NEW ORLEANS EXCEPTIONALISM IN THE CULTURAL RESPONSE TO HURRICANE KATRINA
A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities
2018
Patrick Massey
Schools of Arts, Languages and Cultures
List of Contents
Thesis Introduction: 6 -Historical contexts of paradigms of exceptionalism: 8 -Exceptionalism and historians of New Orleans: 23 -Katrina commentary: five “schools” of discussing New Orleans: 25 -Katrina culture criticism: state of the field and this thesis’s intervention: 36 -How the thesis will progress: 40
Section 1: Narrative Non-Fiction
Chapter 1: “Single-Subject” Narrative Non-Fiction: 42 -Zeitoun: “symbolic site of emergency”: 48 -Why New Orleans Matters: “Benjaminian city”: 60 -1 Dead in Attic: “deteriorated psycho-scape”: 67 -Trouble the Water: “raw conditional city”: 78 -Recovering the victim: 85
Chapter 2: Group-Biographical Narrative Non-Fiction: 88 -Nine Lives: 91 -A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge: 103 -When the Levees Broke: 108 -Chapter/section conclusion: 118
Section 2: Original Creative Katrina Culture
Chapter 1: The “Ordinary” School: 121 -A Little Bit Ruined: 125 -Life in the Wake: 135 -The Rising Water Trilogy: 145 -Conclusion: 160
Chapter 2: The “Microcosmic” and “Globalist” Schools: 161 -City of Refuge: microcosmic school: 165 -A Thousand Miles From Nowhere: microcosmic school: 180 -Blood Dazzler: globalist school: 192 -The Lower Quarter: globalist school: 203 -Conclusion: 210
Chapter 3: The “Neoclassical” School: 212 -Treme season 1: 215 -The Floating World: 229 -Chapter/section conclusion: 244
Thesis Conclusion: 246 Works Cited: 249 Word count: 72, 387
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Abstract
This thesis studies significant literary and visual-media responses to the flooding of New Orleans after the passage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At one level, it discusses how representations of New Orleans in “Katrina culture” either radically refashion or embody alternatives to historical paradigms of New Orleans exceptionalism, of New Orleans as a sui generis enclave. More than that, it argues that practices of “representing the city” illuminate and participate in Katrina culture’s overarching project, as theorized here, of “recovering the victim”: reinvesting Katrina victims with the voice, dignity, and agency they were denied in mass popular and media responses to Katrina. The thesis analyses texts’ representational and recovery practices, both separately and in terms of how they interrelate, across narrative non-fictional Katrina culture (section 1) and original creative Katrina culture (section 2). Within narrative non-fictional Katrina culture, Section 1 identifies two “Dorian” and “Locrian” sets of practices, each comprising a “mode” of representation and a “manner” of recovery. Within original creative Katrina culture, Section 2 identifies four “ordinary”, “microcosmic”, “globalist”, and “neoclassical” sets of practices, each comprising a “school” of representation and a “manner” of recovery. Navigating widely yet always relative to a conceptual lodestar of New Orleans exceptionalism, the thesis works not only to extensively map out practices of representing the city in Katrina culture, but also to establish recovering the victim as the fundamental impulse, and de facto governing project, of the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina.
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Declaration
No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
Copyright statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=24420), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.
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Acknowledgements
Mum, Rupert, Wanda; Natalie, Doug, Will; Gwynne, Helen, Amy, Christina; Valerie from New Orleans.
The Author
BA, English Literature, University of Durham, 2010-2013: First Class Honours
MA, English and American Studies, University of Manchester, 2013-2014: Merit
Current: PhD
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Thesis Introduction
On the 29th August 2005, New Orleans largely withstood the passage of Hurricane Katrina per se through its immediate vicinity. The city’s levees, though, could not withstand the storm surge owing to Katrina that barreled into New Orleans’s flood defence system. The levees broke, and over the next three days, approximately 80% of the city (Rivlin 27) was flooded. What ensued is termed throughout this thesis the “week of Katrina”: the period of time from the Monday when the levees broke (29th August) to the following Monday (5th September) when water began to be pumped out of the city. It was a week of utter failures in terms of evacuations, supply-lines, law and order, formal rescue efforts, and public service at both state and federal levels. It was equally a week of full-spectrum human abjection, weighted towards the poor black demographic but still encompassing all identity- based race-class-age-location configurations. And it was a week when no conscientious observer of New Orleans was anything less than confounded by what they observed.
To briefly adopt a personal register, I went to New Orleans in February 2017 to get the “sense of place” of a city I had hitherto only experienced secondhand. No single sense of place prevailed: New Orleans is very much a city of separate milieus, of sense-facets that stubbornly resist being unified, in the mind’s eye, into one definitive sense-entity. Taking the city’s residential milieus alone, it would be hard enough to unify the black working- class Hollygrove and Lower Ninth Ward, the white upper-middle-class Lakeview, and the more mixed lower-to-middle-class Treme, Broadmoor, and Gentilly into one representative milieu.
To nevertheless propose the most evocative and least esoteric city-simile I can, as seems appropriate here for readers without direct experience of the city — and I should say that what follows is self-consciously playful — New
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Orleans is like a sousaphone. On the one hand, the sousaphone is one of the most unmistakable instruments in the orchestral guidebook; it is gregarious in design and emphatic in voice; it is indivisible from very specific associations with the brass-band tradition; and it uncoils at length in a curve that abruptly opens into a bell-shaped “gulf”. On the other hand, it exhibits the features of a formal family of instruments (brass); its timbre accommodates adjectives that temper any prima facie gregariousness: “brusque”, “laconic”, “undemonstrative”; and as a rule it keeps an ensemble of human actors moving to regular beats and rhythms. Similar in its fashions is the charismatic yet grounded city of New Orleans. What erupted into existence in the week of Katrina, though, defied similes not just to any one instrument, but to anything capable of music. Katrina threw the nature of New Orleans into flux; and even in the long-term aftermath of reconstruction, a cast of thousands — city returnees; the members of a new city diaspora; conscientious outside observers — were left in a limbo of wondering what New Orleans both had become, and would become.
All told, Katrina had a fundamental and indeed “exceptional” effect on the nature of New Orleans: this fact, three years ago, ignited the intellectual kindling that has resulted in this thesis. It explores what is formally termed here “the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina”: a term habitually shortened hereafter to “Katrina culture”, and which signifies more precisely “significant literary and visual-media responses” to “the symbolic ‘week’ of immediate events indelibly associated with Hurricane Katrina per se”. The thesis traverses both widely over this territory in sum, and intricately within more contained areas of that territory on a chapter-by-chapter basis. In the last analysis, though, all its traversals are plotted against one conceptual lodestar: New Orleans exceptionalism.
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Historical contexts of paradigms of exceptionalism
Most basically expressed, New Orleans exceptionalism is the school of thought that holds that New Orleans is a unique site, a sui generis enclave, within the United States. More precisely, it is a school of thought comprising two paradigms: a dominant “classically exceptional” one, and a subordinate “execrable” one. What follows, in the first instance, discusses the nineteenth-century conceptual basis of the classically exceptional paradigm. It identifies six “classically co-opted” attributes of nineteenth-century New Orleans: attributes of the historical city that were co-opted and coarsened into the classically exceptional paradigm of New Orleans. Throughout, it cites choice contemporary testimony to the city’s classically co-opted attributes from across the nineteenth century. In each case, too, what follows will point to how each attribute except the last identified has, in its fashion, lasted into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The historical New Orleans’s first classically co-opted attribute was its demographic variety. Within an otherwise predominantly Anglo North America, early nineteenth-century New Orleans was a markedly non-Anglo city.1 Rather it was predominantly French, having been founded as a French colonial town in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville and early governor of French Louisiana, and inhabited for subsequent generations by French-colonial settlers, soldiers, planters, and bureaucrats. Thus, although her travelogue of 1837 mentions Scots, Germans, and Philadelphians, a visiting Harriet Martineau spends most of her time in New Orleans at the parties of rich French Creoles (124-5, 129). Writing in 1819, meanwhile, the English traveller Henry Bradshaw Fearon attested to the city’s abiding connection to France, as evinced in citizens’ predominant use of French and the presence of French theatrical companies. Nor was early nineteenth- century New Orleans even secondarily Anglo, but instead Hispanic, reflecting
1 Re: “predominantly Anglo North America”, see Laurence Powell on “New Orleans’s Anglo- American hinterland” c. 1812, in Powell, 315. 8 its four decades under Spanish occupation.2 These decades saw an appreciable Spanish-colonial influx of governors, intendants, and a commercial throng of the likes of merchants and Catalonian innkeepers (Powell 176).
As a result of this Franco-Hispanic heritage, New Orleans’s ambient Europeanism was enhanced sui generis over that of other North American cities. Few other contemporary cities would so readily yield Frederick Law Olmsted’s mid-century tableau of Americans of “all possible mixed varieties”— “French, Spanish, English, Celtic, and African”, as well as “sub- … and sub-sub-varieties” — in the city’s central market (163-4). New Orleans’s status as a port city enhanced the city’s demographic variegation still further, not least in terms of salt- and tobacco- smuggling circuits maintained by ships bearing “flags of numerous nations”, and by “boatmen of every hue and nationality” (Powell 103).
From the city’s non-Anglo bases furthermore, and particularly from the intersections of its French and African bases, derived New Orleans’s varied demographic block of Creoles. Between certain “white” and “black” contingents, a significant number of Creoles, the gens de couleur, inhabited a “light copper” and “passé-a blanc” middle ground between white and black, and were divisible along various further lines: free or enslaved, Francophone or otherwise.3 Demographically exceptional too, albeit statistically modest, was New Orleans’s Caribbean presence: this predominantly comprised San Dominguan refugees after the Haitian Revolution, and was centred in New Orleans’s faubourgs, or suburbs. As a result of all this, early nineteenth- century New Orleanians defied concise demographic categorization. This can be registered today through reading the literature on Creole New Orleans and, for example, Shirley Elizabeth Thompson’s protracted definition of
2 Only c. 1830s would a majority Anglo- presence take hold in New Orleans, and even then located uptown. See Campanella, “Ethnic Geography”. 3 Color quotes: Thomas Ashe, “Golden Petticoats”, 89; Thompson, 68. Powell offers a nice précis of their first-generational heritage at 92. 9
“Creoles of color”, her specified (free, Francophone) historical subjects, as distinct from other permutations of “Creole” (14). It can be registered further through the colonial-era lexicon of racial-demographic labels as collated by Jennifer M. Spear — “affranchis … nègres … mulâtres … quarterons … métis” (15) — which Spear herself acknowledges can make for “convoluted reading” (16).
In the twentieth century, although the Creole mélange crumbled away into “one drop”-era black/white biracialism, New Orleans remained demographically exceptional. It did so by being ever a statistically significant black city.4 From at least 1788 onwards, a non-white majority held until the white influx of the 1830s; in the twentieth century, an always appreciably black New Orleans had become 55% black by 1980.5 As of autumn 2015, New Orleans remains c. 59% black; and it remains one of North America’s few majority-black cities. Noteworthy too, in a contemporary demographically exceptional regard, is New Orleans East’s Vietnamese population, established in the 1970s by refugees from South Vietnam.6
The historical New Orleans’s second classically co-opted attribute was its cultural variety. In a way, this can be conceptualized as the above attribute writ large: a racial, national, and ethnic mélange. Before 1900, to wit, New Orleans culture encompassed Voudou, centred in the city’s Haitian hotspots; the folk customs of the Cajuns (née Acadians), bayou-based descendants of the Canadian French; free black—founded literary endeavours like the bilingual Cenelles poetry anthology (1845) and the Tribune newspaper (1862+); and white Creole Francophile Charles Gayarré’s four-part Histoire de la Louisiane (1846-1886).7 Even in the exclusively white-European cultural arena, New Orleans tended towards Gallicism over Anglicism: a perceived
4 On the move from Creole to biracial thinking: see Hirsch; Fertel; and Thompson 12-3, 121- 2. These texts address nineteenth-century white Creoles’ attempts to “exceptionalize” themselves and their heritage — and to re-appropriate the word “Creole” for whites only. 5 1788 stat: Powell 198; twentieth-century stats: Levitt and Whitaker, 7. 6 Potted history in Wooten, 17-8. 7 Re: Tribune, see Thompson 216-218. 10
“strong partiality [that] still exists for the French nation” in 1804 (Claiborne 64), for example, endured in a perceived “air thoroughly French about the people” of 1861 New Orleans (Russell 202). Ever more concertedly after 1800, meanwhile, African-Americans fashioned their own cultural agenda within the New Orleans ecosystem: a weekly dance and market assembly in Congo Square; a network of neighborhood-level benevolent societies; and post-1900, the all-black “Zulu” Mardi Gras krewe.8
As well as in these broad spatiotemporal terms, New Orleans’s cultural variety cuts through even the individuated forms of the city’s culture. Writing independently of each other, Nick Spitzer and David Rutledge have devised the same tripartite model of New Orleans culture, what Spitzer calls New Orleans’s “holy trinity”: music, food, and architecture (Rutledge 11; Spitzer, “Rebuilding” 310). Within each of these categories, cultural variegation has always existed and endures today. The modern city’s music still varies between brass-band jazz, Cajun zydeco, and Mardi Gras Indian chants; its food, between étouffée dishes, gumbo, and red beans and rice; and its architecture, between colonial-style verandas, Creole-style cottages, and two-room shotgun shacks.
The historical New Orleans’s third classically co-opted attribute was its geography, or more precisely, its geographical site. Water surrounds the city: Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, bayous; marshland supports it physically; and much of it lies below sea level. Precisely this site makes New Orleans Laurence Powell’s Accidental City, fellow historian Peirce Lewis’s “impossible” city, and both accounts’ implicitly exceptional one.9 Within the city proper, meanwhile, nineteenth-century travelers commented on
8 Pre-1900, we might highlight the Bamboula among extant Africanist cultural forms. This was a dance practiced by slaves before the Civil War [see Powell, centerfold], and popularized by Romantic composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. 9 Cf. Powell’s title, The Accidental City, and esp. 4 on New Orleans as an “unintended consequence”; Lewis 19. I qualify with “implicitly”, and write “accounts” not “authors”, because neither Powell nor Lewis personally subscribes to New Orleans exceptionalism (more on this anon). 11
“perpetual plagues” and “beehives” of mosquitoes (Martineau 122; De Forest 250); the “blazing suns” of April (Martineau 122-23) and May (Russell 203), let alone the summer months; and a “super-abundance … of spring- blossoms” and Spanish moss (Thackeray 157): in sum an environment quite unlike other North American cities.
Even as public health standards and methods of taming the “Big Muddy” improved, as Morris has discussed at length, New Orleans remained “exceptionally” vulnerable to natural phenomena in comparison to mainland North America. A century and a half before Katrina, Theodore Clapp wrote of “autumnal hurricanes … by which in a few moments of time the strongest edifices are leveled with the dust, the majestic live oaks and cypresses prostrated” (Clapp 49). Union General Benjamin Butler, during his Civil War occupation of the city, recounts the utilization of the New Orleans waterworks’ “whole pumping force” to combat an approaching gale or so- called “norther” which, according to Butler, blew “two and one half feet of water” from Lake Pontchartrain (Butler 227-28); and the twentieth century brought further, more widely known instances of natural disaster: the 1927 Mississippi flood, Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and of course Katrina.
The historical New Orleans’s fourth and fifth classically co-opted attributes were its sexually and existentially laissez-faire philosophies. What follows will detail each in turn before accounting more particularly for what is here termed their “laissez-faire” quality.10 In the first regard of sexual laissez-faire, one might most readily recall Storyville, the city’s legalized vice district and nucleus of the “Great Southern Babylon” between 1897 and 1917.11 Even before Storyville, though, nineteenth-century commentators noted New Orleans’s immanent iniquity.12 Certain commentators mediated the city
10 Suffice to say here that the word itself is used for its salient echoes with “[sexual] licentiousness” and “laissez les bons temps rouler”. 11 I allude to the title of Long’s work. 12 Let us not forget what laid the ground for this sexual laissez-faire, including the permissibility, within Spanish-colonial manumission laws, of white—free black racial 12 through its quadroons: the “very peculiar and characteristic” class of Creole women upon whom — and upon whose currency as placées or mistresses for moneyed white men — Olmsted lingers latterly in his 1857 account of New Orleans (165).13 Writing in 1883, meanwhile, J. W. Buel likewise lingers on both the “gilt-edged aristocratic bawds” of Basin Street (590) and the “very Cleopatras with nut-brown and half-transparent complexions” comprising the Creole contingent (592). However akin it might have been to other North American cities vis-à-vis its commercial sex culture — Alecia P. Long makes pains of this point, for one (4-5) — New Orleans retained such a reputation into the twentieth century. Violet Harrington Bryan, looking back in 1993, discussed the city’s image having been and remaining “intimately tied on the myths of the southern belle” (7), whether Parisian belles (Grace King’s choice figure), voodoo queen Marie Laveau (Robert Tallant’s), or Storyville courtesans (William Faulkner’s).
The historical New Orleans’s fifth classically co-opted attribute, as stated above, was its existentially laissez-faire philosophy. As classically imagined, New Orleans has a distinct laid-back, free-spirited attitude to time and being: an attitude immortalized in its informal motto “Laissez les bons temps rouler”, or “let the good times roll”. This motto embodies two imperatives: to keep a healthy work/play life balance; and to not hurry time’s rolling stock of hours and minutes.14 From this existential ethic derive two common tropes in “New Orleans writing”. One is timelessness: a term which means less that New Orleans is ahistorical than that it eschews the vertiginous Now, and that it defies — to use Andrei Codrescu’s irresistible phrasing — “the guillotine hands of global-economy time” (xx-xxi). “Here,” Codrescu
exogamy (Powell 288); the distinctively New Orleanian and “at its core a Creole” practice of plaçage (Thompson 12); and the imaginable symbiosis between prostitution and itinerant sailor cum port city culture. 13 See also Thompson 71: “decades of travelers had commented on the physical beauty… of New Orleans’s mixed-race women.” 14 For the intrinsic interest of the thing, I offer some philosophical coordinates: Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1932: “Moving matter about is emphatically not one of the ends of human life”; Rousseau on liberté, égalité, fraternité; and Epicurus: “death is nothing to us”; “it is impossible to live wisely, honourably, and justly without living pleasantly”. 13 expounds further on New Orleans in Hail Babylon, “there are doors older than most American trees, street corners dense with the psychic substance of past events” (3-4). Elsewhere in the literature, this trope modulates into “memorialization”, a preservationist impulse that has been ascribed to New Orleanians over the twentieth century by M. Christine Boyer (322+), Thompson (7), and Barbara Eckstein (8); and in the twenty-first century, by Sara Le Menestrel (165). Indeed, Eckstein’s whole project concerns the dialectical ways of civically and culturally preserving —in Eckstein’s argot, “sustaining” — New Orleans.
Alongside timelessness, another trope runs through New Orleans writing: performativity. Precisely that preoccupies Joseph Roach’s seminal Cities of the Dead, a work on Black Atlantic “orature” (theatre, carnivals, funerals) oriented around London and New Orleans. In this work, Roach traces New Orleans practices of “surrogation”, or cultural self-reproduction, in terms of performance-based practices like Mardi Gras (10); and he identifies sites including Congo Square and Storyville as “vortices of behaviour”, or central sites of cultural self-reproduction (27-28). A good example of this trope operating in New Orleans discourse comes courtesy of Mark Twain. What binds his 1881 account of New Orleans together is precisely his attention to local practices of performativity: whether funereal practices, such as the maintenance of tombs and hanging of “‘immortelles’ … a wreath or cross … a kind of sorrowful breastpin” (267); festive practices, such as in the “startling … solemn and silent” Krewe of Comus processions he recalls of old (274); or ritualistic practices, as at a cockfight he attends: “you could have played the gathering [crowd] for a prayer-meeting,” Twain writes “and after [the fight] began, for a revival” (272).
As time passed into the twentieth century, performativity devolved ever more into exhibitionism in certain areas of the city, not least Bourbon Street, the city’s by-now legendary aorta of commercial bacchanalia. Organic local performance in less commercial areas, by contrast — and at least according
14 to New Orleans’s resident cognoscenti — still symbolizes something rather more profound, more existentially attuned. Consider Tom Piazza (who shall reappear at length within Katrina culture) on New Orleans’s jazz funerals: “In New Orleans, the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on” (Matters 31). We might think too of Mardi Gras Indian performance. What may look at first sight like working-class African- Americans gratifying themselves actually functions as homage to Native Americans of centuries gone who, in popular folklore, sheltered and supposedly intermarried escaped slaves in the nineteenth century.15
Inspiriting New Orleans’s sexual and existential philosophies, as indicated above, is a quality of laissez-faire. This laissez-faire, it is averred here, derives from a sixth and more historically contingent of New Orleans’s classically co- opted attributes: New Orleans’s French, particularly nineteenth-century Catholicism — decadent, Latinate, socially subversive, laissez-faire in absolving the sinner — intrinsically at odds with disciplined, Calvinistic, work- oriented Anglo-Saxon Protestantism.16 Like Hamilton Basso (xv), Randall Kenan (502), and Anthony Stanonis (8) after them, nineteenth-century commentators posited New Orleans Catholicism against national North American Protestantism. “What a Display this is,” wrote John James Audubon of “the Market very aboundant” in 1821, “for a Steady Quaker of Philada or Cincinnati” (113). Charles Lyell’s account of the 1846 Mardi Gras firmly differentiates “strictly Romanist” celebrants and masquerade from “unmasked, stiff,” and Protestant “Anglo-Americans from the north” (139- 40). “Sunday among the French & Creoles,” Virginian visitor Eleanor Parke Lewis would meanwhile inform a friend in the 1830s, “& indeed among the Americans too is like any other day. … We do not visit or take visitors on Sunday, but it is a gala day here generally” (qtd. in Stanonis 8-9). English
15 That Native Americans sheltered slaves is, if not entirely a myth, certainly an exaggeration of historical fact; but nowadays the myth attends indelibly Mardi Gras Indian practice: hence the use here of “functions”. Further re: MG Indian tradition, see Roach 14. 16 Re. “subversive”: I think of the mid-C19 Sisters of the Preservation (presently Holy Family), nuns of colour who taught slaves literacy. See Thompson 135. 15 traveler Henry Bradshaw Fearon was similarly “not a little surprised” (92) about the city's busy Sundays. In the nineteenth century at least, New Orleans’s Catholicism remained outside North American cultural and statistical norms, albeit steadily less so in that latter case after the North American-wide influx of Catholic immigrants circa the 1840s.
All the aforementioned attributes collide in the classically exceptional New Orleans itself: the New Orleans of mass touristic and literary discourses from the late 1800s onwards, the core element of which is perhaps best described in a word as “romantic”. What is understood here by the “romantic” New Orleans goes beyond J.B. Priestley’s understanding of the city’s romance as “a combination of the odd, picturesque, and raffish” (qtd. in Stanonis 164). The word “romantic” here connotes in various apposite ways the identified classically exceptional attributes. It connotes romance as amour, with its libidinal element; New Orleans’s linguistically Romantic, French and Spanish occupiers of yore; and a literary-Romantic attitude to existence, sublimity, and “the everlasting universe of things” not unlike that of Piazza to “the Life above all other lives,” etc.17 The word hearkens too to fanciful or “romantic” notions of escape, from staid and unsatisfying sites elsewhere in the U.S. via New Orleans. Such notions surely underlie such waxing lyrical about New Orleans as excerpted below from Hamilton Basso:
We are … a little weary of … work for the sake of work. … We still harbor a last, lingering vestige of man’s ancient, original yearning to sit in the sun and invite his senses and his soul. This is the invitation New Orleans has always offered. (xvii) 18
If the classically exceptional New Orleans is a conceptual golem, then “romantic” is its inspiriting shem, the word that gives it life.
17 I quote P.B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”. 18 Also see Lewis 12, on how New Orleans has both been seen and seen itself as an island. 16
One Ur-text of this romanticized discourse is Charles Dudley Warner’s account of New Orleans for Harper’s magazine in 1887. Throughout the piece, Warner touches upon almost all the attributes identified above. His opening lines emphasize the heterogeneity of New Orleanians and their tongues: of South American songs, French language and “degraded African jargon” (307). Thereafter he writes of “prodigal abundances” of roses (310) and a “heat continuous” (313); the cultural mélange of Creole literature and Spanish architecture (311, 313); and its ineffably Catholic, inexplicably charming “fallen nature” (308), alongside its “Sunday still of the Continental type” (315). Simultaneously, Warner renders New Orleans overall in richly romantic rhetoric: “The region is saturated with romance,” he writes in exemplary fashion, “so full of present sentiment and picturesqueness that I can fancy no ground more congenial to the artist and the story-teller” (313).
What follows now details how, from the late 1800s onwards, mass-market touristic discourse cultivated a classically exceptional New Orleans, and crystalized the attendant paradigm in mainstream culture. First, formal mass- market touristic bodies in New Orleans, not least the Tourist Bureau, invested in pre-modern and antiquated aesthetics: “Floral Trails” through beautified areas of the city, for example; and streetcars named Desire and otherwise. Additionally, alongside residents’ and heritage network efforts, formal tourism invested in preservation efforts — albeit primarily within the French Quarter. 19
Touristic bodies cultivated classically exceptional ideas second by way of appropriating and adulterating both New Orleans’s cultural mélange and its ineffable quality of laissez-faire. Such processes are reflected in the appropriation of African-American music for white audience—targeted commercial purposes, starting in segregated jazz bands and enduring in the modern-day annual Jazz Fest institution, and the likewise enduring “mammy
19 See Stanonis 63-5, 91-103 — esp. 93 [Trail], 96 [battlefield], and Ch. 4 [FQ preservation]; Eckstein ch. 2 [streetcars] — esp. 48-50 [nostalgia], 53 [Old South tourism]; Gotham, Authentic 87+ [grass-roots preservationist networks, esp. French Quarter]. 17 doll” market.20 These processes are reflected too in the apparatus of walking tours built around nineteenth-century faubourg voodoo culture, and around Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (particularly her original Interview with the Vampire). Such processes are reflected still further in the city’s accrued institutions of id and behavioural largesse: commercialised and star-studded Mardi Gras superkrewes; the aforementioned Bourbon Street; and Harrah’s casino, established in the 1990s and, by state statute, Louisiana’s “official gambling establishment”.
Touristic bodies cultivated classically exceptional ideas thirdly by way of sanitizing the city: taking the danger and contentiousness out of New Orleans phenomena, and making New Orleans more family-friendly to the eye. Though the id still inhered in New Orleans, at least it was now contained and formalized, and not untrammelled across public space; and if local African- American culture could still criticize white hegemony, at least it could only do so outside the like of Bourbon and Canal Streets, wherein, in their capacities as waiters and street-performers, blacks had been rendered “childlike” (Stanonis 225) and as “picturesque caricatures” (213).21 In areas actually oriented towards families, meanwhile, the twentieth-century city witnessed the feminization of preservation and civic activity — an increasing number of women involved in establishing shops and restaurants on Royal Street, versus speakeasies and gambling dens, and in arranging Spring Fiestas comprising balls, concerts, river rides, and the like across the French Quarter.22 In this way feminization made the city more “sanitary”. Moreover, this process begat a complementary rhetoric of New Orleanian “quaintness” and “picturesque”, evident in the previous Stanonis quote and popular touristic
20 See Stanonis ch.5, esp. 207-12 [jazz], 231 [mammy dolls]; Regis and Walton re: JazzFest. In New Orleans tourism’s defence, Mark Souther argues that tourism “preserved cultural distinctiveness even as it simplified it”: making New Orleans culture more saleable, by his logic, protected it from forces of homogenization, and commercialization. See Souther 14. 21 On post-Katrina reassertions of African-American agency within dominant tourism narratives, see Thomas, Desire, esp. 143-5 re: post-Katrina tourist routes being rerouted into the “unscripted living city” replete with instances of African-American agency, e.g. community murals under Claiborne overpass. 22 See Stanonis 160-163. 18 literature otherwise. In these ways, all told, mass touristic bodies cultivated and perpetuated a classically exceptional New Orleans.
Literature also perpetuated classically exceptional ideas of New Orleans. One coterie of authors, typically late-nineteenth-century local ones, refigured the heterogeneity of the people of New Orleans as the heterogeneity of people’s stories— as if in a slippage of the meaning of everybody’s “having a story to tell”. Thus they instantiated an anthological mode of writing, evident in Lafcadio Hearn’s journalistic sketches, Grace King’s Stories (1893) and her anecdotal The Place and the People (1895), G. W. Cable’s Strange True Stories (1890), and Henry Castellanos’s vignettes of the New Orleanian underworld. A majority of “Louisiana writers” overall, meanwhile and into the twentieth century, riffed on the generically “romantic”. One might think immediately of the period lushness of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976); the sensuality of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947); the quixotic mode of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980); and the narrative flânerie of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961).23
Running concurrently throughout history with the classically exceptional paradigm of New Orleans, though, another can be discerned: the romanticized city’s shadow-self, which, to catch the timbre of “exceptional”, is here termed the “execrable paradigm” of New Orleans. Observers have disdained New Orleans in such fashion since its French colonial days: as an “experiment gone awry,” reckons Powell, by a jaundiced French crown and intelligentsia (123).24 Only after Katrina, though, did the paradigm enter into mainstream Anglo-American discourse.
