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Texas Studies in Literature
and Language, Vol. 34, 1992. 197-217.
More's Place in "No Place": The Self-Fashioning Transaction in Utopia John Freeman Long the reverenced object of hagiographers, from the humanist saint of William Roper to the socialist martyr of Karl Kautsky, Thomas More is undergoing a second martyrdom at the hands of modern biographers. They have argued for a lack of integration between More's life and its literary productions. The image of the utopian idealist and dreamer is refuted, for instance, by claims that the fury of the polemical works reveals More's "true personality."1 A good deal of these biographers' efforts at de-canonization centers around the critical period during which More wrote Utopia.2 They point to irremediable contradictions between Thomas More, the humanist idealist, and what Stephen Greenblatt labels "Morus," the public servant on an embassy for Henry VIII. In his The Public Career of Thomas More, J. A. Guy portrays More as a sycophantic courtier. Guy argues that More dissembled his intentions to enter court employment even from his dear friend Erasmus. For Guy, More's entry into court service was the culmination of savvy political stagecrafting, "the climax of a progression by which he gained the attention of Henry and Wolsey."3 Focusing on More's activities in the Netherlands during the time of the writing of Utopia, Richard Marius points out that the embassy upon which More had embarked was intended
In his Utopia, Louis Marin concurs that Utopia in its detachment relates "in a different way to the historical and geographic world whose contradictory consciousness produced it."5 Marin even argues that More "erased" himself as the author of the text by pointing at himself as both "a character in his book and, even better, as a historically existing figure, as a real representation" (76). In these critics' estimation, More's place in No Place is by no means assured. Dfffering with Marius and Marin, I wish to argue that the "created world" of Utopia corresponds very closely to the world in which More had to find his place; in fact, Book I represents both England and More's historical and biographical situations, and Book II offers an allegorization of those terms. Moreover, a central problem for Utopia involves the question of how one authors oneself, how one authorizes oneself to speak. More's perceived lack of an integer vita, marking Utopia itself as a disintegrative text,6 is belied by the offering of the text itself as a discursive space (topos) for transacting the terms of More's self-fashioning. A literary topos in Book II, this topos becomes historically determined with the addition of Book II. Far from being situated nowhere, Utopia represents a transaction of values that link the formation of social identity to the agrarian crisis of More's day. Restoring a sense of place to the literary topos by filling in these agrarian values will demonstrate a greater integration of the "created world" of Utopia with the historical circumstances surrounding its composition. This restored topography will also lead to a fuller understanding of the conflicting elements of More's social identity being played out in Utopia (the various bioi constituting life in the private, communal, and state domains). While the utopian text may not have succeeded in integrating these conflicting bioi in a satisfactory fashion, its two books can be read as a convertibility formula for working them out. One reason biographers have
difficulty placing More in No Place is that
the text itself is situated on the very fault line of shifting
topographical values. In More's period, the individual is being
redefined, particularly in terms of that individual's relationship to
the land. As J. H. Hexter has shown,7 More writes a text
that plays a sense of personal crisis against the historical backdrop
of an England plagued by problems of class divisions and social
injustice. Stephen Greenblatt, citing Marin, notes the existence of
ruptures in the Utopian text, "ruptures betrayed by subtle
inconsistencies and contradictions in topography, economic exchange,
the exercise of power," and other factors. Far from "tearing the
canvas" of the work (Marin's estimation), such ruptures in Greenblatt's
view represent the artist's self-consciousness about fashioning himself
in "the presence of those sociohistorical forces to which Utopia
owes its existence."8More's
individualism, the place he will occupy in his society, is forged from
the conflict of those forces. In tracing the emergence of the
individual in the early Renaissance,
Richard Helgerson examines the role of the Renaissance cartographer and
asserts that cartography not only served to free the land from royal
ownership in diminishing the signs of that royal ownership but also
allowed cartographers in their power of representation to gain a
growing measure of authorial autonomy. Helgerson maintains that the
emergence of the land from royal dominance and the emergence of the
individual authorial self are parallel phenomena "deeply implicated in
one another." This parallel development begins with "a common term of
difference," the royal absolutism from which each is beginning to
detach itself. Helgerson maintains that, although neither the land nor
the authorial self explicitly rejects this royal absolutism, "they
nevertheless edge toward a different sense -- a sense of words and
images caught in a complex and mutually self-constituting exchange
between individual authors and the land they represent."9
Helgerson proclaims the mapmaker as "novus homo chorographicus,"
a prophetic being who in his self-asserting, nascent autonomy signals
growing challenges to that royal absolutism. Although Utopia
precedes by some one hundred years the period on which Helgerson
concentrates, it serves as an interesting early text in evaluating
Helgerson's assertions. The ideological differences that arise from the
splitting of the island of Utopia from the once historically contingent
England are an initial indication of the power of the author to remake
the map, to work at the margins of history in reformulating England in
an image far different from that envisioned or sanctioned by any
historical monarch. A disciple of Vespucci, bringing word of a New
World with a new ordering of society, Hythloday offers in his account
of Utopia the possibilities of a new vision not only of society but of
the individual as well. A strategy
of displacement governs the operations of Book II, the neologism
"utopia" expressing a detaching of the land from royal absolutism. Pure
escapism, the book inscribes the character of the land in the mythic
figure of King Utopus. Utopus -- or Eutopos, "the Good King of the
Land" -- has conferred positive value upon the land and its people by
breaking the land link and effectively enclosing that land.10
Textually, he exists in the fullness of the letter, enclosed entirely
from history in his total self-referencing in the figure of the
mythically displaced land of Utopia. As long as Utopia remains No
Place, a merely literary topos
in a long tradition of Golden Age lands, Eutopos can operate as a
mythic Lycurgus. Autonomous in the purest etymological sense of the
word, he is a law
unto himself. His identity is not
contingent upon history, nor is it
contingent upon the vagaries and royal prerogatives of a Henry VIII.
