Utopia and Mapping the Imaginary
In something of a loose association with my previous post, I’ll be writing and thinking this week about another interesting intersection between images and text. In particular, I’ll be exploring both old and new attempts to map Thomas More’s seminal text Utopia.
Written in 1516, More’s Utopia is a text which provides the first major instance of the word “utopia” as we know it today. Derived from a Greek pun which alternately means “no-place” and “good-place,” Utopia concerns the travels of one Raphael Hythloday to a hidden island nation known as Utopia and the report of his findings back at court in England. Book II of Utopia features long descriptions of the island-nation’s geography. More writes:
The island of Utopia containeth in breadth in the middle part of it (for there it is broadest) 200 miles. Which breadth continueth through the most part of the land. Saving that by little and little it cometh in and waxeth narrower towards both the ends. Which fetching about a circuit or compass of 500 miles, do fashion the whole island like to the new moon. (49).
More’s book is best remembered for its discussion of social practices in Utopia, but these geographic details have inspired several attempts to visualize the island which I’ll explore here.
First, let me introduce the map included in the original 1516 edition of Utopia:
The 1516 map makes use of several representational shortcuts. It suggests the 54 cities of Utopia with the presence of only about 10 manmade structures on the island. The size of these representational structures in relation to the 500-mile long perimeter island also points to discrepancies between image and text.
The 1595 edition of Utopia sees a dramatically more attentive cartography:
In addition to representing all 54 of the cities described in the text, this map emphasizes the details of the landscape with depictions of hills, forests, and rivers throughout the island. Furthermore, the cities of the island are represented significantly more proportionally to the remainder of the landscape. Overall, the 1595 map represents a markedly higher attention to detail which, as a whole, conveys a sense of verisimilitude. Mapping the island to such a high level of detail suggests a more stable conception of the Utopia within the text.
As we skip to the contemporary moment, we can see an interesting clash across a technological divide on how to make a map of Utopia. Brian Goodey, in his 1970 essay “Mapping ‘Utopia’: A Comment on the Geography of Sir Thomas More,” undertakes the project of rendering a map of Utopia which is thoroughly founded on what he describes as the “statistical and topographical description of Utopia provided by More in the early sections of Book Two” (15). He makes step-by-step analyses of components of the mapping process before ultimately concluding that “The answer is unfortunately all too simple. More presents us with a Utopia, a ‘Nowhere,’ that cannot be mapped.” (8) Not only does Goodey find it impossible to piece together the details of the text into a coherent map, but he suggests that this is indicative of a larger project by More — an impossible utopic society on an impossible-to-map island.
Andrew Simoson’s 2016 article “The Size and Shape of Utopia” offers a starkly contrasting position to Goodey.[i] In this article, Simoson works through the text of Utopia to find what he considers the five most important cartographic details given in the text. Describing them as “clues,” he lists them as:
Clue 1: Utopia is shaped as a crescent, the horns of which bound a large harbor on its eastern end.
Clue 2: If we loosely define the midline of the island as the perpendicular bisector of the crescent’s two tips, then Utopia’s cross-sections parallel to the midline are all about 200 miles, except near the extremes where it collapses to 0.
Clue 3: This harbor is circular with a mouth of 11 miles so as to make a perimeter of about 500 miles.
Clue 4: Utopia consists of 54 city-states, each separated from the nearest neighbor by 24 miles. Each city-state is square-like with side lengths of at least 20 miles.
Clue 5: The capital city, located in the center of the island, lies about 60 miles from the harbor and 140 miles from the opposite coast. (65-66)
After Simoson works through the way previous maps have failed to accurately render Utopia following these five clues, he proposes five mathematic formulations to more precisely determine the map’s parameters. For Clue 1, he provides “Feature 1: The outer coast of Utopia will be an ellipse parameterized by O = (a cos t, b sint)” (68). Where Goodey relied on analog mathematical devices to attempt a map of Utopia, Simoson inputs his five mathematical features into a computer.
In other words, the mysterious hidden island of Utopia created in the year 1516 could only finally be mapped correctly in the year 2016 with the aid of computers. Those leery of some techno-positivistic moral lesson in this narrative should note that Simoson’s final map actually looks very different from that which was yielded by computer.
Ultimately, the closeness of the computer’s map to the text falls somewhat
short and we are left instead with a map that appears in kind very similar to
both the 1516 and 1595 maps. However this 500-year long mapping struggle seems
to imply a kind of increasingly rational mode of ordering the world, this
ultimate recourse seems to suggest an intertwined narrative about the role of
maps and their relationship both to imaginary worlds and, perhaps, our own.
Maps provide an inlet for us to orient ourselves to text not only in a
rationalistic kind of space-ordering, but, as these examples suggest, some kind
of imagistic and artistic way as well.
[i] Simoson’s article was the culmination of a project undertaken for the 500-year anniversary of Utopia.
References
- Goodey, Brian R. “Mapping ‘Utopia’: A Comment on the Geography of Sir Thomas More.” Geographical Review, vol. 60, no. 1, 1970, pp. 15-30.
- More, Thomas. Utopia. In Three Early Modern Utopias edited by Susan Bruce, Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Simoson, Andrew. “The Size and Shape of Utopia.” Bridges Finland. August 2016, Jyväskylä, Finland.
Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.