23 This is not, however, to forget realist New Orleans novels such as Richard Stone’s House of Mirrors, William Faulkner’s Pylon, and those written by Frances Parkinson Keyes. 24 See Dawdy on New Orleans’s wild, reprobate reputation in its French period — indebted to Dawdy’s key theoretical conceit, the city’s “rogue colonialism”. Dawdy 2-4, 28 in the first instance. 19
In part, the execrable New Orleans is the wastrel city of manifold nineteenth- century accounts: the city sometimes “astonishingly filthy with rotting matter” (Butler 227); possessed, in the French Market, of “the Dirtiest place in all the Cities of the United States” (Audubon 113); afflicted by ‘dust, waste-paper-littered … deep in the streets” (Twain 266) and plaguy ‘effluviam that filled the air’ (Clapp 107). The execrable New Orleans is furthermore one in which sexual laissez-faire has shaded, and subsequently been subsumed, into criminality. Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook evidences this evocatively: his Aunt Sally in New Orleans, he notes in 1920, owns rooms rentable for illicit activity, and while “getting a good price … from the lovers” with the one hand, “rakes down the kitty from the game” and safeguards murderers’ winnings with the other (349-50). Beyond Anderson, and as discussed by Michael Bibler, certain discourse from as early as Reconstruction has mythologized and figured New Orleans as a self-ruining “doomed Jezebel” of a city (“Jezebel” esp. 10). Concurrently, in their fashions, Henry Castellanos’s New Orleans As It Was (1895) and Herbert Asbury’s Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (1936) cultivated complementarily iniquitous images of the city.
The third attribute of the execrable New Orleans is one of deathliness: the shadowy side of the historical city’s distinctive climate and natural and meteorological abundancies. That environment, at least when left unmanaged by sufficient sanitary regulations, fostered deadly summertime epidemics, worst among them the yellow-fever outbreak of 1853 which killed between 8,000 and 11,000 people.25 Tropes of deathliness, too, have enjoyed a modest vogue in twenty-first-century New Orleans historical fiction, for instance in Josh Russell’s Yellow Jack and Kent Wascom’s Secessia. The execrable paradigm draws fourthly from certain kinds of New Orleans discourse, in which Codrescu’s “timelessness” mutates into “backwardness”, typically of a Third World bearing. Certainly the “Third World” tag was used
25 For statistics, and for more on sanitary regulations vis-à-vis mitigating the New Orleanian environment, see McKiven, 20 and abused in media coverage of immediately post-Katrina New Orleans, hereafter called “Katrina media coverage”; and certain critics themselves have figured that milieu as an “Iraq come home” (Goldberg 89), or as a Baghdad brought into the North American national body (Pease 203).26 Additionally, according to an irate Adolph Reed, certain Katrina media coverage misrepresented citizens of New Orleans too poor or infirm to evacuate the city as having a “primordial commitment to place,” and privileged “cat lover”—style eccentricity over more quotidian experience into the bargain. In earlier Jezebel discourse, too, New Orleans was considered “doomed” owing inter alia to its perceived, particularly New Deal-era “backwardness” (Bibler 14-15).
Over time up to Katrina, Bibler reports further, the New Orleans of Jezebel discourse became ever more “distinctly black” (16).27 The execrable New Orleans, then, is in part the city constructed within racist discourse. Precisely how commonplace twentieth-century rhetoric — Jim Crow et al. — would curdle popular conceptions of North America’s blackest city may be readily understood: in intellectually degrading and crudely essentialist terms. In another sense, the New Orleans constructed within racist discourse was the actual historical epicentre of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave trade: a central Southern slave market whose post—Louisiana Purchase slave code only augmented Spanish colonial repressions — stripping slaves of their rights to garden plots, for example (Powell 332) — and the profitability and popularity of whose slave trade Edward Baptist has recently discussed (173- 8).28
Until Katrina, then, a classically exceptional and execrable New Orleans co- existed in the discourse, albeit the former much more so. During the week of Katrina, though, the relationship changed: no longer existing alongside it, the
26 Re: abuse of tag: see Mabrey III. 27 See up to 19. 28 In Baptist, see esp. graph at 174: ‘Average price of a slave, New Orleans, 1804-1862’. 21 former paradigm mutated and dissipated into the latter; and the “execrable” paradigm stood alone. On this, Eleanor Rae may be usefully quoted at length:
Hurricane Katrina created another paradox for the image of New Orleans: How could a place constructed as timeless, exotic, and carefree now be recognized and treated as somewhere personal, local, unglamorous, and serious? This was the moment where the culture city became the disaster city; during the media storm that followed in Katrina’s wake, the spectacle of foreign-ness and laissez- faire gave way to a spectacle of destruction and barbarity. (8)
As a result, and as Rae discusses subsequently (10-11), the classically exceptional New Orleans’s characteristics — Rae’s word; my “co-opted attributes” — were “manipulated to fit the emerging rhetoric”: exoticism thus became Third World Otherness; and laissez-faire became the alleged and ultimately unproven capacity for rape and other degeneracies in the Superdome. Post-Katrina New Orleanians, meanwhile, became commensurately destructive and barbarous, feckless and criminally inclined. If evacuees were not being publicly dismissed as “soap-opera watchers” by Councilman Oliver Thomas, former First Lady Barbara Bush was claiming that evacuation was “working very well” for New Orleanians who “were underprivileged anyway” (Horne 86); and an infamous online meme juxtaposed news descriptions, written hours apart, of a white couple “finding bread and soda from” and a black man “looting” a grocery store (Rivlin 130).
The point to emphasize here is that the New Orleans of media coverage in the week of Katrina was a blatantly misrepresentative exercise in execrable thinking; and charges of babies being sexually assaulted in the Superdome, such thinking at possibly its worst.29 Emphasizing this point makes clear the continuing importance of and need for interrogations and critiques of New Orleans exceptionalism; and at one level, this thesis is preoccupied with
29 These charges were made by then-Police Chief Eddie Compass. He would later resign. 22 exactly that. One of this thesis’s core interests is the representation of New Orleans in Katrina culture, which will see the ensuing chapters deal at length with practices of “representing the city” of New Orleans in Katrina culture. In this representational regard, this thesis will demonstrate chapter-by-chapter how such practices either radically refashion or advance alternatives to the historical, classically exceptional and execrable paradigms of the city delineated in the preceding pages. This key theme of the thesis — and a setting-forth of the thesis’s other core interest, concerning Katrina victims — will be expounded on presently. Returning to introductory purposes, though, what should now be attended to is how, happily, numerous commentators have already interrogated and critiqued New Orleans exceptionalism in all its forms across the city’s history.
Exceptionalism and historians of New Orleans
All the primary historians referenced up to now challenge exceptionalist paradigms of New Orleans. In Exiles, Thompson’s overarching theoretical conceit is that North America is itself, in the broadest sense, a Creole nation; and that, however something becomes “(North) American”, that process is essentially one of “creolization”. In her work, meanwhile, Alecia Long takes pains to point out that New Orleans’s nineteenth-century culture of “commercial sexuality” often differed little from the North American urban norm (4-5). Starker in his assessment is Anthony Stanonis: “New Orleans was not exceptional… it did not differ substantially from other urban centres [in the nineteenth century]” (11-2). And in both pre- and post-Katrina contexts, Jennie Lightweis-Goff condemns practices of exceptionalism that “alienate” (148, 162) New Orleans from the U.S. with the effect of perpetuating falsely constructed ideas of that nation as one free from risk (150).
As Long normalizes the sexual aspect of New Orleans, meanwhile, so Powell normalizes the city’s racial aspect: he argues that, its line in placées aside, New Orleans differed little in its everyday interracial métissage culture from other North American port cities such as Charleston (118-19). Nevertheless,
23 and although he remains noncommittal on the point, Powell seems to credit New Orleans with something sui generis: after all, how many cities could be styled “accidental” so readily, as in his work’s title; or could have been “somehow improvised”, as Powell styles it twice (163, 351), into what “may be America’s only original contribution to world culture” (163)?
Such an acknowledgement of something sui generis about New Orleans can be reasonably attributed as well to Peirce Lewis, author of the authoritative extant historical geography of New Orleans (The Making of an Urban Landscape). Certainly, Lewis is no romanticizing ingénue: in his account, the urban development of New Orleans over time presents as an aggregate of very typical processes of industrialization, segregation, and residential expansion. Lewis himself takes a comparative approach throughout between New Orleans and other North American cities, such as Detroit (91, in terms of main streets) and Washington, D.C. (108, in terms of civic happiness); and indeed he decries outright the exceptionalist “literary treacle” (xvi) of the Tourist Bureau. Nevertheless, even Lewis allows for New Orleans’s genius loci (171), its “eccentric brilliance” (17), and being “not the average American city by any stretch" (11). Writing after Lewis, Thomas Ruys-Smith describes nineteenth-century New Orleans as “one of America’s most individual cities” (1), and attests to the city’s “distinctive tenor” over time (3). Without being explicit, meanwhile and finally, Eckstein seems as well to credit the city with something sui generis. Consider her description New Orleans’s geographical site, and her self-evidently significant adjectives (emphases mine): “This bioregion… is New Orleans’s exceptional home. In New Orleans, a distinctive wilderness of conflicted landscape and demanding climate are the uncommon urban nature…” (9). Besides her choice adjectives, one might further note Eckstein’s overarching interest in New Orleans “folkways”: in “the stories people tell”, their informal and oral histories, which she reads in
24 tandem with her case studies in Sustaining New Orleans.30 Eckstein’s interest in these folkways betrays an appreciation on her part of New Orleans’s classical heterogeneity of peoples and culture, and in its classically infused legacy of literary anthology a la Lafcadio Hearn.
Even diligent historians, then, leaven their dismissal of exceptionalism with fleeting acknowledgements that New Orleans has a place-quality that escapes being pinned down with real linguistic precision. The nature of New Orleans, it can thus be reasonably stated, remains a phenomenon yet to be fully intellectually exhausted; and save Lightweis-Goff, these texts do not even centre their exegeses on Katrina, an event with profound consequences in terms of discussing the nature of New Orleans.31
Katrina commentary: five “schools” of discussing New Orleans
Notwithstanding fleeting moments in certain works (Powell 91; Stanonis 25- 6), none of the above historians really discusses New Orleans after Katrina. Critical commentary on the post-Katrina city nonetheless abounds. What follows breaks down this commentary into five “schools” of discourse on the nature of post-Katrina New Orleans. Four of these schools are characterized by the terms in which their respective cohorts of commentators discuss post- Katrina New Orleans, and by the different characteristic ways in which those cohorts represent the city. The remaining school is characterized by how its constitutive commentators discuss representations of post-Katrina New Orleans in a certain real-world context.
The first school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse is the “microcosmic school”, and comprises those commentators who have argued that Katrina revealed New Orleans to both be and have historically been a microcosm of class and racial problems in North America. These commentators argue
30 For example, Eckstein reads Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side in tandem with discussing prostitution and “the resonance of ‘walking on the wild side’” in early C20 New Orleans. See ch. 2, esp. 93. 31 See Ruys-Smith, writing c.2010/2011, 5: “…the new New Orleans, still taking shape, will inevitably be different from the city that died in 2005.” 25 further that the phenomenon of Katrina resonates beyond New Orleans, and even the American South, across North America in sum; and that any given tableau of post-Katrina New Orleans crystallizes national issues of race and class in North America.
Certain anthologies discuss Katrina’s Imprint or Effect upon the nation: their editors unpack what this means in their respective introductions. The term “Katrina’s imprint”, explains Keith Wailoo, means to draw attention to the “troubling invisibility of poverty and vulnerability in the contemporary United States,” that is, not only in New Orleans (6). William Taylor and Michael Levine, meanwhile, uses the term “Katrina effect” to signify “a range of responses [to] and longer-term impacts of” Katrina (xiii), not least its destabilizing of the U.S.’s hitherto proud “self-conceptions” (4) and its exposure of tensions in the “interface between a problematic civil milieu… and the built environment” in North America (7).
Unmatched by the above for rhetorical force, though, is Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires’s earlier joint foray into New Orleans-as-microcosm discourse. Their introduction to There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster less passes than hurls the buck for post-Katrina disarray towards the federal government. Pre-Katrina New Orleans, they write, was more than the proverbial appendix in the North American national body; and prior to Katrina, they argue — a “social disaster” that needn’t necessarily have happened — the city deserved commensurately greater investment and attention. “‘Katrina’ is in fact a shorthand,” Hartman and Squires put it, “for a set of economic, social, and political policies that characterize most of metropolitan America” (3).
Other commentators argue further along microcosmic lines, but consider Katrina through a particular ideological lens. The first anthology of Katrina criticism, David Dante Troutt’s After the Storm, considered Katrina through an exclusively African-Americanist lens: all of Troutt’s anthologized writers are black intellectuals. In 2009, Jeremy Levitt and Michael Whitaker
26 complemented Troutt’s work with their own all-black, self-confessedly (3) polemical anthology on America’s Unnatural Disaster; and Michael Eric Dyson complements Troutt still further with his own Katrina commentary. Within it, Dyson bemoans the disinterest exhibited by both African-American celebrities (146-9) and the black middle-class (211) towards the plight of poorer African-Americans; he concludes by calling for a post-Katrina revival of black religious rhetoric (179, 197-99).
In 2011’s The Neoliberal Deluge, meanwhile, Cedric Johnson et al. argue that the natural and social disasters represented by Katrina were “rooted in the project of neoliberalization”, a project that had been operative in North America for the past three decades, and that those disasters owed more to public policy choices than forces of nature (Johnson xix-xx).32 Johnson himself, moreover, argues that the city’s problems are those confronting most American cities, only less dramatically there than in New Orleans. For Johnson, the city’s problems are typical “markers of North American urban decay” (xxxviii).
Worthy of note too is Henry A. Giroux’s Stormy Weather, his polemic on bio- politics and black disposability in North America. Giroux argues that Katrina unmasked the Bush administration’s neglect, authoritarianism, and appalling abdication of its duty of public care towards African-Americans; and in a retrospective piece written around Katrina’s tenth anniversary, he reaffirms Weather’s attendant argument that racist attitudes have prevailed in American society since at least the murder of Emmett Till (“Revisiting”). A similarly socially attuned Jordan Flaherty has written both a book (Floodlines) and latterly a Nation article for Katrina’s tenth anniversary (“Movement Lab”) on social justice vis-à-vis post-Katrina New Orleans, particularly “resistance culture”: Black Lives Matter, Latino labor movements, and such.
32 See also Gotham and Greenberg, 2: “we view [New Orleans] as representative of … a long- term mode of uneven, market-driven urban development”; and of a process “unfolding … in many if not most cities and interurban areas.” 27
Perhaps most notably Clyde Woods’s microcosmic angle, in his introduction to a special issue of American Quarterly, is to place New Orleans within a chronological North American remit: that is, to discuss both how historical North American phenomena laid the groundwork for New Orleans’s social maladies, and how post-Katrina New Orleans reaches back to and reproduces the past. “Through the eye of Katrina,” declares Woods in a Gothic mode, “we see the old dry bones of both the Freedom Movement and the plantation oligarchy walking again in daylight” (“Bourbon” 429). Collectively, Wailoo meanwhile informs us, Imprint’s authors are “situating the origins of Katrina in the deep American past (2). Anna Hartnell places post-Katrina New Orleans within the U.S. comparably chronologically, into a perceived historical tradition of African-American exodus (Exodus ch.5).
The big Katrina histories — Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge, Jed Horne’s Breach of Faith, and Gary Rivlin’s Katrina: After the Flood — come into the microcosmic school as well; but they are less “microcosmic” per se — that is, treating post-Katrina New Orleans as a case study in racism, neoliberalism, etc. — than what is here termed “Americanist”. This means first that these historians give Katrina an “American epic” treatment in terms of length — hundreds of pages, up to 700 in Brinkley’s case — and tone: neutral, non- sensationalizing, multi-perspectival, not unlike the artistic method of contemporary film-documentarian Ken Burns. “Americanist” means second that these authors affirm New Orleans’s North Americanism qua part of North America. Katrina “taught the rest of America a lot about Louisiana,” writes Horne, who even addresses the exceptionalism question: “for all that New Orleans lays claim to exceptional ways and a special place in our culture, it is at heart an American city” (xvi). Neither is Horne’s a hermetic history: he tracks the Katrina diaspora as far as Colorado and Omaha (182-83), and spends whole chapters in East Texas (ch.12) and even the city of Kobe (ch.18), comparing Japanese and American post-disaster reconstruction efforts. Brinkley, meanwhile, conjectures how Katrina would have made very
28 viable fodder for the most nationally renowned statesmen of North American letters: “it was too bad John Steinbeck wasn’t around to document the New Orleans diaspora … [and what] if Arthur Miller had written a drama about the daily dilemmas facing evacuees?” (xxiii). All three historians, too, keep turning their narrative eye from New Orleans to federal milieus such as Washington and Congress and back again, thereby bringing New Orleans into a rhetorical North American continuum.
“Americanist” means finally that these authors anchor their accounts in quotidian concerns: lawsuits; levee engineering; issues in rebuilding and claiming insurance on houses; and neighborhood recovery planning.33 Indeed, Rivlin makes his main subject not, say, a classically New Orleanian brass band or a second-lining Social Aid and Pleasure club, but North America’s only African-American bank, Liberty. Demographically notable it may be; but even this bank is as bureaucratic and unremarkable an institution as one could find in North America. Such, all told, is the microcosmic school of post- Katrina New Orleans discourse.
The second school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse is the “neoclassical” school, comprising commentators who renew classically exceptional ways of discussing New Orleans for the post-Katrina moment. Foremost among his peers is C. W. Cannon, who, in an outright affirmation of exceptionalism, declares, “I Want Magic”. Critique of New Orleans exceptionalism after Katrina, argues Cannon, is an academic vogue borne of Americanist bias and cultural puritanism. He decries the “sharply reductive” Americanist conception of New Orleans exceptionalism — overly oriented, he thinks, towards its touristic iteration — and praises how the idea “represents the possibility of an alternative value system… specifically in terms of sensual and aesthetic fulfillment” to a “nationally hegemonic” one,
33 Re: lawsuits, see esp. Horne ch.17. Re: levees, esp. ibid. ch.10. Re: housing, see Rivlin, esp. 225, 311-15 re: the federal Road Home program. Re: recovery planning, ibid, ch.15, 235-6, 266-71; see also Wooten, throughout. 29 and its “capitalist and puritanical” notions of value. Similarly enthusiastic is New Orleans resident Lolis Eric Elie, who, for Katrina’s tenth anniversary and on his fellow citizens’ behalf, penned a choric ode to the different reasons why citizens came back to the post-Katrina city. “Some of us came back,” writes Elie at one point, because we had promised ourselves, Everything I Do Gon Be Funky From Now On, and that shit didn’t even much sound right coming out of your mouth in Topeka”. Such, in distilled form, is the neoclassical tenor of his ode.
Stopping short of Cannonesque apologia, M.B. Hackler and Cindi Katz nonetheless shade into neoclassical sentiment in their respective post- Katrina regional commentaries. Hackler identifies the Gulf Coast as home to “some of the most distinctive US regional cultures” (4); and Katz invokes “historical geographies … of mythic significance in the American and even global imaginary” (16). Tellingly, though, both authors take a wider, Gulf Coastal perspective over a narrow New Orleans one: neither waxes lyrical about New Orleans alone, nor is blind to Gulf Coastal social malaise.34
Neoclassical notes resound too in an essay of Nick Spitzer’s. Spitzer hews his discussion of “cultural creolization” vis-à-vis post-Katrina New Orleans from classically exceptional rock, privileging, perhaps to a fault, set-piece jazz funerals (“Monde” 52) and the famous Allen Toussaint (55-56) over the likes of nightclub gigs and jobbing trombonists. Without using the word “exceptional”, meanwhile, he nevertheless lifts New Orleans up and “outside of” North America, identifying it as a trailblazing national model in how recessionary North American cities might invest in their vernacular cultures (63). Neoclassical notes promise to resound again, too, in what advance press publicizes as Jason Berry’s “character-led history” New Orleans at its tri-centennial, forthcoming November 2018 and fashioned, it is promised,
34 On that latter point, see Katz on segregation and inequalities there, ibid. Cf. too Hackler and Katz’s tones with Brinkley’s in Deluge. In envisaging the possible Gulf South of the post- ‘06 future, Brinkley’s phrasing channels less exceptionalism than optimism: “reemerging with a New South confidence” here, “entrepreneurial zeal” there. 30 around an “extraordinary cast” of historical actors.35 Such, all told, is the neoclassical school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse.
A third school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse, antithetical to the second, argues for New Orleans’s “ordinariness”. Whilst admitting its musical distinctiveness, for example, Lewis Watts and Eric Porter nonetheless affirm New Orleans’s relative normality within North America vis-à-vis its and the country’s “social hierarchies and exclusions” (74). Richard Campanella, meanwhile, rehearses the argument most succinctly in his opinion piece on “The Seduction of Exceptionalism”:
Who can argue that most modern-day New Orleanians don’t speak English, indulge in national popular culture, shop at big-box chains, and interact socially and economically with other Americans and the world on a daily basis? ... Most commercial radio stations (i.e., the ones with the most listeners) play mainstream pop music, and those featuring local and regional music have so few listeners that they must rely on donations. (“Seduction” 25)
Though Campanella writes after Katrina in “Seduction”, he does not write about post-Katrina New Orleans per se: the ordinariness of Campanella’s New Orleans presents as ahistorical and unproblematized by Katrina, which goes unmentioned. By the logic of other commentary in this school, though, New Orleans has ultimately become more “ordinary” not merely after but owing to Katrina, that is, to the opportunities it afforded for urban remodeling. This is the commentary of post-Katrina gentrification: the middle-class rebuilding cum whitening of historically poorer, non-white New Orleanian areas. The Bywater district is the proverbial urban Ur-text of this whitening: census blocks that were 63% and 51% black in 2005 are now 32%
35 Jason Berry, City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018): see spiel ft. on e.g. amazon.com listing.
31 and 17% black.36 As it happens, Campanella has written elsewhere an entertaining broadside against precisely this gentrification process and its “gutter punk … [and] bourgeois bohemian” harbingers (“Discontents”); but the commentary otherwise strikes a sincerer, more sympathetic note. Different tenth-anniversary pieces, for example, figure the whitening of the Tremé through two real-life women: a displaced African-American and a white arrival (Roig-Franzia); followed new/old neighborly rapprochements in the Fifth Ward (Stanton); and rendered graphically denizens of the city’s Broadmoor neighborhood aggrieved and displaced by Airbnb and its ilk (Wimberly). Their common contextual point, and the takeaway point vis-à-vis “ordinariness”, is that post-Katina New Orleans is becoming whiter, more bourgeois, and overall nearer the North American urban norm.
Other commentators in this school address “ordinariness” via the praxis of living in New Orleans. In their tenth-anniversary period works of sociological Katrina discourse, Tom Wootten, Roberta Gratz, and Karl F. Seidman recount the establishment and efforts of neighborhood-level rebuilding committees across the post-Katrina city, detailing distinctly mundane issues of sub- committee structuring and municipal/neighborhood bureaucratic wrangling. Matt Sakakeeny and Robert McClendon, meanwhile, discuss the praxis of New Orleans street performance. Street musicians may appear to be symbols of vitality, advises Matt Sakakeeny, but behind the curtain they comprise “excluded public housing residents, neglected students, and underpaid and underinsured” service workers (725). Writing around Katrina’s tenth anniversary, McClendon traces the forced suburbanization of musicians and Mardi Gras Indians, and suggests, seconding Sakakeeny’s characterization, that their prosaic housing and employment concerns will determine his subjects’ future street-cultural capacities.37 Such, all told, is the ordinary school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse.
36 See maps in Roig-Franzia. 37 See esp. his interview with Sue Mobley. 32
The fourth school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse is the “media school”, comprising conscientious criticism of media Katrina coverage, and of exceptional paradigms of post-Katrina New Orleans. Some of these commentators have already been encountered, but a recap is useful, and a revisiting is productive.
First to reenter the arena is Michael Bibler. Near the end of his piece “Jezebel”, Bibler turns from classic Jezebel discourse to its post-Katrina legacies. He identifies two such legacies: a popular tendency to “accuse” New Orleanians of being “somehow complicit in their suffering” (22); and an official tendency to “treat future flooding as inevitable, and so do little or nothing to stop it … effectively turning prognostication into self-fulfilling prophecy” (24-5). The one tendency condemns New Orleanians; the other condemns New Orleans itself. Writing further in comparative historiographical fashion, Jennie Lightweis-Goff dovetails printed Katrina media neatly into nineteenth-century travelogues, specifically Olmsted’s account of the New Orleanian quadroon. Specifically, she perceives in Olmsted’s quadroons and a TIME image of disheveled post-Katrina black womanhood a common, cynical intent: to figure a disarrayed New Orleans as foreign and “non-American”, and thus safeguard the North American national body (150, 158).
Other previously encountered critics of the media school are Adolph Reed, last encountered condemning “backwardness” tropes and Eleanor Rae, last encountered detailing the characterization of New Orleans as a “disaster city” after Katrina. Reed characterizes Katrina media coverage as not just carelessly but cynically and culpably misrepresentative: “Always ready to exoticize, even when on their best behaviour, the media pulled out their one-size-fits-all cultural exceptionalism”. The process Rae unpacked in the previously excerpted passage, she meanwhile asserts in the full piece, closed down discussions of systemic social problems (111). Cheryl Harris and Devon
33
Carbado wax likewise disapprovingly about Yahoo News’s “looting”/”finding” calumny.
Whatever their merits, these excoriations of media Katrina coverage afford less interest than commentary that considers the construction of this coverage, and of the exceptional paradigms of New Orleans it comprises. Recently in significant pertinent scholarship, Ron Eyerman has discussed how photojournalists, painters (75-76), museum curators (54-56), and other media professionals have constructed Katrina as a cultural trauma, and post- Katrina New Orleans as a site of exceptional emotional rupture. His discussion comprises warzone-inflected photography (29) and visual compositions à la Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression photography besides TV news. Notably, Eyerman actually commends televisual Katrina coverage, that is, the “actively engaged” reportage of Anderson Cooper and Shepherd Smith inter alia, and their attempts to mobilize an emotional, empathetic community across North America (138, 145).
Where Eyerman commends TV news, though, Bernie Cook condemns it, in his deconstruction of how major news networks applied disingenuous schema and high-concept formulae, for example “Baghdad on the Bayou”, to network Katrina coverage, and to post-Katrina New Orleans. In so constructing their coverage, Cook suggests, networks sought to distract viewers from questions of federal responsibility, and latterly to glorify the National Guard's arrival in New Orleans (16-17). For Diana Negra, meanwhile, media in all its forms has been historically insufficient in representing New Orleans: a “representational urgency” (6), she argues, has thus lingered around the post-Katrina city (contemporary media’s response to which urgency — by constructing new home-makeover and survivalist reality TV formats, for example — her anthologized authors variously address). In these ways the above commentators — and others, though less extensively — address the construction of media representations of Katrina. Although this thesis’s focus differs from theirs, similar problems of construction and
34 fictionalization will preoccupy the thesis’s initial discussion of narrative non- fictional Katrina culture.
The fifth and final school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse is the “globalist” school, comprising commentators who eschew the traditional North American context of New Orleans and instead place the post-Katrina city within newer, international contexts. Junot Diaz and Anna Hartnell orient their work towards the Caribbean — specifically Haiti, after the earthquake of 2010. Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, ruminates Diaz, reveal both the “sociality” of notionally natural disasters, and the inimicality of the global economy, its leaving-behind of less developed cities and countries (esp. sec.4, sec.5). Hartnell identifies Katrina and the Haitian earthquake together as a dual exposé of both American Century rhetoric and North American “slow violence” (“Reflections” 65) against Haitian tree cover and Louisiana wetlands. Mark Thompson, meanwhile, advocates an “Atlantic approach” to considering New Orleans over time, one that attends more to the Caribbean and non-Anglo migrants from across the Atlantic.
As discussed previously, Donald Pease and David Leo Goldberg orient their work towards the Middle East, perceiving analogues therein for New Orleans: Pease’s Baghdad and Goldberg’s “Iraq come home”. Other authors follow in this vein, invoking Katrina in their globalist discussions of twenty- first-century American exceptionalism. Nicholas De Genova discusses Katrina’s aftermath vis-à-vis North America’s post-9/11 Homeland Security ideological project, arguing that the one “exposed the obscene truth” of the other’s “most elementary conceits about safeguarding … the United States” (626). Taking in the entire Eastern hemisphere, meanwhile, Bart Gruzalski bemoans North America’s averageness in, inter alia, post-disaster reconstruction in post-Katrina New Orleans compared to Japan and Bangkok after contemporary earthquakes/ nuclear spillage and floods respectively.38 An anthology’s dozen of writers, finally, take a Transatlantic Perspective on
38 See esp. from “What we have seen is truly astounding….” 35
New Orleans: one informed by conferences between French and American scholars on the Continent; and one that includes French and Australian viewpoints in its print embodiment.39
Such are the “schools” of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse in critical Katrina commentary. This breakdown will be crucial to the ensuing thesis, and indeed will directly inform one of its main structural frameworks, in ways that will be set forth presently. The more immediate concern, though, is situating this thesis — and its interest in Katrina-cultural practices of “representing the city”, as set forth earlier — amidst the extant Katrina discourse addressing the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina.
Katrina culture criticism: state of the field and this thesis’s intervention
Criticism on “Katrina culture” abounds much less than the sociological kind profiled above, and most of it addresses the Spitzer-style “holy trinity” of architecture, food, and above all music. Certainly, critical essays on non- musical Katrina culture have been written since soon after Katrina itself; but what John Swenson, Keith Spera, and Lewis Watts and Eric Porter have done in their books for music post-Katrina, few or none have yet done for literary and screen culture. At the time of writing, only two appreciable academic books addressing non-musical Katrina culture have been released, both anthologies: Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik’s Ten Years After Katrina, and Simon Dickel and Evangeline Kindinger’s After the Storm. Neither text’s broad remit, as defined by their editors, particularly privileges ideas of “representing the city”. Ten Years, Marotte and Jellenik explain, is about “chart[ing] the effects of Katrina on our cultural identity … [and] processing [the] emerging canon of creative rehearsals of the storm’s effect on us” (viii, x); After the Storm, write Dickel and Kindinger on their part, is “a multifaceted take on the meaning of the storm and its cultural negotiations,”
39 I think of the viewpoints of Sara Le Menestral and Thomas Jessen Adams. 36 with an emphasis on questions of narrative agency vis-à-vis how cultural texts facilitate under-represented and diasporic voices in “talking back” (13- 14). Within these anthologies, meanwhile, the essays most oriented towards ideas of representing the city are interesting but tightly focused: one essay on “space” in one Katrina-cultural text (Samuel); and another on theoretical place/space distinctions in two other texts (George).