Indeed, Eutopos serves in many ways as an absolute contrast to the
historically contingent figure of Henry VIII. As a point of departure
from history, the absolutism of Utopus is benign, in sharp contrast to
that exercised by Henry VIII. A ruler who would phase out monarchy in
his own land represents a bit of wistful thinking on More's part when
we consider the fanatical preoccupation Henry VIII had in providing
himself an heir. In establishing the terms of these two forms of royal
absolutism, Morus and Raphael define the terms between the restrictive
royal absolutism of Henry VIII and the possibilities of self-creation
represented by the royal absolutism of Utopus (an absolutism that
elevates the individual to his own kingly status). In his More fanciful
moments, More actually imagined himself as king of Utopia. At the
height of his enthusiasm for Utopia, he confides to Erasmus: "You have no idea how thrilled I
am; I feel so expanded, and I hold my
head high. For in my day-dreams I have been marked out by my Utopians
to be their king forever; I can see myself now marching along, crowned
with a diadem of wheat, very striking in my Franciscan frock, carrying
a handful of wheat as my sacred scepter, thronged by a distinguished
retinue of Amaurotians, and, with this huge entourage, giving audience
to foreign ambassadors and sovereigns; wretched creatures they are, in
comparison with us, as they stupidly pride themselves on appearing in
childish garb and feminine finery, laced with that despicable gold, and
ludicrous in their purple and jewels and other baubles."11 This "fascinating vision" or
"dream" is broken up by the light of day,
"deposing poor me from my sovereignty." More's only consolation is that
"real kingdoms are not much More lasting" (lxxix). Not only do we witness in this
remarkable exaltation a personal
dissatisfaction with the royal imperative, but we can also witness the
fundamental nature of Utopia, specifically Book II, as the
place in which an overreaching individuality is mounted against that
royal imperative. In this light, Marie-Claude Rousseau writes of the
utopist as "the demiurge of his world and his work, a psychodrama where
his dreams are projected."12 The modest symbols of this
Utopian kingship, emblems of which Raphael certainly would approve,
mark More, at least in this momentary fancy, as sympathetic to the
peasant. Expressing a subversive, momentary desire for absolute
autonomy, More is the farthest possible from Morus, the court servant;
at the same moment, he is closest to Raphael in Hythloday's championing
of the oppressed and
his hatred for gold and the
trappings of courtly spectacle and excess.
In this dream, More does not see himself in the image of the aspiring
courtier, trained in the Inns of Court for a career as a royal servant
and adviser. The desire projected here, given free play in the utopian
field wherein all things are possible, is one in which More can
momentarily find a place for himself and his longing for the monastic
life (symbolized by the Franciscan frock). This dream marks the
autonomizing appeal Utopia had for More in its glorifying of the
private individual. More's assurance to Erasmus that his fanciful rise
from his "lowly estate to this soaring pinnacle" will not threaten
their friendship indicates that his concerns about entering Henry's
court and compromising his humanist principles are also scripted into
this psychodrama. This vision suggests that elements of the historical
More are incorporated in the text, that Raphael embodies impulses in
More contradictory to the Morus persona. What might make one a king in
fiction would not necessarily serve to
advance one in the More practical world of court politics. The limits
to self-fashioning in fiction and imagination were indeed boundless,
not so the limitations placed upon self-fashioning in the very real and
dangerous world presided over by Henry VIII. Even on its own terms,
however, the created world of Utopia reflects the historically
contingent circumstances surrounding its composition. Those critics who see rifts
between the created world of Utopia
and the life More led fail to recognize that More's text is a More
faithful mirror of his life and England's historical circumstances than
a superficial investigation reveals. In seeking to situate Utopia
in the discursive space between the concept and history, Marin asks a
series of provocative questions: "To what reality or to what absent
term does it ["utopia"] finally refer? What figure -- fraught with
incoherencies of its own -- traverses it? What discursive conclusion
opens up as soon as the thesis of historical truth, from whose posture
it speaks, is lacking?" (xxi). In posing Morus against Raphael, the
historical figure against the mythic figuration, More has hedged his
bet. I use the term "hedged" advisedly, for it is the figure of
enclosure -- "fraught with incoherencies of its own" -that traverses
the text as a constant equation in the self-fashioning transaction. It
mediates the conversion of values between the private and the public,
between opposing class identities. The bet that More is hedging is
that involving his own self-fashioning,
and its broadest values are those represented by the opposing figures
of Morus and Raphael. The self-fashioning that must be worked out
between the opposing terms of Morus and Raphael points toward class
conflict, a conflict between an expropriating class and an expropriated
class in which More represents the very middle class that was being
defined in this conflict. Morus, the representative of the
expropriators of
land, and Raphael, representative
of the dispossessed, cause this
topographical discourse to be extended into the narrative structure of
the text as their two voices bring the historical notions of
improvement and impoverishment into that text.13 If we reexamine the myth of
Utopia's founding, for example, we find
that in his conquering of the Abraxians, King Utopus acts out of a myth
whose plot is very much grounded in a history vexed with the problems
as well as the opportunities of enclosure. The "incoherencies" of
enclosure expose Eutopos as Outopos in demonstrating just how closely
the created world of Utopia is linked to historical
contingencies. The "problem" that the text of Utopia seeks to solve is
that of enclosure, particularly the large-scale pastoral enclosure
occurring in More's day. Lying along a fault line that represents a
break in historical continuity occasioned by the irreconcilable
programs of large-scale enclosers, small-scale improvers, and
