A NEW SOURCE FOR MORE'S ‘UTOPIA’

Abstract

In a letter to Erasmus dated 3 September 1516, Thomas More wrote: ‘I am sending you my “Nowhere”, which is nowhere well written’. More's use of the Latin word ‘nusquam’ in this sentence (not ‘Utopia’, as one might have expected) made explicit what would have been apparent to any reader of the book with a knowledge of Greek: that the island of Utopia which the character Raphael Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’. The name ‘Utopia’, those readers would have known, was a compound of the Greek adverb ‘ou’, meaning ‘not’, with the noun ‘topos’, or ‘place’. The non-existence of Utopia operates throughout the work as a joke with at least two dimensions. On one level, the story Hythloday tells is ostensibly presented as fact, whereas humanist readers with a knowledge of Greek would have known it to be fiction. But additionally, Hythloday's argument (against the objections to communism voiced by ‘More’) that communal living really does work in Utopia is ironically undercut by the fact that Utopia is nowhere at all. Why More should choose to make this second joke is in a way the most fundamental question for the interpretation of Utopia, for if we do not understand why More thinks it is important that the commonwealth Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’, we will not be able to understand what More is doing in the work as a whole.