In the next most significant instance of culturally dominated Katrina criticism, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies, thematic precedents are again interesting but tightly focused: one essay detailing the sensationalist treatment of reconstruction efforts in crime fiction (Yousaf); and another tracing the historicizing of Katrina in a particular visual-arts context (Bibler “Flood”). This analytical lacuna afflicts further some of the more sociological anthologies mentioned in the earlier breakdown of the schools of Katrina discourse. The section of the special issue Wake entitled “Culture, Music, and Performance” addresses hip-hop, Mahalia Jackson, second lines, and jazz, but only one non-musical auteur (a poet). In Effect, meanwhile, Taylor and Levine openly acknowledge “literature, filmic, and television representations” as one of Effect’s “omissions — disciplines and questions we would have liked to see discussed in greater detail” (8-9). And although Anna Hartnell has recently ranged creditably widely across Katrina culture in her latest academic treatise, she uses her featured texts to develop an argument about different real-world Katrina-related “temporalities”, rather than about Katrina culture per se.40
Into this arena enters this thesis, which stands out in various regards. It is one of the first expansive book-length analyses of the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina, as opposed to the more tightly focused analyses of that response anthologized by the likes of Marotte and Jellenik; and it will bring conceptual and theoretical binding agents to the hitherto less than distinctly
40 Hartnell, After Katrina: e.g. use of Katrina documentaries to discuss “Katrina time”/present age of neoliberalism in ch.3. 37 defined entity that is “the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina”. It shall help us to understand a major American city after a watershed moment in its history, and how that city exists in the creative imaginary after that watershed. It attends to New Orleans vis-à-vis non-musical cultural forms relatively neglected in Katrina cultural criticism hitherto.
The thesis stands out in further regards. It represents an exercise in canon formation, in canonizing the cultural response to one of the greatest disasters in the twenty-first-century U.S.; it represents as well one of the most dedicated exercises in preserving the cultural legacy of that disaster so far in Katrina discourse. It is the single most fully thought-through critical consideration so far of representations of New Orleans in Katrina culture, or of practices of “representing the city”. More than that, though — and to now introduce this thesis’s other core interest — it is a critically unprecedented consideration of the place of the Katrina victim in the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina.
Empathy for Katrina victims runs through critical Katrina commentary to such an extent that what follows can hope to convey only the variety of instances on offer, and nothing like the totality. To wit, it runs through Giroux’s interrogation of Katrina fatalities in relation to the bio-politics of disposability (Stormy); Clyde Woods’s analysis of how the post-Katrina redevelopment model stripped victims of public assets in the city (Woods “Les Misérables”); and Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires’s condemnation of successive city-official failures to have maintained public services and infrastructure prior to Katrina and citizens’ time of need (4-5).41 It runs further through Eyerman’s interpretation of Katrina as representing the rupture of a “covenant” between Gulf Coast residents and public officials (1-2); Hartnell’s conceptualization of Katrina within a narrative tradition of Exodus and popular dispossession (Exodus ch.5); and Dyson’s defence of
41 In Woods, see e.g. his account of the stripping of affordable housing at 782-84. 38
Katrina victims against judgemental conservative Christians and their “punitive theodicies” (192).42 And it runs through Boyer’s condemnation of post-Katrina survivors’ continuing “ruination” as of 2015 owing to “neoliberal urban policy” (“Ruination” 244); Le Menestral’s account of post-Katrina memorial forms that advocate citizens’ “right to return” to the city (161, 169); and Nancy Boyd-Franklin’s analysis of how established U.S. social prejudices against New Orleans exacerbated the basic trauma incurred by Katrina victims.
Empathy fuels also certain critics’ comparisons between the domestic U.S. responses to 9/11 and to Hurricane Katrina. These critics have discussed how, across both popular and political responses, the event of 9/11 was more rigorously memorialized (Pramaggiore 84-85), responded to with more “melodramatic urgency” (Simpson 331), and more readily embraced as a national tragedy (Fuqua 50-1). Elsewhere critics have dwelt on how 9/11 victims were considered more authentically “American” (Bibler, “Jezebel” 16) , more readily “lionized” (Negra 16), and more overtly “demarcated” as heroes (Fuqua 50-1), than Katrina victims, who were “Otherized” (Bibler, “Jezebel” 16) and proscribed within a “blame-the-victim” discursive frame (Fuqua, 50-1). Needless to say, these critics condemn these discrepancies, and commonly empathize with Katrina victims.
Katrina culture, this thesis argues, is similarly governed by its practitioners’ common empathy for Katrina victims. More precisely, it is governed by a project of “recovering the victim”: of reinvesting Katrina victims with the voice, dignity, and agency that were denied them in both the week of Katrina and the disaster’s longer-term aftermath. This thesis thus amounts as well to a humanitarian exercise, inasmuch as it puts the human figure of the Katrina victim in the spotlight throughout its examination of the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina. In this empathetic victim-oriented regard, this thesis has
42 Dyson’s defence proceeds from 182+. 39 greater precedent in extant criticism of Katrina culture. Critics have variously addressed African-Americans’ positive role in the grassroots reconstruction of community culture in the city (Brown); the responses specifically of gay victims to Katrina (Richards); the filmmaker-interviewee dynamics and participatory modes of certain Katrina documentaries (Letort); and how certain post-Katrina hip-hop records try to hail and interpellate listeners, and thereby secure their sympathies, on victims’ behalf (Jellenik, “Subversive” 100-02). Ideas of recovering the victim, though, are original to this thesis, and its enterprising study of the secular missionary work that is the foundation of the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina.
It should be acknowledged that some critics, Michael Dyson for example, are concerned particularly with working-class African-American Katrina victims. Here, though, “the victim” is a neutral, abstract, all-encompassing category. It is not gradated in terms of identity categories: it is a category that covers all identity categories quite indiscriminately. Certainly, then, analytical shades of grey and intersectional inflections can be added to this thesis’s portrait of “recovering the victim”; but such work would be for a future time. Additionally, it should be noted that the term “Katrina victim” refers in this thesis only to those victims of Katrina who were citizens of New Orleans. Katrina made victims of many Gulf Coastal dwellers beyond New Orleans: they are respectfully remembered here, but factored out of what the terms “Katrina victim” and “Katrina victimhood” signify in this thesis hereafter.
How the thesis will progress
This thesis comprises two sections. The first discusses the narrative non- fictional response to Hurricane Katrina; the second discusses the canon of what is here termed “original creative Katrina culture”. Their overarching conceptual framework is informed by the earlier breakdown of critical Katrina commentary into five schools of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse. The first section ranges across written, graphic, and visual texts. It identifies
40 two “modes” of representing the city in narrative non-fictional Katrina culture, which represent radically refashioned forms of the classically exceptional and execrable paradigms of New Orleans established above. It theorizes as well two corresponding manners of recovering the victim in narrative non-fictional Katrina culture. Secondarily, the section pursues an argument regarding texts’ “media characters”, inspired by the generic common ground between narrative non-fiction qua genre and the media school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse.
The second section discusses original creative Katrina culture, ranging across novels, short stories, poetry, films, and television serial dramas. It identifies four schools of New Orleans representation cognate with the ordinary, microcosmic, globalist, and neoclassical schools of discourse discussed above. As well, it theorizes how these creative schools correspond with distinct “manners” of recovering the victim. These correspondences are traced in turn over the section. Overall, this thesis will comprehensively account for practices of representing New Orleans in Katrina culture. As well, it will work towards establishing “recovering the victim” as the tectonic impulse that fundamentally moves Katrina culture, and as the de facto governing project of the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina.
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Section 1: Narrative Non-Fiction
Chapter 1: “Single-Subject” Narrative Non-Fiction
This first section of the thesis, comprising two chapters, discusses narrative non-fictional responses to Hurricane Katrina, within a frame informed by the media school of post-Katrina New Orleans discourse. In the introductory survey of this school and of Katrina media coverage, one major leitmotif emerged: misrepresentation. From mythmaking about child abuse in the Superdome by New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass, to sensationalist “Baghdad on the Bayou” broadcast-network narratives as discussed by Bernie Cook, few media narratives avoided the methods and pitfalls of misrepresenting or “exceptionalizing” along execrable-paradigmatic lines, post-Katrina New Orleans. Consequently, this discussion of narrative non- fictional Katrina culture attends at length to ideas of representation, chiefly of that genre’s more conscientious “modes” of representing post-Katrina New Orleans. Ideas of recovery, it should be said, will be equally important to this section overall, just not as immediately in the ensuing chapter.
To be clear, in fact, these texts’ practices of recovering the victim will not be discussed until the end of the chapter. Such discussion is deferred here so as not to complicate the intricate waters of discussing these texts’ representational practices, and their media characters. The end of the chapter shall retrospectively and smoothly dovetail discussion of texts’ recovery practices with the preceding analysis of their representational practices.
Two important notes should be made here. First, Katrina media coverage is understood to be primarily televisual news coverage focusing on New Orleans in the “week of Katrina”, that is, the period spanning the Sunday before the hurricane’s landfall to the following Friday and the National
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Guard’s arrival en masse in the city. Written journalism did of course address Katrina; but as the more popular and powerful mediating technology, televisual news is privileged in the conceptualizing of “Katrina media coverage”. Second: this discussion differentiates memoirs — Joshua Clark’s Heart Like Water, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc’s Not Just The Levees Broke, for example — from narrative non-fiction. Chris Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic comes closest to the memoir genre, but its form, to be discussed later on, distinguishes it out of the generic norm.
The texts discussed in this section are Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun; Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters; Chris Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic; Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water; Dan Baum’s Nine Lives; Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: After the Deluge; and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Baum, Neufeld, and Lee’s texts are all instances of the group-biographical genre in particular: the first four named texts are thus considered apart from the latter three, as what this discussion terms “single-subject texts”. These single-subject texts are what concern this first chapter; and the group biographies, the second. At this juncture, though, this section’s overarching argument about narrative non-fictional Katrina culture should be set forth.
This section argues that narrative non-fictional Katrina culture exhibits two aesthetic “modes” of representation, which radically refashion the “classically exceptional” and “execrable” paradigms of New Orleans discussed previously, and substantially revise crude conceptual templates of New Orleans into respective and refined aesthetic templates. They may be more fully understood to have arisen and been utilized by auteurs as an interpretative “way into” an already atypical North American city rendered that much more “un-American” (that is, Third World–like) after Katrina. The representations of New Orleans within these modes, meanwhile, are all more conscientiously wrought than their conceptual forebears, tending nearer fact than fiction.
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The term “mode” here comes from musical theory, and in that context is one of the seven classical scales that can be wrought in a given musical key. The “Do-Re-Mi” melodic line immortalized in the eponymous show tune from The Sound of Music, for example, equates to what is termed the Ionian mode in that song’s given key. These modes differ formally in terms of the extents of sonic “sharpening” and “flattening” of their constitutive notes, and aesthetically in terms of their ambient mood-tenors. A mode, in other words, is one of seven ways in which one can fashion and refashion the classical- scale template in a given key. In this light, an adroit analogy spontaneously presents itself: as musical modes fashion and refashion the classical-scale template, so the modes of representation theorized here refashion the classically exceptional and execrable conceptual templates of New Orleans. The modal model, it can thus be appreciated, captures adroitly the essence of the theorized “refashioning” practices in narrative non-fictional Katrina culture. It is a model highly conducive to analysis of those practices, and what follows hereby adopts it for analytical purposes.
To name these modes of representation, meanwhile, I appropriate the names of certain musical modes, taking my cue from serendipitous sympathies between the mood-tenors of those musical modes, and the aesthetic tenors of the theorized modes of representation. I do not want to overstate what amounts only to the serendipity of these sympathies, but it is sufficient that the musical-modal names adopted here serve adequately as usefully concise and evocative shorthand terms for working purposes. Specifically, “Dorian” is adopted for the one mode of representation, practiced within Zeitoun, Matters, and Nine Lives; and “Locrian” for the other, practiced within Attic, Trouble, A.D., and Levees.
The Dorian musical mode is, as renowned twentieth-century U.S. composer Leonard Bernstein defined it, “almost minor, but not quite”, and evokes the “primitive, Oriental… timeless, brooding, (and) ancient”: altogether, it
44 possesses what Bernstein broadly characterized as a “special feeling”.43 The Dorian New Orleans of Eggers, Piazza, and Baum can be likewise characterized. Although not blind to its depredations, these authors, commensurately heightening their responses to its heightened condition, abstract New Orleans out of mundane denotative materiality into a symbolic state of “special significance”. The Dorian method can be compared, if only to inform one’s understanding of “special significance” in this context, to that of the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century English literature: John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan’s common method of abstraction-through-conceit, of spinning rarefied/profound philosophical thoughts and argumentative conceits — about love, death, mourning — from fleas, pairs of mathematical compasses, and other mundane objects (see “The Flea”, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”). What was once the romantic core element of the classically exceptional New Orleans, the Dorian mode radically refashions into a poetic-metaphysical element. Overall here, “Dorian” as an aesthetic term signifies “possessing special symbolic significance, and poetic-metaphysical energies,” and Dorian cities can be characterized as being “sites of special significance”. Within the Dorian mode of representing the city, New Orleans becomes Zeitoun’s “symbolic site of emergency”, Matters’s “Benjaminian city”, and the cities of Nine Lives and A.D.: After the Deluge. The above terms, originally conceptualized in this thesis, shall be explained presently.
By contrast to the Dorian mode, and quoting Bernstein again, the musical Locrian mode is “terribly unsettled and inconclusive”; it is a generically “dark” mode, as that “terribly” suggests, and discordant to the point of not being musical (indeed, little extant music utilizes this mode). Aesthetically akin is the post-Katrina New Orleans represented in Attic and its peers: a city whose ravaged condition finds reflection in Locrian writing’s depressive energies, “aesthetic of damage”, and studiedly anti-lyrical style: its
43 Leonard Bernstein, “What Is a Mode?”, lecture, 1966: “Do you see what I mean about the special feeling of the Dorian mode?” 45
“darkness”, to coin a generic term. This darkness need not wholly preclude descriptive touches of local color, particularly in Attic, a text studded with them. Nevertheless, darkness certainly subsumes local color in these texts.44 Furthermore, this “darkness” can be understood to be in essence the “execrable” quality of the execrable New Orleans translated into an aesthetic product. Overall here, “Locrian” as an aesthetic term signifies “studiedly anti- lyrical, evidencing an aesthetic of damage, and depressive in affect”. And across its exemplary arenas — Attic’s “deteriorated psycho-scape”, Trouble’s “conditional city”, and the cities mapped and composed in A.D. and Levees — the Locrian mode refashions the “cursed” quality etymologically encoded into the “execrable” paradigm — via the Latin root exsecrari, “to curse” — into a kindred, comparably negatively coded quality.
To recapitulate, this section’s main argument is as follows: narrative non- fictional Katrina culture exhibits two aesthetic modes of representation, Dorian and Locrian, which radically refashion the historical, classically exceptional and execrable paradigms of New Orleans respectively. This first chapter theorizes how these Dorian and Locrian modes of representation manifest across “single-subject” narrative non-fictional texts of Katrina culture, as named above: Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun; Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters; Chris Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic; and Trouble the Water. The remaining group-biographical texts — Nine Lives, When the Levees Broke, and A.D. — are discussed in the next chapter.
Secondarily, this section pursues an argument concerning what is here termed these texts’ “media characters”, or the degrees to which these texts evidence the characteristics of Katrina media coverage. All seven texts in this section exhibit some of this coverage’s characteristics: generic ones of stylizing, schematizing, and stereotyping. Attic, for example, indulges in
44 Re: use here of “local color”: inspired by Nagel. One of Nagel’s arguments is that his studied texts are all examples of a “Local-Color movement” defined by its “portrayal of regional characters, values, folkways…” (16). 46 morbid and wasteland aesthetics à la those of televisual Katrina et al. disaster coverage, as discussed by Michael Levine (“Witnessing”) and John Hannigan (esp.81); Piazza “draws on common cultural assumptions (including myths) about” New Orleans à la the televisual Katrina media, as discussed by Havidán Rodriguez and Russell Dynes; and Eggers crafts archetypal, allegorical characters akin to the “exemplars of American perseverance… [and] citizenship” peopling mainstream Katrina journalism, as described by Sue Robinson (804-05). Only 1 Dead in Attic, though, so strongly exhibits techniques of such “in the thick of it” correspondence as that of, say, CNN‘s Anderson Cooper; only Trouble the Water has a media-characteristic televisual vérité element; and only Locrian texts evidence further marked “media characteristics”. The section’s secondary argument, then, is that texts with lesser media characters represent the city along Dorian lines; and texts with greater media characters, Locrian. Besides the intrinsic secondary interest, it should be appreciated, this secondary analysis will inform the section’s primary analyses of texts’ representational and recovery practices, and will inform how those analyses are conducted. It will bring to light, too, an alignment between Katrina media coverage’s execrable impulses and the heightened media character of Locrian texts: a symptom of at least one of the mode-paradigm relationships theorized in the primary regard.
In summary, this chapter discusses how the theorized Dorian and Locrian modes manifest across “single-subject” instances of narrative non-fictional Katrina culture. The Dorian text Zeitoun is discussed first, its peer Why New Orleans Matters second, the Locrian text 1 Dead in Attic thereafter, and finally Trouble the Water. Their media characters will be secondarily discussed. After these individual textual analyses, the chapter concludes by discussing how these texts’ Dorian and Locrian practices interrelate with their practices of “recovering the victim”: of reinvesting Katrina victims with voice, agency, and dignity.
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Zeitoun: “symbolic site of emergency”
What follows theorizes Zeitoun’s featured New Orleans as a “symbolic site of emergency” defined by its “critical statehood”. It identifies two distinct “critical states” deriving from that statehood, and theorizes further how those states participate in Eggers’s overall narrative practice.
In 2008, the San Francisco–based author Dave Eggers released Zeitoun, the narrative non-fictional biography of Syrian-American contractor and New Orleans landlord Abdulrahman Zeitoun. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the historical Zeitoun remained in New Orleans, canoeing through the floodwaters, conducting ad hoc rescues Good Samaritan–style, and safeguarding his rental properties. For his troubles, federal authorities detained Zeitoun as a suspected terrorist: first in the so-called “Camp Greyhound”, the temporary prison established after Katrina in New Orleans’s Greyhound bus terminal; then in the Hunt Correctional Center, appropriated by the federal government immediately after Katrina. Over September 2005, Zeitoun’s extended family, especially his Anglo-American wife Kathy, sought to secure his release: they succeeded after 23 days. Three years later, Eggers put these events on written record.
At first sight, Zeitoun appears a reputable work of reportage that “documents”, “observes”, and “records” historical ignominies; a text that offers “eloquent witness” and “lets the facts speak for themselves”.45 Eggers’s prose, too, is unadorned and dispassionate: both ideal qualities of objective writing. In practice, though, Eggers muddies the “non-fictional biographical” ballast-waters of his narrative, and manipulates how that narrative’s readers receive it. Instructive here is the real Zeitoun’s post-2008 history, which took a markedly ignominious turn. After his extended post-
45 I synthesize here the critical plaudits excerpted in the prefatory material in my edition of Zeitoun. 48
Katrina detainment, Zeitoun became an increasingly aggressive individual: domestically abusive, and ever more insistent about his and his family’s practice of Islam. His marriage to Kathy fell apart; and since then, he has been repeatedly indicted for stalking, bail violations, and, in 2013, on suspicion of soliciting his estranged spouse’s murder.46 This surprising ignominious turn makes retrospectively clearer the crux of Eggers’s narrative practice in Zeitoun, namely, how he folds personal history into narrative, and refracts the real Zeitoun’s biographical narrative through a hall of fictionalizing, heroic-narrative mirrors.47
How might this “hall of mirrors” metaphor be figured in media-theoretical terms? Stuart Hall’s theories of encoded messages offer one option. Hall argues that televisual broadcasting structures/entities encode messages within visual and aural signs and semiotic “codes”; and that a viewer might decode this message in three ways: as the encoding entity intended it to be read (in a dominant-hegemonic reading); largely as intended but with caveats (in a negotiated reading); and wholly contrarily to how the encoding entity intended it to be read (in an oppositional reading). Certainly, this text could be studied in terms of “negotiating” the heroic “coding” of Zeitoun. The media metaphor most faithful to Eggers’s practice in this text, though, is the “narrative frame”, a metaphor that chimes better with keywords in Katrina media criticism besides.48 In media discourse, the frame metaphor figures however a given media outlet organizes and presents the events and issues it covers; and “framing” qua practice is the privileging of aspects and the representation of a phenomenon according to a given media outlet’s ideological interests. In so many words could also be characterized Eggers’ heroic-narrative refraction of the real Zeotoun’s biographical narrative as
46 For a précis of the real Zeitoun’s malpractice up to summer 2015, see Daley. Re: his downturn, see Kathy Zeitoun’s interview with Naomi Martin. 47 Inevitably, one wonders what Eggers might have picked upon and edited out of his narrative. Such thought experiments are interesting, but probably largely unfair to Eggers; and Kathy Zeitoun herself has acquitted the author of any rank dissembling of the truth: “I think (Zeitoun) portrayed us as we were at that time,” she attested in 2013 (“Interview”). 48 Re: “keywords”, see Rodriguez and Dynes on five TV framing themes (see sec. “Framing Themes”; see discussion of the looting frame in Tierney et al., esp. 61-2; and see discussion of “anarchy frame” in Stock. 49 figured above. Zeitoun’s media character can thus be figured as the “heroic- narrative frames” applied to its basic biographical narrative; and Eggers’s narrative practice, as so much heroic-narrative framing.
What follows theorizes two heroic-narrative frames. It theorizes first a “good American” frame, within which Zeitoun manifests as a yeomanly, socially conscious Everyman. This is the narrative frame of Zeitoun as beneficent paterfamilias, “pouring himself a glass of orange juice … passing through the kitchen now, kissing the girls’ heads” of an average pre-Katrina morning (Eggers, Zeitoun 17-18). It is a frame that accommodates as well Zeitoun as the bootstrapping American Dream model of thrift, grit, and pluck: the contractor who tries to instil fiscal responsibility in his own workers, that is, “the knowledge that if they saved a few dollars a week, they could live well” (29).
Theorized second is a “good Muslim” frame. Within contemporary critical discourse, the “good Muslim” notion originated in 2005 with Mahmood Mamdani. Mamdani argues that after 9/11, both then-President Bush and “regular accounts” in the New York Times et al. propounded a “good/bad Muslim” paradigm. Within this paradigm, good Muslims were modern, secular, and westernized, and (in the paradigm propounded by Bush) were obliged “to prove their credentials by joining in a war against ‘bad Muslims’” (Mamdani 13, 22). That they were expected to do so both publically and willingly becomes clearer in Sunaina Maira’s breakdown of the good Muslim trope:
“‘Good citizenship’ is performed by Muslim American individuals and organizations in a variety of ways, testifying loyalty to the nation and asserting belief in its democratic ideals, often through public testimonials … By definition, ‘good’ Muslims are public Muslims who can offer first-person testimonials, in the mode of the native
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informant, about the oppression of women in Islam (et cetera).” (634- 5)
Though Mamdani and Maira were writing in the Noughties, the good Muslim trope not only had currency in the West pre-9/11 — being applied to Sunni Iraqi allies during the 1980s Iran/Iraq war, as discussed by Karim H. Karim — but also has both entered and retained currency within discourse today, including this very discussion. Within the good Muslim frame, Eggers’s Zeitoun manifests pre-Katrina as the paradigmatic good Muslim. He is typically patriotic, and Eggers frames any irritation Zeitoun does have with the West as an understandable lapse in otherwise wholly commendable patience: “he was so content in this country… but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves? ... When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion?” (47). He prays, but he is not forthright about it: a discreet Friday jumu’ah prayer here (38), a family- dinnertime Koranic lagniappe there (48). His Islam influences him, but not unduly beyond secular Western mores.
As important as these frames to the present discussion is Zeitoun’s featured New Orleans. Eggers’s city functions actively within his framing-narrative practice, as a hothouse of character: it hones Zeitoun’s heroic profiles across their respective frames. Crucial to its functioning so is how it “abstracts” from historical reality this text’s secondary subject: the historical “state of emergency” in New Orleans during and after the week of Katrina, within which state the real Zeitoun underwent his travails.
Immediately before and throughout the week of Katrina, New Orleans existed within a de jure state of emergency, an umbrella term comprising the suspension of civil liberties; the subordination of civil to martial law (curfews, the authorized shooting of looters); the enforcement of emergency response plans (for example, obligatory evacuation); the deployment of federal and militaristic bodies (FEMA, National Guard) within the post-Katrina city; and the challenging of state by federal authority, that is, of Louisiana Governor
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Kathleen Blanco’s by President George Bush. Notwithstanding the clear contextual import and overlap, the salient thing here is the subsequent argument about Zeitoun made in what follows: where the real immediately post-Katrina New Orleans existed within such a state, then Zeitoun’s New Orleans symbolizes within itself that state of emergency, and is a symbolic site of such emergency, or of what is here termed “critical statehood”.49 This process of abstraction essentially is the theorized Dorian mode of representation as manifested in Zeitoun; and the critical statehood thereby inculcated within Zeitoun’s New Orleans cultivates that site’s essential Dorian energies.
Besides being the source of the text’s state-of-the-nation Geist, the theorized critical statehood functions within Eggers’s fictionalizing framing practice. Although the above suggests a single statehood within the theorized symbolic site, this discussion actually theorizes two different iterations of said statehood: two “critical states” (“critical” as in “crisis” as in “synonymous with ‘emergency’”). These are namely a state of ideological conflict between liberal individualism and institutionalism; and a steadily intensifying state of gracelessness. These critical states manifest respectively within the good American and good Muslim frames theorized above, and each hones one of Zeitoun’s heroic profiles. In its thus conditioning an enhanced heroic character as a crucible of critical states, Zeitoun’s New Orleans finds its full Dorian “special significance”.
What follows shall discuss first the critical state that is the state of conflict between two ideological “-isms”, and how it hones Zeitoun’s good American profile. These “-isms” are identified here as liberal individualism, coded positive in the text’s terms; and institutionalism, coded negative. In the main, this critical state of conflict manifests in Zeitoun’s detainment-narrative
49 Cf. Christopher Lloyd, who brings Agamben’s “state of exception” (via Butler’s critique of its universalizing tendencies) into his discussion of a “Southern bio-politics” in Zeitoun and other texts, and of their attention to dead black bodies. Lloyd, esp. 160-1 re: Zeitoun as homo sacer. 52 period: the period beginning after Zeitoun’s being detained within postdiluvial New Orleans by Greyhound agents (180). Certainly in the preceding postdiluvial period, good-American behaviour on Zeitoun’s part abounds: shuttling neighbours to safety (114, 147-8, 165-6); feeding abandoned dogs (131, 138, et al.); making routine reconnaissance of overpasses (135, 146, et al.); and faithfully phoning Kathy every day (133, 139, et al.), all reflecting the productivity, routine, and diligence idealized within the classical bootstrapping American Dream narrative. A conditioning critical state of conflict between “-isms”, as theorized above, can also be identified: it is one cultivated by Zeitoun’s remaining at individual liberty in New Orleans despite conflicting official, or institutional, evacuation orders. Only within the Greyhound-Hunt complex, though, does the theorized critical state of conflict reach its apogee.
Within the good American frame, Greyhound and Hunt compose a dispiriting showcase of institutionalized malpractice. Greyhound’s agents, National Guardsmen deployed to New Orleans, intimidate Zeitoun both verbally — in terms of “barking admonitions” and/or “barking orders: ‘Hold still!’ ‘Stay there, motherfucker’” (218, 222) and provocative sotto voce accusations of their “being Taliban” (223) — and physically, whether through rectal exam (227) or “pausing meaningfully” in front of Zeitoun’s cell with a German shepherd (230). The guards at Hunt, meanwhile, remain at best diffident about Zeitoun’s rights — offering a “cursory shake of the head” to his request for a phone call home, for example (253) — and at worst as hostile as the guards at Greyhound: “Why the fuck you eyeballing me?” asks one representative figure (256-7). Notorious historical detainment institution Guantanamo Bay, meanwhile, becomes a pointed narrative motif: “just like Guantanamo, all prisoners could be seen by anyone” (237); “was it so improbable that (Zeitoun)… might be taken to an undisclosed location… To Guantanamo Bay?” (264).
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Against this backdrop institutionalism, and certainly earlier on in his detainment, Zeitoun manifests as a classically good-American idealist. His processing therein having not been as “simple and fair enough” as he had earlier anticipated (220), Zeitoun wakes in Greyhound nonetheless “convinced … that today would bring a return to reason and procedure” (235). Even as he reconciles himself otherwise, Zeitoun keeps faith that, whatever its ignominies, Greyhound remains an aberration of federal procedure: hence Zeitoun’s capacity for ingenuous optimism never quite deserts him, and hence his capacity to be “struck by … this level of professionalism” upon his arrival at Hunt (251). Again, though, his hope that “standard procedure — a phone call for the accused — would be observed” proves similarly fleeting, leading to the epiphany iterated most powerfully at p.273: “But now nothing worked. … The police, the military, the prisons … were devouring anyone who got close… This country was not unique. This country was fallible.” This passage strikes clear chords of liberal individualism, and functions as a good-American casus belli, whereupon Zeitoun becomes an active individual agent challenging institutional bodies (a makeshift court- room at Hunt) for liberty on bail. Immediately before that passage, moreover, Eggers rehearses textbook civil liberties debates in the trappings of internal monologue on Zeitoun’s part:
That four men were occupying a house [in the week of Katrina] … was worthy of investigation, he conceded. But there had been no investigation. There had been no questions, no evidence seized. … [He] knew the stories. Professors, doctors, and lawyers had all been seized and disappeared for months and years in the interest of national security. Why not a house painter? (262, 265)
In this way institutionalism and liberal individualism come into conflict in the detainment narrative, and cultivate the theorized critical state.
