[00:00:01] INTRODUCER:
Today is the occasion of the second lecture honoring the memory of Professor Carl O. Sauer of the Department of Geography. And our lecturer today will be Mr. John Brinckerhoff Jackson. Mr. Jackson was born in nineteen oh nine and received his education at Harvard College and graduated in nineteen thirty-two.
On talking to Mr. Jackson, I find that his interests were far removed from geography and landscape architecture at that time. But something happened between nineteen thirty-two, when he left Harvard, and nineteen fifty-one, when he became the editor and publisher of the Landscape Magazine. It’s not entirely clear what happened, but the results are obvious.
We have the appearance on the American scene of a small magazine with a handful of local subscribers which soon gained national attention, in fact, had an international audience. With the appearance of that magazine and the things that took place before that, it’s quite clear to even the casual observer that Professor Sauer and Mr. Jackson were on converging paths. They–
The, the convergence was accelerated by the appearance of the magazine, and contacts were made in the early ’50s between the faculty here in the Department of Geography and Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson continued as editor of Landscape Magazine until nineteen sixty-seven. His efforts were rewarded in nineteen sixty-six by an annual award of the American Geographical Society.
In nineteen sixty-seven, he left the magazine in other people’s hands and, uh, enjoyed since that time a freer life, uh, free of the burdens of maintaining a magazine with its subscriptions and its costs and production problems. Um, he did venture into the academic world. Having made contacts in nineteen fifty-two, he became a person on the Berkeley scene.
Later on, in nineteen sixty-four, he was appointed lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture, and in sixty-seven, he was appointed, uh, adjunct professor in landscape architecture and, uh, geography. In that time, when he was on the Berkeley campus, he was also other places as well, notably Harvard. There appears in the correspondence at the time some eq- some problems, some tension on the part of the faculty because he was traveling at the two ends, from the two ends of the Berkeley-Cambridge axis, spending part of his time in Harvard in the fall and part of his time in Berkeley in the spring.
On occasion, he did touch down in Minnesota. Uh, it seems to have been a busy life, full plate, as it were, in the academic world for a man who arrived there out of the excellence of his magazine and the concerns of the, the world around us.
(cough)
Professor Sauer wrote Mr. Jackson on the occasion of the tenth birthday of Landscape Magazine and congratulated him on what had been accomplished. And he gave him good wishes for the continued growth of the grace and stature of the magazine. At the end of Professor Sauer’s letter, he remarked that man’s life is an important thing and that the magazine had contributed to illuminating that.
And he wished that the, the magazine would be able to continue to have the sensitive and subtle spirit that it had demonstrated in the ten years, uh, since it began.
[00:03:34] DEAN BROWN:
At the end of his letter, Professor Sauer made the following observation, that man does not live by bread alone, that the mechanistic view of the world is not sufficient, and he gave a charge to Mr. Jackson. That is to say, in the future, he should continue to report to the world the importance and the qualities of man’s dwelling on Earth. It’s in the spirit of that today that I have the pleasure to introduce Mr. Jackson.
He will speak to us on landscape as theater. Mr. Jackson.
(applause)
[00:04:14] MR. JACKSON:
Thank you, Dean Brown, for your very kind introduction. I’m honored to have my name identified with Dr. Sauer in any connection, and honored also to be given this opportunity to express my regard for Dr. Sauer. There are many others who could do it far better than I. Uh, people, men and women, who have studied with him and been his students and who, in the course of their careers as geographers, have, uh, passed on his ideas and, uh, uh, they are the best testimonial to his influence there can be.
I knew him only as a friend. I came out to Berkeley, uh, uh, for the first time twenty-five years ago to meet him and, uh, found him, uh, so inspiring and, uh, and so stimulating and so generous in giving of his stimulation, uh, that I became his student, as it were, simply by sitting in the room with him. Uh, you were aware that you were with a great man when you were in his presence.
And I learned, like many of his students learned, to have a, perhaps a more mature and a more speculative approach to the world, thanks to Dr. Sauer. I certainly am not in a position to comment on his eminence as a geographer, uh, but I do recognize him as a humanist and as the embodiment and the expression of some of the most, uh, valued traditions in Western civilization. Uh, specifically, I was grateful to Dr. Sauer, and will continue to be, uh, for his having restored some dignity to the word landscape.
Uh, it had been entirely too much used by painters and by ecologists and conservationists. And Dr. Sauer, I think, reminded us, it was twenty-five years ago that he did so, that the world belo- the word belongs to man, and that a landscape should best be seen as a, as the place of a struggle where a man seeks to, uh, live on amiable and profitable terms with his fellow man, and at the same time to adjust himself to the natural environment.
And, uh, it’s in that sense, I think, that, uh, Dr. Sauer used the word, and let me quote from his definition of it: “The cultural era— area,” he wrote, “as a community with a way of living, is an historical and geographical expression.” Every human landscape, every habitation, at any moment, is an accumulation of practical experience. The geographer cannot study houses and towns, fields and factories, as to their where and why, without asking himself about their origins.
He cannot trust the localization of activities without knowing the functioning of culture, the process of living together with a group, and he cannot do this except by historical reconstruction. I think that the word landscape or the concept landscape is not merely geographical, uh, but it is also a legal concept. It’s also an economic concept.
It’s also an aesthetic one, and eventually, it’s a religious one. And, uh, it goes through these, uh, various phases, as I hope to show. And since we’re talking about history and the history of the landscape, one aspect of that history, which I think is very revealing, is the history of the word itself and how it is used.
And this is what I wish to discuss, uh, the use of this word landscape or what they thought they were defining when they used the word. And I think in its original sense, which is not necessarily its basic sense, but the first sense, it meant simply a rural community of farmers, their fields, and their houses. And, uh, this was the archaic use of the word, the very first word that we have, first use of the word that we have in the language.
Uh, and it has long since disappeared, uh, the, the landscape itself. Uh, but it’s been kept, uh, uh, been kept alive in an extraordinary way in the minds of all of us, uh, this early archaic landscape, uh, by a series of cultural contributions, uh, the Bible, uh, the classics, myths, fairy tales. And I think this picture of this pre-technological landscape is kept alive in America, perhaps more than anywhere else, by the constant influx of people who are coming from Asia or from Latin America, where they have been in contact with the pre-technological landscape.
