토마스 모어의 유토피아와 소설의 기원 담론: ‘허구성’을 중심으로

Abstract

Thomas More's Utopia, which was written in the sixteenth century and has long been regarded as the first utopian literature, surprisingly matches with Michael McKeon's now classical account of the origins of the novel. As if anticipating the dialectical development of the novel that McKeon explains, Utopia presents Morus, a character and a portrait of the public self of More the author, as a figure that believes in the traditional truth and virtue in the beginning of Book 1 (“romance idealism” “aristocratic ideology”). On the other hand, Hythlodaeus, a fictional character who asserts the supremacy of Utopia and also the narrator of Book 2, represents “naive empiricism” and “progressive ideology,” the anthesis in McKeon’s scheme; he believes in his own experiences of Utopia as the ultimate authority of truth while claiming for the inconsistency of status. Lastly, Morus takes a synthetical position of being skeptical of Hythlodaeus's Utopia and contemporary England at once (“extreme skepticism,” “conservative ideology”). Morus' ultimate take of “extreme skepticism,” which reflects the overall epistemology of Utopia, assumes the blurring of truth (or fact) and fiction (or lie) as McKeon explains. Indeed fictionality is a key concept in Utopia and the novel genre at once. As Louis Marin argues, fictionality in Utopia is the core of utopian representation and also utopian practice since it is fictionality itself which enables the political message like the abolition of private property to be represented. According to Marin, the irreconcilable contradiction of reality, the starting point of utopian literature, can be negotiated and neutralized only in the space of fiction. Yet the fictionality of Utopia is a peculiar kind of fictionality in which a certain opposition or contradiction in reality is negotiated and neutralized, and which excludes a fantastic or escapist imagination as we see in e.g. romance. And this kind of fictionality is exactly what the genre of the novel pursues and embodies in the form of “realism” in its emerging period. Just as Utopia addresses the political through a peculiar kind of fictionality, the novel could be the leading genre of modernity with its specific kind of fictionality, i.e. realism. That said, we should remember the meaningful difference in the way of representation in utopian literature and the novel. While the novel takes “verisimilitude”, a similar rendition of reality/truth, as the principle of representation, utopian literature addresses reality only as a “missing term” which exists only inversely in the text.