As this critical state of conflict intensifies, during the Greyhound period, Eggers bedecks the narrative background with supplementary good-
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American aesthetic touches. A mural at Greyhound upon which Eggers’s descriptive eye lingers at p.224, for example, groans, in Eggers’s description, with state-of-the-nation symbolism: “there were many depictions of the suppression of peoples — Native Americans, slaves, immigrants — and always, nearby, were … the instigators: wealthy aristocrats in powdered wigs, generals in gleaming uniforms…” (224). An account of Greyhound guards’ pepper-spraying a young man “stunted … at no more than five or six years of age” (242), meanwhile, as witnessed by Zeitoun from his cage, clearly figures in the narrative as a good-American narrative figure. Nothing compels this damaged young man’s appearance in terms of plot progression: he exists to enable Eggers to moralize in free indirect fashion: “that he had to watch [the pepper-spraying] … was punishment for the other prisoners, too. It diminished the humanity of them all (246).”
As the narrative moves into Kathy’s attempts to secure Zeitoun’s release, the theorized critical state of conflict becomes newly potent at plot level, and finds new figurative currency. The makeshift “kind of courtroom” in which Zeitoun attempts to secure conditional liberty on bail (288) becomes a symbolic battlefield between the identified -isms; and Kathy’s attempts to wrangle information from the Hunt and New Orleans District Attorney institutions, a secondary skirmish (see phone conversations at 280-1, 289-90). At Hunt, meanwhile, Zeitoun hears from fellow detainees how — increasingly improbably, increasingly outrageously — they ended up his peers. Unduly denuded of liberty as they are, these disproportionately punished shoplifters and public nuisances (260), plus the septuagenarian whose full farcical detainment Eggers relates at p.269, appear as so many casualties of the theorized conflict of -isms. Thus the theorized critical state abides throughout the latter detainment narrative, abating only upon Zeitoun’s release (298-9).
Thereafter comes Zeitoun’s extended epilogue (set in 2008, circa the original time of publication), which may be saliently commented on in two regards.
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First, it is this ex post facto period wherein the theorized critical state of conflict can be most clearly seen to have honed Zeitoun’s good American profile. However ravaged by his detainment, Zeitoun in 2008 is back contracting better than ever, having “restored 114 houses to their former states, or improved versions thereof” (333). In the epilogue’s closing lines, too, Zeitoun exhorts the importance of a yeomanly kind of work ethic, and of the need to “get up early and stay late, and, brick by brick … get that work done” (335). Second, the theorized critical state does not, as it were, simply dissipate away in this narrative period. In the epilogue, Eggers expands his perspective from his Syrian-American subject to behold and inscribe a North America outside New Orleans. At this point, Eggers may be usefully quoted at length about narrative world-building in Zeitoun. Discussing the text in general, Eggers says:
I cut a lot of passages that I was tempted to include. There were long passages about the contracting business, long passages about the Iran-Iraq war, long passages about the history of FEMA and Homeland Security. But I was determined to keep the focus on Abdulrahman and Kathy, and to avoid inserting my own thoughts about New Orleans or FEMA or Bush. So I had to keep it focused on what they knew and what they saw and felt. (Eggers, “Interview” 63)
In the epilogue, nevertheless, such socio-political contextual passages abound. Eggers’s remit expands to include the construction of Camp Greyhound by inmates of Louisiana State Penitentiary (320-1); testimonials to legal enforcement mal/practice in the week of Katrina (312-16); and the Department of Homeland Security’s pre-Katrina research on “‘possible terrorist exploitation of a high-category hurricane’” (317-9, quote at 318). In both these listed passages and those Eggers excised can be detected ideological interests in society, justice, and social justice, whether at home, abroad, or in the critical state of conflict between -isms that, within the good American frame, this narrative’s New Orleans symbolizes within itself.
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This discussion theorizes second a steadily intensifying critical state of “gracelessness”: a term chosen for the salient religious connotations of “grace”, and which comprises both the “falling-from-grace” state of Eggers’s immediately post-Katrina New Orleans, and the absolute gracelessness — crass, instrumentalist, and above all anti-Islamic — of the Greyhound-Hunt complex. This critical state hones Zeitoun’s good Muslim profile: what follows details how.
In the first instance, the immediately post-Katrina New Orleans presents in generically “graceful” terms. Eggers vamps on the “stillness” and “novelty of a new world” with “new physics”, in which Zeitoun “could be an explorer … see things first,” and subsequently in which, even amidst an ever “dirtier … mélange of fish and mud”, three “ethereally content” horses still chew grass at inner-city intersectional islands (104-5, 165). Precisely that adulterated mélange, though, attests to New Orleans’s steady “falling-from-grace” after Katrina, as do the emergence of marauders (139) and the remains of crashed rescue helicopters (175). Attesting too to this falling-from-grace is the corollary honing of Zeitoun within it as a Godly advocate, a “good Muslim in the desert” figure. Zeitoun is certain, the omniscient narrative voice declares, that “he had been called to stay, that God knew he would be of service if he remained”, and that “God had waited to put him here and now to test him in this way”: meanwhile, visions of Koranic passages recounting the flood of Noah dance in his head (120, 163, 177).
Two of the featured flashbacks, meanwhile, draw explicit attention to Zeitoun’s devoutness, both physical (his “always testing himself, seeing how much his body could do” swimming in a seamen’s shipboard swimming-pool three hours nightly: 155) and intellectual: “’Any vessel, any carrier of humans, needs a captain,’” the younger sea-faring Zeitoun philosophizes to a Greek captain “taken with the beauty of the metaphor” (164). The Koranic excerpt Zeitoun recalls here, as well, advances on preceding excerpts in terms of narrative import: no generic prayer here, rather the particular and pertinent al-Haqqah, about the “roaring, raging wind compelled” against sinful Islamic 57 milieus “for seven uninterrupted nights and eight days,” leading to the Koranic equivalent of Noah’s Ark (169). It can be readily imagined how the prayer intimates ideas of falling-from-grace. In this way, the theorized falling- from-grace state hones Zeitoun’s “good Muslim” profile.
Within the wholly fallen Greyhound-Hunt complex, an absolute gracelessness finds lease, and manifests in the main as crass anti-Islamism. Not only are both Zeitoun and Nasser denied MREs without pork in Greyhound, obliging them to live on crackers alone (233, 238, 248); the textual body itself twice alienates Zeitoun and Nasser’s ritual performance of prayer and frontier wuduu (ceremonial cleansing, albeit with dust in the narrative circumstances) into its own two-sentence paragraph (see 235, 45). Amidst other, more prosaic sacrileges, such as another full-body exam (270-1), guards at Hunt label Zeitoun with bisexuality: “the guard … raised his eyebrows and nodded over to Nasser. … ’I thought that was against your religion anyway’”, which “implication … enraged him” (256-7). Thus the theorized gracelessness accrues special symbolic currency as crass anti-Islamism within the “good Muslim” narrative frame.
Against this absolute gracelessness and crass anti-Islamism, Zeitoun’s detainment manifests as a metaphorical martyrdom. “Was this imprisonment God’s way of curbing his pride, tempering his vainglorious dreams?” Zeitoun wonders explicitly at one point (274). Ostensibly while Zeitoun recalls Koranic referents for “the grim nothingness of his surroundings” at Hunt (254), meanwhile, Eggers quotes the full al-Takwir, “The Darkening”: the most pertinent featured prayer yet, and one that foregrounds the inspiriting “strength amidst suffering” sentiment (formulation mine) of martyrdom. Indicative quotation follows (translation Eggers’): “When the sun is darkening, when the stars plunge down … when the Garden has been brought close, every soul shall know to what it is prone … Your companion is not one who is possessed (254-5)”. And with the subsequent and final featured prayer, at the end of his detainment there,
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Eggers figures Zeitoun’s martyrdom directly and defiantly against Hunt’s gracelessness as embodied in its agents:
A guard was calling to him [about his release]. The guard can wait, Zeitoun thought. … He continued his prayers.
You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help. Guide us to the straight way …
Zeitoun continued his prayers until he was finished. The guard waited silently. (298)
Something similar in sentiment inspirits the final passage of the narrative entire. As the narrative eye withdraws from New Orleans c.2008, the omniscient narrative voice merges with Zeitoun’s reported voice in ineffably prophetic mien: “And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith? … Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light” (334-5). Happily for the paradigmatic secular Westerner, though, the prophesized message here is essentially a non-contentious carpe diem. Throughout the “good Muslim” narrative frame, then, Eggers’s Zeitoun remains a conscientious, neither radicalizing nor radicalized, and paradigmatically “good” Muslim — however intense or crassly anti-Islamic his surrounding state of gracelessness becomes.
Manifested twofold across the narrative’s heroic frames, to summarize, one symbolic site of emergency bas been identified — a site within which the historical post-Katrina state of emergency is symbolized as one of two critical states, which in collective turn cultivate and condition heroic character. Its critical statehood is what constitutes the Zeitoun New Orleans’s essential Dorian element; and as far as said city constitutes a Dorian “site of special significance”, its critical statehood, conditioning exceptional heroic character
59 as it does, is whence derives its specific “special significance”. It is secondarily worth reiterating here, too, what Zeitoun’s media character is, namely so much heroic-narrative framing of the text’s basic biographical narrative. Ultimately, though, Zeitoun’s media character inheres in metaphor and thus remains modest.
If anything, the media character of Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters (2005), this chapter’s other Dorian text, is even more modest. Music journalist and adopted New Orleanian Tom Piazza’s love letter to New Orleans is, moreover, a veritable minnow in the Lake Pontchartrain of New Orleanian letters. Nevertheless, the text merits attention as the first extended prose work of Katrina culture: a conscientious rhetorical broadside against those, such as then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who publically questioned the merit of New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The analytical interest here lies less in aesthetics or characterization, as in Zeitoun, than in voice, and tone, and Piazza’s address.
Why New Orleans Matters: “Benjaminian city”
Defining Matters’s form briefly gives one pause: it is neither a series of essays nor an autobiography in the traditional senses, and is ultimately most neatly categorized as “personally involved reportage.”50 This term, too, speaks to the nature of Matters’s media character. Sue Robinson, in an article previously cited, compares and contrasts official and “citizen” kinds of journalism. The former comprises the usual suspects, outlets, etc.; the latter comprises ordinary people and moonlighting journalists putting their own immediately post-Katrina testimony online, typically on message boards and blogs. Citizen journalism, Robinson concludes, thus became less a public sphere à la Habermas than “a public place of private remembering” (807-08). This privacy-in-public formulation characterizes Matters: a text two-thirds
50 See Piazza’s own use of the term to describe George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier in relation to Matters: Piazza, “Tom Piazza on writing fiction under duress.” 60 personally informed apologia — the bulk of Part 1, in which Piazza recalls eateries and Jazz Fests of past experience — one-third outwardly directed polemic: the bulk of Part 2, in which Piazza excoriates inter alia those who would rebuild the city as a gambling-industrial Jazzworld (Matters 155). Within this, in part, lies Matters’s faint but still discernible media character.
Matters’s media character inheres also in its practice of advocacy, which recalls similar practices within Katrina media coverage. After Katrina, notes Ron Eyerman, reporters such as Anderson Cooper and Shepherd Smith moved from witnessing and the dispassionate recounting of facts towards advocacy practices: empathizing with victims and “offering powerful social criticism” (138, 145). Similarly, Piazza balances the profiling of musicians (e.g. Fats Domino, at 69-71) and recounting of restaurants (19-20) with advocating for precisely Why New Orleans Matters: its having “shaped much of the best of what we think of still as American culture” (xvii); its importance to oil, shipping, and import industries as a port city, and those industries’ need for “an efficiently functioning port” (158). Meanwhile, as reporters began increasingly to emote and express frustration on air throughout the week of Katrina, so Piazza rails against those who question the merit of rebuilding New Orleans: those “able to think only in terms of dollars and cents … who have mortgaged their souls for a short-sighted self-gratification” (160-1). And by inserting himself into his featured New Orleans— in his use of the indeterminate “you” and personal recollection (“Back when I first started coming to Jazz Fest” at 66, etc.) — Piazza recalls Jeanne Meserve and Mark Biello: CNN reporters whom Bernie Cook lauds for their venturing into immediately post-Katrina New Orleans by foot and boat, recording live street-level rescues, and “revealing the lived experience” of Katrina (14).
What, to return to the primary theoretical regard, of Matters’s featured New Orleans? As in Zeitoun, the city exhibits a Dorian mode of representation: a mixture of profanity and the poetic-metaphysical, and a creative abstraction of the city into a site of symbolic significance. Certain sentences mix the profane and the poetic-metaphysical in self-evident ways: “New Orleans is a
61 city of elegance, beauty, refinement and grace. It is also a city of violence, poor education, and extreme poverty” (76). After Piazza’s initial return to post-Katrina New Orleans, meanwhile, he finds a makeshift café offering beers, sandwiches, and the “sound of welcome, the New Orleans sound … and if that sound and the feeling could be rekindled in the midst of all that chaos, then I know New Orleans had a chance” (135-6, emphases mine).
More significant in the Dorian regard, though, is Matters’s “religiosity”, its spiritualistic Geist. Certain elements of Matters’s religiosity are readily evident. At the end of chapter 2, Piazza discusses explicitly the nature of Catholicism in New Orleans (inter alia its proximity to syncretic African traditions: 34-36). Throughout, too, words like “sacramental” (22), “spirit” (51, 66), “fountain of life” (98), and “covenant” (144)/ “tangible incarnation” (143) recur persistently, albeit typically in theologically denuded fashion. Elsewhere, Matters’s religiosity is more ineffable: a matter of tone rather than lexis. Piazza’s description of a typical jazz funeral comes to mind, particularly this summative statement: “In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God’s sake” (31). What this religiosity points to is Matters’s abstraction of New Orleans into what is here termed a “Benjaminian city”. In its turning material city into poetic-metaphysical urban experience, and obituary into encyclopaedia, Matters’s treatment of New Orleans recalls that of nineteenth-century Paris in Walter Benjamin’s seminal Arcades Project. The “Benjaminian treatment” of subject — the refraction of subject through dialectical, phantasmagorical, and encyclopaedic prisms —essentially is the Dorian mode as manifested in Matters; and from it, Matters’s New Orleans derives its Dorian “special significance”.
Benjamin’s Arcades, to summarize its salient aspects, was intended to be that author’s magnum opus addressing the birth of capitalism in nineteenth- century Paris (as Benjamin theorized it), and particularly within that city’s
62 shopping arcades. In practice, Arcades went unfinished in Benjamin’s lifetime, and remains, in essence, so many notes, catalogues, and interjected thoughts. Formally, Arcades is hard to categorize. Benjamin’s own term for Arcades’s form was “literary montage”, but some of Arcades’s subsequent commentators have utilized ideas of the encyclopaedia: Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, for example, claim that Arcades “can be read as an encyclopaedic narrative of everyday life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris” (288). As regards genre, Arcades is perhaps best described in one word as “allegorical”: consider J. M. Coetzee on Benjamin as the “esoteric reader of an allegorical city” (60). Finally in its salient aspects, Arcades’s inspiriting impulse may be identified as an attempt to recreate a lost paradise. “Two books,” to quote Coetzee, “served Benjamin as models: Louis Aragon's A Paris Peasant, with its affectionate tribute to the Passage de L'Opéra, and Franz Hessel's Strolling in Berlin, which focuses on the Kaisergalerie and its power to summon up the feel of a bygone era” (57).
In its formal hybridity as “personally informed reportage”, non-contiguous chapters, and focused summoning-up of pre-Katrina New Orleans, Matters has three broad similarities with Benjamin’s text: with its montage form, constitutive Konvolutes, and urban-historical focus respectively. As Arcades immortalizes nineteenth-century Paris for a modern audience, moreover, so Piazza, defying the immediately post-Katrina commentariat, refuses to administer last rites for New Orleans in Matters. The crux of a concerted Matters/Arcades comparison, though, and what justifies such a specific comparison, is the applicability to elements of the one text Matters of two key concepts in the other text Arcades: the “dialectical image”, and “phantasmagoria”. These elements, moreover and crucially in the present theoretical regard, catalyze a Dorian “enchantment” of New Orleans in Matters: a phenomenon more readily evidenced than it is explicitly defined.
One of Arcades’s most famous passages concerns the “dialectical image”. To quote Benjamin: “image is that wherein what has been comes together in a
63 flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill” (précis in Coetzee 59). Dialectical images, in other words, replace the linearity of past leading to present with the simultaneity of past existing with present. To this conceptualizing of time, Piazza’s handling of time in Matters can be readily compared. “Dialectical” in nature, for example, is his handling of the old, classically exceptional tropes of New Orleanian timelessness: “a thereness and nowness that hovers above the street” during Mardi Gras (105); and his medievalist description of inner city “fiefdoms of graft … dukedoms and baronets controlled by drug dealers” (87). Dialectical too is Piazza’s handling of time in Matters’s Jazz Fest chapter, in which he intercuts an account of a prototypical day at each event — “Before you arrive [at Jazz Fest], you have probably circled acts. … Sooner or later, you will get very hungry. … Maybe late in the day you will finally work your way” (59, 63, 69) — with flashbacks to his own historical memories of such days (66-9, 71-3). What can finally be considered “dialectical” is Matters’s motivic blending between past and present tenses in chapters one and three. In chapter 1, then, what begins as an extended flashback to Piazza’s first time in New Orleans bleeds into present-tense ruminations, as of halfway down p.17, marked only by a standard paragraph break:
The next morning I went back there for breakfast and had eggs and grits and confirmed my previous night’s estimation of the place. [BREAK] New Orleans, as everyone knows takes its food seriously. And food is tied up with all the rhythms of life in the city.
In chapter 3, meanwhile, a general discussion of music and Mardi Gras Indians bleeds increasingly into flashback. A chapter spanning pp.37-55, to run the numbers in this regard, is punctured by flashback at pp.43-4, 47-51, and 52-54: increasingly so, that is, as one progresses towards p.55.
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Another key concept in Arcades, and the second salient one here, is “phantasmagoria”. Coetzee, writing on Arcades, perhaps summarizes the term most succinctly:
The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in commodities. In their ensemble these constitute a phantasmagoria, constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and offered to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest desires. (58, italics mine)
To Arcades’s conceptual line in the mutable and synesthetic category “phantasmagorical” can be compared Matters’s mutable and synesthetic aesthetic line, wherein “music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from food” (23). What follows identifies a systematic “synesthetic style” in Matters, contiguous in its character with “the phantasmagorical”, and comprising five stylistic techniques.
The first technique is the crafting of clauses into juggernaut sentences, moving from one stimulus or sensation to another between clauses. In the below examples, this movement occurs in sensual terms: from touch to sound to taste, say; or from sound to sight to touch; or sight to smell to touch. The salient elements are italicized:
You could bring them to zydeco night at Rock ‘n’ Bowl, where a live band plays for dancers up on the mezzanine level while people bowl happily a few feet away, or to Snug Harbor to hear Ellis Marsalis play piano, or you could even sit them down at one of those cramped counters at Central Grocery and put half a muffuletta sandwich and a Barq’s root beer in front of them … (xix)
The sound of a brass band flares up behind you and a marching band approaches in full cry, accompanied by one of the city’s many marching
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clubs decked out in full regalia, matching suits, bright and beribboned sashes across their torso, waving brightly colored matching feathered fans and cutting steps that would humble any dancer … (58)
… the people who saw all that [which happened after Katrina], who smelled all that, even as they were sustaining their own traumas, people who walked through the streets crying, holding onto small children, or who swam through oil-slicked, sewage-filled water … (141)
The second technique is the listing of evocative names of, variously, Jelly Roll Morton recordings (39); Social Aid and Pleasure clubs “with names like the Moneywasters and the Treme Ports and the Scene Boosters” (26); and foodstuffs including cochon de lait, crawfish sacks, and snowballs (63-4). The third is the crafting of sentences that progress along unpredictable and incongruous lines, as below:
Across the infield and through the African-village style stalls, past the blacksmith who is already set up in his own little corral, a Cajun band is playing at the Fais-Do Stage … (60)
It is good to take out a little breakfast from the Williams Food Market right to the corner and eat it sitting on the curb, where someone will ride up on a bike dressed like the Archbishop of Canterbury and greet you and you will realize that it is your dentist. (100)
The fourth technique is the crafting of a semantic field of “synaesthesia”. This field inheres foremost in direct derivations of its keyword: “cultural synaesthesia in which music is food, and food is a kind of choreography” (33); “the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthetic transformation of materials” (25). Secondarily, this field includes figures of mutability and heterogeneity. Mardi Gras becomes “the multifarious flow of chance and felicity, of music and motion” (99); a jazz
66 funeral, a microcosm of “simultaneous modes” of emotion (curiosity, morbidity, joke-telling) (28); and each of certain classic jazz recordings, “a whole world in itself, a miniature society of contrasting musical personalities” (40).
The last of these techniques is Piazza’s habitual foregrounding of “tactility”. In his description of a Red Cross camp, for example, the abstract becomes tactile: said camp’s existence becomes “a balloon that inflated, and then deflated”; the movement of diasporic citizens becomes their “seeping into communities like rain into the ground” (149). At p.129, perhaps most notably, Piazza exploits the tactility of the reader’s copy of Matters for enhanced direct address: to imagine his flooded house, he counsels the reader, “take this book, place it in a sink filled with water and leave it there for a week and a half. … Immerse [your other books] in a mixture of water, urine, spoiled food …” (129).
Through its handling of time and synesthetic style, in summary, Matters effects a Benjaminian treatment of New Orleans that can be considered its Dorian mode of representation. As far as Matters’s New Orleans itself is a Dorian “site of special significance”, it is more precisely a “Benjaminian city” whose “special significance” derives from its namesake treatment; a city comprehensible only through phantasmagorical, dialectical, synesthetic, and allegorical prisms.
1 Dead in Attic: “deteriorated psycho-scape”
Thus the chapter turns to Locrian texts. Although it attends primarily to how the Locrian mode manifests within these texts, this discussion attends secondarily, and more so than with the Dorian texts above, to the secondary theoretical regard of media character. Generic “media characteristics” — “live-ness” (Bernie Cook’s term); the use of archival footage and interview; “edited-ness” — feature and are reflected variously across Locrian texts. In
67 what follows, these generic characteristics are enfolded into analyses of texts’ more particular media characteristics, which are also the more salient ones in the Locrian regard.
Crucial to the media character of Christ Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic (2007), hereafter Attic, are the text’s origins in print journalism. Attic started as a series of weekly columns written by New Orleans Times-Picayune journalist Chris Rose about his post-Katrina existence up to January 2007: these columns were subsequently collated into the text Attic. These origins in commercial print news media are what distinguishes the one exercise in personalized advocacy, Attic, from the other, Matters, as discussed above. Distinguishing Attic from Matters further, in further media-characteristic fashion, is Attic’s line in media-characteristic “quickness”.
“Quickness” as understood here is an umbrella term for the compression of facts and profiles, for headlining and ticker-taping purposes; the speed cum incessancy of the 24-hour news cycle; brevity; and the non-revision or correction of earlier inaccurate reportage.51 “Television very rarely returns to revisit a report,” notes Cook (5): “once broadcast, television news is hard (if not impossible) to call back or redo” (118).52 Such issues in “quickness” are especially salient vis-à-vis disaster-oriented media coverage. “The event- centred focus of coverage,” opine Robert Miller and Andrea Goidel on news organizations’ information gathering during natural disasters, “means that news media generally cover the breaking news and developing events quickly” (272). “Television news,” Bernie Cook writes meanwhile with regard to Katrina, and particularly with FOX News in mind, “was moving towards amateur Internet journalism in rushing to air stories based only on rumours” (88).
51 Re: speed, see Cook 5, on how the 24/7 cable news cycle encourages speed over analysis; and 126, on how television news “works to construct “live-ness” as a claim to authority. As a result, television news prioritizes the moment and the future over the past.” 52 Cook lingers in this regard on a particular report re: an incident on New Orleans’s Danziger Bridge: 113-118. 68
Attic possesses a cognate “quickness”. Although Piazza produced Matters in impressive time, roughly 6 weeks, he nevertheless revised it along the way; it underwent the conventional publishing and editing process; and it was conceived as a discrete entity. By contrast, each constitutive column of Attic was written in a week, with minimal opportunity for extensive revision; and even though Attic comprises specifically selected and arranged columns, a sense of restlessness — a incessant darting-about of narrative attention — runs throughout the text as one reads it. Precisely that “weekly column” format, too, serves to compress the text into x hundred word—column bursts. Thus Attic accrues a media-characteristic “quickness”, completing the inventory of its media character.
In the first instance in the primary theoretical regard, analysis must begin with Attic’s form. As intimated above, Attic is a concertedly constructed text, constituted by specifically selected articles from Rose’s original series. Thus Attic differs in certain crucial ways from Rose’s original journalistic dispatches, not least its eschewal of the original chronological publication of said columns. Rather, a thematic ordering principle holds, with columns ordered into groupings oriented around children and young people (“The Ties That Bind”); events, festive and sporting (“Things Worth Fighting For”); exercises in creative writing (“Misadventures in the Chocolate City”, including a mock pitch for Survivor: New Orleans and an imagined conversation between Rose, God, and Martin Luther King), and place (“Love Among the Ruins”, in which five columns are what are here termed “discursive walking-tours” of given areas: these will be returned to presently). Within and across these groupings, chronology is loose. Although most individual groupings proceed essentially chronologically, there is habitual jumping-around between months (and seasons, in “The Purple Upside-Down Car”). Habitually, too, one grouping will begin at some point before the last article of the previous grouping: “Purple” starts in March 2006 where “Ruins” ends in August 2006, for example.
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Differentiating Attic further from its source material is its stronger sense of narrative. That is to say, where Rose’s original series of columns registered it in unpremeditated real-time, Attic “narrativizes” Rose’s psychological deterioration. Insofar as Rose’s original series revealed retrospectively its having gone “from grey to brown to black” by late 2006, as Rose figures the series’s mood-color spectrum in his October 2006 column “Hell and Back” (330, italics mine), Attic weaves blackness more concertedly, and premeditatedly, throughout itself. It builds up to Rose’s being clinically diagnosed with depression, as recounted in “Hell and Back”, as another, more fictive narrative might build up to a “big reveal”.
Rose’s psychological deterioration as it manifests at the narrative level, to progress to the salient theoretical point, is whence Attic’s featured New Orleans derives its “darkness” as theorized. More precisely, Rose’s deterioration manifests as a darkening of the lens — that is, Rose’s own eyes and ears — through which his readers see Attic’s New Orleans. It manifests too as Rose’s recounting voice’s becoming brusquer, more depressive, and more “damaged”: in a word, “darker”. Thus Rose’s deterioration as manifested at the narrative level essentially is the Locrian mode of representation as manifested in Attic, and cultivates a Locrian compound of depressive affect and “damaged” aesthetic. As this deterioration process progresses, Attic’s New Orleans emerges as a “deteriorated psycho-scape”: a cityscape that registers, and renders readily perceptible to Attic’s readers, Rose’s deteriorated psyche post-Katrina at given narrative points, as well as his psychological deterioration throughout the narrative. In the cityscape’s implication thus in Rose’s deterioration, from which implication it derives its depressive and aesthetically “damaged” qualities, the Locrian character of Attic’s New Orleans inheres.
How, then, does Rose’s deterioration manifest itself at the narrative level, as an intra-narrative process within Attic? Initially, it does so in a “group context”, that is, in showcasing Rose’s depressive feelings only amidst those of others: the “civic life-support system” of the “Elephant Men” (Rose’s
70 term), post-Katrina returnee stoop-sitters who gather nightly (48); the “fidgety, glassy-eyed” pharmaceutical med frenzy of the general populace (51). When Rose does discuss his own compromised emotional state, any moments of vulnerability are styled as transient: see his admitting to being “filled with anxiety” about his family’s returning to New Orleans, only to be resolved, by the column’s end, in their being with him as “part of the solution” (93); see also his having merely to “take a few days off” from reporting, after a stress-induced blackout (115). Simultaneously throughout that 2005 period, though, the seeds are sown for a more sustained and significant collapse: his inability to stop “just driving randomly around”; his cri de cœur, following the suicide of a fellow Elephant Man, for a higher power to “turn this movie off; I don’t watch to watch anymore” (63); and his nearly assaulting a man for dropping litter in a parking lot: “‘It matters!’ I said again — as if he hadn’t heard me the first time — and then I just stood there in a forwardly lurched position” (108).
After the narrative enters 2006, Rose’s deterioration intensifies as an intra- narrative process. Increasingly, the narrative evidences Attic’s “depressive affect”: the narrative affect derived from Rose’s intra-narrative deterioration. Certain articles stand out in this regard for their titles alone: “Funeral for a Friend”, Rose’s recounting of a jazz funeral he encounters by chance; and “Mrs. Ellen Deserved Better”, a eulogy for one of his earlier interviewees which becomes an exercise in self-abnegation: “she had made a great impact on my life, but in my typically self-absorbed way, I never really kept in touch”; and versus “her Zen-like appreciation for the beauty, power, and grace of life,” we are told, “I was pretty much a wreck” (262). And in articles like “The End of the Line”, one of Rose’s discursive walking-tours, the wry, wisecracking recounting voice that typifies earlier Attic gives way to one much more muted, more blankly and baldly regarding:
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“I pass two old men sitting on their stoops, one white, one black. Their imperceptible nods — the slightest tilt of the jaw — are the only signs that they are alive …” (202)
And thereafter:
“Back on the bus route, riding up Desire, more wasteland. You know the drill: Piles of household debris. The occasional FEMA trailer. All the houses bearing the inscription of our loss …” (204)
Even outside these examples, Rose’s deterioration ruptures into any and all columns as depressive affect, and does so increasingly as Attic progresses. Alongside further episodic spikes of anger (about a dishwasher dumped into a pothole: 160+), Rose begins breaking into spontaneous “crying jags” in public (134-5). Increasingly, too, a sustained misanthropy, going beyond an individual or individual episode to encompass multiple events and individuals, emerges in the text. It emerges in Rose’s article about the gun- blighted post-Katrina homecoming second line parade, and the “disconnect between my value system and the culture of guns” among a younger “predatory generation” unabated by Katrina (224); and it emerges in his excoriation of the “arrant dreck” (311) filling the letters page of USA Today, that is, readers’ criticism of post-Katrina municipal investment in the Superdome. As well as anger and misanthropy, Attic’s depressive affect presents in ancillary part as paranoia: Rose’s opposition to a nebulous “them” in earlier chapters (for example, “the people who simply don’t give a damn” versus those “busting their butts every day”, vis-à-vis the dumped dishwasher episode: 162) devolves latterly into the tonal and syntactical anxiety attack of pp.274-5: “From now, I don’t care what THEY think. THEY think we’re drunk, insouciant … if you watch cable TV coverage of Mardi Gras, THEY would have you believe that’s US” (274-5).