So this concept of a landscape, which is part of our childhood and part of our dreams, is very much alive and still with us. I’m not holding it up as an example of what a landscape should be. I would say that this first one should be considered as a political and economic concept.
Nevertheless, it is very alive. And I would like to mention some of its characteristics, not because they’re admirable or because we want to revive them, but simply as a basis of comparison with another kind of landscape which comes later and which I’ve called the landscape of theatre. So this early landscape, this, uh, archaic landscape should be seen, I think, uh, as used a thousand years ago or even more, as this small village of ramshackled houses, uh, clustered around a tower of some sort, and in turn surrounded by fields and gardens, which in turn is surrounded by the forest.
And this place is very isolated, very primitive, very cut off from the world, and it’s very small too, two or three hundred people. But it has a very strong community sense, a very strong sense of, of everybody knowing each other and belonging together, which gives it its political or its legal, uh, status, I think, as much as anything else. Uh, I think the remarkable feature, I’m simply speculating about what this landscape is, is the close intimacy of everybody that’s there.
They all know each other. They know who their parents were. They know what their genealogy is.
They know what their status in society is. So that, uh, one of the results of this is a very cohesive society, And one, uh, which, uh, provides an identity which has never changed. You are born what you are, you stay in that station, and that is what you are known, so that you have a very fixed and a very visible identity, which carries over, of course, into the religious beliefs, too.
Uh, but in contrast with this very stable social order that one would find in this kind of a very primitive landscape, which is cut off from the rest of the world, you have a landscape itself, that is to say, the countryside, uh, which is in, in considerable flux. It’s always changing. Uh, the forest is coming back into the fields.
Uh, fields are cut into the forest. The technology is so poor that they can’t very well, uh, fertilize the fields or keep them open for very long so that they revert to waste. The houses are so poor and so poorly built, Uh, that they either collapse or burn down or are moved.
Uh, the, um-
(cough)
Other man-made constructions are not much better. Uh, the roads are abandoned when they’re no longer passable. In other words, the whole landscape is in a constant state of flux.
The whole countryside is in a constant state of flux. Uh, the law considers the house mobile property, almost the way a mobile home would be now. Uh, and sometimes a whole village moves to another spot if, if war comes or there’s disease, they move.
Boundaries are very flexible, very vague, very arbitrary, very much ignored. So by contrast with a very stable society where everybody knows who they are and will remain as they are, you have a, a, a countryside which is, uh, uh, very difficult to pin down. Each head of the family, each head of a family in this village owns a piece of land, as you all know this setup, and he can farm that to support his family and to pay some of his many obligations.
Uh, but it doesn’t really belong to him. It belongs to the lord of the manor or to perhaps some other power, and, uh, he is using it on sufferance, and he can’t do what he likes with it. Uh, he can’t put a fence around it, and he can’t raise crops of his own choice.
And he has to follow the orders of the village as to what to plant and when to plow, when to harvest. And in many villages, his land is, uh, actually taken away from him for a year at a time to be used as communal, communal pasture. Uh, this is a very, uh, sensible and a very efficient arrangement, this collective farming, and it brings the people close together.
And, uh, it also carries over into the forest and into the meadow. It’s not confined just to the village. And everybody survives this way, and they get to know each other better.
But I doubt if it, uh, I doubt if it encourages much of a sense of, of identity with a piece, a particular piece of land, uh, since it’s not yours. Uh, your relationship to this piece of land is more like a man in a factory at his bench, perhaps, rather than the owner of a piece of property. And I doubt if it’d encourage a feeling that your identity is reflected in even a tiny fragment of the environment.
And I think there are signs that this detached attitude toward the environment, uh, carried over into the whole wider environment of this archaic period, uh, and that nobody felt any strong sense of possession for it. I use as a frame of reference here, uh, I don’t know how appropriate it is, but the Pueblo, uh, Indians of New Mexico, where I live, who have, it seems to me, what I would call the same archaic landscape and the same attitude toward the natural environment as I understand it, plus the same very strong personal identity, which is, uh, with them from the moment they’re born until the moment they die. And I’m not suggesting that, uh, the people in these villages of the archaic world were not, uh, sensitive to their environment.
And, uh, uh, probably they’re more sensitive than we are to its beauties and to its terrors and, uh, to its mysteries. And they certainly were much more dependent upon it than we are. Uh, but what it seems to me is that their whole culture and their whole development of their personality did not allow them to change, to develop, to grow as a result of contact with this unknown force.
They’re living in a society where a premium is placed on staying in your place, staying who you are, whether socially or religiously or morally, and there is no place in their way of thought for personality being changed by contact with the environment. That isn’t to say they were not responding to it, but instead of saying, “I am changed,” they would say, “A spirit has come into me, which I is not me, and which is very hard to accommodate.” Uh, such a contrast with the 19th century, where the romantic would say, “As a result of seeing this sunset or the result of being lost in the wilderness, I am a new man.
I’m totally transformed.” This is not possible in a society, it seems to me, where your identity is a fixed, unchangeable item. What this means, uh, seems to me, is that, uh, when you are assaulted and made, uh, uneasy by environmental factors, emotional ones, subjective ones, you immediately say, “That’s a spirit that’s assaulting me, a spirit that’s, uh, coming my way,” and that spirit is identified with that particular place rather than with you.
And consequently, you have a feeling for place which is based on whether a spirit is there or not. This is what Mircea Eliade has written so much about, the sacred place, the profane place. The sacred place is a place which is identified with a cosmic or religious force or spirit, and those are the places where you want to be.
The rest of the world is indifferent. It’s undifferentiated space that surrounds these few places. So I think we have
(coughing)
an attitude towards space or toward the environment which is quite different from ours, insofar as it’s the spirit of the place rather than our own response to it that gives it any particular value. Uh, I think this archaic landscape, uh, must have been extraordinarily rich. Again, I refer back to the Pueblo Indian landscape, extraordinarily rich in what you might call invisible monuments and landmarks, uh, myths, uh, songs, uh, uh, memories, symbols, uh, whether they were visible or not, that are scattered throughout what to our eyes would be an empty landscape.
