In informal usage a utopia is a paradise, a perfect place, an
ideal society. People who reflect on the history of literary
representations of utopias starting with Plato's Republic,
and on the many failed attempts to put them into practice,
will think of the word in the more precise sense of a conception
of a perfect place before which real human arrangements
inevitably fall short. Readers of the work that coined the
term, Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), will find a
still sharper distinction between the ideal and the real. The
etymological roots of More's word suggest that Utopia is both
a "good place" and "no place," simultaneously ideal and
nonexistent. Ithaca uses the word in this third, most
stringent sense, directing readers to More's fiction by
capitalizing it. The allusion implicitly compares the
transatlantic voyage described in More's fiction to the
traditional Christian conceit that God, and the completion of
humanity, can be found on the far side of the stars.
More wrote the Utopia in Latin as a dialogue between
himself and a fictional traveler named Hythlodaeus, a
political idealist who tells More about a perfect society that
he encountered on an island off the coast of South America.
Although he sees the life lived there as superior in every way
to European societies, Hythloday strenuously refutes More's
arguments that he should put his knowledge to use by entering
the service of a monarch and making things better at home. In
his view, politics as it exists in England and other European
countries is so deeply corrupt that the idealist would only
find himself corrupted, rather than making things a little
less bad for everyone else.
The picture of life lived by the Utopians, then, remains an
unattainable alternative to actual life, and the Greek roots
of More's name for the imaginary place (Hythlodaeus is a
student of ancient Greece) reflect that disparity. Utopia is
both eu-topos, a good place, and ou-topos, no
place. Consequently, it is hard to know how to interpret
More's richly detailed portrait of an imaginary society. Does
he present it as something to aspire to, or only as a mirror
to criticize the reality of his own society? And are its more
outlandish ideas presented as truly admirable, or do they
reflect the total unreality of the place? Hythlodaeus, itself
a compound of Greek roots, means speaker of nonsense, or
dispenser of nonsense, or cunning nonsense, or destructive
nonsense.
Joyce brings the ambiguities of More's title and artistic
conception to bear on the traditional association between the
starry heavens and Christian religion. After Bloom imagines
the night sky as a heaventree,
his thoughts turn to modern astronomical conceptions of the
stars as inconceivably vast, radically uncentered and
unbounded, and mathematically determined. He asks whether
human beings might be able to live on other planets, and if so
whether flawed humanity might find its salvation in that
adventure. And he decides "That it was not a heaventree, not a
heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it
was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to
the unknown." In the travelogue of his scientific
imagination, aiming for the stars will no more provide the
solution to mankind's problems than sailing to South America
would in More's opinion. For traditional Christians, heaven,
somewhere beyond the stars, is the ultimate "good place." But
in the cosmology of modern science the stars lead to "no
place." Getting from the known conditions of this life to the
unknown paradise of heaven is a Utopian adventure.
These, or something like them, are Bloom's thoughts as
filtered through the narrative voice of Ithaca.
Stephen thinks more complex and subtle thoughts about
Christian religion, but for him too faith is a matter of
proceeding from the known to the unknown. In Scylla and
Charybdis he presents this idea in terms of paternity:
"On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning
Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is
founded and founded irremovably because founded,
like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon
incertitude, upon unlikelihood." The bond of mother and child is
immediate, physical, certain. Fatherhood is uncertain,
distant, spiritual, and must be believed rather than felt. In
this conception as in Bloom's astronomical meditations, God
the Father beckons across "the void." His heaven is in "no
place."
