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.