And at the same time extraordinarily poor in human, uh, artifacts. Uh, what one would see is the, perhaps the church or a shrine, ruins everywhere and not much evidence of, uh, of the human, uh, i-i-input there. But, uh, by the same token, I think that the landscape that, uh, that we want, uh, is one which has a great many human associations.
In the sense that that, uh, archaic landscape reflects, uh, this lasting, uh, aspiration of men to live with each other and to understand the cosmic order and to interpret it. It’s a beautiful one. Uh, but visually speaking, I think we would have to think of it as empty, uh, as, as, as incomplete.
And, uh, in other words, uh, what we’re dealing with is a, is an area which one could identify with, uh, something as impersonal as a, as a school s- as a school section or a, a, a census tract or even a zip code. Uh, it has no personality to it. You know that people live there, but you don’t identify with any particular emotion.
So it’s a legal political concept. I’m through with that particular landscape. I’ll offer it merely as a form of contrast.
Then about five hundred years ago, in other words, when the Renaissance is coming, uh, landscapes assume a different form. And, uh, the forces we all know that are producing change in the world, uh, they’re economic, they’re social, they’re political, they’re religious, uh, they’re, uh, aesthetic. All of these forces are producing a new world.
And, uh, what we’re concerned with, or what I’m concerned with, is merely the impact of these forces on, on the landscape. And I would say that, uh, the greatest change, the greatest difference, the most distinctive feature of this Renaissance landscape that comes is not its richness, is not its bigness, its size, but this very specific spaces that are beginning to develop. Spaces which in the other landscape have been vague, fluctuating, changing, uh, impersonal, now are becoming precise.
They’re bordered with fences, hedges, walls. Uh, they are surveyed. Uh, they are given form.
And this is a landscape which is now, one could say, is a real mosaic of spaces, some of them beautiful spaces. Uh, this is a result of a variety of things. It was one of them, the coming of a sense of, of personal territory, your own place, or of independent sovereignty, so that the boundaries have to be fixed.
Uh, and of a difference between the public realm and the private realm. This brings about a change in the way we organize space. But I think, uh, perhaps, uh, one important explanation of this change in the landscape is that man has learned to identify the difference between spaces.
He’s learned to say, “This one is good for a certain particular job or for a certain particular, uh, crop, and this one is not.” So a new sense has come of space and of differences in space. He’s learned to distinguish this.
It’s a mysterious process, which I wouldn’t presume to try to explain why man’s eye or man’s consciousness begins to discriminate in the space around him, whereas previously it had all been in undifferentiated. But this is what happens in any case. And along with this comes an awareness is, uh, that people and space are somehow related, that the space occupied in– by an individual or by a group is part of that individual or part of that group’s identity.
They reflect each other. So that space is beginning to achieve, uh, quite a different function than it had before. It’s, uh, conferring visibility.
To be located in a particular space is to have a visibility that you would not have had if you were elsewhere, so that space and place and visibility all become terribly important in the organization of space here. And this is when, five hundred years ago, the word landscape begins to assume a new meaning. It’s superimposed the meaning on the old one.
Landscape is still a legal concept, still an economic concept, still a political concept, but it becomes a visual concept, too. And it… this is achieved in two different ways.
(coughs)
Uh, the artist, the painter now discovers that man should be depicted with his background. In other words, he starts to paint landscapes so that the landscape is used to, to interpret a picture, to indicate a picture of people in their surroundings, which was its first use. And then the landscape is used in a much more nice way to mean the area that surrounds a city.
In a great many old-fashioned place names or provincial names in France and in Germany, you find the name of the city indicates the territory around it, so that the landscape, instead of being this little rural community, is used a little, perhaps a little more flexibly, first of all, to mean a picture and then to mean the territory that surrounds a city. So it’s, it’s getting to be a new word. And what this seems to me implies as much as anything else, uh, is that identity has become three-dimensional.
It has to have, uh, a background. It has to have a place. And, uh, this is what the artist captures, and this is what, uh, uh, the the property owner acquires.
So the greed for land, uh, becomes, uh, very much part of a search for a new identity, as it were, because this is one of the few ways we are still in a very rigid order, and you change your identity very slowly and with a good deal of ceremony. And one of the ways you change your identity, your social identity, is by acquiring more land and the power that goes with it, and perhaps the title that goes with it. So the search for land, and not this, uh, romantic love of the soil, not at all.
It’s love of possessions that we’re talking about. And I think that some of the first colonists that came over to he– over to the United States, over to America, uh, came to search for land. as we all know, but not purely for land that would support the family and that would make him his own master, but land as the beginning of accumulating more land, more power, more visibility, more status.
So that place and status is an important element in the formation of our own landscape. Anybody who is interested in landscapes and how they develop, I think would, would find or will find or does find, uh, the 16th and 17th century in Europe, uh, about the most interesting and, uh, perplexing and attractive, uh, period in the development of landscapes. Because what one sees, in addition to the landscape itself changing, is that you see this fascination, uh, with space and with its design, uh, and, uh, love of space and love of design and love of the world, uh, as a material object, uh, which provides us with a background and with status.
So that, uh, a variety of disciplines develop, which really are celebrating man as a figure in the world. Uh, the artist, uh, who is painting, uh, he’s the first one. The artist is the first one who comes along and depicts men and women not as isolated figures, but as belonging in an environment.
And this is, uh, the, the first conquest, as it were. And then comes the cartographer, who comes in the, uh, early 16th century, and who is producing not only maps of the landscape, but it is allowing people to see the relationship between spaces and allowing people to see the form of spaces which they had never recognized before, and to reveal the world from a different perspective. In other words, from above.
The artist has his perspective, but the cartographer has his other. And finally, uh, the emphasis is always on the visual. If it, uh, if it’s allowable to qualify the spirit back of a landscape, and I’m not sure that it is.