subsistence-level farmers, Utopia must mediate the class
conflicts that arise from shifts in agrarian values. The myth of
Utopia's founding is not at all divorced from the problems of English
history; in fact, the king's conquering of the Abraxians is simply the
telling and enactment of that history over again, its characters
disguised in myth. The improver,
Utopus, is not merely conducting a raid upon a fictional people; he is,
in essence, raiding history, for his conquering of the Abraxians allows
him to redefine and reshape English history for his own ends. This
reworking of history begins with a forcible expropriation of people
from their land. While we are not told specifically whether that part
of the conquered Utopians who resist are killed or expelled, this
initial expropriation of Abraxa sets an obvious precedent and model for
the Utopians' spillover colonization of lands outside their territory. In these seizures of territory,
those who refuse to be ordered by the
Utopians' laws are driven "out of those bounds which they [the
Utopians] have limited and defined for themselves" ( Reneuntes
ipsorum legibus uiuere, propellunt his finibus quos sibi ipsi
describunt"
[ Campbell, 91]; note the initial surveying that has occurred before
eviction, a surveying not unlike that preparatory to the evictions of
historical enclosure). Like their historical counterparts, the
enclosers, the Utopians justify their expropriation of others' lands by
arguing their ability to improve them by a fuller utilization than that
practiced by the natives. These vanquished people, their rights of
landholding extinguished, are the fictional counterparts of England's
squatter population evicted by enclosure. Those who do comply join with
their conquerors in enclosing the peninsula of Utopia as an island.
They, along with the conquering Utopians, become the class of
improvers, their historical counterparts. The plot of Book II thus offers a
careful reenactment of English history
in this conquering and evicting of
one part of the Abraxians. This is
the overt content of Book I, the historical injustice perpetrated
against a displaced class. As the problem of Book I, it gets little
play here, for the myth of Book II must work toward finding an
intermediate term between the displaced yeomanry and the large-scale
encloser. To insist too strongly upon the historical identity of any of
the players in this mythic reenactment would undermine the myth of
improvement so dear to Raphael. Obliquely, the text addresses the
problems of vagrancy and idleness by enclosing the wastes of the "New
World." As a means of implementing and expanding social control in
More's England, enclosures of the unenclosed wastes were advocated, for
these wastes were commonly characterized as "nurseries of beggars."
Enclosed lands were reputed to breed a More prosperous, better quality
citizenry; they also yielded a higher parliamentary subsidy.14
Those who block Utopus's "improvement" are evicted, the counterparts of
the historically dispossessed (and their voicelessness in Raphael's
account of Utopia's founding corresponds to the voicelessness of their
counterparts in history). If we consider the problem of history beyond
the confines of Book I, we shall find that this glossing over the
evicted Abraxians allows Book II to redefine history not as a conflict
between the expropriated and the large-scale encloser but as a
collusion between the small-scale improver and the large-scale
encloser. This collusion,
constituting the myth of Book II, is essential if the text is to
recapture the historical value of improvement for itself. As Rodney
Hilton indicates, within the peasantry a split was developing as this
peasantry began to separate into "elements with differing economic
interests."15 Unlike the "poor and middling peasants"
involved in subsistence farming, a wealthier class of entrepreneurial
peasants had accumulated both movable and landed property and were
increasingly the beneficiaries of any new economic ordering (the
improvements which could be had through enclosure, for example). These
were what Hilton labels the "upper stratum of the peasantry, benefiting
from the crisis in the seigneurial economy" (127). With the impetus of
the textile industry, these peasants would play an important role in
constituting the class of capitalist farmers that emerged in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (127). Hilton closely links the
growth of this class, which struck against all forms of seigneurial
control, with the emergence of capitalism. Historically within the English
"tribe," a widening separation was
occurring between the upper- and lower-strata peasantry, a division
very much rooted in the political and economic shifts that occurred in
sixteenth-century England. The "wolves" -- large-scale enclosers -- not
only expropriated the land of the poorer peasantry -- the sheep -- but
they have also disrupted the
orderly historical shift being brought on
by the small-scale enclosers. The plans of the large-scale encloser and
the small-scale improver are merged in Book II, as the remaining
Abraxians are subsumed into one common identity with their conquerors,
both henceforward known as Utopians. This merger runs counter to
history, for Hilton has shown that the programs of these two groups ran
directly counter to one another. In this respect, Utopus raids history
twice over, for he both expropriates one element of the peasant class
while co-opting the program of another. Most important, this conquering
and transformation of the "compliant" element of the Abraxians allow
Utopus to wrest the historical value of improvement from the program of
the small-scale enclosers and to reinvest it in the large-scale
enclosing of Utopia. Utopus and,
by association, Raphael rework historical situations and identities in
a fashion that does not bear close scrutiny; indeed, the myth of Utopia
is undermined when one converts the values expressed in Book II into
those More historically oriented ones of Book I. The myth of Utopia's
founding by enclosure risks being exposed if it is not disguised. The
expropriation of the Abraxians is thus muted, displaced, and
"alienated" in the example of Utopus's conquering of foreign lands. The
historical expulsion of peasants from private land by members of the
yeomanry and nobility might not seem to equate to the conquest of an
alien territory and the expulsion of some part of its people by a king;
however, the digging out of the land link, transforming the mythic
Abraxian peninsula into a figuration of the English island, reminds us