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Rose’s deterioration manifests at the narrative level not only in strains of depressive affect, but also in imagery, for example, in metaphors of headspace. Besides self-evidently salient references to the “two bit- predators in my head” (228) and to how a given obituary “just sits in your head” (291), the “headspace” figure undergirds Rose’s prima facie locational use of “place” as he refuses to entertain thoughts of those who, during the week of Katrina, were “in Lakeview or Lower Ninth or Chalmette or… well, I’ve had enough of those horror stories for now. I don’t even want to visit that place today” (137). Increasingly, too, Rose concludes articles with tableaus of himself at psychically potent moments: at the piano, trying to “find… just a slight phrasing that’s not about this [experience]” but finding instead that “nothing comes. Not a single note” (199); by the Mississippi, “asking it: Will you kill us one day? Is that your plan?” as the river “seems to whisper to me: That is for you to find out” (191); and on route to a “bounce” music gig, telling himself, “If I don’t feel better after doing this … I am irretrievable” (269). As thus evidenced by these tableaus and burgeoning misanthropic and paranoid tendencies, to thus take stock of our discussion so far, Rose’s deterioration as an intra-narrative process can be seen to cultivate the depressive affect and “damaged” aesthetic of the Locrian mode.
Hitherto, this analysis has focused on the lens through which we see Attic’s New Orleans; but what of Rose’s direct discussion of that city? The salient columns are what were earlier termed Rose’s “discursive walking-tours”: those articles in which the Rose avatar physically moves around a region or neighborhood within the city (Mid-City, for example: see “The Muddy Middle Ground”, pp.172-5), or traverses the entire city, for example, along the old Desire streetcar line (“Misery in the Melting-Pot”). Three tropes in particular recur across these walking-tours. They rescale New Orleans through the depressive perspective, magnifying the minutiae of objects and lives. In addition, they evidence New Orleans as a psycho-scape in a deteriorated “psycho-state”, and attend to “place” as lived and deleterious experience.
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First, Rose trades frequently in images of debris on the streets: a mound of garbage bags in a playground in the 13th Ward (232); “carpet, plaster, furniture, and televisions, lots of televisions” (177), “lawn mowers stacked up on the sidewalk” (179)/; “napkins, envelopes … the ubiquitous tumbleweed of downtown New Orleans” (202); and a boat called Zombie deposited incongruously on an inner-city roadside (206). Such images of debris are as so many visual symptoms of a general “deterioration”.
Second, Rose consistently associates areas with their inhabitants’ week-of- Katrina travails. He associates the 8th Ward, for example, with the Mardi Gras Indians evacuated from there after Katrina: “apparently, a lot of (them) are from there. Or were from there; I’m not sure what the proper terminology is” (59). Elsewhere, he associates “homes in Gentilly” with holes hacked through their roofs “from the inside with an axe … through which people sought escape” (57), and East Lakeside with the travails of his friend Renee Peck, whose “front door portico was found two streets away” (170). He predicates his account of the Mid-City neighborhood on his “looking for my friend Tracy”, post-Katrina condition ultimately unknown after Rose finds his house “empty. Clean out. No trace of life” (174); and his attendant account of Mid-City is rooted in bars and institutions with strong personal associations: most saliently, his spending 1992’s Hurricane Andrew “at the Red Door (bar), grabbing buck-ten-cent Carlings” (173). In these ways, Rose’s walking-tours attend to place, if not as experience per se, at least vis-à-vis individuals’ lived and deleterious experiences within it.
Third, Rose’s discursive tours contain several stylized tableaus of New Orleanians “standing out”, both in the landscape and in extremis. Thus we find the elderly Clara Hunter watching “from her front porch… the boulevard before her, silent but for speeding” (179); a reverend and repairman restoring a classic Hammond organ outside the “unassuming brick façade of the New Light Baptist Church” (203); and “the man named Dooley … eating lunch out of a Rally’s bag” in his “unmarked green tin” Auto and Wrecker’s
74 premises (177). In a synthesis of our first and third identified tropes, moreover, Rose’s walk down the Desire streetcar line yields one Willie Gordon, inhabitant of an abandoned corner lot turned “artful junkyard” where “yard umbrellas and tarp make his shade”, and which “stunning spectacle breaks the pale and dusty horizon” (207). Besides attending again to place as lived and deleterious experience, all these tableaus suggest some quality of “starkness”: of a subject against their surroundings, or of said subject’s social situation. Such starkness, I would suggest, is of a piece with the vertiginous emotional exposures of the depressive condition. In various ways, then, these tropes evidence New Orleans as a deteriorated psycho- scape.
Tropes across other non—walking-tour columns supplement these processes of “psycho-scaping”. In a column of late 2005, Rose waxes rhetorical about the anonymity, the unknowability, of the archetypal and unknowably “distanced” Katrina victim, personified as “1 Dead in Attic”: “Who grieved over 1 Dead in Attic, and who buried 1 Dead in Attic? ... I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic” (58). This same column trades latterly in Chernobyl-style imagery: scattered Mardi Gras Indian costumes are “like the first flowers to bloom after an atomic explosion” (59), and the Indians’ history is “now but a sepia mist over back-of-town streets” (60). Bookending and contrasting with the face-to-face quotidian encounters of Rose’s Desire line tour, meanwhile (including Willie Jordan and the rocking reverend), Rose figures and “distances” intrusive and institutional parties in phenomenological or empathetic regards: the repair crews on rooftops, reduced to the “ubiquitous pneumatic tat-tat-tat of roofing nail guns” (202); and Common Ground volunteers “dressed in space suits, and doused in patchouli, gutting out the ruins” of Claiborne (208).
At this juncture, prior to discussing the climactic tranche of Attic, the characterization of the Locrian mode in Attic hitherto must be honed; for it does not boil down entirely to the process of “deterioration” evidenced
75 above. The Locrian mode does not wholly preclude altogether lighter touches of local color, and indeed may juxtapose “darkness” with the same. In turn, amidst the grey and the black, there are brighter phases within Attic’s mood-color spectrum. What follows discusses these brighter phases in terms of “local color”: a generic term for homegrown New Orleans culture, for whatever popular wisdom might understand to be “the insider’s” New Orleans.
Although eschewing exceptionalism per se, several articles in Attic do indulge in local color. Certainly, Rose’s earliest articles remain rooted, in their perspective/sense of subjectivity, through Rose himself. Subsequent articles, though, constitute character profiles that capture Rose’s local subjects as much as they showcase Rose himself. Initially, these subjects are cut from the cloth of overt eccentricity: a “consummate, isolated cat lady” with thirty- four pets (110-2); the waiter who gathers magnets from dumped refrigerators after Katrina and attaches them to his car cum “rolling art installation” (116-8); and a Yuletide fraternity of “Drunken Santas … spreading the cheer” through seasonal pub-crawls (124). Presently in these profiles, though, eccentricity gives way to the quotidian: artists turned post- Katrina house painters (250-2); first responders falling in love (253-6); and garrulous women’s hairdressers (235-6). The immediate pertinence of their doing so aside, these latter articles so indulge localism that Rose’s recounting voice could be replaced readily enough with that of another wry, wisecracking white Everyman without making much difference to one’s experience reading said articles on their own terms. The point being, within these identified articles, Rose’s deterioration is a passive narrative element: local color punches through the grey, eclipses the black.
Although “local color” is not “exceptionalism” per se, one might understand as “exceptionalist”, in a generous interpretative sense, Rose’s penchant for capitalized nominative abstracts: his references to Katrina as “The Horror” (84), “The Aftermath” (33, 45, 250), and/or “The Thing” (247-8, 281); his
76 mapping of the “Avenues of Despair” and more in the “Teardrop City” (20), or “Sorry Town” (77), or “the Katrina Zone” (238). Another reference in that latter regard, the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (28), reflects another penchant for making pop-cultural, typically genre-fictional references: to The Outer Limits (53), The Twilight Zone (55), When Harry Met Sally (114); 24 and The Wire (166); Animal House (235); and Bad News Bears/Rocky (300), among others. These outré, literarily “colorful” penchants may be understood to cultivate a contiguous exceptionalist kind of rhetoric.
That the above examples range across Attic is important: this evidences how, for much of Attic, depressive affect remains in rough narrative equilibrium with local color. Up to the start of the antepenultimate grouping, this is to say, Attic attends to neither decisively more than the other: a grouping might balance two depressive columns with two discursive exercises in local color. Nevertheless, as theorized earlier in the Locrian regard, darkness still subsumes brighter moments in Attic overall: depressive black subsumes local color. As regards what determines this, what follows ventures that the course of Rose’s deterioration — that is in essence, the standard course of clinical depression — models, and mutatis mutandis essentially is, the course of narrative progression in Attic.
Said course is modeled self-evidently enough in the “peak and trough” progression between depressive and non-depressive columns (exercises in localism inter alia) until the grouping titled “Things Worth Fighting For”. Most of this grouping is an optimist’s run of chapters: chapters concerning Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, and the New Orleans Saints’ first post-Katrina football game, wherein Rose expresses sentiments such as, “I hear Al “Carnival Time” Johnson calling my name, and I shall answer the call” (273); “… a really good day at Jazz Fest. To hell with The Thing. Let’s party” (283); and, after a Saints win, “I declare: It is good to feel like a winner” (306). After this run, though, and culminating “Things Worth Fighting For” entire, “Eternal Dome Nation” plunges us back into depressive affect, representing as it does Rose’s irate
77 broadside against “demagogic arguments” decrying post-disaster municipal investment in Superdome events (313). Immediately after this, as the subsequent grouping-title puts it, we find Rose “Falling Down” still further. “Things Worth Fighting For” can thus be understood as an extended prelude to an extreme emotional fall: a classic development in the standard course of depression. Note too how the text implicates local color itself in the theorized process of darkness subsuming the exceptional. “Things Worth Fighting For” inheres as a grouping in accounts of events that, however well attended by tourists, are classically and characteristically New Orleanian. Local color as it thus exists in this grouping, then, intensifies the depressive lows plumbed in “Falling Down”: the local color of the one grouping accentuates the contrasting black of the other.
The Locrian mode of representation in Attic, to summarize the above analysis, is mutatis mutandis the post-Katrina psychological deterioration of Attic’s author Rose as it manifests within that text. The text realizes Rose’s real-time post-Katrina psychological deterioration as an intra-narrative process: a Locrian ”darkening” of tone, rhetoric, and the lens through which we see New Orleans both directly (in “discursive walking-tours”) and as lived experience on Rose’s part; and a process that, channeling the standard course of depression as it has been theorized to do, accommodates but ultimately subsumes Attic’s line in local color. Evidencing this process as it does is what renders Attic’s New Orleans a “deteriorated psycho-scape” as theorized, and is what affords it its Locrian character. Additionally, Attic’s media characteristics — its quickness and column format — should also be recalled here, given their secondary theoretical salience.
Trouble the Water: “raw conditional city”
The chapter now moves to its other featured Locrian text, and its first audio- visual one. Trouble the Water (released 2008), a documentary film produced and directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, documents the eighteen months
78 post-Katrina in the lives of a Lower Ninth Ward couple: Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott. It weaves professional filmmaking with both Kim’s home video footage of her week-of-Katrina experiences, and her and other parties’ further amateur footage of the post-Katrina period. Summarized succinctly, the film starts with Kim’s Katrina footage, documents the Robertses touring New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, follows them to Memphis as they consider starting over outside New Orleans, then follows them back to New Orleans as they decide to continue in that city after all. Along the way, Trouble attends to themes of citizens’ feeling “let down” by the government (Trouble 36:20), Lower Ninth disenfranchisement — “As long as they fix their downtown, they straight,” declares Kim at a late point (1:24:45) — and the difficulty of moving away from New Orleans without means or qualifications (1:20:30-1:21:16).53 As edifying as they are in these regards, though, Trouble’s themes and content are of less interest in the Locrian regard than its form and cinematography.
What follows argues that Trouble’s New Orleans is a city whose ravaged, raw condition after Katrina — that damaged, distressing, and ineffably Locrian condition — finds analogue in Trouble’s attention to the “raw conditional”. “Raw conditional” is understood here as a generic term covering both the material conditions of filmmaking — its practicalities and technicalities — and the rawness and inherent inelegance of the production process in sum. From evidencing the film’s attention to these raw-conditional elements, Trouble’s New Orleans derives its Locrian character; and that attention to the raw conditional essentially is the Locrian mode of representation as evidenced in Trouble.
“Rawness”, as a quality in this text, inheres in the reams of footage actually filmed mid-production and which, if retained in the final cut of a mainstream film, would have been cleaned up and digitally refined out of recognition to
53 Transcriptions are mine; times given in MM:SS and H:MM:SS format. 79 its origins in the daily “rushes”. This is not the case in Trouble, though. Repeatedly, the film returns to Kim’s home-video recordings of her immediately pre- and mid-Katrina experiences, splicing excerpts from those recordings into its primary narrative. Trouble thereby renders readily apparent, and indeed foregrounds, the differences in quality between Kim’s grainy, unrefined, inelegant footage and the cleaned-up, refined footage of a mainstream film release. Unlike that latter footage, Kim’s is distinguished by poor-quality torch-based lighting (14.50+, 18.40+), rain haze (15.45), light smears (19.09, 20.30+), under-saturation of exterior shots (20.02-20.30), severe pixilation of middle-distance landscape features (e.g. “STOP” sign at 32.50), excessive close-ups on arms (15.10+) and faces (21.44-21:54), and erratic Dutch-angle camerawork throughout. The key consequence of all this is that graininess, non-refinement, and inelegance — what may be generically termed “rawness”, or otherwise “an aesthetic of damage” — become associated, for Trouble’s viewers, with New Orleans.
Perhaps the film’s most distinctive feature is its attention to the conditions of filmmaking: the practicalities and techniques of the production and editing processes. Trouble’s attention to these conditions has a double significance for present purposes. First, it is inherently media-characteristic, insofar as it attends to the apparatus of filmmaking, and to Trouble’s own transmission or “mediation”. Second, Trouble’s attention to specifically its own making as a film has anti-lyrical, aesthetically “damaging”, and overall Locrian effects: ones of troubling the narrative flow, and of “damaging” the illusion of an autonomous diegetic narrative world. Trouble’s attention to its making is as so much Locrian gilt edging to its overall Locrian portrait of New Orleans.
More precisely as regards “the practicalities” of filmmaking processes, Trouble attends to the use and presence of cameras: those instrumental tools usually unseen and tacitly unacknowledged in the diegetic film milieu. Various shots of one Brian Nobles, however, expose them: Nobles is a friend of Kim and Scott’s who both films material and, in the salient shots, is seen
80 on ancillary handheld filming duties, weaving in and out of shots capturing his own film record. Such shots occur when Brian is in the Robertses’ car (12- 19+), in the Lower Ninth Ward (14.35, 36.42+), in a missing friend’s house (30.24), and walking around a local high school (36.42). Disrupting the viewer’s experience of Trouble as they do — disrupting the illusory holism of the viewed narrative, as tacitly indulged by the viewer — these shots cultivate a Locrian aesthetic of damage.
Trouble attends to practicalities otherwise, and to further “damaging” aesthetic effect, throughout its runtime. Media coverage of Katrina’s sister storm Rita, for example, is shown at a double remove, that is, as it appears in situ on the Robertses’ television set in their house in Alexandria, Louisiana (59:14-21; 1:00:09-11). Prior to seeing the salient footage, meanwhile, Scott and Brian are shown soliciting permission to film within one Frederick Douglass High School:
SCOTT: See that classroom with the windows boarded up back? ... I wanted them to, er, see where we stayed in the school for a couple of days. GUARDSMAN: Let me see if we can get our commanding officer out here. (37:50—38:00)
Twenty seconds of phatic talk follows — “we’ve come up from Oregon”/”We’re just glad you’re here now” — in an intra-narrative “waiting period” analogous to Scott et al.’s awaiting permission to film from the commanding officer, before the film cuts to the C.O. leading Scott and Brian up a staircase to the solicited classroom (38.20+).
In Kim’s home-video recording of traversing the Lower Ninth Ward on Katrina’s first anniversary, finally, the following exchange occurs:
Policeman drives up, sound siren. Kim et al. stop.
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POLICEMAN: Everybody [Kim, Kendall, et al.] on the vehicle… Turn the camera off… turn the camera off… KIM: We just doing our commemoration thing, man — (1:25:40-51)
And the camera cuts straight to black with a simulated “turning-off” sound effect (1:25:51), holding for three seconds before a “six months later” time- jump tag. These moments highlight some of the practicalities of camerawork: how it is practiced at a remove from the milieu it captures on film, in the Rita example; how its practice is contingent on being permitted, in the schoolroom and policeman examples. In thus exposing the practical wizardry behind Trouble’s diegetic curtain, and thereby “damaging” that curtain, these moments cultivate an aesthetic of damage.
As well as its practicalities, Trouble attends to and utilizes the techniques of filmmaking, in particular splicing: a technique intrinsically conducive to Locrian anti-lyrical and “damaging” aesthetic effects, continually interrupting and intercutting multiple reels of footage as it does. Splicing in Trouble occurs in relation not only to Kim’s home-video recordings, as discussed above, but also to archival Katrina media coverage. The featured coverage encompasses various canonical examples of week-of-Katrina iconography: Ray Nagin intoning the order of “mandatory evacuation” into a microphone; citizens in postdiluvial disarray; cutting-edge spinning discs amidst psychedelic colors signifying “emergency weather forecast”; and FOX network bulletins voiced over by Shepard Smith (41:40-42:00). As well as engendering depressive affect amidst affects of alarm and fear, such splices act as Locrian breaks to Trouble’s narrative flow: although it remains lucid and runs its course in essentially linear fashion, Trouble’s narrative is not lyrical, and indeed is anti-lyrical, and thus Locrian.
Subsequent instances of splicing serve not merely contextual purposes, but subtler ones of dramatic-ironic and “damaging” aesthetic effect. After the Robertses’ return to New Orleans in January 2006, and following Kim’s
82 upbeat pronouncements of New Orleans’s renewability — “I never thought they’d come back, but see: everybody’s here… that’s why I wanna be here” (1:21:35-45) — Lessin and Deal briefly take leave of them for a narrative interlude with the New Orleans Tourism Bureau. After espousing a somewhat myopic touristic-corporate line on post-Katrina New Orleans — “the French Quarter looks great, it’s really been cleaned up” (1:22:40-2), et al. — the Bureau’s featured interviewee introduces Trouble’s viewers to “a DVD we produced right before the storm… but everything in the DVD… is perfect, so we can still use it” (1:23:10-9). Lessin and Deal then splice said DVD footage directly into the narrative; and in its full-screen glory, we watch smiling African-American trumpet players, lip-syncing zoo-keepers, and sweeping pans of a sunny Jackson Square to the strains of “Do They Play Jazz in Heaven?” (1:23:19-56). Compared to that of Kim’s pronouncements, the “upbeat” tenor of the Bureau’s drumming-up of tourism sounds distinctly hollow: an effect enhanced when the film cuts to a rolling shot of the barren Lower Ninth Ward, filmed from a car window, over several seconds of which, incongruously, “… Jazz in Heaven” continues to play in the background. This extended splice is Locrian insofar as it damages “diegetic autonomous world” illusion, and as it “damages” the credibility of the Bureau’s “aestheticized” and prettified video in dramatic-ironic fashion.
Otherwise as regards techniques, Lessin and Deal utilize montage to varied Locrian effect. Although montage is a generic maneuver in twenty-first century cinema (and twentieth, going back to Sergei Eisenstein), all the notable montages in Trouble generate particular, depressive and anti-lyrical Locrian energies. The first of these is the Superdome/Convention Center montage (42:00+). Its Locrian depressive energies draw from the readily imaginable elements and imagery: rolling shots of citizens waiting outside the Convention Center, at long distance and in close proximity (42:00-44:00); of garbage bestrewn upon pavements (44:10-20); and of further, albeit fewer, dispossessed citizens on empty highways (44:35-45:00). Thereafter occurs the FEMA montage. Soon after arriving in Alexandria, the Robertses
83 visit a Disaster Recovery Center to try to collect their FEMA maintenance checks. Between their arrival and their ultimately abortive appointment, Lessin and Deal insert a montage of other people awaiting appointments: these anonymous subjects, six in all, look directly into the camera — in close- up, on their own, neutral in expression — for a couple of seconds at a time (56:00-24). As well as rechanneling the Superdome montage’s depressive energies, this montage works to Locrian effect through its inherently anti- lyrical breaking or “damaging” of the fourth wall.
Third comes the prison montage, accompanying the week-of-Katrina travails of Kim’s brother Kendall/Wink, who had been detained in the city jail over that week. This montage plies the Superdome/Center one’s trade in depressive and desperate imagery: prisons walls daubed with “HELP FOOD”, the guards, as Wink recounts, having abandoned the prisoners (circa 1:11:40); a bed-sheet rope dangling out of a third-story window (circa 1:11:55); and a mass of inmates crowded on a semi-submerged bypass, on which the camera pans out to conclude the montage by 1:12:30. Finally, and almost finally in the film itself, comes what is here termed the “summative rap” montage. Presently after Trouble’s final time-jump to summer 2007, a montage of landmarks in New Orleans plays out to Kim’s original rap track “Trouble the Waters”. Over each constitutive clip, Lessin and Deal superimpose a chyron of police tape, along which run various facts: “rents in the city have doubled and so has the homeless population”, for example, superimposed over a nondescript shotgun house (circa 1:28:59); or “thousands of livable public housing units are being demolished”, superimposed over a representative housing estate (circa 1:29:02). The conceit is as anti-lyrical, as artistically obtuse, as the content is dispiriting: the combined effect is clearly Locrian.
Overall, then, Trouble’s attention to the “raw conditional” cultivates all three qualities of the Locrian mode as theorized. Its attention to filmic techniques of montage and splicing cultivates depressive affect and anti-lyricism; both
84 this and its attention to the practicalities of its own making as a film cultivates an aesthetic of damage; and its attention to Kim’s “raw” amateur week-of-Katrina footage cultivates all three Locrian qualities. The film’s featured New Orleans, evidencing these strands of Trouble’s attention to the “raw conditional” as it does, thus becomes a likewise Locrian city. Enmeshed into all of this analysis, in the secondary theoretical regard, has been Trouble’s media character, nucleated in the film’s interest in its own mediation and mediating apparatus. It can be appreciated now, notwithstanding that they all do possess media characters, how much greater the media characters of the Locrian texts Attic and Trouble are than those of the Dorian Zeitoun and Matters. The ensuing chapter will bring this Dorian/Locrian divide in media character to light in Katrina group biographies. Still in this chapter, though, at this retrospective point, texts’ practices of recovering the victim must now be addressed.
Recovering the victim
Up to this point, texts’ practices of recovering the victim have been unaddressed in the chapter. At this point, with texts’ representational and media-characteristic intricacies having been established and clarified, texts’ manners of recovery are here identified in retrospect. What becomes clear here too, notably, is how Dorian and Locrian modes are instrumental to texts’ practices of recovery.
Besides its immediate involvement in Dorian texts’ representational practices, the Dorian mode is instrumental to those texts’ recovery work. Dorian texts’ manner of recovering the victim can be characterized as one of “enhancement”: one that creatively enhances or “heightens” — suffuses with symbolism so as to ineffably ennoble — the lives of Katrina victims and their common lived condition of “Katrina victimhood”. Instrumental to the enhancement of lives across all three Dorian texts discussed in this section, the two texts above and the one to come, is the Dorian mode. Its poetic-
85 metaphysical energies innately enhance both the Dorian cities wrought within it, and the case studies in victimhood amassed within those cities. Both Zeitoun and Why New Orleans Matters, it can be seen in retrospect, evidence case studies in this manner of enhancement. Through its heroic- narrative heightening or indeed “enhancement” of subject, story, and cityscape into the theorized site of critical statehood, Zeitoun ennobles both its protagonist qua Katrina victim and ennobles an experience of disaster bureaucracies, racial profiling, and postdiluvial hardship representative in its outlines, if not necessarily its peaks of unpleasantness, of many an ordinary Katrina victim’s. Through its stylistically “enhanced” Benjaminian treatment or “enchantment” of New Orleans, meanwhile, Matters renders all the more wretched, and empathetically compelling to Matters’s readers, a citizenry not just dispossessed but disenchanted of that city.
Besides its immediate involvement in a Locrian text’s representational work, the Locrian mode enables that text’s recovery practices. Locrian texts’ manner of recovering the victim can be characterized as one that “etches” chronicled lives into readers’ minds — one that etches the personal profiles of Katrina victims and the contours of their experiences into readers’ minds— in more vivid, more acute, and less readily forgotten fashion than an untreated chronicle could: a fashion that scours, so to speak, readers’ sensibilities. In all four Locrian texts discussed in this section, the two above and the two to come, the “etching” of lives is enabled by said texts’ shared Locrian mode. Both Attic and Trouble, it can be seen in retrospect, evidence this manner of etching their chronicled lives. By realizing Rose’s original series of articles as a testimonial cum confessional of his post-Katrina deterioration, Attic becomes an acutely affecting work of post-Katrina ecce homo. Attic, that is to say, puts its readers into the victim Rose’s headspace: its reordered “grouping” form throws its readers between points of post- Katrina space-time in a simulation of the mental disequilibrium attending Rose’s Katrina victimhood. Meanwhile, through its attention to the “raw conditional” — to unvarnished amateur footage, the working practices of the
86 production process, and variously disruptive techniques of treating filmic narratives — Trouble makes itself a commensurately more scouring account of Katrina’s un-glamorized, workaday, and displaced cum disrupted majority of victims: not least, of course, Kim and Scott.
Retrospectively, then, all four texts discussed hitherto evidences manners of recovery corresponding to their modes of representation. The next chapter will discuss further case studies in these mode-manner correspondences, this time within the specific sub-genre of narrative non-fictional Katrina group biographies. Immediately it begins, though, it must introduce a phenomenological quirk to how modes and manners are analyzed in the ensuing texts.
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Chapter 2: Group-Biographical Narrative Non-Fiction
In Katrina group biographies, the dual projects of “recovering the victim” and “representing the city” merge: recovery and representational practices not only interrelate, but integrate. For what preoccupies each group biography as much as New Orleans per se is New Orleans’s citizenry; and across these group biographies, the city is conveyed to the reader through a prismatic “group” of citizens. That a text’s dual practices “integrate”, then, is to say in elementary terms that a text’s representational practice takes as its raw material the victim-subjects of said text’s recovery practice, and thus operates in the citizen-territory of recovery.
Behind the thinking here is a hinterland of phenomenological thought. Phenomenological thinking informs also the works of previously discussed historians Peirce Lewis, Shirley Thompson, and Joseph Roach, whose works respectively invoke Paul Vidal de la Blache’s theorized “genre de vie” (Lewis 4, 171); Michel de Certeau’s notions of “frontier narration” and the “transgressive walker”, as a model for historical nineteenth-century real- estate Creole magnate Victor Lacroix (Thompson 284, 307); and de Certeau’s notion in another context of “pedestrian speech acts” (Roach 13). The phenomenological thinking that buttresses this chapter, though, is localized elsewhere around one of said school of thought’s Ur-figures, namely “the path”.
In his discussion of place as “historically contingent process”, structuration theorist Allan Pred utilizes the “path” to figure one of his discussion’s two crucial concepts, the biography. “The biography of a person”, writes Pred, “can be conceptualized as a continuous path through time-space, subject to various types of constraint” (281). What maintains place in Pred’s model, as he puts it further, is “the intersection of individual paths with institutional projects” (282); and an individual’s ideology/decision-making results from
88 their “uniquely accumulated path histories” (283). In terms of informing this discussion, though, the most useful formulation of the phenomenological path comes courtesy of Michel de Certeau. In his essay “Walking in the City”, de Certeau writes about the Wandersmänner, those ordinary citizens whose experience of the city defies the cartographical, rationalistic “Concept-city” (95), and whose mobile bodies collectively write, “follow the thick and thins of”, an “urban ‘text’” (93). De Certeau understands these bodies’ writing this text in terms of the path: “The paths that correspond in this intertwining … elude legibility” (93); “their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together” (97); “the art of “turning” [literary] phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path” (100).
Pace Pred, this discussion utilizes de Certeau’s formulation of the phenomenological “path”, both because it addresses notions of “writing a city” and given its salient relationship to “story”: salient, that is, with caveats. Although de Certeau certainly allows for cities’ telling and harbouring stories, and for walkers’ paths to write or (his word) “enunciate” a collective story, a single path itself does not enunciate its walker’s own story, or at least is not described as doing so by de Certeau. In this regard, without violating its original theorized parameters, this discussion embroiders de Certeau’s path as originally formulated.
Insofar as the phenomenological path finds analogue in Katrina group biographies, it does so in the “character narrative”. As understood here, a character narrative is that which incarnates, like a cable around a wire, the metaphorical “path” between two space-time points in an individual’s life: in this context, the life of one New Orleanian out of the featured “group” of a given group biography. The character narrative thus represents the crucial group-biographical “unit”: x number of character narratives constitute one overall group-biographical narrative.
