Utopia, an Elusive Vision.

This slim volume in Twayne's Masterwork Studies presents a critical reading of Thomas More's Utopia and supplies further evidence, if any were needed, of how varied an understanding and interpretation of that Renaissance classic is possible. Tot homines, quot sententiae is undoubtedly the rule in approaching that enigmatic work. Professor Fox who is head of the English Department at the University of Otago in New Zealand emphasizes the equivocal, ambiguous, and paradoxical character of the work and attempts to follow and explain the mind of the author in its composition. He views More as proposing a social ideal, an exemplum, which he constantly subverts by his skepticism and his pessimism about human nature which he deems "irremediably imperfect." That theme is reiterated throughout and bolstered by a detailed analysis of the text. More's plight in Fox's explication struck me as similar to the plight of the man in Boswell's Life of Johnson who tried to be a philosopher but whose cheerfulness was always breaking in. In More's case his pessimism was ever frustrating his humanist idealism.

I must confess that I did not find Fox's analysis very persuasive. Not surprisingly, I have another view of Thomas More and his Utopia which I relate more to Erasmian inspiration and style and to a more meaningful moral purpose. More has given us a dramatic and open-ended dialogue and has posed questions and presented problems which are not meant to be easily answered or resolved. Fox, I think, does not deny this, but he sees it as troubling and confusing and attributes it to More's own inner tensions. I can't quite perceive that.

Speaking of Erasmus, I was somewhat disturbed by this reference to him in Fox's book:

The key to understanding the ambiguous nature of Utopia is provided by a crucial remark by Erasmus. In his famous description of More sent to Ulrich von Hutten in 1519, Erasmus declares that More "had written the second book <of Utopia> at his leisure, and, afterwards, when he found it was required, added the first off-hand." (30-31)

If any key is sought in Erasmus' remarks about Utopia in his letter to Hutten, it is certainly in the sentence that precedes the one Fox quotes. Strangely he ignores it, but it is preeminently relevant to understanding More's work. It reads:

He <More> published Utopia to show what the cause of our civil problems are, having England which he knows and understands so well particularly in mind. (Allen IV, 21)

I'm inclined to follow that latter tack and see the contrast that More draws between England (and Europe) in book I and Utopia in book 2 as an essential feature of Utopia and a very instructive one. Fox's reading here stresses a highly ambiguous "ambifocalism" (49-50), a reading characteristic of the theme he develops throughout his study. Whether this is an example of deconstructive criticism or not, it doesn't seem to me to be a fruitful approach in examining Thomas More's classic work.

John C. Olin FORDHAM UNIVERSITY