that there is a strong sense of the familiar in the alien. It also
marks Book II as a prophetic text in a sense quite contrary to Kautsky
celebration of Utopia as a precursor to socialism. The text's
transfer of the enclosing function from the levels of yeomanry and
nobility to that of the state predicts the link between large-scale
Acts of Enclosure and the growth of the modern state.16 The charge of duplicity that
Marius brings against More is offset and answered by the double text of
Utopia,
for Book I provides many keys for reading and deciphering the myth
offered in Book II. Indeed, unwound from the historical materials of
More's own embassy is another embassy, uniting history and myth, that
brings Raphael forth. Raphael argues on behalf of the dispossessed
yeoman who appeared many times before More in Chancery court; Hythloday
sets forth -- this time quite pointedly and eloquently - the rights of
the expropriated. As Richard Sylvester points out in "Si Hythlodaeo
Credimus" Hythloday is "both uprooted himself and an uprooter of
others. His most urgent pleas for reform bristle with metaphors of
deracination and eradication."17 In service to the interests
of royalty and the wool merchants, More is
suddenly confronted in the
Netherlands with the very spokesperson for
those less powerful, competing interests: the dispossessed yeomanry.
Contrary to Marius's and Marin's assertions, Thomas More provides a
text entirely contingent to history and to his personal circumstances
at the time of its composition. Utopia exemplifies Jean
Howard's dictum that literary texts do not constitute "monologic,
organically unified wholes" but "sites where many voices of culture and
many systems of intelligibility interact."18Raphael's
curious -- and untenable -- position as a spokesperson for the
expropriated and a representative of Utopus, a large-scale encloser,
bears witness to the text's rootedness in the history it allegorizes.
Morus himself, representing a collusion between monarchy and merchants
in an embassy that sought to improve trade equally advantageous to
both, offers yet another voice in the text's encoding of dissonant
cultural interactions. The historical contingency of Utopia,
a text that uses enclosure both as a theme and as a principle of its
own organization, provides a better sense of place for More in his
text. It should cause some revision of critical stances that argue that
More led a duplicitous and inauthentic life. Stephen Greenblatt, for
instance, sees More's life as "nothing less than this: the invention of
a disturbingly unfamiliar form of consciousness . . . poised between
engagement and detachment" (31). He notes further a distinction between
text and "lived reality . . . precisely abrogated by More's mode of
existence" (31). Raphael, summoned forth by this rupture
between lived reality and self-fashioning, stands between More and the
"achieved" identity of Morus, marking within that identity "the signs
of its own subversion or loss" (9). As an abrogation of More's mode of
existence, Raphael stands in the place of that marginalized existence.
Nonetheless, the enclosing of Book II in Book I brings that which is
marginal into the enclosure of the text. Critics who emphasize the gaps
between the text and lived reality fail to recognize that the two
books, taken together, offer a full presentation, if not an
integration, of Thomas More. In fact, in hedging the text as a bet
between Morus and Raphael, More reveals an authorial intention bent
upon confrontation. If history has
not been erased from the text, then it is reasonable to assume that
traces of the historical Thomas More yet linger. For Marin, the initial
erasure of the author from his book and the attendant gap that opens up
thereby are repaired only at the end of the Book 11. Here, Marin
indicates, the historical figure of Thomas More reappears "to initiate
an ambiguous transition toward the author of the book, to exit the
book"
(75). Between the two identical signatures, the last of which will
reunify narrator and author, Marin sees More's historical identity as
having been suspended. Marginalized for the space of the text is the
public identity of " Thomas More,
Citizen and Sheriff
of the Famous City of Great Britain, London," a representative of the
London merchants. This public identity, inscribed at both margins of
the text, provides the topical circumstance in which Utopia was
composed, for it was as the popular under-sheriff of London that More
was called upon by the merchants of the city to travel to the
Netherlands to negotiate matters of trade in English wool and Flemish
cloth. The opening lines of Book
I, however, point toward the potentially divisive nature of More's
embassy as both a representative of the London mercers and as an
ambassador from Henry VIII ("The most invincible King of England, Henry
the eighth of that name, who is distinguished by all the
accomplishments of a model monarch, had certain weighty matters
recently in dispute with His Serene Highness, Charles, Prince of
Castile," 47). At this time, the interests of king and merchants
coincided, but there is a disturbance lying just beneath this
officious, laudatory opening to Book I. Indeed, More has struck an
uneasy balance here between Ambassador Thomas More and what Russell
Ames labels Citizen Thomas More. As Ames indicates in his Citizen
Thomas More, the middle class "campaigned" against feudalism as a
decaying system, employing the merchants "as its chief economic power
and the humanists as its ideological shock troops -- with More active
in both groups."19 A member of the Company of London
Mercers, their "chosen mouthpiece" sent, as Roper tells us, "at the
suite and instaunce of the Englishe marchauntes," More was embarked
upon a mission that represented "the interests of all English exporters
of wool."20 At this point, at least, More was not a king's
man but, as Ames asserts, someone far More "attached to town republican
political principles than [to] monarchist principles" (52). That More
himself felt an opposition here is a matter of historical record, for
he turned down a pension offered him by Henry, feeling that acceptance
would cause him to come into a conflict of interest in fulfilling his
role of sheriff. As he writes to Erasmus in 1515, "Should any question
arise between them and the King about their privileges (as sometimes
happens) they might have less confidence in me as a pensioner of the
King" (61-62). At each margin of
the text, the reiterated signature of "Citizen and Sheriff" encloses
