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

Abstract

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.'