Irony In Thomas More`s "utopia"

'More's Utopia is fundamentally at odds with the real character of More's mind.'

The assertion of the fundamental opposition between the 'real character' of Thomas More and the residual image of More as expounder of the Utopian Ideal, is borne out of a re-evaluation of the man and his work spearheaded by late twentieth century biographers and critics. The residual image of More the "immaculate hero"1 - for socialists and hagiographers alike - has been defaced. This re-evaluation of More is reminiscent of the notoriously cynical "demystification" of another English Renaissance giant, John Donne, at the hands of the critic John Carey. In recent reappraisals of these canonical figures, both are portrayed as contemptibly ambitious. These criticisms separately evoke the congruous image of the unctuous, boot-licking courtier. As if reading history with the same glasses, J.A. Guy concludes - as Carey does of Donne - that More was a shamelessly crafty and dissembling careerist.2 Attention has also been refocused on the now infamous persecution of heretics by More during his Chancellorship. In his introduction to Utopia, Paul Turner reluctantly observes that 'although the worst charges of cruelty to heretics. have not been substantiated, there seems to be no doubt that More sentenced some people to death (which means burning alive) for heresy'.3 Turner seems uncomfortable with the contrast that this bears to the Utopian idealist that he believes More to have been. Turner would certainly not agree that Utopia is 'fundamentally at odds with the real character of More's mind', for he asserts that Utopia is 'an ideal country, where human life is organized in the best possible way' and serves to contrast 'the unhappy state of European society'.4 Turner explicitly states his belief 'that the book actually means what it says, and that it does attempt to solve the problems of human society'. As a result, we find Turner trying to explain away and resolve contradictions in Utopia and quickly concluding that it simply isn't necessary to resolve these contradictions. For Turner, a man of More's intellectual might and integrity would have embraced inconsistency as a necessary product of the thinking person's large and perpetually evolving mind. As Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'. The antithetical positions of either harmony or discord between More and his 'little book' presupposes two questionable notions. Firstly, that there is a single unifying principle in Utopia, and secondly that both this and the 'fundamental' nature of the real historical More can be sufficiently determined to support such claims. Even the briefest examination of the text reveals that things in Utopia are not so straightforward. Most critics begin their discussions of Utopia with noting its self-professed aim to both delight and instruct. It is 'a really splendid little book, as entertaining as it is instructive'. It thereby explicitly places itself in the tradition of Horatian satire, and possibly takes its form from Menippus goes to Hell, by the Greek satirist Lucian. More was evidently a fan of Lucian, having translated some of his works into Latin with Erasmus5. In his book, More's Utopia, Dominic Baker-Smith draws attention to the influence of Lucian upon More. He identifies the presence of specific terms from Lucian's satires that recur in More's satires, and which stand for 'that blind acceptance of established forms which makes society into an unconscious conspiracy geared to the baser appetites of its individual members'.6 This implies a reading of Utopia in which the imagined republic is not necessarily the author's idea of an ideal state, but more importantly it functions as a proposition: a proposition that challenges the status quo. In this challenge is the implicit suggestion of reform. If we are to accept the idea that More repeated Lucian's terms because he agreed with the ideas in which they were ensconced, then we should infer that when Raphael considers 'any social system that prevails in the modern world,' and he can't - he swears - see them 'as anything but a conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interests under the pretext of organizing society,' that this is not simply a revolutionary challenge to the status quo, but really the voice of More; closet proto-communist and silent defender of the down-trodden working classes. Many have found such a reading of Utopia quite convincing. Karl Kautsky, a close friend of Friedrich Engels and a leading theoretician of social democracy, praised More for his creation of an ideal model of a communist state. In his book, Thomas More and his Utopia, Kautsky laments the tragedy of 'More the Socialist' who 'divines the problems of his age before the material conditions exist for their solution'; More's is the 'tragedy of a character who feels obliged to grapple with the solution of the problems which the age has presented, to champion the rights of the oppressed against the arrogance of the ruling class, even when he stands alone and his efforts have no prospect of success'.7 This reading is not widely accepted, and the prevailing ambiguity of Utopia allows more than sufficient grounds for other readings. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival is quick to suggest itself when reading Utopia. The carnival, for Bakhtin, is a collective experience that opposes the official feasts that 'sanctioned the existing patterns of things'8. The carnival functions as a sort of pressure valve for all the anxieties that come with living in a strictly ordered society; it is a total inversion of the normal rules under which people exist, and for a short time all 'barriers of caste, property, profession, and age' disintegrate, all 'hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions' are suspended9. Bakhtin describes carnival as a celebration of 'liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order,' that is 'hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.'10 Under the looking-glass of Bakhtin's concept of carnival, Utopia loses its spirit of reform, it is merely a prolonged moment of rebellion that paradoxically reaffirms the power of the status quo by returning to it. The existence of completely divergent readings of Utopia is, in a sense, a testimony to its success as a satire. In the words of Dominic Baker-Smith, 'It is, after all, in the gap between outward sign and inward meaning, between the signifier and the reality signified, that the satirist operates.'11 Whilst satire often has a clearly defined target, Utopia is an incredibly tenebrous affair. More's equivalent to Menippus is the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus, appropriately titled Rapahel "Nonsenso" by Turner. As the principle voice of criticism, the name Hythlodaeus disallows any simple alignment between More's actual opinions and those voiced by Raphael. The literal translation from the Greek is something like "dispenser of nonsense"12 or "well learned in nonsense"13. This only slightly hidden meaning drops a cloak of irony over Raphael. The descri ption of him in Book I with his cloak over his shoulder supposedly mirrors an actual characteristic of More's dress, so it is tempting to infer that there is truth in the notion of Raphael as both alter-ego and mouth-piece of More. In the dialogue of Book I, Raphael criticises the nefarious practices of Kings and their courts, and repeated instances suggest that More is quite transparently voicing his own criticisms through this fictional character. When censuring the seizure of arable land for pasture in England, Raphael refers to the evicted farmers as 'poor creatures'. This sympathetic phrase resonates with the sense of compassion that More is known to have felt for his own workmen, as expressed in a letter to his wife when he advised her not to dismiss any of their workers without the assurance of obtaining employment elsewhere.14 Later in Book I Raphael states:

It's generally agreed that a King can do no wrong, however much he may want to, because everything belongs to him, including every human being in the country, and private property does not exist, except in so far as he's kind enough not to seize it.

In light of this, Turner's edition helpfully points us to the fact that in 1504, 'as a young M.P.,' More 'made himself unpopular with Henry VII by obstructing his demand for about £90 000' which was reduced to a grant of £40 000, and the King 'then worked off his resentment against More by trumping up some charge against his father, and keeping him in the Tower until he paid a fine of £100'.15 The whole dialogue between Raphael and More in Book I is quite plausibly construed as the 'dramatization of an internal conflict'16 that More was experiencing at the time of writing. Throughout the period of Utopia's composition, More was contemplating entering into the counsel of the king. This supports the notion of Raphael as, at least in Book I, authentic evidence of More's genuine perceptions of corruption and malpractice. This is undermined, however, by the comic elements of Raphael's portrait. Peter Ackroyd argues that 'Hythlodaeus is in many respects portrayed as a blusterer, mixing specious argument with impractical fantasy'.17 In a debate between More and Raphael over the appropriateness of philosophy at court, More bears the standard for the Machiavellian courtier aware of his role in the great dramatic pageant, and parodies the naively candid speaker that Raphael represents. To speak one's mind at court in the knowledge that all others will disagree is like

interrupting some comedy by Plautus, in which a lot of slaves were fooling about, by rushing onto the stage dressed up as a philosopher, and spouting a bit of that scene in the Octavia where Seneca is arguing with Nero. Surely it would be better to keep your mouth shut altogether than to turn the thing into a tragicomedy by interpolating lines from a different play?