I think one would say that the spirit of this seventeenth and sixteenth century landscape is the importance of the visual of what we see, because I don’t think that is true of our present landscape, and I don’t think it was true of that archaic landscape that I was mentioning. But the world and everything is a source of visual delight. And, uh, Uh, what, uh, uh, men see is what they understand, and that is as far perhaps as they feel they have to go in order to, to, to recognize the world, because the art of perspective has told us that, uh, in order to give a body a three-dimensional reality, place it in space, and you have it.
So, uh, landscape, uh, has now acquired this aesthetic meaning in addition to the legal meaning. Uh, aesthetic in a, in a very wide sense involving, uh, the senses here. Uh, this is the landscape has now acquired a, a, a visibility, and, uh, it can be an object of affection, which I don’t think it was before.
A word which was very much used in this sixteenth century in the books, maps, and discussions that came out about the world and how wonderful it was, was the word theater. And there was a popular geography, for instance, which was called the theater of the world, and, uh, or the Theatre of Geography, it was called. And there was a popular book on cities, which were equally fascinating to people, which was called, uh, The Theatre of Cities.
And there was a book called The Theatre of Agriculture, and there’s The Theatre of the Garden and The Theatre of the World. The theater, theater, theater keeps recurring in all the, uh, the titles of these things, uh, even of the titles of pictures. And I think it’s pretty obvious what, uh, the word means.
Uh, the word emphasizes the spectacular aspect of the environment, uh, what’s visible. Uh, but I think more than that, it emphasizes the spectacle itself. In other words, it emphasizes a dramatic production, uh, which is, uh, well-defined, uh, a well-defined space, and there’s an organization of place and time, and there’s a coherence to the action.
So, uh, theater implies more than something simply to look at. It means a marvelous organization, a marvelous interpretation, so that theater becomes a very useful metaphor, and w– uh, they’re using it constantly. The world is theater.
The garden is theater. Whatever it may be as theater. But I think it’s more than that.
I think there’s a, a further reason for, uh, the use of the word theater, uh, because it’s theater which gives this ultimate three-dimensional form and seems to, uh, uh, bring to a head these aesthetic and choreographic and philosophical theories, uh, that were in circulation, So that theater provides still another definition of the word landscape, which I’ll tell you about later. Uh, I think it’s quite clear, at least in retrospect, that, uh, why the drama should have been the most important art form in this particular period in our history, a period which is fascinated with place and with visibility and with classical ideals. And I think it’s also quite clear, again, in retrospect, why the, the theater developed, uh, new techniques of staging, uh, just when artists and cartographers and geographers are beginning to describe the world.
Uh, uh, Lope de Vega, for instance, wrote a play called The Great Theater of the World, and Shakespeare, among others, kept referring to, uh, the world as a stage. Uh, so that man’s place in the world can be best depicted and best understood in terms of theater, in terms of, of theatrical art. So that the sixteenth century sees the development, quite suddenly, of theatrical art to place man in, uh, in, in, in, in, in his environment.
Uh, but before then, before the 16th century, uh, there’s no such thing as, uh, staging of a, of a play. Uh, the plays are given on a temporary, almost, uh, empty platform, and there are a few conventional props. There’s– perhaps there’s a tree or a throne or signpost, and they’re supposed to suggest the location of the action.
Uh, there’s no such thing as a theater building. Any place, any large room, any space in the town will do to put these performances on, and the action often progresses from place to place throughout the town, perhaps on the back of a wagon. And, uh, so that you have no illusion being offered there, no, no reference to environment in these plays.
It’s simply action. Uh, in one very popular medieval play, uh, the, the action, uh, starts in paradise, uh, with a reference to, uh, the angel and to Adam and Eve, and then it moves from there to, to Egypt, and then it goes to Syria, Ethiopia, Persia, uh, Rome, without any change of scenery at all. Uh, nothing happens at all except the figures, uh, are indicate…
Someone indicates that they’re in Rome or they’re in Syria. Well, I don’t think it’s necessary to point out to you how this indifference to stage setting corresponds to that medieval indifference or what seems to me indifference to the landscape, indifference to the environment as, uh, part of your emotional life. And it’s, uh, also typical, I think, of the medieval period in this concentration on persons and personal relationships, uh, rather than on environment.
Uh, and it’s by no means a primitive form of theater, a form of writing, in spite of its having no decoration at all. It’s a, it’s a very sophisticated form of theater at times, but it’s not a type of theater which the Renaissance, uh, would enjoy. The Renaissance is fascinated with space, fascinated with boundaries, fascinated with the importance of place, fascinated with maps, and it’s not likely to find this very, uh, reduced form of drama interesting.
And, uh, so it follows that, uh, uh, that a form of decorative art, a form of staging has to develop among these people who insist on having a background for their, for their actions. And it should, it’s not, uh, unreasonable that this should have developed in Italy, where the art of perspective was first developed, or the science of perspective. So it’s in Italy that you get the first stage sets of a perspective, which presumably leads far into the rear.
It’s in Italy that you get the first stage rather than just a platform. It’s in Italy that you get the first, uh, theater building, uh, designed for theatrical productions. And for more than a century, in other words, almost until the time of the French Revolution, The drama was called, uh, Italian-style theater.
Uh, and it involved– uh, this Italian-style production involved not only a well-defined space of the stage itself, which had not existed before, but sets, wings. And not only action, uh, on the stage, but the space and the illusion of space, and the skillful use of light and color and music, and the skillful production of a whole make-believe world, an unreal environment goes with this type of production. Uh, I think it to be wrong or certainly premature to assume that the sixteenth or seventeenth century, because it had expressed this interest in the world and had and had fallen in love with the world, was necessarily– had necessarily fallen in love with the natural environment.
I don’t think it had. Uh, it’s, uh, not re– it’s not interested in the relationship between, between nature and man. Uh, the world that the artists of the period, uh, were trying to create on the stage, uh, was anything but realistic.
