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We have become so conscious of the dialogue and drama of Book I of St. Thomas More's Utopia, with its multiple ironies, its subtleties of frames within frames, and its rich and equivocal development of characters and themes, and of the dynamic relationships between the two books and the parerga surrounding More's "libellus uere aureus" (cxcv),2 that it may seem almost paradoxical to look simply at Book II, for many modern readers the duller of the two books.3 Obviously it cannot ultimately stand alone. Yet More did write most of it (with the early part of Book I) first,4 and Erasmus made distinctions between the two books in words which seem to suggest the greater polish of Book II.5 I should like to look at it then, and more particularly at a few passages within it, so as to articulate from within the island of Utopia itself, as it were, some aspects of the style involved in the much larger question of the language of Utopian negation.
The form of Book II, like the Utopia as a whole an instance of the new Renaissance development of the mixed genre,6 has been variously defined: as declamatio, demonstrative oration, prosopopoeia, or the obverse or positive side of a satire.7 With two humanist rhetorics in mind, however-Erasmus' De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia and Vives' De Ratione Dicendi-we can begin by seeing what purports to be a traveller's tale as an instance of Evidentia, more particularly as the "Description of a Thing."8 Erasmus argues that this should include
descriptions of kinds of people and ways of life: as though one should place before your eyes a picture of the Scyths, the Androphagi, the Indians, the Troglodytes, or similar peoples. (50)
Rhetorically this is a type of amplification which is essentially poetic and so developed that "it may seem that we have painted, not narrated, and that the reader has seen, not read" (47). Both fitting figures and the "exposition of details" which "most forcefully bring a thing before one's eyes, and produce an arresting narrative," (49) are crucial, and seem to look ahead in some ways to a Sidneyan poetic.9 These comments underscore Raphael Hythlodaeus' fundamental rhetorical strategy, of course: both at the beginning and end of Book...