the two identities of Morus and Raphael, hedging in the dialectic they
represent. Far from representing an exclusion of biographical detail or
an incomplete self-presentation, the text reclaims one part of More's
split and marginalized identity in the figure of Raphael, making it
part of the self-fashioning transaction that is usually discussed in
terms of Morus alone. The narrative splitting of Thomas More between
Morus's narration of Book I and Raphael's narration of Book II makes
the two appear to be marginal to one another. Upon closer exami
nation, however, a certain
convertibility formula exists between the two books as well as between Utopia
and the marginalized identity that constitutes its circumambient
context. When we consider the relationship
between Morus and Raphael, we find a
contradictory pairing in which there is both a sense of identification
and denial. Dialectically opposed, there seems to be very little the
two can agree upon. More defends service to the state; Raphael shows
that "servitude" and "service" are divided from each other by an easily
removed prefix ("servias" versus "inservias"). Morus is
in the Netherlands representing the wool industry and the interests of
enclosers; Raphael appears as the advocate of the threatened yeomanry,
offering a stinging attack against those very interests. Commenting upon the relationship
between the two as presented in Book
I, critics have spoken of Raphael as More's alter ego, someone
radically different from More coming at a critical moment to challenge
him. That More fashioned part of Raphael from himself becomes clear
when Raphael tells us that he was brought up in the household of John
Morton, Thomas More's mentor at the Inns of Court. As the author of Social
England indicates, Morton was an unrelenting reformer of the
decaying Church, and his influence upon More would be a lasting one: From him it may well be that More
learnt first to view with sympathetic
eyes the sorrows of the people, and to speak what was in his mind so
boldly and clearly. He belongs half to the past, half to the future: in
him the interests of the Middle Ages and those of Tudor times, if not
of modern life, seem to find a connecting link.21 This shared biography denotes some
of the affinities Raphael bears to
More; of course, the More we encounter in Book I -- Morus -- serves as
the antithesis to Raphael in reflecting the practical and politically
ambitious side of Thomas More. If Morus represents More's tendency
toward royal service, then the portrayal of Raphael is a hedge against
that bet. The product of four separate voyages to the New World,
Raphael cuts a figure in striking contrast to what we can imagine of
Morus's own person as the courtly representative that negotiates for
English wool merchants. The ambassador, locked in technical and
interminable negotiations of international commerce, finds himself in
an unexpected, face-to-face encounter with Hythloday, "a man of
advanced years, with sunburnt countenance and long beard and cloak
hanging carelessly from his shoulder" (49). Indeed, there is no More
striking a contrast imaginable than this between Raphael, with his
future course already set on the New World, and Thomas More, who, in
his embassy to Flanders, represents the new "economic" man being
created from the
dissolution of feudalism and the
rise of capitalism. And yet, the More
Raphael's mythic mask is stripped away, the clearer it becomes that the
negotiations undertaken in Utopia represent a crisis that
involves all elements of More's self-fashioning. The sense of crisis to which Utopia
is a response represents for More an uncertainty about his place, the
role he should play in his society. This sense of dislocation can be
expressed in terms of the social identity that modern society has
inherited from the Greek city-state. As Hannah Arendt asserts in The
Human Condition,
the rise of this city-state meant, according to Aristotle, "that man
received besides his private life a sort of second life, his bios
politikos.
Now every citizen belongs to two orders of existence; and there is a
sharp distinction in his life between what is his own (idiom)
and what is communal (koinon)."22 Arendt catalogs the
three ways of life (bioi) that Aristotle thought were the
choices allotted to the free man: the life of enjoying bodily
pleasures in which the beautiful, as it is
given, is consumed; the life devoted to the matters of the polis, in
which excellence produces beautiful deeds, and the life of the
philosopher devoted to inquiry into, and contemplation of, things
eternal, whose everlasting beauty can neither be brought about through
the producing interference of man nor be changed through his
consumption of them. (13) The influence of the first bios
occurs in the discussion of pleasure in Book II, in which we are told
that the Utopians
maintain "that a person would be stupid not to seek pleasure by fair
means or foul," the only restriction being that this pleasure should
not "interfere with a greater nor . . . follow after a pleasure which
would bring pain in retaliation" (163). The influence of the life
devoted to matters of the polis, the second bios, is a central
concern for Citizen Thomas More as representative of the mercers. The
third bios,
the life of philosophic contemplation and detachment, is the path
advocated by Raphael in his rejection of royal service as a form of
servitude. In particular, this second and third bioi define the
conflict between Morus and Raphael. As Greenblatt indicates, the vita
activa or vita negotiosa is an essential concern in Utopia,
where More argues with Raphael about the choice of a detached and
philosophic existence versus the choice of a More engaged life devoted
to public-political affairs. What is central to this question is how
much of one's own life should one preserve in the face of public
demands upon one's time and even upon one's very self. To what extent
is one a private individual and to what extent a public one? Thomas
More tries to
fashion himself amid the
counterweights of three different possible fashionings: private,
communal, and state. The presence of these three
identities in Utopia
suggests a far More complete self-presentation than what is often
characterized. Representing a mixture of the private and philosophic bioi,
Raphael, as the narrator of Book II, offers More a tempting escape from
the world of historical circumstance and political compromise. As
Robbin S. Johnson argues, Raphael's disengagement from the political
realm is isolative, for "the individual Utopian dreamer . . .