Uh, it was compounded of illusions of enormous distances, uh, horizontal as well as vertical, of fantastic architecture, uh, spectacular displays of, of natural phenomena, uh, volcanoes and landslides and, uh, waterspouts. And, uh, even the Sha– plays of Shakespeare, which were produced on a much more modest scale
(coughing)
than those in Italy and France, were performed in an atmosphere of, of an enormous amount of magic. The staging was full of processions and tableaus, battles and crowds, and a variety of sound effects, uh, accompanied the action: bells, thunder, cannon, birdsong, music, uh, on occasion, uh, the wind blew and the sea crashed and, uh, echoes resounded. And music was closely related to the action on the stage, whether it was happened to be lyrical or passionate, the music, uh, tried to keep up with it.
Uh, in Italy, uh, this went much further, so that you have, uh, designers who are practically engineers of producing these, uh, magnificent, very, uh, spectacular effects of cloud effects, uh, thunder and lightning, uh, and the illusion of, uh, mountains and seas, uh, suddenly appearing. The stages are very long, uh, or the theater is very long, uh, and mountains will suddenly appear, or a sea will appear, and there’ll be a naval battle on the sea. Uh, or else, uh, some divinity comes out of the sky in a chariot drawn by horses, and he descends on, on the stage, too.
And all this, of course, takes place to appropriate music that’s going on whi-while these earthquakes and everything are happening. Uh, in a, a Spanish production of the sixteenth century, a god himself, uh, uh, was shown and surrounded with saints and angels on the stage, and the action was taking place in front of him while this was going on. Uh, these plays naturally were not always of high quality, uh, and some were farces and others were little pastoral romances.
And, uh, then there were melodramas where, uh, demons would suddenly appear out of the floor, uh, or else they’d hover in the air, and there’d be… And there was an atmosphere of terror and, uh, and confusion. Uh, and not a few of these plays were written primarily in order to show these, uh, this skill.
Uh, Bernini, the architect, uh, uh, was one of the most, uh, uh, prolific of stage designers. in Rome, and, uh, he put on an enormous number of plays, uh, one of them in which the entire stage was flooded, uh, representing the flooding of Rome. Rome, Rome in the background has all been flooded.
Uh, and you may well ask, what’s the purpose of this elaborate, uh, ex-expensive, uh, make-believe scenery? Well, it’s certainly not to provide a life’s, a lifelike, uh, setting for the play. Uh, it serves a very different, uh, purpose.
Uh, it serves a purpose of delighting and amazing a public which might well not have been able to follow the drama itself. Uh, in the early days of the modern theater, if you want to call it the modern theater, certainly not the classical theater, many conventions carried over from, I dare say, the court and from church, uh, interfered with any kind of realism on the stage itself. Uh, the writing and the acting, the throwing of the voice, the costuming, all of this was very inexpert.
So there’s– uh, the idea of realism in these productions is, uh, uh, is, They are very impractical. Uh, the left side of the stage, for some reason or other, was always considered the most prestigious, and so an actor would prefer to be on the left side of the stage. Regardless of what the stage action called for, he would always try to get into the left side or to stand there as much as possible.
Uh, actors, when they were not saying their lines, uh, Very often greeted friends in the, in the audience and, uh, mm, favored members of the audience who came and sat on the stage and made comments on the acting and, uh, interfered with the movement of the, of the actors, too. Uh, but, uh, if realism is not what they’re after, quite obviously they were not, uh, what these illusions which is taking place back, The stage is here, but back of us is, is all of this that’s going on in the wings. All of this is, is introducing or making visible a world which they knew about and thought about.
But here, for the first time, it had become visible because of this, uh, marvelous art that had been developed, a world of myth and, uh, magic and history and nature. All of these things kept, uh, crowding out in the most beautiful form from the stage. And here, the world is made visible, which had previously simply been a legend or simply been an old wives’ tale, and now here it becomes real on the stage.
And it serves as a background for these very powerful emotions which are being performed in the foreground, and it’s a kind of a supernature. It’s not nature, it’s supernature that is– serves as a frame, as a garland for the action of man in the foreground. And so s-the stage intensifies our identity, and it locates the action in a very dreamlike region.
Uh, in a more specific sense, I think these sets, uh, introduce the New World, uh, that is now being discovered or was being discovered at this time, uh, which is being explored by travelers and which people are talking about all the time, so that you go to the theater and there’s a certain topical, uh, uh, element in the decorations. In other words, there’d be a, a ballet composed of people that are dressed like Indians or dressed like Turks or dressed like Chinamen, or a boat which has obviously come back from Africa will come floating across the front of the stage. A music will try to imitate…
Uh, in other words, they are bringing in, uh, the world that, uh, is being discovered. And it’s also, it’s on the stage that man’s new proud role as, uh, controller of the universe is made visible. Uh, and these references to the world itself are being introduced.
A Roman battle, since they’re all so fond of the classics, a Roman guard will appear, and, uh, celebrated people will appear on the stage. I think it’s worth noting that it’s in the seventeenth century, which I’m talking about now, that the word landscape acquires still another meaning, and this meaning, uh, is most the most anthropocentric of them all, the most centered on man. Uh, it– in the seventeenth century in England, it comes to mean the background or the scenery in a stage.
You would talk about the background, or you would talk about the landscape of a Shakespearean production or the landscape of any play, meaning the scenery of it. And, uh, what the word that was used is, uh, that which helps give form or helps give color or helps give quality, uh, but is not of the main body of the argument. That’s the way the word seems to be defined at this time.
In other words, it is not playing a role in the play itself, but it is intensifying it. And it’s very nice to note that, uh, when this enthusiasm for the world and for describing it and for possessing it and loving it, uh, is taking place, uh, Uh, it’s when the geographers come to the fore. And, uh, it’s in the second half of the nineteenth century that geographers, descriptive geographers, begin to become important and attractive figures on the literary and in the academic world.
And, uh, so that we have not only the youth of the theater, but we also have the youth of geography, uh, uh, right along with each other. And the inspiration for this, uh, geography, which is not, and needless to say, it is not what they thought it was, which they said it was cosmography, the world as a heavenly body, which was what they were prepared to analyze. But now comes the world as the stage of man, and consequently, you’re describing scenery, you’re describing, you’re describing the world, descriptive geography.
