Few places depend as much on their vision as islands, where everything happens as if thing and representation were one, by an operation that would immediately make the reality correspond to its image. We see the island being in the world at the same time as being born to its intellection via a whole imaginary. We can see it at the same time as we discern it. One of the reasons for its myth is its centrality. If the island is, from antiquity, presented as a navel (omphalos), it is not only because it represents, in a small way, the Ecumene surrounded by water, but also because it indicates an origin. Now, this cradle of the island, where mythology gives birth to Zeus (on Crete), Apollo (on Delos) and Aphrodite (on Kythera), is also the tomb painted by Böcklin in his Island of the Dead. An idea of origin thus leads to the notion of a cycle. And to speak of the umbilicus also leads to the cordon that is the island, once considered not in its singularity but in its globality as an archipelago, where centrality gives way to decentring. So much so that we never finish going around the island, which is both total and finite, fragmentary and discontinuous. Therein lies an explanation for the success of the island archetype: its ambivalence, or rather its reversibility.
It is by inversion that the term “archipelago” (Aigaion pelagos, etymologically the Aegean Sea) today designates not the container “sea” but the content “islands”, or that conversely the word “Mediterranean” did not designate the sea of the same name but, literally, what lies in the middle of the land. And it is in the same way that utopia, a genre impossible to dissociate from the island with which it was born, cannot be envisaged without simultaneously postulating its spatial reality and its fiction of a place situated nowhere. Ou-topos, in other words “non-place”. But to pose the negation is – such is its paradox – to deny it. It is not that utopia is not in any place, it is that it is the place of its non-place. It is that its very nature is to be other, and its nowhere an elsewhere, or even a nowhere-where – a fictional reality conditioned by a void where the best of all possible worlds (eu-topos) will be constituted, on a play on words[1] .
We know that the pages of the manuscript that are supposed to inform us about the coordinates of Thomas More’s island of Utopia (1516) have disappeared, that Raphael Hythloday, the traveller and Utopian narrator of the book, is unconscious during his arrival on an unknown land, and that, as if this were not enough, the coughing fit of a servant prevents us from hearing his position for the first time in Book I through words that are only whispered. The place of Utopia will remain without location. The narrative alone, after the narrator has left the island, will attest to its truth, through fiction. It is what restores it that institutes it. Utopia makes discourse a condition of space, and it is the eponymous book here that qualifies not only the island but also, soon, the entire utopian genre.
A first utopian act is to cut the isthmus attaching the future island to the continent. This movement of geographical foundation (a cut immediately followed by a fence) is completed by the naming of the place of the sort established after the name of its founder, Utopus, with which it merges as a place founded on what names it, a place whose configuration is presented in the form of an amphitheatre and constitutes the island in scene. A strait succeeds the isthmus, inverting the ancient terrestrial continuity into a solution of liquid continuity. A rock, “visible from far away”, then achieves a reduplication by diminutive nesting. (This “abyssal” device is redoubled by the mention of an “immense” gulf in the form of a “great lake” inside). In the centre of the island (in its “navel”): a city acting as a capital. Finally, a string of lighthouses spread out over the entire island territory gives the island complete visibility. “(…) Thomas More’s island offers itself (…) entirely as a map“[2] .
Foundation effect: the island is a new world. Condensation effect: the island is a small world. Reduction effect: the island is a mirror world. Naming effect: the island is a monogram[3] . Appropriation effect: the island is made suitable for the achievement of power and knowledge. Modelling effect: the island is a pictorial world that must be seen, at all points, as a map, a scene, a painting. But this other world of the island is our own, a Mundus alter et idem, as defined by the title of a utopia by Joseph Hall written in 1605: “The decisive criterion of insularity is the obligation to think of the island in its secondarity rather than in its singularity. Inseparable from the reference to what it is not, the theme of the island would necessarily stem from the dialectical link that it maintains with the continental space.[4]
This explains why the bipolarity, not only of utopia (no utopia without dystopia…), but of the signified of the island in general (edenic/apocalyptic, erotic/eremitic, historical/ideological, etc.) has no equivalent but its reversibility. This is why, instead of the notion of difference or gap, we will substitute the notion of neutral or interval. Or heterotopias: “kinds of counter-locations, kinds of effectively realised utopias in which the real locations, all the other real locations that can be found within culture, are at once represented, contested and inverted, kinds of places that are outside of all places, though they are indeed locatable.[5]
[1] See Louis Marin, Utopiques: jeux d’espaces, Paris, Éditons de Minuit, 1973.
[2] Jean-Michel Racault, Robinson & Company, aspects de l’insularité politique de Thomas More à Michel Tournier, Paris, Éditions Pétra, 2010, p. 28 (emphasis added).
[3] Monogram is the term used by Frank Lestringant to indicate the singularity of the island paradigm. See Le Livre des îles, atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne, Geneva, Droz, 2002, pp. 333-334.
[4] J.-M. Racault, Ibid, p. 16. Underlined in the text.
[5] Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres”, lecture at the Cercle d’études architecturales (14 March 1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no. 5 (October 1984), pp. 46-49. Reprinted in Dits et écrits II, Paris, Quarto Gallimard 2001, p. 1574-1575.