More Is Not Hythlodaeus: Utopia's Early-Modern Enterprise of and Experiments with Individual Subject Formation Dhriti Shankar College

Thomas More’s Utopia involves circumlocutory ways of distanciating the author’s self from Hythlodaeus’s delineation of the exemplary city. More wanted not only to obfuscate his agency as the author, but also lend a unique credibility to the conceptual hypothesis that he sought to fabricate. By endowing his “philosophical city” with the semblance of reality, he caused his readers to see the mechanism in operation by means of a feigned description, which is also the essential feature of the utopian genre (Frye 31). Symptomatic of the renaissance anxiety about the constant entanglement of the ideas of dissidence, privacy, guilt and anti-state practices, More's Utopia does not ascribe any private space to its inhabitants. Consequently, “[T]here are . . . no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places . . . [E]veryone has his eye on you, so you're practically forced to get on with your job, and make some proper use of your spare time” (More 65). Ironically, More too is painfully aware of such eyes on himself and as a consequence, the pretence of second-hand reporting can indeed be construed as a protective technique that More avails himself of (Turner xiv). The paradox of this situation can best be identified by locating...