So descriptive geography starts out, uh, Uh, uh, its first thought is, uh, sort of to turn homewards to let’s see what the places that are described in classical literature, what they are like. So that the first thought of geographers, descriptive geographers, is to try to see the mountains or try to describe the mountains, the cities, the seas, which they had read about in Greek and classical literature. So what e-e-evolves, first of all, is kind of a historical geography, which is based on the reading of the classics and discussion of it, and reading, of course, some of the classical geographers, too.
But, uh, in addition to that, another element is coming in. It’s not enough simply to write guidebooks to antiquities. You have the travelers coming back, the missionaries coming back, the explorers coming back.
Uh, much material is coming in, uh, to, to the descriptive geographers. And I was interested to see that, uh, in the, uh, University of Paris, much of the new geographical information was coming not from the professors or their connections, but from the foreign students who had letters from home, from Portugal, from Spain, when they were studying in Paris, saying that they had heard about these new discoveries in the New World, which Paris had not yet heard of. So the students contributed, evidently, a great deal to the enthusiasm for geography.
And, uh, so that, uh, this attractive and, uh, uh, informative type of topographical knowledge begins to spread. And many of you are familiar undoubtedly with the topographical descriptions which appeared in England at this time, the various English counties, and they also appear in Germany, they appear in France, and they appear all over the world, uh, particularly of, of cities. And, uh, the emphasis on this descriptive geography is on the human and political aspects of the earth’s surface.
In other words, monuments and towns and cities. And then there’s a great emphasis on history, and history is usually interpreted in dynastic terms or military terms. And, uh, so that you’ll have the history and kingdoms, uh, a history of kingdoms and and counties and landscapes.
Two literary sources are used for a great deal. Uh, one of them is the classics, and the other is the Bible. Uh, they’re very much interested in locating things that occurred in the Bible.
The Bible is not necessarily a scientific source. It’s a source of, of what they’re interested in, too. And there are no scientific methods being involved here.
(coughs)
And as a result, as we all know that I have read any of this, there’s a great deal of inaccuracy and a great deal of falsehood and a great deal of misinformation in the accounts that these early geographers write. Uh, Mandeville is an instance of it, and Münster, who was the standing standard geographer for about hundred and fifty years. It’s, it’s full of, of, of absurd, uh, uh, generalizations based on no evidence at all, and full of myth, too.
Uh, but we must bear in mind, I think, uh, that just as a theatrical producer was not interested in, uh, a punctilious realism, uh, the geographers are not interested in being punctilious in their accuracy of the information that they offer. What they’re trying to give us is sort of an overall view, a kind of a super truth, as it were, uh, which pays no attention to details. And, uh, so that all the geographers are interested in is to tell you about places and the people that live there, and they’re not trying to explain one in terms of the o- in terms of the other.
There’s no cause and effect involved here at all. And, uh, along with the, uh, standard classical writers on geography, Uh, th-they read a great deal of Hippocrates, but they never seemed to have acquired from Hippocrates any idea of environmental determinism, which I think would would be the natural thing to do. But they didn’t.
Uh, they read Hippocrates and thought it was very interesting and never drew any conclusions from it at all. They were very much interested in climate and wrote a great deal about climate, particularly its sensational aspects, uh, but they never seemed to think that climate had any effect on people. And an English traveler by the name of Morrison, whose first name I forget, uh, was writing about, uh, it– The, uh, climate that they’re interested in is the contrasting north and south, usually.
And, uh, he says that climate is, is responsible for many diseases and for madness, but it has nothing to do with our vices or virtues. So there’s not much, uh, determinism in their, in their interest in geography at all. And I would ascribe this immunity, which it is, of, uh, the 16th and 17th century to environmentalism a-as being based on a very simple fact.
Uh, in that age, men still believed that God had ordered the distribution of spaces in the world, and that he had ordered the distribution of environments and climates, and that he had ordered the distribution of the people who inhabited them, and that his wisdom accounted for all inequalities and apparent injustices. So why do you have to explain? Why do you have to, uh, study this thing?
It’s, uh, perfectly obvious that it’s God’s will, what we see. Uh, so there are occasions, you see, there are occasions when the environment can be seen as representing God’s way of correcting or guiding man. The environment is not entirely excluded here.
And, uh, this conviction that the environment or environmental forces, whatever you want to call them, nature, uh, can be used by God to, to, to guide us, uh, is shared by theologians, and it’s shared by geographers, it’s shared by philosophers, and it’s shared by playwrights. They all are aware that there is such a thing as a kind of intercession which can happen, uh, in on the world stage, shall we say, uh, which should be interpreted as God’s advice to us or God’s guidance to it. So this is not, I don’t think, any kind of environmentalism.
It is, on the contrary, a form of piety. So this, I think, would explain the persistence of these theatrical interludes in what is becoming a very sophisticated and worldly, uh, public. Now, whether it’s in Paris or Rome or London, uh, who nevertheless are sitting through these things with these strange intercess-i-i-intercessions on the part of the scenery, as it were.
Uh, a protagonist is struck dead by a bolt of lightning. There’s nothing in the play that would lead one I think that, uh, he was to be struck dead. Uh, or else a ghost suddenly appears with a mysterious message, uh, to one of the characters.
Or else a divinity descends, uh, from the sky in a chariot to rescue somebody who is in trouble. Uh, these occurrences, which of course are usually accompanied by all sorts of brilliant, uh, stage effects, uh, are never thought of as the workings of chance. This would have been the classical approach, that this is fate which has struck the man dead.
Uh, but, uh, this world which we’re dealing with, which is a Christian world, does not see this in terms of chance. It sees it as divine concern for the actors or for the people that are playing that, that role. Uh, it’s another way of saying, I would say, that man’s identity can sometimes be affected and even changed by the environment.
That men are sometimes, uh, divinely influenced by their setting. Uh, this, uh, is not a, is not a, a very, uh, likely thing to have happened, but there is an opening now left. You can change your identity in two ways.
You can accumulate land, and there can be divine intercession or natural intercession which can change you. Oh, perhaps it’s the insanity of the climate. I–
Perhaps we’re unfair, I think, to the Puritan objection to the theater. And one of the bases of the Puritan objection to the theater was, regardless of the immorality of the private life of the actors, is that the actor is assuming another identity instead of his own God-given identity. And this is a very dangerous thing to do, and it’s a very impious thing to do.