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Crucially in the theoretical regard of “representing the city”, character narratives are understood here to map and compose a given text’s New Orleans rather as the paths of de Certeau’s Wandersmänner map and compose “the urban text”, and thus to essentially be that milieu at a phenomenological remove. The city exists, it might be said, as a collation of character narratives. Discussion of a text’s constitutive character narratives is thus understood to be discussion de facto of its representation of New Orleans; and a text’s treatment of its character narratives is understood to mediate its mode of representing the city.
In what follows, in the salient cases, the shorthand for “Locrian treatment of character narratives” will be “harrowing”: a term chosen for its Locrian connotations, that is, its connotations of both depressive energies — “harrowed”→ “distressed”→ “depressive” — and the practice of “harrowing” or “damaging” farmland to allow the uprooting of weeds etc. It might be more precisely understood to mean “the investiture of character- narrative texts, across their constitutive character narratives, with Locrian qualities”.
In addition to evidencing the theorized modes, these group biographies work also towards the ends of recovering the victim. All do so through treating a collated “group” of named Katrina victims and their individual “chronicles”. As ever, though, the manner in which each group biography treats their group in situ — whether it “enhances” or “etches” its group-members’ Katrina chronicles — changes depending on whether a text is Dorian or Locrian. More than that, as proposed at the top of the chapter, these texts’ recovery practices not only interrelate with their representational practices, but integrate with them. This integration occurs within a text’s treatment of its character narratives, its chronicles, in situ. This one treatment administers both kinds of practice: it is the means of a text’s recovery practice, of enhancing and etching chronicles in situ, and mediates the mode that enacts a text’s representational practice. To discuss the mediation of mode thus
90 opens a window into how that text recovers its victims, and how it enhances or etches its collated Katrina chronicles.
In a nutshell, what follows discusses Katrina group biographies’ exhibited modes as mediated through said texts’ treatments of their constitutive character narratives. It does so, it should yet be established, in terms of texts’ “modal operations”: the processes and practices, the specific courses of character-narrative treatment, whereby modes are mediated across these texts. To thus embellish the nutshell, what follows evidences texts’ modes by way of evidencing, namely, processes of “character-narrative interconnection” and “individuation” in one text, and “harrowing” practices in two other texts. Evidencing all this, furthermore and finally, evidences in large part these texts’ manners of “recovering the victim”. Integrated as modes and manners are, these texts’ modal operations enact their recovery practices essentially in toto: discussion of modal operations as follows thus equates in essence to discussion of texts’ enhancing or etching practices. What follows leaves the latter to be intuited from the former throughout.
Additionally, what follows evidences further the secondary theory of media character established and evidenced in chapter 2: that Locrian texts, namely A.D. and Levees, possess greater media characters than Dorian texts, represented in what follows by Nine Lives. What follows shall address this secondary theoretical regard at appropriate points in discussing A.D. and Levees, the real proofs of this theory.
Nine Lives
This analysis of Dan Baum’s Nine Lives (2009) unpacks said text’s dual Dorian processes of character-narrative interconnection and individuation. These processes are the two halves of Nine Lives’s treatment of its character narratives, and together, as the text’s “modal operations”, they mediate the Dorian mode in Nine Lives. What follows evidences these dual processes: in
91 so doing, it evidences too how Nine Lives recovers its victims, and how these processes enact essentially in toto the enhancement of nine chronicled lives less ordinary. Working as they do in the æther between character narratives in isolation and the text’s 320-page overall parent narrative, these processes engender poetic-metaphysical Dorian energies no less than they intuitively “enhance” Nine Lives’s chronicled lives: imbue them with an ineffable higher or “upper air” (→ Greek aither, “upper air”) of intrinsic import.54
Begging note from the analytical outset is that Katrina itself is not as important to Nine Lives as might be assumed prima facie. Katrina is not the crux, central element, or predominant context of the overall Nine Lives narrative: it is the climax, and thus is only of relative importance within the decades covered in the text. Certainly Katrina precipitated the writing of Nine Lives: an exercise in honouring New Orleanians that Baum considered both intrinsically interesting and necessary after Katrina:
While covering Katrina and its aftermath, I noticed that most of the coverage, my own included, was so focused on the disaster that it missed the essentially weird nature of the place where it happened. The nine intertwined life stories offered here are an attempt to convey what is unique and worth saving in New Orleans. (Baum, Nine Lives x)
Nevertheless, Katrina’s importance as a narrative element within Baum’s text is relative.
Nine Lives recounts its subjects’ lives from different points and years before Katrina up to different points in 2007, and offers a respectably representative cross-section of New Orleans. Broken down in turn by race, sex, and class, Baum’s nine lives comprise five black and four white
54 “Upper air” is meant to catch “higher” as is etymologically encoded into “enhance”. See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ether. 92 individuals; six men and three women, including one transgender woman who transitions from John to Joann Guidos halfway through the narrative; and two upper-, three middle-, and four working-class individuals.
Nine Lives’s constitutive character narratives enunciate sundry stories. The Guidos character narrative enunciates an archetypal story of self-discovery, wherein John’s teenage fetish for lingerie leads John through trans- subculture and surgery unto inner contentment as a gun-wielding landlady. A second character narrative enunciates a Bildungsroman wherein one Wilbert Rawlins, Jr. matures from emollient teenage musician into inspirational inner-city high school bandleader; another enunciates one Frank Minyard’s redemption from caddish Uptown gynaecologist into public coroner emeritus. One Belinda Carr’s character narrative, meanwhile, plays out to the Mills and Boon playbook: the story of a single black woman pursuing happiness in all the wrong places before finding — then losing, but regaining — a handsome civic-minded husband. With the African-American labourer Ronald Lewis, meanwhile, Baum begins and ends Nine Lives, within which interim the racially proud teenaged Ronald — “Mr. Earl, I don’t want you to call me Pluto no more,” he tells his after-school employer in a personal watershed moment (17) — becomes a prominent community figure in the Lower Nine, organizing second-line clubs and, by character-narrative’s end, establishing a Mardi Gras museum, the House of Dance and Feathers. Nine Lives’s remaining character narratives, limned in brief, enunciate charmed white child Billy Grace’s accession to the kingship of the Krewe of Rex; chronic petty criminal Anthony Wells’s unending ricochet between prison and New Orleans’s less salubrious reaches; a wife’s sideways history of local Mardi Gras Indian legend Tootie Montana; and policeman Tim Bruneau’s personal and professional travails on the New Orleans beat.
Such are Nine Lives’s character narratives, which, to rehearse the crucial theoretical contention, are understood here to map and compose Nine Lives’s New Orleans. As de Certeau’s city is a “practised place”, and
93 represents “the pedestrian unfolding of the stories accumulated in a place”, so Nine Lives’s New Orleans is a city that Baum’s nine featured citizens “practise” and “unfold” by simply living in it, and by living out the events or narrative “episodes” that accumulate into their Lives. Through the phenomenological alchemy whereby Nine Lives’s character narratives thus compose the text’s New Orleans, the previously identified processes of interconnection and individuation serve to mediate the Dorian mode in Baum’s text. The same processes, moreover, effect that “enhancement” of lives which is the Dorian mode’s concomitant manner of recovering the victim. What follows addresses first the interconnections Baum effects between the text’s constitutive character narratives, then Baum’s treatment of individual character narratives.
Nine Lives’s line in character-narrative interconnection is indivisible from the communion between “chance” and “the foreknown” holding court within the city. On the one hand, foreknowledge hangs over Nine Lives’s narrative: Hurricanes Betsy (1965) and Katrina (2005) bookend the narrative as the Scylla and Charybdis of a cyclical-historical timeline. Under the aegis of “the foreknown”, on the other hand, one reading the Nine Lives narrative might register, which is to say fancy that they register, the operations of an ineffable Chance: a conceit cultivated, this discussion suggests, by Baum’s practice of interconnection.
Although his character narratives are notionally unconnected — are merely routed through Baum, and reflective of Baum‘s ad hoc accretion of contacts in the real world — Baum makes discreet but persistent efforts throughout Nine Lives to fashion subtle but striking connections between character narratives. Beyond the Dorian timbre of the practice per se, of its constellating line in cross-cutting character-narrative serendipity, Baum’s fashioning of “accidental” connections between character narratives can be understood to aestheticize the aforesaid operations of an ineffable Chance: a aesthetic tactic both poetic-metaphysical cum Dorian in itself, and which
94 consummates the theorized poetic-metaphysical communion between chance and “the foreknown”.
A list of these connections follows. One James Brown, the brother of Ronald Lewis’s long-term girlfriend whom Ronald meets in passing (75), turns up presently working at Minyard’s coroner’s office (99), and latterly liaising with the policeman Tim Bruneau (199). Belinda marries one Lionus Jenkins (106) shortly before Ronald Lewis encounters one Derrick Jenkins (118), the former’s brother. During this latter encounter, Derrick produces one of the AK-47s (119) which fuel a murder epidemic discussed soon subsequently by Frank Minyard’s Coroner’s Office employees (124). From his Rex float, Billy Grace espies “a high-school band in green and orange uniforms… blaring its heart out” (167), which the careful reader will recognize as Wilbert Rawlins’s band from one Carver High School: “Carver’s colours were green and orange,” the narrative informs us during Rawlins’s first day working there (142).
The connections continue. As a young officer in New Orleans, Bruneau heads for “the only corner of the East that really rocked and rolled: the Goose” (154), where we often drop in on Anthony Watkins (as at 91-2, 139-40, 161- 2). Subsequently, in pre-Katrina 2005, Bruneau recalls the same St. Joseph’s Night riot between Indians and police that the Montanas hear about on the night itself through their son Darryl (198, 200). And Joyce Montana and Frank Minyard both frequent one St. Augustine Church in New Orleans’s Treme area, and share a contemporaneous chagrin at its shutting its doors after Katrina (296, 298).
More metaphorical “connections” between character narratives will also “prick” the attentive reader. Themes relating to the meaning of male beauty, for example, operate in both the John/Joann Guidos transition narrative as a whole and those episodes of the Montana narrative preoccupied with Mardi Gras Indian practices. See the following between Joyce and Darryl, after
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Tootie’s secession of his leadership of the Yellow Pocahontas Indian tribe to his son:
“Your suit was beautiful; everybody says that.”
“Thank you.” Darryl smiled his wise, sad smile. “But it doesn’t matter what they all say. I’ve never heard Daddy say, ‘You’re pretty.’
“He made you chief.”
“He didn’t say I was pretty.” (139)
Both Lewis and Minyard, meanwhile, in their respective moments of returning to barely postdiluvial New Orleans and manipulating insurance forms to Katrina victims’ advantage, formulate their actions as obligations to what they both term “my people”, namely the citizens of New Orleans:
That night he left Minnie alone—had to start sometime—and drove back down to Nicholls State University. Time to spend a night with my people, he told himself. … I am as responsible for these people as I am for Minnie. I got to get these people home. (250)
Frank took a pen from his shirt pocket and, finding the appropriate box on each [form], scribbled in it. “”I’m putting all of these [deaths] down as storm-related. These are my people. It’s the least I can do.” (304)
This Dorian process of interconnection between character narratives engenders Dorian energies, insofar as it can be conceived to consummate a poetic-metaphysical communion between chance and the foreknown. Throwing interconnecting tethers across these character narratives’ parent- narrative æther as it does, moreover, and thereby affording each character narrative an ineffable higher or “upper air” (æther → Greek aither, “upper air”), this process enacts one half of that Dorian “enhancement” of its chronicled lives whereby Nine Lives recovers its victims. 96
The interconnection of character narratives is one of Nine Lives’s Dorian practices; the other is what this discussion terms the “individuation” of certain character narratives. All Baum’s character narratives are individuated in part by their subjects’ sweeping character arcs, and drastic personal development over time: from Harley Street—style rakish doctor in 1965 to public coroner emeritus by the week of Katrina, in Frank Minyard’s case; and from meek teenaged male to gun-toting landlady, in John/JoAnn Guidos’. Additionally, though, Baum individuates certain character narratives in some significant regard besides that of their central character. These choice character narratives not merely tell special stories, but are themselves special in individual ways: they possess special significance within the overall Nine Lives narrative, hereafter “special intra-narrative significance”, as — listing them in order of subsequent discussion — Nine Lives’s “verbatim”, “revisionist”, “privileged”, and “dual” character narratives. As well as through the process of interconnection discussed above, Nine Lives’s Dorian mode is mediated through this second process: the individuation of character narratives to an “exceptional” extent, as it were, through the investiture of each with “special significance” within the parent-narrative ecosystem existing “around”, “above”, and in an overall Dorian “meta-” relation to said narratives.
Most obviously invested with Dorian-modal special intra-narrative significance is the Anthony Wells narrative: a narrative rendered in italics, and told verbatim by Anthony as transcribed by Baum in this indicative fashion: “Got into a little thing, so I was on probation, and once you on probation, man, they got you. Get a parking ticket, don’t see your parole officer, not working, any of that gets you picked up again” (60). Baum himself has accounted best for this verbatim approach to recounting Wells’s narrative:
I’d started out writing Anthony’s story in the same close third-person as the others, but realized that it was when Anthony was talking that
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the chapters really lit up. Finally I decided simply to get out of his way and let him do the storytelling. He hasn’t been all that good at anything else in his life, but he has a rhythm and poetry and sweetness in his storytelling that is absolute genius. (“Wells”)
What individuates the Tim Bruneau narrative, meanwhile, is how it functions as Nine Lives’s “revisionist” character narrative: the character narrative that plays alienated devil’s advocate to the goodwill expressed towards New Orleans elsewhere. Immediately it is introduced, the Bruneau narrative seems somehow alien within Nine Lives’s character-narrative family: it enters the overall narrative belatedly compared to its peers — at p.145, with the eighth character narrative, Rawlins’, having been introduced at p.58 — and begins not in New Orleans but “outside” it in Fort Polk, Louisiana. Baum works to alienate Bruneau himself from readers immediately they encounter him, too, as a blowhard “cocking his fists on his hips” who “really wanted… to kick some ass” as a policeman (145-6).
As his character narrative unfolds, Baum’s Bruneau exhibits much more disdain for New Orleans than his peers in other character narratives. What begins as a contained contempt for Sixth Ward denizens — “It’s always, Oh, Mr Officer, we got it hard. Oh, Mr Officer, I got the sugar and can’t work,” he thinks in free indirect narrative fashion (171) — becomes, three years down the narrative line in 2005, a contempt for the entire city: “Tim’s churchgoing, Republican, Texas upbringing told him that sooner or later, a city this slovenly would have to pay a price.” Those choice words “Republican” and “Texas”, too, crystallize Bruneau’s alien status in Louisiana’s historically Democrat city: a status reasserted after Katrina enters the narrative. Within the overall Nine Lives narrative, the Bruneau narrative emerges as the choice character narrative through which Nine Lives addresses the Monday of the week of Katrina: the day the levees broke, albeit at staggered points from sunrise to sunset. Seven of thirteen character-narrative episodes occurring on that Monday, 29th August (spanning 220-241) lead with Bruneau: Nine
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Lives’s alienated guide, it seems in situ, to a city becoming more “alien” with every passing hour in the week of Katrina.
Finally and fittingly in the revisionist regard, the Bruneau narrative ends with Bruneau’s absconding from New Orleans after Katrina, having become barely more enamoured with the city in the interim. Out of Baum’s nine, only Bruneau absconds the city at narrative’s end; and in a telling inversion of his belated narrative entry, Bruneau is the first of Baum’s subjects to “exit” the overall narrative, at p.292. Thus the Bruneau narrative functions as Nine Lives’s revisionist narrative, and accrues its Dorian-modal special intra- narrative significance.
Where the Bruneau narrative accrues its special significance as Nine Lives’s revisionist character narrative, the Ronald Lewis narrative accrues its own as what we might call Nine Lives’s “privileged” character narrative. The Lewis narrative owes its privileged status in one degree to the placement of its constitutive episodes within the overall Nine Lives narrative. Baum both begins and ends the overall narrative with Lewis-narrative episodes: the Lewis narrative thus becomes the character narrative most readily associated with the overall Nine Lives narrative. The Lewis narrative owes its status second to Lewis himself, who comes closest, out of Baum’s nine subjects, to embodying the archetypal New Orleanian: a middle-aged-to-elderly, second- lining, working-class, gregarious, community-minded African-American.
Crucial too to its privileged status is how the Lewis narrative speaks outside itself, to both the overall Nine Lives narrative and Katrina’s historical context, to an extent Nine Lives’s other character narratives do not. At the first significant narrative break, at the end of Nine Lives’s “Part 1”, Baum drops a Lewis-narrative episode c.1982 the final lines of which, in the reader’s historical hindsight, cast Katrina’s foreshadow over the hurricane’s Lower Ninth Ground Zero: “As the jobs disappeared, more men were spending their
99 days sitting on their front porches. … A shadow was falling across the Lower Ninth Ward, no question about it” (76).
In Katrina’s immediate aftermath proper, as Lewis visits a shelter in Thibodeaux, the Lewis narrative channels that discursive line which considers Katrina amidst historical traditions of African-American hardship: “The line of evacuees stretched back to the auction block in Jackson Square, the slave market in Cuba, the terrors of the Middle Passage” (246). Immediately thereafter, the Lewis narrative intimates in meta-narrative fashion at Nine Lives’s overall narrative form. That the real Lewis procured a tattoo of a “skull and crossbones, with the legend ‘RWL: 65-05’” in Thibodeaux need not be doubted; but that the Lewis of Nine Lives calls those numbers the “bookends to my life. Forty years apart. Betsy and Katrina” (246, emphasis mine) begs being read as a moment of meta-textual caprice on Baum’s part, given that Nine Lives’s very first episode is in fact an account, featuring a teenaged Lewis, of the day after Hurricane Betsy. In a subsequent and final salient moment of “speaking outside itself”, the Lewis narrative foregrounds Nine Lives’s key overall-narrative concepts of “home” and “being with one’s community” at another significant narrative break: that between Parts 3 and 4. That moment comes as, driving back to a still inhospitable post-Katrina New Orleans, Ronald resolves in free indirect narrative fashion that “I got to get to work. … I am responsible for these people as I am for Minnie, as I was for the men of my local. I got to get them home” (250). Thus the Lewis narrative functions as Nine Lives’s privileged narrative, and accrues its Dorian-modal special intra-narrative significance.
To finish discussing “intra-narrative functions” means queering the idea of “individuation”. For in this final case, two character narratives compose two sides of the same intra-narrative coin: the Wilbert Rawlins and Belinda Carr narratives, putting the point more precisely, work together, from halfway through the overall Nine Lives narrative, to tell a dual romantic narrative within the text. Their initial encounter, told from Belinda’s perspective,
100 draws Rawlins slowly from the hermeneutic sleeve: “a big man in an orange and green tracksuit” becomes someone’s old “frat brother from Southern” becomes “the band director from Carver” named, as he provides it finally to Belinda, Wilbert Rawlins (152-3). Thereafter, Belinda and Wilbert’s character narratives interweave so organically that following their first date as précised at p.156, the narrative reintroduces Belinda as Wilbert’s established wife in such glancing ex post facto fashion as even the careful reader could almost overlook: “[Wilbert] said good night [to his father] and drove home. Belinda was already asleep; he got into bed beside her. It was still dark when the phone rang” (165-6). Thereafter, one dual romantic narrative — following a familiar course of increasing estrangement, separation, and ultimate rapprochement — plays out from the alternating perspectives of Rawlins and Carr. Thus the Rawlins and Carr narratives function as Nine Lives’s dual narratives, and accrue their Dorian-modal special intra-narrative significance.
As well as telling a dual romantic narrative, the Rawlins and Carr narratives dually tell their readers about each other, insofar as they let us see their subjects from their specific subject’s partner’s perspective. From Belinda’s perspective, we see Rawlins anew as “kinda goofy” with a commensurately “goofy crooked, broken-toothed smile” (152, 156), and habitually “smiling so wide” or “lighting up with a smile” (191, 313). In the Rawlins narrative, in turn, the struggling single mother Belinda becomes newly and variously “severe and hip” (172), “regal in a suit and high heels” (195), and “incongruously elegant” in plum suit and skirt (285). Rawlins’s jocularity and Belinda’s sartorial éclat are not denied within their individual narratives, but nor are they that apparent in them. That they do appear in the overall Nine Lives narrative owes to the Rawlins-/Carr-narrative interweaving. In this way, the Rawlins and Carr narratives supplement their “dual” character-narrative status.
To summarize this textual analysis: the enhanced individuation of select character narratives, via the investiture of different kinds of special intra-
101 narrative significance, constitutes Nine Lives’s second Dorian process, and the other half of the text’s treatment of its character narratives. Alongside the previously theorized process of character-narrative interconnection, it mediates the Dorian mode in Nine Lives; and alongside the same, it enacts Nine Lives’s Dorian enhancement, and said text’s Dorian “recovery”, of its eponymous lives. In this way Nine Lives participates in Katrina culture’s overarching project of “recovering the victim”. Thus concludes discussion of Nine Lives’s representational and recovery practices.
This discussion turns now to Locrian group biographies: Josh Neufeld’s graphic-novelistic A.D.: After the Deluge (2009), and Spike Lee’s screen documentary miniseries When the Levees Broke (2006). In so doing, it brings to the theoretical fore the idea of “harrowing”: the investiture of texts with Locrian qualities: depressive energies, “damaged” aesthetics, and anti-lyrical stylistic elements. “Harrowing” is coined here for its dual connotations of depressive energies — “harrowed” → “distressed” → “depressive” — and the agricultural “damaging” of land so as to break up land and uproot weeds. Discussion of texts’ harrowing practices is understood here to mediate discussion of the Locrian mode as it manifests in those texts; and harrowing itself is understood to be a given text’s “mode-as-mediated”.
What follows discusses and evidences harrowing practices within A.D. and Levees. In so doing, it evidences too these texts’ manners of recovering their victims, and their “etchings” of Katrina chronicles. In these texts, the harrowing of character narratives, of “chronicles-in-context”, enacts the etching of chronicled lives essentially in toto, enveloping generic qualities of “recovering the victim” — conscientiousness, acuity, empathy — within itself. Even the name of the one is as an aestheticized form of the name of the other. Discussion of harrowing as follows should thus be considered discussion in essence, too, of these texts’ etching practices: what follows leaves the latter to be intuited from the former throughout.
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As with their authored peers, meanwhile and saliently in the secondary theoretical regard, these texts’ Locrian practices, in other words their particularized harrowing practices, are interrelated with their media characters. Indeed, the harrowing effects wrought upon A.D.’s character narratives map neatly over the text’s “media characteristics”.
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
Inspired by his time volunteering with the Red Cross in post-Katrina New Orleans, graphic artist Josh Neufeld collated five Katrina chronicles, spanning from summer 2005 to 2007, into his graphic group biography A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2009), shortened to A.D. hereafter. In terms of race, sex, etc., A.D.’s cross-section of New Orleans represents respectably enough the city’s demographic make-up, covering as it does Darnell and Abbas’s joint experience of waiting out the flood in a grocery store; one Denise’s “greatest hits” week-of-Katrina tour through the Charity and Convention Center; the student Kwame’s diaspora travels; the Pepys-like observations of one Dr. Brobson; and twenty-something white couple Leo and Michelle’s relatively quotidian experience of evacuation, return, and domestic reconstruction.
Certainly, A.D. has idiosyncratic aspects. Its graphic basis comes immediately to mind, which is still unusual enough in the cultural mainstream to be a “special” medium: “exceptional”, of course, is barely a semantic stumble away. In its own right, too, Neufeld’s graphic style is idiosyncratic. One might think in the first instance of Neufeld’s colour-coding the days which the A.D. narrative spans, so that Tuesday’s panels are apple green, Wednesday’s are light pink, etc. It is thus a style that does not distinguish between white, black, or indeed Middle-Eastern in the case of the Iranian Abbas: everyone becomes the colour of choice between narrative day-periods. As well as this, Neufeld renders mainly and merely the outlines of things, without much interior detail: another stylistic idiosyncrasy. “Special” too is the very group
103 of lives that A.D. chronicles. Although a smaller sample than Baum’s, Neufeld’s subjects possess on average more striking (→ “special”) personalities. One Denise, as rendered by Neufeld, typifies the “strong black woman” almost unto caricature. Leo and The Doctor alias Brobson, meanwhile, both colonize “eccentric white male” territory: both plump and bespectacled; the one a goateed comic and local music enthusiast (see 27); the other a “medical man-about-town” who hosts a hurricane party for fellow honorary libertines (prefatory Who’s Who page, unnumbered).
For all these idiosyncratic touches, though, A.D. remains a Locrian text: one that works to “harrowing” effect across its constitutive character narratives. The text’s doing so, furthermore and saliently in the secondary theoretical regard, draws indivisibly from its media character: its harrowing practices can be understood to map neatly over its individuated media characteristics. What follows formulates three “media-characteristic harrowing elements” within A.D., through which the text’s Locrian treatment of character narratives occurs. Taking these elements in turn, it explains how each works to harrowing effect across A.D.’s character narratives. Readers are reminded here that, as established at the top of the chapter, an explication of a text’s harrowing practices is also in practice, intuitively, a de facto explication of that text’s “etching” practices, and functions so here.
A.D.’s first media-characteristic harrowing element is its line in close-ups: whole- and/or double-page panels showing something in especial detail. Certain famous photos in Katrina media coverage exemplify the form: the photo of one Milvertha Hendricks, draped in a Stars and Stripes flag outside the Superdome, which photo bedecks the cover of early Katrina-critical anthology After the Storm; or the contemporary online meme juxtaposing two captioned news-media aerial shots — one of two white men wading through the water, another of a black man — so as to highlight the racially loaded use of “looting” in the one (black) context but not the other (Rivlin
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130).55 Two types of close-up in A.D. might be identified, the first being here termed “scenic”. Close-ups of this type establish urban-environmental disarray and depredation, in contexts public and private: the crowds at the Convention Center (122-3); the city under the approaching aegis of the hurricane proper (54-5); the flooded environs surrounding Abbas’s Uptown store (104-5); and the elevated view from Memorial Hospital (111). Before introducing A.D.’s subjects, furthermore, Neufeld dedicates twenty pages in media res to close-ups of the moment when the levees broke in New Orleans: these are still life waterscapes, rendered without third-person narrative exposition.
The second type might be termed “stylized”. Close-ups of this type try to connote trauma, woe, and terror (whence the Locrian feeling) in stylized/allusive fashion. In such close-up stylized fashion we see Leo floating in a symbolic stew of books (116-7); mosquitoes buzzing into the night as an unseen Abbas and Darnell try to sleep (106-7); Grand Guignol faces of citizens at the Convention Center screaming “THEY BROUGHT US HERE TO DIE!” (150-1: sic); and the blank-background rendering of a despairing male citizen proffering his daughter’s drained body to the narrative eye asking: “But … you gotta help me. … What am I s’posed to do with her?” (140-1). A.D.’s double-line in close-ups works to harrowing effect insofar as it brings character narratives to abrupt passes and thereby works to anti-lyrical effect upon cumulative character-narrative movement, and as it “damages” character narratives via consistent stop-and-start motion.
A.D.’s second media-characteristic harrowing element is its circumscribed interest in its subjects, that is, less in their lives per se than in — and only in — their week-of-Katrina travails. Where Nine Lives canters leisurely through its subjects’ pre-Katrina lives stopping at episodes quixotic and understated as well as critical, A.D. deals near-exclusively with hardship: Abbas’s
55 See Lightweis-Goff 157-58 for more re: Hendricks photo. 105
Robinson-Crusoe homage at his flooded grocery; Kwame’s and Leo’s journeys within the Katrina diaspora; and Denise’s experience awaiting aid at the Convention Center. Its approach to pre-Katrina backstory, in its “City” period, is limited to naming sundry unseen characters in assorted contexts and affording a couple of panels and speech-bubbles to its subjects’ closest family members: Denise’s mother, Abbas’s wife and daughter, Kwame’s father. The “City” period begins besides from only two days before Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. A.D. thus exhibits the same circumscribed interest in its subjects’ lives — that is, in their week-of-Katrina travails alone — as historical Katrina media coverage exhibited in the lives of New Orleanians en masse. More than that, as Katrina media coverage concentrated on New Orleans’s less and un-flooded Central Business District and French Quarter, and thus served to “circumscribe” its sphere of awareness, so A.D. concentrates on those areas in terms of sourcing its subjects: Denise‘s apartment, Darnell’s apartment (32), and Leo and Michelle’s house (35) are all explicitly located in Mid-City, and Brobson lives in the French Quarter. Latterly in the “Flood” period, too, A.D.’s sphere of awareness suddenly retracts so that the text concentrates on little outside central-city happenings, namely Denise’s experience at the Convention Center, which monopolizes pp.132-146 and 149-153 (immediately after which point A.D. progresses to the “Diaspora” period). A.D.’s circumscriptions work to harrowing effect insofar as they concentrate character narratives’ depressive energies, and as they circumscribe character narratives’ remit, thereby concentrating their Locrian character. Saliently in the secondary theoretical regard, too, such circumscriptions engender whole-textual qualities which might be considered cousins of “quickness”, the previously theorized ne plus ultra of media character: “cousins” such as brevity, skimming, and ellipsis.
A.D.’s third media-characteristic harrowing element is Neufeld’s inscription of himself qua journalist into the narrative. In the post-Katrina narrative periods detailing “The Diaspora” and “The Return”, we find A.D.’s subjects talking verbatim to a Neufeld avatar, which avatar we see conducting
106 conversations via e-mail and headset immediately each narrative period begins (155, 180). Thus A.D. becomes an exercise in direct address: notionally to Neufeld, effectively to the reader. The immediate Locrian import here is that this framing device enables the delivery, “to camera” as it were, of depressive commentary, wreathed in lamentation and confession: “We knew the apartment would be bad. We just had no idea how bad”: Leo, at 169; ”I think a big part of me was swept away in that hurricane”: Denise, at 177; and in 2008, “I lost three years. I look back and say, ‘Damn, I’m just where I was three years ago’”: Abbas, at 186. What makes this commentary particularly potent is not just the “direct address” factor, but that, at least in the “Diaspora” period, it is retrospective: it derives from a time after the travails rendered in that period have happened. It is a commentary of matured sentiments and energies, not raw, spontaneous, in-the-thick-of-it ones.
