CityReads | Why We Need Romantic Geography?

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Why We Need Romantic Geography?

Humanity’s persistent hunger to reject familiar comfort for the new, strange and sublime landscape drives the development of romantic geography.

Yi-Fu Tuan, 2014. Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Sources: 

https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/romantic-geography-by-yi-fu-tuan

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5252.htm

Is there a romantic geography?  Is there a need for a 'romantic geography'？These are the principal questions underpinning Yi-Fu Tuan's one of the recent books, Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape, in which he responds in the affirmative.  

Tuan states in the first pages that there is a need for romantic geography and the sublime. Tuan proposes the 'Romantic' as a valuable, if often neglected, component of the geographic: a side or "pole" of Geography that tends to be marginalized by images of Geography as a scientific or rational endeavor. As such, Tuan seeks to open the possibility of a 'bipolar' Geography in which traditional understandings of the objective utility of geographical knowledge are placed in tension with the free spirit of explorations, literary creativity and/or experiences of sublime nature.  This 'bipolar' approach operates conceptually and metaphorically across the book through binary categories and images such as darkness and light, or nature and culture.

This book is compiled as a geographic symphony of sorts, including an "Overture", "Interlude", and "Coda": the "Overture" precedes Chapter 1 and offers a brief introduction, an intermission ("Interlude") follows Chapter 2, and Tuan's summative comments are gathered in the "Coda".  The first chapter, "Polarized Values", sets out the binary framework through which Tuan understands and frames 'Romanticism'.  In Chapter 2, "Earth and its Natural Environments", Tuan turns to the extreme topographical formations that inspired the romantic imaginations.  These features are gathered under six subheadings: Earth and Solar Systems, Mountains, Oceans, Forests, Deserts, and Ice. In Chapter 3, "The City", Tuan's focus shifts to urban spaces, artificial constructs that offer protection from "nature's vagaries". In chapter 4,"The Human Being" begins by establishing a strangely simplistic categorization of humankind into three categories: "Civilization has produced three distinctive human types: aesthete, hero, and saint".

Romantic Geography brings together an impressive number of wide-ranging case studies that span from ancient China to modern American cities, and stretch from antiquity through scripture to twentieth-century space exploration.  Textual sources for Tuan's Romantic Geography include the literary canons of Shakespeare, Hugo, and Orwell. Literary texts are explored as romantic archives for imaginative geographies such as the oceans in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and the high altitudes and pure air of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It is in its capacity to span, and to interweave Western literature, Indian mythology, Christian theology, imperial China, and medieval Europe that Tuan’s account is most impressive. Readers will encounter a variety of scattered anecdotes and rarely known knowledge. For example:

Indeed "superior" is derived from a Latin word meaning "higher". "Excel" (celsus) is another Latin word for "high". The Sanskrit Brahman is derived from a term meaning "height". "Degree", in the literal sense, is a step by which one moves up or down in space.

Thus "savage" derives from silva, a wood; and "foreigner", an alien being, has the same root as "forest".

What is romantic or romanticism?

The words,"romantic" or "romanticism", are a loose set of ideas and values that emerged in Europe between 1780 and 1848. Romanticism is essentially a transcendence of the everyday and a faith in human perfectibility.  It is "admiration for energy, moral enthusiasm, original genius, recognition of contrast between man's greatness-wretchedness, power-misery". Romanticism overlapped with the idea of the sublime and of the gothic. Both then dovetailed into a phase of Western imagination called the decadent (1880-1900).

In the eighteenth century, one such idea is the sublime, articulated by Edmund Burke in 1757, but with roots in classical antiquity. And what is the sublime? It has something in common with the beautiful, but it is not order and harmony, and it does not necessarily give pleasure. Indeed, it can invoke the opposite sensation of being overwhelmed by the huge, the chaotic, and even the ugly, making one feel ecstatic to the point of pain, intensely alive and yet yearn for death. This state of being is tailed by two others, Romantic and Gothic, the one rising to prominence in the eighteenth century, the other somewhat later. All four characteristics—romanticism, the sublime, the gothic, and the decadent—were rebellions against the norms of life, with their ideal of stability.

Much of the book draws on the hundred years or so before the twentieth century, the reason being that since 1900, the ideals of high romance have been progressively overshadowed by the ideals of democracy and the common man.

