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Lies and the Limitable Inane: Contradiction in Move's Utopia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Alan F. Nagel
Alan F. Nagel*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

More's Utopia is a 'no place' land, as the title etymologically denominates it. To name this nusquama where the main river is the Anydrus is to enter a realm of fiction and contradiction, for this place belongs to language. This verbal irony has a precedent in the Platonic text which is one of More's models and which is, like the Utopia, a fiction with practical and didactic implications. At the end of Book ix of the Republic, Plato has Glaucon ponder just where might be located that city which has been their topic of conversation for so long: it is to be found, he says, only and 'nowhere on earth.'

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Summer 1973 , pp. 173 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1973

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References

1 On More's etymological play see Ward Allen, ‘Speculations on St. Thomas More's Use of Hesychius,’ PQ, 46 (1967), 156-166. More refers to the work as ‘nusquama’ in a letter to Erasmus, quoted by J. H. Hexter in his introduction to the Yale edition of the Utopia, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J. and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, 1965). All succeeding references are to this edition.

2 Republic IX. 592.A-B. Shorey translates ‘in the ideal,’ Rouse reads ‘in words,’ and Jowett ‘in idea.’ Ficino's commentary reads ‘quae verbis solum, in terris vero nusquam, ut arbitror, exstat.’ (I cite from the 1781 edition.) It is possible then that More's inspiration for his ‘Utopia’ and ‘nusquama’ may have derived from the passage in the Republic via Ficino.

3 On the resemblances to England see pp. 384-393 of the Yale editors’ notes. In addition to the resemblances observed by Surtz and Hexter there is the fact of Utopus’ having created the separation of his country from the mainland by digging the ditch. Prof. William Nelson has kindly pointed out to me the idea that Britain was once attached to mainland; see Spenser FQ, II, 10, 5. The Variorum note cites Holinshed, Camden; Camden refers to Servius’ note on Virgil (Eclogues 1.66) which may be the source of the idea: ‘quia olim iunctafuit orbi terrarum Britannia.'

4 See notes, pp. 386 and 517, and Allen, cited n. 1 above.

5 P. 112.

6 P. 110: Surtz and Hexter translate ‘The island of the Utopians extends in the center (where it is broadest) for two hundred miles and is not much narrower for the greater part of the island, but toward both ends it begins gradually to taper. These ends form a circle five hundred miles in circumference and so make the island look like a new moon, the horns of which are divided by straits about eleven miles across.'

7 Dc Bcllo Gallico 1. 38.4: concerning the river Dubis nearly surrounding the town of Vesontion, Caesar writes ‘ut circino circumductum.'

8 Nearer to More in date, Nicholas of Cusa had computed pi as 3.1423, and this figure was repeated by Charles Bouelles, Liber de quadratura Circuli…, Paris, 1503. See Herman C. Shepler, ‘The Chronology of Pi,’ Mathematics Magazine, 23 (1950), 165-170 and 216- 228.

9 De Rerum Natura 1.439

10 P. 40.

11 As the Yale editors point out, the distinction is made in Aulus Gellius, Noctes Attkae, XI, II. 1-4, and is used similarly by More in a letter to Erasmus, Ep. 2,193. Cf. also Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, I.xxvi.(40).

12 P. 118.

13 On More's translation, see Thompson, Craig Ringwalt, The Translations ofLucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, 1940)Google Scholar and Pearl Hogrefe, The Sir Thomas More Circle (Urbana, 1959), pp. 33fGoogle Scholar. In the dedicatory letter to Thomas Ruthall, More characterizes the Philopseudes as ‘non sine Socratica ironia'; the letter appears in Rogers, Elizabeth Frances, The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, 1947), pp. 11–14 Google Scholar.

14 P. 48.