As well as enabling a depressive voiceover in this way, and thereby inducing commensurate depressive energies within the narrative, Neufeld’s self- inscription into A.D. qua journalist works to harrowing effect in two further ways. First, it “damages” the illusion of an autonomous i.e. “unframed” A.D.- narrative world; second, it wrenches lyrical narrative flow through its fixing of points in prolepsis, that is, at points in the post-epilogue, non-diegetic past from which, via the “interview” framing device, Neufeld’s interviewees recall the diegetic narrative events.
In the three delineated ways, in summary, A.D. works to media-characteristic harrowing effect across its constitutive character narratives: this, the present discussion holds, mediates the Locrian mode in Neufeld’s text. More than that, by dint of working in this way across its character narratives, its chronicles-in-context, A.D. enacts essentially in toto that etching of chronicled lives whereby it recovers its victims. On that note concludes discussion of A.D.’s representational and recovery practices.
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When the Levees Broke
Never knowingly insensitive to the African-American condition, popular emeritus of black cinema Spike Lee found in Katrina a muse. When the Levees Broke was the result: a documentary Requiem of the Katrina phenomenon. Over four hours on prestige American TV channel HBO, Levees tracked Katrina’s phenomenological wave from its twentieth-century root causes up to two years after the hurricane, up to Levees’s post-production and broadcast period. Critics heretofore have tended towards the holistic and macrocosmic: towards considering Levees as a non-episodic entity and discussing it in terms of “grand-canvas” themes, to wit: its drawing post- traumatic silence into public discourse through film techniques (Parasher); reaching towards transnational understandings of blackness in America (Hartnell “Levees”); its “powerful communication” and grand narrative of environmental injustice (von Mossner esp. 149, 152, 161); its vaunting of culture and cultural production as a sine qua non of “a way home, a way back to life” after Katrina (Cook 150); its being a “political documentary that witheringly criticizes” politicians and federal bureaucracy (Vest 150); and its self-reflexively interrogating and experimenting with documentary form (Cobb and Jackson 265).56 What follows takes a more micro-analytical approach to Levees, which is to say it analyses the text at the intra-narrative level of individual interviewees and isolated interludes, and proceeds from a methodological breaking-down, schematizing, and “mapping-out” of each episode of Levees.
Before any analysis of Levees’s harrowing practices, some lines should be spared on the text’s media character, in the section’s secondary theoretical regard. Where A.D.’s media character is readily divisible into media characteristics, Levees’s media character exists much more essentially
56 Cook’s discussion of Levees runs from this page to 172. 108 throughout the whole. “Essentially” is to say that unlike other texts, Levees evidences no explicit mediation through consciously self-documenting subjects — the Robertses in Trouble, Rose in Attic — or self-inscribing journalistic wranglers like Neufeld in A.D. Lee’s opus is an exercise in pure mediation, through clips, interviews, and archival media coverage alone. What this signifies is how essential Levees’s media character is to the text; and to how indivisible Levees’s media character is from discussing Levees in the first place. That Levees’s Locrian practices are media-characteristic, to make the key point in the secondary theoretical regard, is taken as an a priori given in the ensuing analysis of said practices, and is not expounded on at length hereafter.
Where Levees differs from Nine Lives and A.D. is in its sheer number of character narratives. The best way to approach Levees, then, is to look at its choreography of interviewees: at when interviewees appear episode-by- episode across all four episodes, both in their individual rights and within larger groupings of interviewees; and at how different voices combine and contrast to compose Lee’s “Requiem in Four Acts”.57 Its handling of voices, this discussion holds, offers the best framework within which Levees’s Locrian practices, which is to say its particularized harrowing practices, might be discussed. What follows identifies four formal components into which Levees’s choreography of voices, and its episodic bodies, can be dissembled. Each component works within the overall Levees narrative to its own, multipartite “harrowing” effect.58
The first component is here termed the “cluster”. A cluster is understood here to be a grouping of ordinary New Orleanians; and in formal terms, to be a run of consecutive interviews with at least three interviewees speaking in personal capacities on a foregrounded theme. Clusters abound in Levees’s
57 Levees’s subtitle. 58 As with A.D., what follows leaves the nature of etching in Levees, and the theorized components’ concomitant “etching” effects, to be intuited from the analysis of harrowing, and from said components’ harrowing effects. 109 first episode: across them, featured citizens describe their preparations for Katrina, their actions immediately the flooding began, and what they did throughout the week of Katrina. In subsequent episodes, the number of clusters per episode reduces on average from five to three. Across these subsequent clusters, one theme at a time, Lee’s featured citizens discuss: further midweek-of-Katrina happenings, particularly within surrounding parishes including Gretna (Levees episode 2, minutes 5-11), experiences of evacuation via Louis Armstrong Airport (E2 47-50), and their endpoints within the Katrina diaspora (E2 53-55); the cases for (E3 17-19) and against (E3 27-29) returning to New Orleans, as well as post-Katrina medication abuse (E3 49-52); and FEMA bureaucracy (E4 32-33), Lower Ninth redevelopment (E4 46-51), and the uncertainties cloaking their and their city’s futures (E4 56-58).59 From this overview alone, a couple of harrowing effects might be identified. Rather as oil refineries distil crude oil into its constitutive fractions — gasoline, kerosene, et al. — so the cluster component distils inter-mixed depressive energies into distinct strains such as attend given clusters’ inspiriting themes. By dint of breaking down character narratives into their episodic building blocks, meanwhile, clusters render character-narrative flow more discontinuous and ever less lyrical. Indeed, Levees’s clustering practice might be understood to “anti-lyricize” character narratives.
As a closer reading will show, though, Levees’s breaking-down of character narratives is a double process. Not only are individual character narratives broken down into discontinuous clusters: each cluster comprises a different sample of interviewees, and each character narrative is broken down across a different set of clusters. Put otherwise, Lee features and privileges different themes and elements of different Katrina chronicles.
59 All timings here and hereafter are given in simplified minutes. 110
Two interviewees Herbert Freeman and Mike Seelig, by way of comparative example, both feature in the cluster concerning interviewees’ pre-Katrina preparations (E1); but Freeman discusses his reluctance to return to New Orleans after Katrina (E3), and Seelig discusses midweek-of-Katrina happenings (E2), in clusters that leave out their fellow interviewee. Two further interviewees Cheryl Livaudais and Phyllis Montana-Leblanc, meanwhile, both feature in the “diaspora” cluster (E2); but where Livaudais features without Montana-Leblanc in a cluster concerning post-Katrina FEMA incompetence (E4), Montana-Leblanc features without Livaudais in clusters concerning interviewees’ activities in the week of Katrina (E1). All the while, and bouncing between those named above as they do so, Lee’s other interviewees plot their own unique courses between clusters: one Will Chittenden, chef, discusses midweek-of-Katrina happenings alongside Seelig and post-Katrina mental health issues alongside Montana-Leblanc; one Audrey Mason discusses her doubts about returning to New Orleans alongside Freeman, and her actions immediately Katrina hit alongside, again, Montana-Leblanc. Thus different character narratives are sorted into different sets of clusters, and thus Levees doubles down on its anti-lyrical treatment of character narratives.
Important to note too is how different interviewees come to the fore in different clusters. Seelig, for example, predominates in the cluster concerning midweek-of-Katrina happenings, ranging between himself, Jefferson Parish, and criminal elements in that period across three extended clips. An Upper 9th Ward couple, meanwhile, heads up the second-episode cluster concerning evacuation procedures at Louis Armstrong Airport; a Judith and a Henry Morgan (relation if any uncertain) voice choice broadsides against FEMA in the salient fourth-episode cluster; and one Tanya Harris takes center stage in the fourth-episode cluster concerning post-Katrina Lower Ninth Ward redevelopment: across three extended clips, she recalls telling her mother about the devastation of the family home after Katrina. The Locrian import here is that these “comings-to-fore”, circumscribing
111 clusters’ spheres of awareness as they do, localize and concentrate the depressive energies of given clusters’ featured themes.
The second formal component to be identified here does not operate on Levees’s character narratives per se: rather, it operates within the text Levees — harrowing Levees’s textual body, investing the text with Locrian qualities — so as to affect character narratives at a remove. This component is here termed the “tribunal”. A tribunal is understood here to be a grouping of professional New Orleanians, or more precisely, of citizens featured primarily in their professional capacity, as opposed to their personal capacity as dispossessed and desperate citizens. In formal terms, as with clusters, tribunals are understood to be runs of consecutive interviews with at least three interviewees on a foregrounded theme. Deployed lightly in Levees’s first episode — once to dismiss rumours of the levees’s having been bombed, again to limn the historical pre-Katrina Hurricane Pam simulation — the tribunal returns with a vengeance in subsequent episodes. Across the first half of the second episode (E2 12-27), Lee’s featured panellists play an extended blame game attacking NOPD chief Eddie Compass, the Bushes, Mayor Ray Nagin, and FEMA director Michael Brown for their week-of- Katrina failings.60 Further tribunals hold court on crime statistics, education, and encouraging evacuees to return (E3 esp. 30-34); and on the historical fallibility of the Corps of Engineers (E4 15-19), wetlands erosion and exploitation (E4 22-27), and the rationale behind post-Katrina damages lawsuits (E4 39-42).
Levees’s tribunals work to twofold harrowing effect. First, by dint of occurring between the theorized clusters, these tribunals further interrupt and “discontinue”, or “anti-lyricize”, the character narratives already broken down into said clusters. Second, as used across Levees, they are the aesthetic means whereby certain macrocosmic themes — pre-Katrina institutional
60 Spread out in E2 between minutes 12-27. 112 malpractice/negligence, week-of-Katrina culpability, post-Katrina social and environmental malaise — are disgorged, through the indictments and adjudications of Lee’s featured panellists, of their immanent depressive energies, which energies then diffuse into the Levees narrative.
Levees’s third formal component is here termed the “showcase”, which affords privileged minutes’ worth of attention to a particular moment in a particular character narrative. It might alternatively be understood to be a self-contained sub- or flash-fictional narrative involving a showcased interviewee. Showcases occur healthily across all four episodes of Levees. Instead of being listed in turn, though, these showcases might be better surveyed in terms of different showcases’ shared harrowing effects.
Certain showcases exude a distinct shared strain of depressive energy: a strain derived from showcased interviewees’ testimonials to deaths, in each case that of a family member, in the week of Katrina. Latterly in Levees’s first episode, for example, Herbert Freeman recounts at length his mother’s passing away outside the Convention Center: an account rendered the more affecting by Terence Blanchard piano-and-trumpet music on the soundtrack (E1 53-55).
Episode three ends on an extended interview with Kimberly Polk, circa three minutes, within which Polk recounts her child’s death-by-drowning through Katrina and subsequent funeral. On home video footage of this event — of Polk walking out of the graveyard, audibly inchoate with grief — the episode ends. Lee utilizes various techniques to fully extract the emotion from this showcase: sparse Blanchard piano music; close-ups on Kimberly’s teary face, mid-interview and mid-funeral service; and the camera’s transitioning from an interview with Kimberly to footage of Serena’s funeral via a cross-fade between framed photos of Serena: the one presented to camera by Kim, the other adorning Serena’s coffin (E3 53+).
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Thereafter in the fourth episode, young citizen Paris Elvin and a coroner bat back and forth an account of Elvin’s mother’s death: of Elvin’s finding her body in a supposedly vetted house; and of the delay in the body’s being examined post mortem and released for burial. Elvin expounds the above while one Dr. Louis Cataldie, coroner, provides contextual information about the coroner’s office’s basic inability to process bodies in an ill-provisioned post-disaster environment, inter alia (E4 22-5). In these three showcases, a distinct strain of Levees’s depressive energies might be espied.
Another set of showcases works to harrowing effect by way of cultivating a distinct aesthetic of damage: one rooted in the “showcasing” of the real, material damage incurred upon New Orleans by Katrina. Capping off a discussion of New Orleans culture mid-way through episode three, in the first instance, Levees runs footage of a one-man “jazz-funeral march” conducted by a trumpet-playing Terence Blanchard walking through the Garden District (E3 41-44). Initially, the damaged-aesthetic elements are of a terse, un-showy visual variety: mounds of detritus on the sidewalk; sticks and shells of houses; panning-shots of ravaged and houseless residential lots. Presently, though, the aestheticizing and visual cueing of “damage” becomes increasingly stylized. Increasingly uncanny close-ups occur: on home-made “JESUS SAVES” signs, then a dead dog hanging out of a window, then the face of a begrimed abandoned Barbie. Presently, too, voices of interviewees — Mackie, Givens, Robinette, the Harris family — emerge amidst Blanchard’s trumpet solo: voices that strike comparisons precisely in terms of material damage between New Orleans and post-WW2 Europe, Beirut, and downtown Jakarta, and that serve to supplement this showcase’s overall damaged-aesthetic effect. A more formally adventurous showcase in damaged aesthetics precedes the Blanchard march in Levees’s second episode: throughout archival media coverage of CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien traversing the abandoned Convention Center, Levees weaves O’Brien’s subsequent studio-based interview with Lee, in which, both on-screen and in voice-over, O’Brien recalls how a corpse seen in the coverage remained
114 outside the Center when “two days later I come back to do a stand-up” (E2 57-58).
Such showcases in damaged aesthetics continue into Levees’s fourth episode. Against the backdrop of another commemorative jazz funeral, this time enacted by local second-liners, one Dinerral Shavers, musician, walks the viewer through New Orleans’s poorer, blacker areas. “Your whole history under a pile of rubble,” he laments while gesturing to Claiborne Avenue; “a good neighborhood that’s … gone, man,” he laments further while gesturing towards stricken houses and street-corners in the Lower Ninth Ward: “that’s where the old folk used to sit” (E4 1-3). Midway through that episode, meanwhile, one Judith Morgan, ordinary citizen of Yscloskey, St. Bernard’s Parish, takes Lee’s cameraman and viewers on a tour of the foundations whereupon her house once stood, and in front of which she, alongside one Cheryl Livaudais, has always been interviewed in Levees heretofore: “over here were my bookcases, and over here, my fridge,” she recalls, waving to a detritus-strewn tent, before climbing the remnants of her staircase: “duck your head, you’d hit a low beam,” she continues, gesturing to air (E4 30-32). To watch her, Morgan might be walking around an empty stage after the post-production “get-out”, that is, the removal of furnishing, props, etc. used in a given theatrical production.
Both the third and fourth episodes, finally, share a singular kind of showcase in damaged aesthetics, in which one of Lee’s interviewees, in both cases a celebrity, is filmed returning to their or a relation’s house post-Katrina, at parallel points about forty-five minutes into their respective episodes, and reacting to what they find. After his jazz-funeral march, in the one showcase, Blanchard accompanies his mother Blanche to her house in Gentilly Woods. Rolling shots of multitudinous browns and ravaged living- and bedrooms ensue: shots aestheticized further by doorways’ both framing and featuring as frame-like presences in interior shots, and both sound-tracked throughout by and interspersed with shots of Blanchard’s crying mother (E3 44-48). In
115 the other showcase, one watches Wendell Pierce’s home video footage of his return to his father’s home in the post-Katrina “ghost town” of Pontchartrain Park, intercut with interview footage. As Pierce recounts his father’s buying the home in the 1950s and his breaking down upon returning there post- Katrina, his camera-wielding avatar walks us through the material ruination of his mother’s home: mouldy exterior walls; a living-room with walls and blackened furniture; and assorted white-goods pressed up fully against a door frame leading into a kitchen. Lingering panning shots of these aesthetic elements continue as Pierce condemns his father’s insurance company’s machinations over not paying out for “repairable” or supposedly “non–flood- related” damage. Capping the showcase is footage of a prowling bulldozer mid-neighbourhood: an augury, it seems, of the likely common fate of chez Pierce and others (E4 42-46). Again, sparse Blanchard music, this time a solo trumpet, supplements the overall effect.
The fourth and final type of component defies a neat one-word term. It is a choice kind of interlude that is somehow stylized out of the clips-and- interview format, and that might be considered “a-temporal”, that is, not rooted in a particular point in Katrina chronology or Levees’s chronology, but mutable within that chronology. A prayer by Audrey Mason, for example, delivered mid-interview thanking God for “bringing us through that water”, occurs in practice at the start of Levees’s third episode, immediately after the week of Katrina; but little would stop it from occurring either earlier — as an act of pre-Katrina prolepsis; as a week-of-Katrina chamber-piece while couples wade to dry harbour on screen — or afterwards, as a fourth-episode counterpoint to citizens grappling with their own issues of belief: in their futures, in New Orleans’s long-term future, and with their loss of faith in the federal government. Other interludes are similarly stylized and a-temporal, and work to the depressive ends of Mason’s prayer amidst other Locrian ends.
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The second episode ends with perhaps Levees’s most scouring single sequence: a montage of dead bodies, twenty-three all told, all waterlogged and bloated: some floating in water, others tucked up into reeds, most in spread-eagled rigor mortis (E2 59+). The especially scouring aspect of this sequence — the thing that really draws out depressive energies, in Locrian terms — is the sense that suffuses these photos of bodies sinking and decomposing back into the timeless cycles of geological time. At the respective ends of this and Levees’s fourth episodes, meanwhile, one of Lee’s interviewees, the performance poet Shelton Shakespear (sic) Alexander and Phyllis Montana-Leblanc respectively, delivers an original poem both penned after and dealing with Katrina. Although not Locrian per se, these poetic interludes complement Levees’s harrowing practices in terms of their themes: rebirth, resurrection, and the coming-unto-acceptance that is in essence the grieving process; themes composing the light that defines the Locrian shadow. In a low-angle shot — the so-called “hero” shot, used typically as here to confer authority upon a subject — Alexander, alternating his gaze between the camera and the middle-distance, recites the street- poetic ‘Will You Be There’, limned below:
Blessed are the ones who sacrificed their lives …/ and blessed are the ones who are lost and displaced. …/ Cemeteries turn into mazes/caskets coming out of their graves. …/ Our neighbourhoods are being reconfigured to be rearranged. …/ I know I’ve been changed/ the angels in heaven done sign my name. … / Jesus done led me through the fire, the storm, the hurricane, and the rain. …/ I told you I would be here/ what’s important is that I came./ I’m leaving/ but I’ll be back again:/ Will you be there? (E2 final scene)
Themes of rebirth and resurrection cut clearly through the imagery and sentiments here. Certain visual elements of the shot draw out those themes further: the clear, Virginal-Marian blue sky against which the angled camera angle casts Alexander; the masthead of St. Vincent de Pau Cemetery, an iron-
117 wrought memento mori overarching Alexander’s head. In her post-Katrina trailer home, meanwhile, Phyllis concludes Levees overall with a poem, limned below, built on a broken/repaired motif:
My spirit broke, the families broke apart. … The smell broke away from my body when I came out of the waters. … My being together broke when I fell apart. … But out of all this broken-ness, I have begun to mend… with my deep commitment to infinite strength. … When you see the levees breaking, know what they really broke along with them. (E4 59+)
Notwithstanding her poem’s essential stoicism and sotto voce optimism, one can see across the duration that Phyllis is hitting sundry Locrian beats, not least the beats of personal and psychological deterioration so heavily struck in 1 Dead in Attic. At the same time, one can see that she is hitting such thematic beats of rebirth and resurrection as complement Levees’s harrowing practices elsewhere.
As deconstructed above, in summary, Levees works to harrowing effect across its textual body and said body’s constitutive character narratives: this, the present discussion holds, mediates the Locrian mode as it occurs in Lee’s opus. More than that, by dint of working as it does across its character narratives, its chronicles-in-context, Levees enacts essentially in toto that “etching” of chronicled lives whereby it recovers its victims; and saliently in the secondary theoretical regard, Levees’s harrowing practice overall is an essentially media-characteristic phenomenon. Thus concludes discussion of Levees’s representational and recovery practices.
Chapter/section conclusion
Such is the field of narrative non-fictional Katrina culture. In its two modal fashions, Dorian and Locrian, it alchemizes misrepresentative historical
118 paradigms into more useful ways of conceptualizing New Orleans, especially in light of the paradigm-shifting moment in the city’s postmillennial history that Katrina represents. Along the same bimodal lines in terms of enhancement and etching, narrative non-fictional Katrina culture generates ways of chronicling the lives of Katrina victims so as to reinvest those victims with voice, dignity, and agency: in other words, so as to recover them.
The greater merit of modal representations of New Orleans relative to paradigmatic ones can be appreciated particularly in terms of this section’s secondary theoretical argument. Distinct from matters of representation and recovery, the above chapters have traced an interesting alignment between Katrina media coverage’s execrable impulses and the heightened media character of Locrian texts. As well as being of intrinsic secondary interest and having informed this section’s primary analyses, tracing that alignment enables an especially straight comparison between the merits of Katrina media coverage (low) and Locrian texts (high). This comparison holds across all forms of the theorized modes and paradigms, and impresses on us that much more how valuable narrative non-fictional Katrina culture’s representational practices are. The value of their recovery practices, of course, should speak for itself.
This section has discussed two sets of representational and recovery practices at length over its constitutive chapters. The ensuing section covers a greater range of sets, through which it moves on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It retains the concept of “manners” of recovery, but substitutes the concept of “modes” of representation, associated in this thesis with instances particularly of “fictionalization”, with one of “schools” of representation, in light of the more fundamentally fictional nature of exercises in original creative Katrina culture. As well, where this section discussed representational and recovery practices in separate blocks in chapter 1 and in highly enmeshed terms in chapter 2, such practices are
119 discussed concurrently and typically in discrete dual-track fashions throughout the ensuing section.
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Section 2: Original Creative Katrina Culture
Chapter 1: The “Ordinary” School
The thesis turns now to “original creative Katrina culture”, that is, Katrina- cultural texts that are more purely “creative” texts relative to narrative non- fiction. This section identifies four “schools” of “representing the city” in original creative Katrina culture, corresponding to four of the schools of post- Katrina New Orleans discourse identified within critical Katrina commentary in the introduction of the thesis. In turn over this section, then, “ordinary”, “microcosmic”, “globalist” and “neoclassical” schools of representing the city are identified within original creative Katrina culture.
This section argues as well that each school of representation corresponds to a particular manner of “recovering the victim”. These correspondences will be set out across the ensuing chapters, which will discuss, school by school, how texts of a given school exhibit both associated practices of representing post-Katrina New Orleans, and a corresponding manner of recovering their featured Katrina victims. These manners of recovery will be identified and explained on an instance-by-instance basis. At the end of these chapters in turn, the schools of representation and manners of recovery discussed will be evaluated in relation to the thesis’s conceptual lodestar of New Orleans exceptionalism.
Very occasionally, it should be incidentally noted here, these chapters will contrast aspects of these schools with aspects of 9/11 culture as characterized in works of 9/11 cultural criticism. They do so to explore in further ways, in terms of the cultural responses to these disasters, the contrast initiated in the Introduction between U.S. domestic responses to 9/11 and Katrina victims: between the beatification of the one disaster’s victims and the vilification of the latter’s. These further contrasts are purely
121 supplementary and, though enriching, not theoretically vital. The substance of this first chapter in the section, to resume in the main regard, is the “ordinary” school of original creative Katrina culture.
The “ordinary” New Orleans fairly defies being formally defined, mutable and contingent on context as “ordinariness” is: conveying what it is understood to be here requires a more imagistic, impressionistic approach. The ordinary New Orleans is the one spanned, veined, and serviced by the city’s RTA public transport map. It is the New Orleans that encompasses Algiers (New Orleans’s second-oldest neighbourhood, on the West Bank across the river from the French Quarter) and Hollygrove (tucked above Carrollton and a couple of stones’ throws from Carrollton Avenue). It is the New Orleans of private, workaday existence and experience; is the one that maintains New Orleans’s touristic, cultural, and heritage apparatus. Its inhabitants include those for whom Mardi Gras means so many inconveniences on the morning commute as floats clog up the traffic into the centre; those whose typical mid-afternoon finds them shuttling up and down Claiborne Avenue collecting children from kindergarten; and those for whom parading means, more than the parades themselves, so much after-school band and dance practice.61 In critical Katrina discourse, meanwhile, the ordinary New Orleans has recently appeared in Peter Marina’s account of the contemporary city’s “new creative urban” tribes, living “on the edge of the post-industrial tourist economy” in the city’s fringes (4).
Easier to pin down and precisely identify than the ordinary New Orleans itself are its essential characteristics as iterated in “ordinary” Katrina texts, namely Patty Friedmann’s A Little Bit Ruined; the short-story anthology Life in the Wake; and playwright John Biguenet’s The Rising Water Trilogy. First, these texts take place in less tourist-trodden areas: they jettison the French Quarter and occur in areas requiring not only a streetcar but a bus to get to:
61 The present author had first-hand experience of all these inhabitants and their practices on fieldwork. 122 areas served not by streetcar lines, but by public-transport commuter routes. They are marked by understatement and non-descriptiveness, in terms of tone and style. They are less about big events and set-piece happenings than about ways of being; and even when such events and set-pieces do happen, they do so at the edges and in the liminal zones of narrative worlds. Ordinary texts read as if they were written for particular communities, and moreover ones localized near New Orleans: Friedmann’s already-established fan-base; the community associated with NOLAfugees, the digital media production group founded after Katrina that inter alia published Wake; and the audience of the Southern Repertory theatre, for which Biguenet’s play Rising Water was commissioned.62
Ordinary texts are concertedly unromantic. They give vanishing concern to showcasing any colourful variety of peoples or cultural practices, or the laissez-faire philosophies borne and continuing from yore, or any special genre de vie in the city. Rather their hues are bleaker, their textures grittier, their temperaments more subdued. Ordinary texts might be discussed yet further in terms of their “domestic index”. A text’s ordinariness, that is to say, can be indexed by an interest in domesticity, in domestic sites and situations. This index operates particularly in Biguenet’s Rising Water trilogy. Important finally to the ordinary timbre, especially in Wake, is a sense of continuity, of things ultimately continuing on post-Katrina much in the order of things that had existed pre-Katrina. These texts reject characterizations of Katrina as a kind of terminus a quo demarcating one universe of things and happenings from another. They commit to ideas of “the everyday”, of no Katrina event ever rupturing the existential run of days into pre- and post- event periods, and of those days continuing in one unbroken order of things. From this breakdown of ordinary texts, characteristics of the “ordinary” New Orleans can be readily formulated. To wit, ordinary cities are unromantic; have little to no touristic footfall; are interested in domesticity; and are
62 The trilogy is named for its first play. 123 infused with senses of continuity. The ensuing chapter will address and namecheck these characteristics as it discusses texts’ practices of representing the city.
Ordinariness as characterized here, it should perhaps be stated, is not modelled on Raymond Williams’s influential, politicized characterization of “the ordinary” as a great class-cultural leveller (Williams esp. 8). Ordinariness here is an altogether more neutral quality. Nor are domestic relationships (Gray 30, 51), suburbia (Knapp), or individual private experience (Mishra) associated with the avoidance of disaster, as across 9/11 culture according to certain critics.63 Ordinariness in Katrina culture is very much enmeshed with citizens’ straitened socio-economic conditions after and owing to Katrina.
As well as being inherent to texts’ practices of representing the city, the cities discussed here are also instrumental to these texts’ practices of recovering the victim. What follows posits that ordinary cities are “sensitive to the victim”: creatively encoded at an essential level with a basic sensitivity to Katrina victimhood. Conditions of victimhood, in other words, register within and run through these cities like vibrations within and through a tuning fork. Whether by grace of their “Rushing resemblance”, their “movement into recovery”, or their “concentrations of Katrina victimhood” — each originally conceptualized here and to be explained in good time — these texts’ cities are not just frames around but are extensions of the victims that inhabit them. Invested in these cities is thus the “human interest” denied so many Katrina victims in media coverage of that event: the interest indivisible from reinvesting victims with voice, dignity, and agency, and from ultimately recovering those victims. This human interest, it bears noting, is of a piece with “ordinary” authors’ own intimacies with the city. Such intimacies can be seen on Friedmann’s part when she invokes in interview “the kind of love and friendship… not so possible in many places
63 In Knapp, see esp. 24 re: “insistence upon the quotidian” and “circumspect” examination of 9/11; in Mishra, see esp. par. beginning “In succumbing to”. 124 outside New Orleans” and how “to lose New Orleans would be losing one’s mother” (“Interview”). And they are discernible on Biguenet’s part in his preface to the print edition of his Rising Water trilogy:
Writing [the trilogy] has not healed whatever wounds I carry. In fact, writing these plays has felt more like salt than balm. The deeper I have explored the needless suffering of my fellow New Orleanians, the angrier I have grown (Biguenet, “Introduction” 8).
Across these texts in turn, then, what follows discusses first a text’s practices of representing the city, then its practices of recovering the victim. In other words, it discusses first a text’s featured ordinary city, then how that city participates in its parent text’s recovery practice, which is to discuss its manner of being sensitive to the victim. Texts’ practices are discussed in different proportions depending on what and how much compels explication in each text.
A Little Bit Ruined
A Little Bit Ruined (2007), hereafter Ruined, is in essence a character study of Eleanor Rushing, dilettante and wisecracking lady of leisure in New Orleans’s historically blue-blooded Uptown area. Much of the novel’s first half follows Eleanor, dually motivated by vanity and libido, as she undergoes plastic surgery from and begins an affair with local Dr. Richard Kimball. Neither initiative runs smoothly, as the readers can see even while Eleanor, narrating, cannot. At the narrative halfway mark, the Kimball plot thread is abruptly replaced by a Katrina thread, threading through Eleanor’s week-of- Katrina sequestration in her maid Naomi’s house and her eventual evacuation to Houston. Here, with roughly a third of Ruined to go, the Kimball thread dovetails back into proceedings, with Eleanor briefly befriending Richard’s likewise evacuated wife; and it interweaves with the Katrina thread, which is to say Eleanor’s returning to New Orleans and
125 dealing with Katrina’s fallout, through to the narrative’s end. All told, Ruined ends with Eleanor left disfigured and depressed by her surgery, her relationship with Richard dwindling towards nothing, and a narrative world in listless limbo.
