Reclus

When I started reading Reclus’ A Journey to New Orleans I thought it was just going to be a straight forward example of the descriptive style of regional geography since it opens with beautiful accounts of the natural physical environment of New Orleans, the man-made environment, and the way the two are intertwined. His writing was great and he was really able to create in my mind a very vivid picture of the city. (I found that looking at New Orleans on Google Earth really added to this.) It’s no wonder his work was so successful outside of academia. As I kept reading though, the focus shifted much more towards social description – and not a passionless, sterile version of what he saw, but with a leaning toward an evaluation and judgment of it. His account of slave auctions had me cringing the entire time. It was like some scene in a movie that is too terrible to watch. I’m sure that many New Orleanians at the time of this writing would have disagreed with his portrayal of the city, with its drunkenness, pervasive crime, extreme violence, and political buffoonery. It still paints a scary picture though, even if only half of it was accurate. What it really made me think of was how far we’ve come in some respects, and how all the people who speak of returning to “the way things were” would feel if they’d read this account of the way things really were (at least to one person). On the other hand it made me realize that we really haven’t come that far in so many respects. His portrait of politics, religion, how “hatred separates factions and races”, and parochialism could just as easily be applied to what is going on today in this country, and around the world. His view of the spirit of America at that time reminded me of how we, in the west, often tend view adolescent males - as “young upstarts,” immature, full of vice, volatile, violent, dangerous, opportunistic, disrespectful of authority/tradition (how he says that for Americans, ”Present-day life is too active and tempestuous for the traditions of the past to dominate the soul.”) I thought it was interesting to contrast that quote, and his view with one American’s view of the spirit of the same times. In Walt Whitman’s Pioneers, O Pioneers, the same sort of attitudes are seen in a kind of glorious way. He says:

                Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

                All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

It may be a bit of a stretch, but, even though Reclus isn’t speaking directly about westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, I think that that same spirit had a profound influence on American attitudes in this period, and on a lot of what he describes. When reading the first half of this paper I kept asking myself, how does this fit into a book called Critical Geography?, but now it seems like maybe this piece is a good example of the transition between the old descriptive style of geography and a newer, more critical one.