Romanticism inclines toward extremes in feeling, imagining, and thinking. The romantic imagination favors phenomena that are very large or very small rather than those of a middle scale. Moreover, the romantic imagination readily leaps from one extreme to the next，an example being in William Blake's famous lines, "To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower".

Some individuals delight in vastness and the utterly remote and that they, for all their allegiance to precision, are romantics.

What is romantic geography?

Geography, however, is mostly about the norms of life. When geographers note change, the change is usually ascribed to impersonal forces. To even hint that a yearning to transcend the everyday or that the lure of human perfectibility plays a role would put the work out of the category of serious scholarship and into the category of romance.

Geography not only is a spatial science but also is an enquiry into nature and culture, the transition from living close to nature to living in an artifactual world, and, in the case of the individual, from biological being to cultural being. Geographers study such transitions, but at a group level, they attribute the changes almost solely to impersonal forces. I, by contrast, introduce individuals. Their stories are personal, more driven by emotion and ideals, more likely to depart from group convention, more romantic.

Underlying all human desires, temptations, and aspirations, are the polarized values, existence of which lures people to move, at least in imagination, beyond the norm to the extremes.

What are the polarized values? They include darkness and light, chaos and order, body and mind, matter and spirit, nature and culture, among others.

These binaries underlie a romantic geography for the following reasons: they focus on the extremes rather than on the middle-range; they affect our feelings and judgments toward objects and people in the ordinary encounters of life, but also—and more central to romantic geography—in the envisioning and experiencing of large, challenging environments such as the planet Earth with its natural subdivisions of mountain, ocean, tropical forest, desert, and ice plateaus, and their human counterpart in challenge—the city.

Quest—as in the quest for the Holy Grail—is at the core of romance。

These binaries define the limits of what is acceptable in the normal operations of human life—geography—and hint at possibilities beyond—romantic geography.

Romantic geography focuses on the more extreme bipolar values and on large, challenging environments. The merit of doing so is that the extremes reveal—as midrange values and small accommodating environments do not—what human beings truly fear and desire.

Romantic geography is not a thing of the past. There are still places on earth—the oceans, for example—for geographers to explore, and beyond earth are the other planets and stars.

Humanity’s persistent hunger to reject familiar comfort for the new, strange and sublime landscape drives the development of romantic geography.

Why city is romantic and sublime?

The city has majesty, one that is achieved by distancing itself as far as possible from bondage to earth. The city began as an attempt to bring the order and majesty of heaven down to earth, and it proceeded from there by cutting itself from agricultural roots, civilizing winter, turning night into day, and disciplining the sensuous human body in the interest of developing the mind. Humans have done all these things such that, in the city, one can experience the heights and the depths—in a word, the sublime.

To the extent that the city distances itself from agriculture, it is romantic.

The city protects human beings against nature's vagaries. For instance, the seasonal reversal—the city coming fully to life when nature sleeps. But even more daring—and far more recent—is the conquest of night.

Candles and open-flame oil lamps, already in use when the Pyramids were built, remained the most common form of illumination until the approach of the nineteenth century.

Before Paris came to be known as the "City of lights", the first impetus toward efficient illumination came in the year 1667, when Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie—Paris's powerful lieutenant of police—ordered some 6,500 lanterns to be strung across the streets. By the end of the seventeenth century, candles illuminated some sixty-five miles of city streets during the winter months.

Large inroads became possible with the introduction of gaslight in the nineteenth century, but only in the twentieth century, with the wide use of electricity, can we truly say of some cities that human beings had altered another fundamental rhythm—the diurnal rhythm—of nature.

The advent of electric lighting finally made the conquest of night possible. Public activities no longer depended on the sun. Twilight presaged not withdrawal but a new burst of life on brightly lit boulevards that came to be known as the "great white ways". No city in the twentieth century could claim to be cosmopolitan and glamorous without a vigorous nightlife. A modern metropolis, however deficient in luster during the day, is transformed by the mere flip of switches into a brazen world of glittering lights after dark.

Light dispels darkness, exposes ignorance. Its meaning has always had an intellectual-spiritual component, as perhaps the word "illumination" more clearly indicates. the city is a place of illumination, and it became that way long before the arrival of artificial light, or before it literally became illuminated. No wonder Socrates says he never learns from "fields and trees"; rather he learns in dialogue with his fellow humans in the street, marketplace, and gymnasium, or under the temple porch, of a city.

The city offers beauty and more—the sublime, a life-enhancing experience laced with stress and pain, for the city is not only life and light, but also darkness and death.

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