Wordwatch: Utopia

“Utopia” is a word invented by Henry VIII’s Chancellor Sir Thomas More as the name of an ideal state; his book of that title was published in 1516 (English translation 1551). It describes “the best conditions of the state” as embodied in an imaginary country off the coast of South America. 

The word has been applied to any advanced or perfected social system, thence to circumstances that seem unimprovable or ideal and even to the Garden of Eden and Heaven itself. 

It was the inspiration for a whole genre of books in which fictional travellers discover new lands, specifically embodying ideas presented as foreign to the society of the author. There is an element of satire in More’s book, and these “travellers” tales’ are often couched in terms of bitter satire. 

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a famous example. Gulliver visits several strange countries, exemplifying caricatured aspects of English society in the early eighteenth century, finally discovering the land of the Houyhnhnms. These horses embody finer qualities than those found in the humans (Yahoos) who inhabit the same country. 

Here satire is used as a vehicle for social comment. More’s Utopia aims not so much at satire but at philosophy. The name is Greek and means “no place” or “nowhere”. In the late nineteenth century, Samuel Butler borrowed it (backwards) for his own imaginary country, “Erewhon”, which he uses, again, for largely satirical purposes.

In April of this year, an article in the Daily Telegraph read, “[Oysters] are of course considered to contain edible utopia”. In all these various versions and subversions of the notion of “Utopia,” I’ve never before come across it being used in the sense of gastronomic heaven. 

There’s something faintly absurd about the idea of its being “edible”, let alone being associated with oysters (which, for the record, I love). But this is what happens when a word becomes divorced from its original meaning – and of course, when writers cease to carry in their minds the significance of that meaning. 

There are other interesting ways in which More’s word has been transformed over the centuries. In the 1960s, the architectural historian Ian Nairn coined the term “subtopia” to describe the uninspiring urban and suburban landscape of many twentieth-century towns and cities. 

This was a clear – and very rueful, definitely satirical – reference to the ideal world that More had conjured up, Nairn using the “-topia” element in his neologism to stand ironically for a range of relevant ideas which he did not need to spell out. But perhaps now, in the twenty-first century, there is just such a need.  

In recent years, Nairn’s term has so far become a part of the language that it has developed a life of its own. The internet informs me that there’s somewhere in Sweden (where English is spoken better than it is here) calling itself “Subtopia”: “a creative cluster south of Stockholm where artists and creative entrepreneurs come to work and make the world a little better”. Well, that’s good to know. 

But I guess the originators of that obviously “Utopian” place hadn’t quite grasped Nairn’s purpose in inventing the term.