And I think this puts a little more respectable light on this Puritan objection to the theater, when it is very much involved with this fear, which pervades this time, of our changing our identity without being licensed to change it. Well, it’s in this period, uh, of reverence, uh, for nature without perhaps a critical examination of it. And, uh, I think that men expressed most freely and most beautifully, uh, their delight in the world as God’s creation.
And they did this as they traveled, and in their paintings, and in their gardens, and in their cities, and in the artificial world of the theater. Everywhere that they could create spaces, they created beautiful spaces. And it was then, it seems to me, in this, should we say, the si– seventeenth century, uh, first part of the seventeenth century, that, uh, the smallest landscape, the most obscure town was thought worthy of admiration and study.
And it was at a time when geography was, uh, scarcely less popular than the theater itself as a form of stimulation and a form of edu-education. Uh, geographical books appeared in quantities, very readable, but also bought and sold. And a French book, uh, which was written in the mid-seventeenth century, on the art of conversation, uh, uh, ridiculed an amateur geographer, I dare say there were many at the time, for, uh, who had just bought a beaver hat.
And, uh, he regaled everybody at the table by saying that it was a beaver hat, and it came from Canada. Then he would describe Canada, he described the trappers in Canada. Then he would describe North America and its principal rivers, move down to South America, describe it especially.
And this was, this was what, uh, this, uh, enthusiasm for geography apparently occasionally did. And, uh, atlases were very popular, and albums of city panoramas were very popular, and fashionable ladies would read books about Siam and Persia in order to shine in society. And this same writer on the art of conversation advises women, uh, against appearing too geography-minded.
Uh, there was apparently that temptation. “I permit them to use the words climate,” he says, “zone and isthmus.” “These are new words at the time, and a few others,” “but I do not want them to terrify me by mentioning” longitude and latitude.
I, I think it’s quite possible that this this public applause went to the head of the geographers because, uh, sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century, uh, geography ceased to concern itself with the everyday, with the visual, uh, with the unusual, with the historical, with the attractive and charming, and, uh, stops describing the everyday environment and concentrates instead on the environment on a national scale. The little provincial, the little landscape is no longer attractive. It’s, it’s uncouth.
So that we’re switching over to the national scale, whether it happens to be England or France or even Germany, is that the national scale is what appeals to the geographer rather than the, the regional. And he is also going in for what I suppose in Berkeley we could call the earth sciences and the water sciences too, because they’re very much interested in questions of water as well as of questions of land. Mm-hmm.
And that is the practical as well as philosophical reasons for this switch in geography. As you geographers in the audience well know, uh, there’s a different clientele that’s arisen for geography. It’s not children in school.
It’s not people that are interested in the classics. It’s not fashionable ladies looking for conversational tidbits. It’s merchants.
It’s the, uh, the, uh, commanders of the fleet that want to know, uh, about tides, that want to know about currents, that want to know about harbors. So there is a very definite market for a certain type of information that the geographers can produce. They want to know about the winds.
Uh, there’s also a market, or at least a demand on the part of the Crown, which wants political information, statistical information, and also strategic information. So the geographer is, uh, is accordingly switches over from this, uh, uh, this traditional form of geography as a descriptive geography, and he goes over to research and theory. And, uh, there’s a corresponding decrease in the provincial and the historical and the moral content of geographical writing at this time.
Uh, and on the continent, uh, this, uh, this, uh, the influence of Descartes on geography results in the rejection of the classical tradition to a great extent, and a new and skeptical approach to this folklore, and to this question of magic, and to some Aristotelian ideas, and the natural or rational origin of meteorological and geological phenomena, uh, open up entirely new methods of study to, to the geographer, so that this complex beauty and harmony of creation, uh, is no longer something that you necessarily have to apprehend through the senses, uh, but through the mind. And, uh, even vision demands, uh, uh, a new non-human perspective through the telescope and the periscope, uh, the, uh, microscope. Uh, so there is a turning away uh from the charms of the visual, the charms of uh the everyday, the charms of the historical, uh, to, uh, theory and to the world of, of speculation and thought.
And this turn inward, of which struck geography very heavily, this turning away from the world as spectacle, as a spectacle which reveals the divine order, uh, is also manifest in the theater. The same thing is happening in the theater. They are turning away from the spectacle, from the spectacular.
Uh, instead of, uh, establishing man’s, man’s, uh, central place in creation by means of spatial illusion, which is what the theater had been doing
(cough)
, uh, by formulating, uh- it now turns over to doing this thing intellectually. In other words, uh, we have the three unities, the unity of place and action and time, which is an intellectual formulation for all of this stuff that’s been going on in the back, and consequently does away for the sake, or at least in– for serious drama, serious, important, uh, uh, pieces of drama. This is nec– not necessarily the popular drama, but the, the serious drama is leaving out this stuff and going into the three unities, which as I say, is an abstract, intellectual way of indicating the importance of space.
Uh, so the classical of the plays of the time, and this is particularly true in France, uh, all they demand is a small empty stage, uh, like a, a Beckett production, shall we say. A small empty stage with a highly formalized background, a room in a palace or a public square in the city. And interaction between this little space and the outside, the imaginary outside world, is nil.
It’s cut down as much as possible by playwriting, by not having this coming and going of the actors. They’re, they’re pretty much there where they are. And it’s as if the century was saying that man defined himself, uh, by discarding the influences of the environment or cutting out the environment as much as it possibly can, and by interaction with other people.
This is all that matters. This is, this is the divine order, uh, as they would see it. And, uh, drama has become psychological, uh, shift of identity.
And those of you who remember Sartre’s play, uh, No Exit, in which we have exactly the same situation of people in a room which they can’t get out of. The windows are blocked up. But the moral that’s drawn there is totally opposite, because the moral there is other people are hell.
Uh, in, uh, this thing, other people are utopia. But, uh, this is what a historian says about, uh, this, uh, particular type of, of, uh, highly stylized, highly formalized, highly intellectual, uh, play that is now put on. This is the second part of the seventeenth century.