tends to withdraw from any socially common cause. He merges his own
being into the ideal [thereby turning] all expression inward."23
She finds Raphael's idealism "self-serving." Arendt also notes the
limitations of an excessive privatizing and isolating of oneself from
the community. The ancients, she argues, stressed "the privative trait
of privacy. . . . A man who lived only a private life, who like the
slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the
barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully
human" (38). It is little wonder
that, faced with these two identities of Morus and Raphael, More seems
to have insisted on the middle term, of Citizen Thomas More, for he
resisted both the extreme detachment of Raphael's elevation of the
individual as well as the emptying out of one's private life involved
in committing oneself to royal service. The essential problem in Utopia,
however, remains one of demarcating the boundary between the private
and the public that, for Arendt, signifies "the world itself, in so far
as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned
place in it" (52). What is one's own and what part of oneself is
public? What boundary should one set around oneself in terms of
maximizing what one could achieve in both realms? In each of these three elements of
a self-fashioning, one can find
limitations and risks. As Arendt notes, "The rise of the city-state and
the public realm occurred at the expense of the private realm of family
and household" (29). More felt this opposition, noting at one point
that he could remain an ambassador only by starving his family. The
problem for More in this period was that of establishing the boundary
of his own private sphere while maximizing the benefits to be derived
from participating in the larger spheres of communal and state life.
This is, of course, an essential concern in Raphael's and Morus's
argument about the desirability of public service. Morus argues in
behalf of such service, even though it often intrudes upon the private
preserve. He invokes Raphael's "generous and truly philosophic spirit"
in arguing that he "apply your talent and industry to the public
interest, even if it involves some personal disadvantages to yourself"
(57).
In Utopia there is an
overriding concern with balancing what is private and one's own with
what is the public interest ("publicum rem"). The communality
stressed in Utopia
("Nature calls all men to help one another to a merrier life," 165) is
tempered by an allowance for individuality so long as that
individuality does not move the person to further his own advantage to
the disadvantage of his neighbors (165). Especially in terms of
contracts and laws, Utopia offers a fine resolution of tensions
between the private and public spheres, a resolution seemingly
unobtainable in the litigious times of More's England: Therefore they hold that not only
ought contracts between private
persons to be observed but also public laws for the distribution of
vital commodities, that is to say, the matter of pleasure. . . . As
long as such laws are not broken, it is prudence to look after your own
interests, and to look after those of the public in addition is a mark
of devotion. But to deprive others of their pleasure to secure your
own, this is surely an injustice. On the contrary, to take away
something from yourself and to give it to others is a duty of humanity
and kindness which never takes away as much advantage as it brings
back. (165) Here, pleasure itself is viewed as
a "commodity" for distribution as the Utopians
seek to balance equality of "ownership" with each individual's
exercising of a private right. There is a sense of fluidity between
private and public; indeed, the boundaries that compose what is private
display an open face to the public interest, in the fashion of the Utopian
houses that are "permeable" structures in allowing for both private as
well as public accessibility. What is private can be easily merged with
the public domain in Utopia, a merger and lack of conflict that
surely must have appealed to a Thomas More striving to strike a proper
balance between the private and the public in his own life. In working out the proper equation
between the public and the private,
Arendt does not believe it is accidental "that the whole discussion has
eventually turned into an argument about the desirability of or
undesirability of privately owned property" (61). The conflict between
private property and communal right is, of course, a crucial one for Utopia.
Raphael is a strident critic of private property: "When every man aims
at absolute ownership of all the property he can get, be there never so
great abundance of goods, it is all shared by a handful who leave the
rest in poverty" (105). This privatizing of land takes the land out of
communal ownership; it separates individuals from the community in
freeing them from many of the communal obligations previously situated
in the very character of that land. Morus's counterargument to
Raphael -- "Life cannot be
satisfactory where all things are common"
-emphasizes "the motive of personal gain" as a necessary inducement for
making individuals productive and not slothfully dependent upon the
industry of others (107). At the root of this conflict is the fact that
More's complete self-fashioning into Morus, the public bios, cannot be
achieved without retrieving private property from Raphael's
condemnation; equally true is that the self-fashioning represented by
Raphael cannot be achieved without the total rejection of the public
bios that Morus advances. Greenblatt indicates the
topographical basis of this conflict when he
states that "private ownership of property is causally linked in Utopia
to private ownership of self (what C. B. Macpherson calls 'possessive
individualism,'" 38-39). The conflict in Utopia
is that the abolition of private property advocated by Raphael is for
Morus, a representative of the propertied interests, a threat to that
very self he seeks to fashion ("to abolish private property is to
render such self-conscious individuality obsolete," Greenblatt, 39).