Here, More employs his favoured metaphor of the dramatic stage. In the famous New Historicist study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt discusses the appeal and resonance of the theatrical metaphor for More: he claims that 'the theatre pays tribute to the world that it loves - or at the least that it cannot live without - even as it exposes that world as a fiction'.18 Greenblatt thus draws attention to More's sense of 'human pretensions', and particularly to More's sense of his own theatricality, his 'tragicomic perception of life lived at a perpetual remove from reality'.19 More was evidently aware of the nature of the courtier's self, of his own self, as perpetually decentred. Raphael believes that 'a sensible person should steer clear of politics', and whilst More must not have entirely agreed, Raphael may be giving voice to that part of More that yearned to stand back and disentangle itself from the web of fantasy and illusion. Utopia is the product of More's ability to participate in the great pageant whilst imagining a separation from it; it is an ultimately ironic expression of self-conscious role-play.20 The effect of the irony in Utopia, is to place a chasm of inexorable possibilities between the author and his work. As Richard Marius has noted in his paper 'Utopia as Mirror for a Life and Times', the work is 'heavy with irony'.21 Marius goes on to claim that 'irony was the experience of life in the Sixteenth Century - reason enough for Shakespeare to make it perhaps his most important trope while the century was drawing to a close'.22 Many would agree that More bears a great similarity to Shakespeare in this regard, if not in irony as the dominant trope of his collected works, then in irony as his characteristic mode of address. In The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, Cresacre More - the great-grandson of Thomas - recalls the deadpan expression on his great-grandfather's face when making a witty remark: he 'spoke always so sadly that few could see by his looke whether he spoke in earnest or in jeaste'.23 This account is matched by another contemporary of More's, the English lawyer and chronicler Edward Hall:

For undoubtedly he beside his learning had a great wit, but it Was so mingled with taunting and mocking that it seemed to them that best knew him, that he thought nothing to be well spoken except he had ministered some mock in the communication.24

Baker-Smith takes this characteristic of More as indicative of his 'constant awareness that the official forms of social order could never encompass reality, any more than the literal signification of words could contain the inventive possibilities of language'.25 More appears, then, to have taken considerable glee in obfuscating the interpretation of his words. He seems to have made a habit of continually skirting in and around the opaque, overlapping spaces between the ambiguous and the transparent, the literal and the comic. According to one of More's most recent biographers, Peter Ackroyd, 'irony was the most powerful and complicated literary tone in a society where formal appearances were becoming less and less appropriate to the actual realities of power, and where traditional beliefs and authoritative customs were beginning to decay.'26 Utopia's profound use of irony is arguably its most dominant characteristic, and as a product of More's mind it therefore appears to be absolutely and fundamentally in accord with it. It is impossible to separate out and resolve the contradictions in Utopia, and it safe to assume that More wanted it that way. There are aspects of Utopia that would seem to conform to the character of the man we think we know: perhaps in the ascetic qualities of Utopian life; its patriarchal structure; its attitudes to sex, or its authoritarian system. Yet there is plenty to counterbalance these conjectures: More would certainly have found the Utopian's belief in religious toleration barbaric. This toleration is a result of the foundation of Utopian society in natural reason. Ackroyd points to the place of Utopia within a humanist debate between 'reason and revelation,' and that in the pre-Christian context of Utopian society, their state is not the product of revelation: 'they have no sense of an imperfect world, or of human corruptibility; in that respect, as far as More is concerned, the joke is on them.'27 Even though it is plausible to suggest that Utopia represents - at least in some significant ways - an inferior society to More, it is hard to reconcile this position with the knowledge that More told Erasmus about his fanciful daydreams in which he is marked out as king of Utopia by its citizens, and parades around with a crown of wheat and a large entourage. If we accept the argument of Stephen Greenblatt, that More's very life is an example of self-conscious role-playing, a continuous and shifting process of 'self-fashioning,' then 'the historical More' becomes 'a narrative fiction'.28 If we can discern anything concrete about the real character of More's mind, it lies in its elusive nature, in its ability to occupy and express equivocal states simultaneously. If there is a single unifying principle in Utopia, it is ambivalence.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter, The Life of Thomas More (London, 1998).

Baker-Smith, Dominic, More's Utopia, Unwin Critical Library (London, 1991).

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (IUP, 1984).

Donner, H.W., Introduction to Utopia (Uppsala, 1945).

Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980).

More, Thomas, Utopia, tr. Paul Turner (Hammondsworth Penguin Classics, 1965)

Web Resources:

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/tmore.htm

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/conf/texts/marius.html

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1888/more/index