“The tragic palace,” a simple decorated antechamber with its four doors, makes all action and movement in the drama converge on a single point. It corresponds to the severity of a plot or storyline where fate has enclosed the protagonists in one place and has condemned them to struggle against each other until death or flight has liberated them. Uh, the environment is recognized by its very exclusion, and the stage becomes the very epitome of space and, uh, the heart of space.
Now, I think one could say here, and it’d be appropriate if I wound up, that, uh, when we’ve reached this point, when the drama has become so totally remote from the world and from, uh, the visual, uh, that the word landscape or the theater of landscape is a metaphor which is no longer valid, and it’s perfectly true. It isn’t. From here on out, beginning, shall we say, uh, about the, uh, uh, beginning of the eighteenth century, I think the world as theater, uh, would not be true.
Uh, something, uh, something has happened. But I th– I, I, I would just like to indicate a kind of epilogue which happens to this particular m-metaphor insofar as there are two words involved in it, and each goes its separate way and what happens to them, uh, after this parting here. Uh, the popular theater, uh, uh, as distinguished from the classical theater, goes on getting more and more pompous and more and more exuberant and more and more, uh, illusory and, uh, s– more spectacular.
And it becomes increasingly spectacular to such an extent with these, uh, uh, imaginary landscapes, particularly in the opera and the ballet. That’s what takes over here and makes these grandiose stage sets. Uh, it…
The result is finally, on the popular level, which I dare say is ninety percent of the theater here, uh, the scenery begins to overwhelm the actors. Uh, the actors are not as important as the scenery, and this fascination with illusion leads to a fascination with deception. And you begin to get plays of very little quality, which are written like those first plays, uh, but to produce, uh, with infinite pains, the most realistic setting possible.
This is a total different ex– different thing. That other illusion was the illusion of imagination and fancy and myth and, uh, poetry. This is the illusion of reality that we’re getting here.
And so that you have plays put on which are historically correct down to the costumes, the furniture, the lighting, everything. This is in the, this is in the late eighteenth century. This isn’t, uh, contemporary.
This happens, and so that you’re beginning to get this, uh, uh, realism in scenery, in the props, in the costumes, even in the gestures, the accents. All of these things become, become an obsession with the popular theater here. The, the, uh, the background is now assuming the, the leading role here, and the actors become little more than props.
They are interesting little figures to put in front of these historical backgrounds or whatever it may be. So identity is almost, uh, e-entirely a matter of environment. That’s what this contemporary theater of, uh, of the late eighteenth century, the time of the French Revolution, is saying identity is a matter of the environment that you’re in.
Well, that’s something that, uh, we have evolved into a philosophy one hundred and fifty years later. Uh, you can indicate, uh, very precisely when this switch comes, it seems to me when the roles are reversed between theater and between theater and, uh, actors, And this happens in 1799. Uh, Robert Fulton, the American inventor, uh, uh, came over to Paris and he brought with him the first large diorama, uh, Uh, that Far-
Paris had ever seen. Uh, a big round, uh, display, I think, of the Mississippi. I don’t know what it was.
But they’d never seen one before, and it was a sensational success. Everybody flocked in to see this diorama. Here was this grandiose spectacle of scenery, uh, with no actors in it at all, uh, all without any evidence of man in great detail, and they loved it.
So a very short time afterwards, a theater was opened which was devoted exclusively to dioramas, and one of its rules was that no more than two actors were ever to be allowed to appear in front of the scenery. Uh, the theater, uh, so it was, uh, announced, was dedicated to the re-reproduction on a theatrical scale of those views which are most worthy of exciting public curiosity from the historical and picturesque point of view. And significantly enough, one of the men who involved himself in making this as realistic as possible was Daguerre, who in a few years was to become a pioneer of photography.
So we have Fulton and Daguerre, uh, elements in the destruction of the, uh, classical theater of Europe. So here we have the first theater, uh, which is without actors, uh, which is devoted to the display of landscapes without people. And this comes very conveniently at the beginning of the, of the nineteenth century.
And, uh, so we’re getting, of course, a new concept of the word landscape here, which is something which man should not contaminate or, to use a popular word, should pollute. This is what the landscape is now becoming as of about, uh, 1800. And it also marks a total change in the function of the theater and of the view of the theater as a place where man’s role can be demonstrated.
And hereafter, it’s, uh, the theater is, is devoted to, to, to exploring interior realms, a psychological world, not necessarily to the relationship to the environment one way or another. And, uh, with this complete rejection, which happens in the first years of the 19th century, of this metaphor, the theater, the landscape is theater, uh, the search is on or was on for a new and more appropriate way of identifying, uh, the true nature of the man-made landscape, the community and its territory, and we’re still searching for it now. Uh, all that we seem to be able to come with, come up with for the contemporary scene is, uh, a series of analogs.
Uh, an analog drawn from biology or ecology or communication. Uh, and when it’s a matter of controlling or manipulating, regulating, uh, the environment, analogs can be extremely useful, and we are very wise to learn how to use them. But landscapes, as, as Sauer, I think, was one of the first to point out, are not quite the same as, as environments.
And if we are to learn how to understand landscapes and respond to them emotionally and aesthetically and morally, as what the past has done, uh, we shall have to find a metaphor or several metaphors which are drawn from, uh, uh, our human experience. And so far, we’ve not been able to do so. But I don’t think that’s any cause for despair, uh, because as history has taught us, and particularly the history of the theater, it’s largely a matter of perspective.
Uh, in this case, a chronological perspective. Uh, it was only in the 19th century, uh, when people began to look objectively at the landscape of the previous period and to see it as a landscape of theater. And it’s only now that we are beginning to look with some objectivity at the landscape of the 19th century and see it rather in, uh, in organic terms or in terms of biological processes, which seems to be the metaphor best suited to the 19th century.
Then it’s still, I think, far too early for us to find any kind of a, of a metaphor for the 20th century. And the best we can do, I think, is to rely on the insights of the geographer and of the artist, uh, because both are by being, by way of being custodians of the human tradition of discovering order within randomness, beauty within chaos, and the enduring aspirations of humanity behind its many blunders and shortcomings. Thank you.
(applause)