Enclosure, with its asserting of individual rights over communal
rights, is at the very heart of More's embassy to the Netherlands. The
privatizing of land resulted in the privatizing of individuals, the
creation of a middle class whose very identity had been formed through
its claim to private ownership of property. This is the class from
which Citizen Thomas More had emerged. The class conflict entailed by
enclosures becomes personalized in the choices More had to make among
these possible bioi. Citizen Thomas More, forming the hedge between a
private and enclosed life and a more public and expansive life, must
decide upon the costs involved in converting the private into the
public (Morus's position) or the public into the private (Raphael's
position). The absolutist
positions taken by Raphael and Morus produce the dialectic from which
More must work out his place in society. Raphael's freedom from private
property -- he very early gave away wealth and possessions in
disengaging himself from all familial obligation and expectation --
guarantees him an absolute privacy. The willingness of Morus to
surrender personal misgivings in entering court service, to sacrifice
what is private for the public good, compromises that very privacy.
Here, the surrender of the private ownership of oneself is repaid by
improvement, either the improvement gained for oneself or, more
idealistically, for the collective state. As Peter Giles argues, the
two forms of improvement can be compatible, just as the private gain to
be won from his embassy could be compatible with the public good. The
advantage of operating between the two domains is argued by Morus
himself, for an insider and adviser retains the option of subverting
the aims of the ruling order ("What you cannot turn to good you must
make as little bad as you can," 101). The problem with working
as a private individual within the
margins of the dominant ideology is
that More runs the risk of being subverted himself, deprived
(de-privatus) of that private ownership of himself by the co-optive
force of that ideology. This is the direction in which Morus heads him.
Indeed, in his final justification of royal absolutism, Morus points
toward a total refunding of the common (and private) good in the
deifying adulation that commoners paid to that royalty, a transaction
that is negated by the Utopians' moneyless economy and communal
life. For Thomas More, maintaining a
right to his private opinion came into
conflict with Henry VIII's idea of what was "owned" by the state. We
can find even in as early a text as Utopia a desire to strike a
proper balance between what is private and what is public. Enclosure,
of course, is the very embodying principle of this conflict. In "The
Property Rights Paradigm," Armen A. Alchian and Harold Demsetz point
toward this commingling of property rights and privacy in arguing that
"what is owned are rights to use resources, including one's body and
mind, and these rights are always circumscribed, often by the
prohibition of certain activities."24 The state, for
instance, can regulate and limit a person's right to own certain ideas
and opinions even to the point of violating the most private preserves,
the home and the individual's very person. While Citizen Thomas More might
retain some independence in the
conflicts between the propertied interests and the expropriated, Morus
the royal appointee would undoubtedly find himself at times personally
compromised by this public identity. Still, the publication of Utopia,
particularly the Dialogue of Counsel, suggests an optimism about freely
expressing one's ideas at Henry's court. That More also includes a
healthy dose of Raphael's skepticism about court service demonstrates a
desire on More's part to weigh carefully the risks and rewards of
courtly service against the security and detachment offered by Raphael.
Even though Morus argues in such a way as to emphasize what the
individual could accomplish in the court, the truth was that Henry VIII
had already begun to shape humanists like More to his own ends, as
ideologists for the court in terms of influencing public opinion. As
Kautsky notes, no bureaucracy had yet been formed for carrying on such
vital functions.25 Thus, as Morus, More faced the very real
prospect of being an instrument of public policy shaped to the
strong-willed Henry's ends. As a spokesperson for that very class that
was being expropriated,, Raphael threatens More's self-fashioning as
Morus. As a representative of Utopus," however, Raphael also serves as
a reminder that More cannot seek his place in No Place, for there is
ultimately no escape from historical contingency and the conflicting
choices to be found there. To be expropriated, to be removed from one's
own proper sense of oneself, is a conflict of both a personal and a
historically agrarian nature in Utopia.
The working out of a place for
oneself, the making of a place for
oneself, is the underlying theme of the Dialogue of Counsel in Book I.
More's negotiation of his place in society is ultimately traceable to
the landed values reflected in the agrarian crisis from which Utopia
has risen. Raphael and Utopus reflect the ironies of finding a place,
ironies that Marius felt were excluded from the text. On the contrary,
More's place in No Place can never be fixed beyond the land surveyor's
measure. "The genius of a place," Raymond Williams informs us, "was the
making of a place." This "socially resonant word" was as important in
More's day as it was in the eighteenth century.26 The
improvement of land became tied to the improvement of one's own social
position; however, the large-scale enclosure behind More's
ambassadorship often improved one class at the expense of impoverishing
another. The capital accumulation it engendered was part of what
Williams labels "an ambiguous process: increasing real wealth but
distributing it unevenly" (82) -- quite contrary to the impulse of
small-scale enclosure. Williams, who remarks upon "a continuing
contrast between the extraordinary improvement of the land and the
social consequences of just this process" (82), speaks in the same
voice for the dispossessed and vagrant of the eighteenth century that
is Raphael's for the expropriated of the sixteenth century. Raphael, of
course, speaks in Book I for the marginal and the displaced, subverting
that dominant ideology represented by Morus. Morus argues not only for
the improvement of society -- along with More -- but also for the
improvement of one's own position, the bettering of one's place in
society. Representing wool-trading interests in negotiations whose
success would only serve to spur the progress of enclosures, More
already faced an ethical and moral dilemma in choosing between the two
positions. In hedging the text
within the doubly inscribed identity of Citizen Thomas More and
allowing the engaged and public self of Morus to dispute with the
detached and private self of Raphael, More has recreated the sense of
personal crisis from which the text has risen. "Citizen Thomas More,"
the proper middle term in this self-fashioning, provides the middle
ground for these marginalized identities to be defined and valued
through the enclosure transaction (for enclosure involved the claiming
of the marginal). In this respect, autobiography is expressed in the
conflict among these various bioi: the private, communal, and
state ownership that, derived from the larger discourse of the
sixteenth-century agrarian crisis, is particularized in More's own
personal situation. The negotiating of wool contracts becomes for More,
often idled by long breaks in these negotiations, a negotiating of his
own particular place in society. In this sense, the total work
represents More's efforts to take possession of himself, to define what
was private
against that which was the special
province of the communal or state.
