Yi-Fu Tuan, Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2013, 184 pages, $ 24.95 cloth. ISBN 9780299296803.

Is it possible to conceive of Geography as romantic?  Is there a need for a ‘romantic geography’?  These are the principal questions underpinning Yi-Fu Tuan’s most recent book, Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape, in which he responds in the affirmative.  Tuan begins by proposing the ‘Romantic’ as a valuable, if often neglected, component of the geographic: a side or “pole” of Geography that tends to be marginalised by images of Geography as a scientific or rational endeavour. 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.

In its consideration of emotional and scientific responses to worldly environments, 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.  As the breadth of this material suggests, Tuan establishes connections between different academic disciplines (geography, history, literature, theology), but he writes in accessible language and he illustrates his arguments with memorable anecdotes.  Directed at a general audience, Romantic Geography offers an alternative to modern academic writing, which Tuan criticizes for being aimed at too a “restricted group” (page 172); as an indication of this style, the book contains an index and notes but no bibliography.

Romantic Geography comprises seven sections. Four chapters are framed by a musical substructure: 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’.  For Tuan, Romanticism necessitates extremes, or what he calls “bipolar values”: chaos and form, low and high, body and mind.  The romantic, he argues, lies not with one term or the other, but with “the urge to reach beyond the norm” (page 117) in “extremes in feeling, imagining, and thinking” (page 6).

Tuan proceeds to argue that the “quest” narrative (epitomized by nineteenth-century exploration) is “at the heart of romance” (page 27; page 167).  Indeed, the figure of the explorer carries particular significance within Tuan’s narrative of “romantic geography” and appears at various stages throughout the book. In Chapter 2, “Earth and its Natural Environments”, Tuan turns to the extreme topographical formations that inspired the romantic imaginations of Fridtjof Nansen, Richard Byrd and Ernest Shackleton, among others.  These features are gathered under six subheadings: Earth and Solar Systems, Mountains, Oceans, Forests, Deserts, and Ice.  The section on deserts alludes to the dry interiors of North America and Australia, and to the Sinai, and covers a vast historical period: from “the early Christian era” (page 86) to the figure of the “adventurer-explorer”, T.E. Lawrence (page 88).  This last example, though, turns out to be ambiguous: Tuan describes Lawrence as “one of the best known romancers of the desert” (page 88), a romantic figure with a liking for vast, open spaces (page 89) only to claim that Lawrence’s “disillusionment” renders his account “modern” rather than authentically “romantic” (pages 90-91).

Tuan’s explanation for this inauthentic romanticism, however,  raises the question of just how these distinctions can, or should, be drawn.  In Chapter 3, “The City”, Tuan’s focus shifts to urban spaces, artificial constructs that offer protection from “nature’s vagaries” (page 122).   Free from the natural cycles of day and night, from the natural rhythm of the seasons, and from the agricultural rhythms governing food production, for Tuan, the city reveals human ingenuity over nature: the city is “conquered” by electricity and gardening.  However, the link between the city and romantic geography is only really hinted at in the concluding discussion of the “Coda”: “The story of the passage from nature to glittering city is a geographical romance, made possible by imagination and moral idealism, held back by stupidity and greed, and yet ending with luck as the place most capable of fulfilling human potential” (page 174).  The final and, in my opinion, least successful chapter, “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” (page 147).  The reason behind Tuan’s engagement with the “heroic”, “saintly” individual is that they provide personal stories, “driven by emotion and ideals” and this, he argues, makes them “more romantic” (page 148). Saint Francis appears as an example of a “romantic saint” (page 159), while Dorothy Day (the woman responsible for founding The Catholic Worker in 1933), is described as “a modern day saint” (page 162).

As noted, the explorer-hero is the central romantic figure discussed by Tuan. In a manner that recalls Joseph Conrad’s characterization the ages of Geographyin “Geography and Some Explorers” (1924), Tuan discusses British explorers of the 1850s and 1860s in terms of a “boyish innocence and enthusiasm” (page 154), prior to the “imperial grab” (ibid.).  Those explorers, Tuan would have us believe, were solely motivated by the desire for a “better understanding” of the natural world, “driven by the desire to know the source of the Nile, what it is like at the Poles or on top of the highest mountain, with no worldly recompense in mind” (pages 27-28, my emphasis).  Such claims figure nineteenth-century expeditions into remote places as acts of “epic heroism” (page 156), a view which disregards longstanding critiques of the figure of the explorer as an imperial agent, or “foot-soldier of geography’s empire” (Driver 2001, page 3).  Further, Tuan’s assertion that financial considerations play no part in motivating missions (see also page 167) overlooks a number of factual realities, including the financial incentives put in place by geographical societies. For example, the Société de Géographie de Paris offered ten thousand francs to the first man to Timbuktu, while the English offered forty thousand pounds sterling for the same conquest (Grévoz, 1989: 14).[1]

Romantic Geography will divide audiences. Literary scholars may be left frustrated by the want of close textual engagement with source material, historians sceptical of generalisations, and geographers unconvinced by oversimplifications.  At the same time, 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.  In short, Romantic Geography is not without problems, but it promises the possibility for wider debate concerning the nature of Geography and its complex love affair with exploration and aesthetic geographical experiences. 

Notes

[1] On the foundation, organization, and aims of the Société de Géographie de Paris see also Jules Girard, “La Société de Géographie, sa vie et ses œuvres pendant un siècle, 1821-1921”.  In particular, Girard quotes Article I of the “Règlement de la Société de Géographie”:  “La Société est instituée pour concourir aux progrès de la Géographie ; elle fait entreprendre des voyages dans les contrées inconnues ; elle propose et décerne des prix ; établit une correspondance avec les sociétés savantes, les voyageurs, et les géographes ; publie de relations inédites ainsi que des ouvrages, et fait graver des cartes”.  ['The Geographical Society is established to contribute towards progress in Geography; it commissions travels into unknown lands; nominates and awards prizes; establishes correspondence with relevant societies, travellers, and geographers; prints previously unpublished accounts as well as completed works, and has maps drawn (translation and emphasis mine)]. 

References

Conrad J (1924) Geography and Some Explorers. National Geographic 45: 241-356.

Driver F (2001) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Girard J “La Société de Géographie: Sa vie et ses œuvres pendant un siècle, 1821-1921” (25 f.) avec lettre d’envoi, 20 septembre 1920, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Richelieu, SG Carton GI-GR (494)

Grévoz D (1989) Sahara 1830-1881: Les Mirages français et la tragédie Flatters. Paris: L’Harmattan.