englandâs place in a new world. Importantly, these literary forms are also narratives of community formation, both true and fictitious, with various socio-spatial limits: namely, the imaginary polis, the kingdom (as it was and is), and the unknown, expansive, oceanic world. The novel adaptation of the three forms, Iâll suggest, becomes a means for representing diachronic change synchronically and responding to the spatio-temporal dislocations caused by agrarian, mercantile, and imperial changes to the English polity, in ways that emphasize both continuity and rupture with the past, and that seek out figurative means for representing systemic transformation.
In the final section of the chapter, focused mainly on Moreâs colonial imaginary and Book Twoâs story of the island-forming trench, the concern will be to demonstrate Utopiaâs own obsession with spatial, geopolitical, and territorial origins. Moreover, an examination of its socio-spatial discourses will highlight Utopiaâs nationally circumscribed critique of dispossession. The contradictions that emerge in Moreâs work will be read not only within the context of an emerging agrarian capitalism, then, but also in relation to an emerging world system, for Moreâs representation of domestic struggles looks beyond England to consider an alternative that lies across the sea. In essence, this study is an effort to join two threads of criticisms by considering Utopia not as a product of a capitalist and an imperialist moment, but as a genre-pioneering work that attempts to narrate the experience of an at once very immediate and very distant transformation that gave rise to capitalist relations within and beyond England.
On the Origins of Utopia and the Origins of Capitalism
There is a long line of critics of all political and methodological persuasions who treat Moreâs Utopia as having inaugurated a genre. The most empirical evidence for its ground-breaking status can be found in the number of subsequent works that were explicitly fashioned after the 1516 text. Utopia inspired a host of explicit imitations by fellow English writers like Bacon, Hall, and Plattes, while beyond Britainâs shores, Tommaso Campanellaâs Civitas Solis, Johannes Valentinus Andreaeâs Christianopolis, and Voltaireâs Candide also paid tribute to Moreâs book. Perhaps the strongest evidence of Moreâs invention can be found in the anxiety of influence expressed by some of his pupils. Robert Burtonâs Dutch-inspired âUtopia of Mine Owneâ (in the Anatomy of Melancholy), for instance, parodically proposes that the source of seventeenth-century Englandâs troubles is indeed the idleness of commoners.17 Burton nevertheless gives evidence of the paternal pressure Moreâs text exerted on other writers.18 Interpretive evidence can also be evoked to describe the textâs novelty, from its neologism that coined the contemporary genreâs namesake to its humanist reworking of classical texts and travel narratives. But what marks Utopia apart from earlier classical, pagan, and Christian traditions of the ideal society (within which it should most certainly be contextualized), is the workâs unusually realistic underpinning. Utopia is not just a mythical otherworld; it is also strangely of its own historical world. Unlike the city in Platoâs Republic, where the city is a âpatternâ set in the heavens for a âman who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees,â19 and unlike the lands in those myths of a golden age such as Ovid described, where âspringtime lasted all the yearâ20 and the land could go untilled, the Utopian island is a coeval territory where mankind is flawed and desiring, requiring labor and the regulating institutions of society in order to meet human needs.21
Yet the more recent critical tendency chiefly examines Moreâs novelty in relation to his historical conjuncture. This assertion e...