Books I and II, representing respectively the external and internal
components of the enclosure formula, thus serve in their dialectical
opposition to establish the boundary lines of what More hoped to call
his own. The biographical gaps
that critics perceive between the life More led and the "created world"
of his text are surveyors' errors in failing to measure a seemingly
mythic and alien landscape in real world terms. The error is not
entirely their own, for the text faithfully represents a world in
transition whose shifting values are difficult to represent. Until
those values are fully restored to Utopia, autobiography can
only present itself as auto-{ }-graphy; historically, a gap has opened
up between self-reference or self-presentation (eautos) and the
authorizing power of the letter to inscribe (graphein) that
identity. One of the primary bases of social identity (topos:
land) is shifting along with class boundaries, a fact signified by the
uncertain, indeterminate prefix of '" Utopia."
Expressed as auto-{ }-graphy, this term underscores both the importance
of land in forming social identity and self-referencing as well as the
effect of that land (absent, an undecided value) in preventing the
possibility of self-reference, of individualization, and of
self-fashioning. If scholars are to accomplish More than mere
second-guessing about the fashioning of More's life, then they are
going to have to do their reconstructions from the ground up, employing
the complex set of terms that More himself had to negotiate. More's
place in No Place can be determined by a formula through which the
apparent terms of difference between the mythic island of Book II and
the historical England of Book I are demonstrated to be convertible
values. Neologism institutes a new
term: autopography. Awkward, certainly, but no other term better
expresses the complex oppositions of exclusion and inclusion,
privatization and communalism, that constitute the Utopian
dialectic. Conjoining the two discourses of autobiography and
topography, this neologism fills in the suspended, bracketed term of
the former (bios) with an important determiner of social place
in More's day (topos). It constantly keeps before us the
supplementary nature of the Utopian
text. If the figure of the land is mythically displaced, the
possibility of self-referencing exists once More in the text, but only
through the mediation of the land as it has been restored in the
creation of Utopia by King Utopus. If the figure of the land
remains historically situated, under the absolutism of Henry VIII and
the state, then there is the risk of expropriation. Raphael's vision of
improvement as expropriative and self-corrupting wars against that of
Morus, who represents the privileges and prerogatives of courtly
service. Each figure seeks to shape More to his own ends, to bring that
which is marginal within the special enclosure of each one's vision of
improvement. As More's autopography, Utopia represents the serious work of determining identity amid the special set of circumstances for making this determination in early sixteenth-century England. If Raphael's vision is less preferable to what Morus offers, it is because the Utopian myth ultimately points to the incontrovertible evidence of history. Rather than disguise that incontrovertible evidence in myth and wish-fulfillment, More staked out a claim to a life whose course he could not always control like a work of art. While More's most recent antihagiographical critic, Jonathan V. Crewe, speaks of the "theatricality" of his martyrdom, exposing William Roper's "figure of saintly constancy,"27 he at least recognizes the encircling ring of threats and pressures that drove More increasingly inward at the end of his life. For Crewe, "Roper's More is one who finally inhabits its [the text's] structure of simultaneous total masculine empowerment and implied dependence, of familial enclosure beyond both power and law" (303). In his final days, within this familial enclosure, More sought to preserve his private conscience from the intrusions of the state. But this time the wolf would not go from his door. As More's autopography, Utopia is a text through which much of what Greenblatt calls "social energy" is circulated in terms of historical identities and situations newly coined into myth and refunded once again into history.28 The dynamics of this circulation had to have been an abiding concern for Thomas More as he sought to find his place in his tumultuous times. Those critics who look for inconsistencies and faults in More might do well to make sure their own moral bookkeeping is in order. At least they might recognize that there is only one place where these conflicts between public and private can be fully resolved and transcended. This is the martyr's topos, the saint's burial place, where More now lies. Our scholarly exhumings of the historical Thomas More have invoked an unquiet spirit, restlessly wandering between our heaven and earth of sanctification and vilification. "The unburied dead are covered by the sky" is the consolation the well-traveled Raphael would offer More today. The small consolation that I have to offer is neither a monument nor an urn. It is simply a restoring of the narrower historical confines in which this controversy can be worked out, a modest plot of land, indeed. University of Detroit Mercy Detroit, Michigan NOTES
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