“Mine is the world of Confederacy of Dunces,” asserts Friedmann in the personal testimonial on her website as regards her work as a whole. Certainly this applies to Ruined, insofar as its narrative world is similarly mediated through humour. Where Toole’s New Orleans is French Quarter- and eccentric-centric, though, Friedmann sets her caravan of actors and events against the relatively greyer, understated, and overall “ordinary” backdrop of the Ruined New Orleans. The ordinariness of the Ruined city arises as a whole from four narrative elements: what follows identifies them in turn.
The Ruined city’s ordinariness arises first from the city’s suburban element, from the non-touristic suburbs which constitute most of the text’s chapter- by-chapter backdrops, and within which much of the actual story takes place. These areas are the upriver reaches of St. Charles Avenue in which Eleanor lives; the Pigeontown area in which Naomi lives, an informal working-class, parish-bordering sub-district of the city’s Carrollton neighbourhood; and Metairie, where Richard is based.64 The way in which Eleanor describes this latter area, what is more, speaks persistently to its North American orthodoxy, its homogeneity with the U.S. outside of New Orleans. “Out here in Metairie,” she says by way of example, cross streets are marked to indicate at what hundred block they intersect Veterans Boulevard. This part of Jefferson Parish is new enough to be systematic” (Friedmann, Ruined 86). “Metairie is new and unnatural,” Eleanor continues presently (100): “I do not want Metairie to be reclaimed by the lake for one simple reason: there is too much plastic in Metairie.” Her description of Richard and his wife’s house in
64 Metairie might be more precisely termed “exurban”, but for ease of reading is here subsumed under the catch-all “suburban”. 126
Jefferson Parish, too, conveys its orthodoxy at the same time as Eleanor’s disdain for that orthodoxy, for the “suburban ticky-tacky … purplish-pink bricks with a portico and an oval bevelled-glass opening in a mahogany front door” (233). “New Orleans,” she continues, attesting to the prevalence of this first element, “needs to be rid of anything that smacks of suburbs.”
The Ruined city’s ordinariness arises second from the “corner-shop register” diffused throughout Eleanor’s narration, that is, from a register that suggests years building up the kind of intimate locals’ knowledge that can only be acquired through living day-to-daily, without glamour: the kind of less tourist-touted knowledge and phenomena known only by those who have become too familiar with the city for the city to be anything but ordinary and unremarkable. Two examples of this register occur early on: her school- friend Patti’s daughter, Eleanor says with airily familiar authority, “is going to be one of New Orleans’s little geniuses in a green uniform with a Discimus Agere Agendo logo…” (17). “Jefferson is a very good conduit between the river and important places in Uptown,” she continues presently, “but I found alternate routes, Nashville and Napoleon, until one day construction rerouted me … onto Jefferson” (37). Even her flight to Pigeontown is related in the register of received wisdom: “I know the sensation of letting my wheels slip onto the ruts because you have to do that when you drive on both St Charles and Carondelet downtown” (130); and a page later “onto Oak Street, with no cars around, I straddle the center line. That’s what trucks always do on Oak Street, pushing moving cars into almost hitting parked cars.” One of Eleanor’s comments about Pigeontown, at p.134, carries an especial connotative load, for the way in which it juxtaposes and privileges a local-neighbourhood level of fame against and over that of the real-life Mayor Ray Nagin: “uptown New Orleans,” says Eleanor, “is a small town. We have three dwarves, all in this neighbourhood, all black, one boy, one girl, one woman. [The boy is] a celebrity. More people recognize him than recognize the Mayor, probably.”
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The Ruined city’s ordinariness arises third from the city’s commercial element, from the preponderance of nationally franchised brand-names which pepper the text. To wit: Walgreen’s (32, 103, 118); Home Depot (92); Fed-Ex, the name of Eleanor’s neighbour’s cat (103 et al.); Sav-a-Center (103); Kenwood, and Mag-Lites as amassed on neighbour Theo’s kitchen’s eating island (121); Mepergan (137); and Kool-Aid and Nutrasweet (147). Each occurrence gestures to a whiter, more subdued, unromantic world outside of the sensually heightened, ethnically hyphenated notional norm of New Orleans.
The Ruined city’s ordinariness arises fourth and finally from certain elements of Friedmann’s style, namely stylized non-descriptiveness and mundanity of detail. With these stylistic elements, Friedmann evokes such dull, mundane lives in a dull, nondescript world as serve to contrast starkly with the “Big Easy” of notional yore. The identified non-descriptiveness inheres in comments whose descriptive effects are denuded by words of negation, of vacancies and vacuums (italicized in ensuing quotations). “In the New Orleans where I live there are some streets that it is possible to avoid forever,” says Eleanor at p.37. “It’s even possible to avoid entire stretches of one’s own street.” “I’ve lived in this house so long I don’t hear the streetcars,” she says thereafter (63), short-ending the legacy of Tennessee Williams as she does so. Her description of immediately pre-Katrina Lakeview evidences this non-descriptive stylistic at its apogee:
The streets are empty. This must be the way New Orleans was in the 1920s… It is boring driving with no other cars around… I get to Plantation, and it’s closed tight... They didn’t even open for breakfast… No cars are in the parking lot. In fact, I don’t see any cars parked on the street or around any of the houses in the neighbourhood. (108)
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Even her flight through and out of the flooded city ploughs this stylistic furrow. Note the reduction of complex phenomena to minimal conditions and single sensory outputs (instances underlined; non-descriptive stylistics still italicized):
The news is that the levee at the 17th Street canal has broken. That means nothing to me because I’ve never understood where the 17th Street canal is. It’s the dividing line between Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, but I only know that as a fact, not a place. (127)
The radio takes us places I’ve never been. I’ve never travelled the full length of Tchoupitoulas Street. Today it is strewn with bricks. … The radio takes us across the river, and for the first time I am on the Westbank Expressway. I’ve only heard the W Expressway in screechy commercials on television, and here I am. (170)
Elsewhere we see what might be termed the “idiosyncratic mundane”: moments that apportion so much “mundane” world-building across idiosyncratic character beats for Eleanor. The following moments indicate the kind of thing:
I don’t see any reason why my yard has to be an exaggeration so people can see it from twenty yards away. I want my house scaled for me. (92: pre-Katrina)
Any water will spill past me and flow down into all those ugly houses on Octavia Street around Fontainebleau. (128: post-Katrina)
I’m trying to picture emergency room entrances. Baptist has a ramp; I pass it all the time. Charity has a ramp; it’s been on Trauma: Life in the E.R. (151: post-Katrina)
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Another, especially idiosyncratic moment evinces mundanity in terms of New Orleans’s food scene. Killing time immediately pre-Katrina, Eleanor waxes lyrical about Plantation Coffeehouse in Lakeview for their apple-infused tuna fish sandwich and coffee (107-8: pre-Katrina), as opposed to the more classically renowned likes of Galatoire’s and Liuzza’s; and indeed, “I have not set foot in Galatoire’s since I turned over a table there seven years ago” (13). What these moments betoken too is the sense of continuity that suffuses this text’s tone. From start to finish, Eleanor recounts Ruined in a distinctively ironic, airily assured, iconoclastic tone: a tone that stays as steadfast across pre- and post-Katrina periods as it does across the quotes above. Eleanor’s tone thus works to evoke a “continuing order” and “ordinariness” of things un-ruptured by Katrina. Such, in summary, are the four intrinsic elements of Ruined’s ordinary New Orleans: suburbia, the corner-shop register of Eleanor’s narration, commerce, and stylized mundanity.
The Ruined city’s ordinariness draws too from a quality of the landscape in which it is rooted, a quality best explained by way of John Brinkerhoff Jackson. Jackson was a theorist of landscape, especially the so-called “vernacular” landscape, the landscape of working-class, domestically oriented local variations on a national theme (“Circumstances” 9). Inter alia Jackson was concerned with how the vernacular landscape existed vis-à-vis the “odological” layer of landscape, the landscape of roads and highways (Discovering 35-37); and with such features’ importance in the “commercial vernacular” and “auto-vernacular” landscapes of motorhomes and mobile- oriented landscape features (“Circumstances” 25; “Vernacular” 34). The Ruined landscape might be said to possess a Jacksonian quality of vacillation, of vacillating between Jackson’s two identified kinds of landscape. Pre- Katrina, most of the narrative takes place in private homes and milieus. Much of the latter third of Ruined, though, takes place in cars and on roads: the expressway heading to Houston (chapter 26); the same road heading out (chapter 33); the roads around post-Katrina New Orleans, navigated by
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Eleanor and her companions over two chapters as they take their postdiluvian inventories (chapters 34-5).
Mention should be made too of Ruined’s interest in domesticity, incidental to matters of its featured city per se but which nevertheless enhances the Ruined world’s reserves of ordinariness. Ruined is “interested” in domesticity insofar as Eleanor’s personal development is structured on a movement between domestic sites, ones of different social statures. From her Uptown mansion, Katrina disgorges Eleanor “down” into Naomi’s Pigeontown shotgun, amidst Naomi and her grandmother Miss Leona. Already by this post-Katrina point, the narrative has alluded to its transformative potential, in terms of what Eleanor considers mantelpiece photos “full of secrets that Naomi’s not condescending to tell”, and calls “a certain magic” (115); and post-Katrina that potential is realized. Through the purgative effect of “being pioneer women, making do” whilst marooned mid-flood (139), Eleanor starts, in this house, to accrue “big chunks of common sense I’ve picked up along the way this week” (162), an appreciation of what home ownership means for her less privileged fellow citizens — “Miss Leona owns this house: that’s why she wants to stay” (166)— and empathy: she cries repeatedly for Miss Leona (165, 170-1, 181), who elects to remain in New Orleans instead of fleeing to Houston, and is struck at one point by how “for miles in every direction there are people … making loud noises in their own contexts, and those noises aren’t reaching me, but they’re filling up the city” (172).
Friedmann’s New Orleans is interesting not only in terms of “representing the city”, but also for how it participates in Ruined’s practice of recovering the victim: how it is “sensitive to the victim”, namely Eleanor, and her victimhood. Instructive in this regard are Friedmann’s own words on her website’s homepage concerning her work as a whole:
My work is darkly comical, and New Orleans is an engaging old lady in every story, a beauty past her prime who still looks in mirrors,
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unaware that she’s ravaged, even now, too preoccupied with her looks ever to have taken care of her goofy children. (“Homepage”)
The character Friedmann ascribes to her New Orleans is essentially that of Eleanor Rushing; and in Ruined, the two converge. No mere “old lady… past her prime”, the New Orleans of Ruined bears a resemblance to Eleanor especially: a resemblance rooted threefold in Friedmann’s use of the word “ruined”; the city’s sensitivity to Eleanor’s feelings, which is to say its seeming variously to simulate and sympathize with those feelings; and the call-and-response between the city and Eleanor’s respective states of physical distress. Insofar as it participates in the text’s recovery practice, the New Orleans of Ruined does so precisely through its resemblance to Eleanor: its “Rushing resemblance” essentially is its state of being sensitive to the victim.
The city’s Rushing resemblance stems in part from Friedmann’s use of the word “ruined”, with which word Friedmann gradually converges the city and Eleanor’s respective “ruinations” into an overt resemblance. The first few times we see the word “ruined” in the text, it relates to Eleanor:
Whoever owns this facility will hear about her. I am ruined [after her second surgery], and a lot of people are going to be sorry. (62)
“You do look beautiful,” [Richard] says. “But God, I’m ruined,” I say. (80)
I can’t tell [Naomi] I’m ruined because she’ll think ruined is the same as incompetent. … Having a ruined mind means having uncontrolled terrors; being incompetent would mean I had uncontrolled something else. (119)
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All the other girls [at a young Eleanor’s summer camp] looked at me like I was some kind of freak. I was completely ruined. (142)
Latterly, during the narrative’s Houston period, it occurs three times in relation to New Orleans:
Everything about New Orleans is pretty much ruined except for me personally. (206)
Richard’s house has a fairly immature oak tree smack on top of it, and Richard’s house looks as if it is ruined forever. (227)
And under her own discursive steam, Richard’s wife: “She’s got her fists swinging… ‘So I find out the one damn tree in the whole damn parish falls on my house. Ruined.’” (240). Having established these dual relations of the word “ruined” to victim and city, Friedmann ultimately marries city and victim’s ruinations with consummate starkness: “I am ruined. The city is ruined. At least the city didn’t ask for it” (243).
The city’s Rushing resemblance stems too from the city’s sensitivity to Eleanor’s feelings, which is to say Friedmann’s fashioning the city, her refracting it through Eleanor’s notional first-person narration, so that it seems variously to simulate and sympathize with Eleanor’s feelings throughout Ruined. It sympathizes, for instance, with what might be deemed Eleanor’s default feeling of “being uncomfortable”: that kind of lived condition of prickliness, social combativeness, and being a self-perceived outsider which, says Eleanor in terms of her “being uncomfortable”, “is what being in a city is all about” (185). The city is sensitive to Eleanor’s feelings at more specific moments, too. As Eleanor directs emergency services to Naomi’s house in Pigeontown during the week of Katrina — “‘On Cambronne Street,’ I say. ‘I don’t know which block. Oh wait, it’s a block and a half off Oak’” — she reflects near-simultaneously, “it would be so easy to wreck me
133 right now” (158). In this narrative moment, the city seems to simulate Eleanor’s emotional fragility, as encoded into her expressed capacity to be “easily wrecked”, in a material fragility of its own, as encoded into the stream-of-consciousness disjunctions — “I don’t know… Oh wait” — and disjointed street- and block-names of Eleanor’s micro-map of Pigeontown. Instances of the “sensitive city” continue. In conversation with Eleanor, while watching CNN Katrina coverage in Houston, Naomi senses the tragic pathos Eleanor sees in herself simulated in the CNN cityscape:
“I think I look sort of tragic.” “Well, you not tragic. A person tragic, she haul up off her roof by a helicopter after her mama die in the attic.” (178)
As evoked by the narrating Eleanor in the text’s closing pages, meanwhile, the postdiluvial city seems to sense and sympathize with Eleanor’s own ultimate apathy: “I’ve become a watcher,” she muses, “refusing to try to control my fate. … I think actively trying to make anything happen in New Orleans right now only would make a person sad. … As I said, I’m not doing anything” (245-7). And at an earlier point, where Eleanor’s claim that “people with character shouldn’t live in Houston” meets her near- simultaneous pronouncement that “a person who lives in St Charles Avenue (like herself) cannot live anywhere else” (200), the unspoken presence of New Orleans is positioned, as far as Eleanor were concerned, as a kind of sympathetic ally of hers, a sympathetically characterful kindred entity. In these various ways, then, the Ruined city seems to simulate and sympathize with Eleanor’s feelings throughout the narrative. Embedded in the city are thus such various secondary resemblances to Eleanor’s feelings as serve to supplement the city’s overall Rushing resemblance.
One thing more roots the Ruined city’s Rushing resemblance: the relationship between city and victim’s states of physical distress. During her second round of surgery, Eleanor wakes up mid-procedure “on fire. … I scream, but
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… The pain is going to kill me. It could kill me.” (59). That pain lingers on post- surgery, and is recalled into the narrative at various points: “I’m in terrible pain since I woke up” (71); “suddenly I’m not on top of the pain at all. It’s in my chest, in my head” (81); “too many nights I go straight into a dream of surgery, of pain I honestly felt, and I wake up feeling it” (95: see also 64, 75, and 85). After Katrina makes narrative landfall, these recollections end, and none occur during Eleanor’s week-of-Katrina experience. Immediately following that experience, though, after Eleanor has arrived at a Hilton hotel in Houston, “I lie on my back and go under instantly. Deep. And then in a dream the pain comes, so real that it takes a long time to wake me up.” (178). The point here is that Eleanor’s post-surgical pain and the city’s physically distressed Katrina-state wax and wane around each other. They are as two sides of the same coin, two semblances of one distress. Three things, then, root the city’s Rushing resemblance: the convergence of its “ruination” with that of Eleanor, its sensitivity to Eleanor’s emotional states, and its tidal relationship with Eleanor’s physical distress. In these ways the Ruined city is sensitive to the victim, and participates in the text’s recovery practice. Thus, all told, concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in Ruined, Katrina-based picaresque of life amid the original Steel Fleurs-de-Lis.
Life in the Wake
Life in the Wake, hereafter Wake, is an anthology of short stories assembled by NOLAfugees, an online alternative-media initiative established after Katrina. In June 2007, editors Joe Longo et al. started soliciting New Orleans authors for short fiction about any aspect of life after Katrina. Twenty stories were assembled into Wake, which was released in October that year. What follows understands Wake to be a Gestalt aesthetic entity, and to be not just the sum but the synthesis of its twenty anthologized stories. What follows, too, understands Wake’s featured New Orleans to be a “composite city”, comprising the text’s twenty featured story-worlds. Two tenets of this
135 discussion thus present themselves. First, Wake’s practice of representing the city is enacted by its constitutive stories working as one Wake-wide system. Second, the Wake city’s characteristics are essentially the Gestalt, commonly recurring characteristics of the text’s constitutive stories. Accordingly, what follows discusses the text’s composite city and representational practice in terms of Wake’s constitutive stories, and the characteristics of the city in terms of the commonly recurring characteristics of Wake’s stories.65
Many of Wake’s stories take place in New Orleans’s less touristic spaces. Only three stories occur in well-trodden tourist zones, respectively occurring around St Charles Avenue (Sarah K. Inman’s “The Least Resistance”), the culinary scene in the French Quarter (Bill Lavender’s “Hot White Cum”), and Jackson Square (Karissa Kary’s “Hopeless”). The latter piece spans barely a page besides: revealingly, the Ground Zero of the touristic New Orleans features in Wake only in snapshot fashion. Far more common are stories set in at most only semi- touristic areas, such as the Faubourgs Marigny and Bywater; the lakeside suburbs extending up to Lake Pontchartrain; and the city’s immediately adjacent parishes. Wake’s composite New Orleans is not one nucleated in Royal, Frenchman, and Dauphine Streets. Rather it embraces lesser-known street names and edifices: Argonne Street (Joel Farrelly’s “Shingled Isle”), Gentilly sub-districts Fillmore (Kris Lackey’s “High Ground”) and the Fair Grounds (Amelia Anderson’s “When the Muses Parade”), Sugar Park and the Piety Street wharf on the Bywater riverfront (Justin Burnell’s “A City for a River”), Gentilly’s arterial Elysian Fields avenue (Kelly Gartman’s “Apocalypse Angels”), and the Lambda Center for multifarious addicts in the Marigny (Tara Jill Ciccarone’s “Reality is a Trigger”). At the same time, though, the anthology embraces also a franchised Walgreen’s outlet, in Jason Berry’s “One Hour Turnaround on
65 Authors are introduced by their full names then referred to by surnames alone. 136
Mardi Gras Photos”: briefly the Wake city thus exhibits the third “ordinary” commercial element of Friedmann’s Ruined city.
In the main, too, Wake’s stories are concertedly, bleakly unromantic. They focus on unsensational, everyday little tragedies: addiction, in Ciccarone’s story; abortion, in Andrea Boll’s “Holes”; the post-Katrina black market in stray dogs, in Ken Foster’s “Thinking Outside of the Box”; and dying marriages, in Lucas Diaz-Medina’s “Esther” and Lavender’s “Cum”. Mental health in particular preoccupies several stories: Farrelly’s “Shingled Isle”; Jennifer Kochta’s “Stray”; and Dana Harrison-Tidwell’s “Windows”, a page- long first-person portrait of mid-Katrina insomniac agoraphobia: “I keep a suspicious eye on the arroyo next to my house. It’s 3:00am, and I am unnervingly vacant in the silent moments” (Longo/Wake 158). Even Gartman’s “Apocalypse Angels”, a genre-fictional encounter between a first- person woman and a historical guardian angel of New Orleans, suborns its fantastical premise to the austere psychological pressures exerted by post- Katrina proceedings on the angel Aeron and his departed brother Aesop: “(Aesop) had flown out over the flooded, desperate city at night and seen things he refused to speak of. After that, he was never the same. He started flying into oncoming trains, pulling up at the very last second” (246). The closest Wake gets to any kind of line in “the romantic”, meanwhile, is in the close male friendships delineated in Burnell’s “A City by the River” and Leonard Earl Johnson’s “In the Land of Dreamy Diaspora”, simple, sincere stories of college friends catching up over Christmas drinks in the Carrollton neighbourhood — “It was Christmastime and my friend was in town to wine and dine for three fat days… we walked to Tip’s singing ‘We three kings of Orient are…’” (203-4) — and sinking coolies where West Bank lights “are reflected, rippling in the meandering current” of the Mississippi River (221), and where “the city lights burn, making James silhouette next to me” (222). Otherwise sentiment in Wake comes dropping slow, subsumed instead by life’s meaner emotions. All told, Wake’s heightened and sometimes
137 remorselessly unromantic line in themes and events amounts to the text’s most immediately striking “ordinary” characteristic.
The Wake city’s ordinariness arises in most specialized and systematic part, though, from sundry stories’ positioning the city as a site of continuity, of a continuing order/ordinariness of things. It is positioned so in terms of various aspects of stories’ figured post-Katrina cities and conditions of Katrina victimhood. Across sundry stories in Wake, these aspects are brought into a continuing order with the text’s a priori pre-Katrina universe. Far from being framed as coming only after and out of Katrina, and thus being “exceptional” in origin, they are characterized as “continuing” on from and being in the “order” of what existed pre-Katrina: they exist in “states of continuity” with what existed before Katrina. A sense of continuity as distilled across these states is thus an essential element of the composite city’s ordinariness. What follows, namely a specialized cluster of close readings, evidences this Wake- wide sense of continuity in terms of story-specific states, and discusses how different stories in Wake locate different aspects of their post-Katrina milieus within states of continuity. In this way, instance by instances, it evidences Wake’s most gossamer element of ordinariness.
Some stories place their featured cities’ post-Katrina ambience in states of continuity, so that a given ambience becomes characterized as something that was already present in the city pre-Katrina. One such story is Anne Gisleson’s “Boo”, about a young mother and her child traversing the Bywater on the first Halloween night after Katrina. Various elements of the inimical ambience of this story’s figured Bywater owe particularly to the post-Katrina moment: National Guardsmen in a Humvee (193-4) and the fact that “on the other side of St Claude Avenue, the Reconstruction is faltering” (185). At the same time, though, other elements of this ambience would have been such even before Katrina: the “long unlit blocks of Burgundy Street … dogs rushing the chain-link fences between darkened houses” (189); and the gangs of
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“three boys in ghetto gowns” historically inveterate to New Orleans’s poorer neighbourhoods, with a common capacity to turn aggressive on a sixpence:
As they approach one of them says, “Boo, bitch.” “Fuck off,” she replies without thinking, some previous instinct bypassing her cautious motherly one. “You lucky you got your kids with you, bitch,” says another and they continue walking towards the railroad tracks. (194-5).
Indeed there is an extent to which “Boo” is “timeless”, and thus marked by a heightened kind of “continuing order” of things, insofar as it is an allegory about motherhood, and the feelings and fears attending it. “She’s still relatively new to motherhood,” writes Gisleson in the suggestive sentence in this regard, “not entirely comfortable with its topography…” (188). In a story about traversing an unfamiliar neighbourhood, that “topography” accrues extra allegorical cache.
Another story that places a post-Katrina ambience in continuity is “St. Claude”, Ed Skoog’s story of a schoolboy, Masden, playing truant and explorer in the St. Claude neighbourhood, north of the Bywater. Although Masden only finds himself in St. Claude because of Katrina — “he didn’t like this school. It wasn’t where he went before the flood. … School was too far away from home” (256) — the inimical ambience generated by the story’s lost-child narrative engine is only modestly contingent on the story’s post- Katrina context. Save a shrimp haul reminding Masden of cadavers and thus “those days on the roof … the water they walked through” (262), much of the story’s ambience inheres in generic and non- time contingent tableaus and sensations: “he looked around. Every parked car had a series of dents at the same level … One car, large and old as an uncle, had black tarp instead of glass for a driver’s side window” (259); “he looked around for a familiar landmark and found none” (263). Much of the inimical ambience of Skoog’s story-world, then, is of a continuing order of things un-ruptured by Katrina.
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Other stories place their featured citizens’ prima facie Katrina-conditioned mental crises in states of continuity, so that Katrina is seen simply to exacerbate pre-existing conditions of mental malaise. Jennifer Kochta’s “Stray” does this perhaps most overtly:
The same old bullshit dished out in the same old digs, just under new terms and conditions. Meredith is the one thing in all of New Orleans, from the east to the west, from the lake to the river, that is, on this early October day, exactly the fucking same as it was weeks ago. (121)
Kochta’s protagonist’s subsequent personal development — her becoming more emancipated and emotionally literate through looking for a certain stray dog in her neighbourhood — is defined for the duration against her (ultimately ex-) partner’s “continuing” psychological malaise: “For a month you search your neighbourhood for the dog … and over that month, Meredith has grown even fatter from beer and TV, always promising to do something more than sit on the couch” (128-9).
Another story that places a victim’s post-Katrina mental state in continuity is Joel Farrelly’s “Shingled Isle”, a first-person narrative about a young man, Milo, waiting out the flood on the roof of his mother’s house while fitfully habitually recalling his life heretofore. Prima facie Milo’s malaise seems to stem from the immediate consequences of Katrina, and particularly his mother’s having been caught up in the floodwaters: “[on] what used to be 6301 Argonne Street … I run through the list of reasons why I shouldn’t just swallow my mother’s OxyContin now. Not my mother’s, I remind myself. My dead mother’s. And right there the list gets shorter” (17). Across the story, though, Farrelly sketches out a no less germinal pre-Katrina hinterland of Milo’s “middle-manning various narcotics” and cheating on his girlfriend Ida with “the girl… whose name I’ve already forgotten” (22). In this way Milo’s
140 roof-bound malaise is brought into in continuity with his pre-Katrina experiences. One thing in particular evidences the state of continuity within which Milo’s malaise exists: the words “FUCK THIS”. Pre-Katrina, they apply to Milo’s kindred spirit Simon’s “witty attempt at a suicide letter” taped to his head (22-3); post-Katrina, they are the words Milo paints across his mother’s house’s roof, having entertained then eschewed thoughts of suicide, and which give the story’s ending its bittersweet flavour: “my hands reach out and grab the ladder… I glance down at my little shingled island and spot the “FUCK THIS” written across it in white paint and I grin to myself as I think about how much I can’t help but agree” (27).
Some stories, finally, place whole case studies in Katrina victimhood in states of continuity, most notably Amanda Anderson’s “After the Muses Parade”. At first sight, “Muses” present as a story about a young artist, Sadie, left blindsided by Katrina and trying to reorient herself in the aftermath through art: a melancholic picaresque of a storm-dazed Sadie turning more and more postdiluvial detritus — broken tennis rackets, smashed guitars, mattress springs —into proliferating art installations: abandoned-mannequin murder scenes and 20-foot junk towers inter alia (115). Closer contemplation, though, reveals that this is also the fourth and fifth acts of a story rooted deeply pre-Katrina, that of the triangular relationship between Sadie, alcohol, and art. Sadie’s problematic pre-Katrina relationship with alcohol is established early on in ‘Muses’: on leaving New Orleans, she says that “I made sure to bring my Buddha statue and my sixty-day chip” (98); and that, on returning to her house, she had got “halfway through a bottle of gin, and I’d never been so sober in all my life” (99). Established too is the inverse relationship between Sadie’s alcoholism and her ability to make art:
This bright idea of mine [of finishing every painting she starts] is what brought me to AA in the first place. I told myself that if I could just finish one piece, I wouldn’t have to go, but six months later, I had a
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pile of half-painted canvasses. So I sucked it up and went to my first meeting. (ibid.)
The climax of the story, then, in which Sadie regains equilibrium through the eponymous Mardi Gras parade —“Suddenly I was painting again, if only in my head. I’d do a whole series on the parade” (118) — represents a watershed moment not just for Sadie’s immediate post-Katrina striations, but a larger, more “ordinary” story bridging back into the long fetch of Sadie’s life.
Such, in summary, are the states of continuity so essential to the Wake city’s ordinariness, and to Wake’s practice of representing the city. As diverse as these states of continuity may be individually, their cumulative effect is to reiterate the understanding of New Orleans promulgated in Wake’s foreword: that it is “still crawling along, heart beating strong”, is an “amputee” whose “phantom sensations” may yet be felt, and is a site of a continuing order of things (11-12); and that no post-Katrina condition of being is so “exceptional” that it exists outside the continuing order, and “ordinariness”, of what came before Katrina.
As well as working in this representational regard, Wake works also towards the ends of recovering the victim. Whereas Wake’s representational practice invites analysis at the level of individual stories, its recovery practice begs a bird’s-eye view and analysis of Wake as a whole, as a discrete entity. The Wake city participates in the text’s recovery practice through what might be termed its “movement into recovery”. This movement, it should be first specified, is a movement between halves, that is, between the first and latter halves of Wake, between the first and latter eleven stories of Wake’s twenty- two constitutive stories. In less metaphorical terms, it should now be explained, these ideas of ‘movement’ pertain to how the general nature of stories shifts as Wake progresses from start to finish. As it progresses, this is to say, Wake moves away from extended periods of time in tightly
142 proscribed areas, in single houses and their immediate environs. As Wake proceeds, stories become on average shorter, and their individual story- worlds get more expansive. Across successive stories, Wake’s composite New Orleans becomes more vital, cacophonous, and variegated; less atomized: reintegrated out of so many immediately post-Katrina shards and splinters. In all its aspects, this “becoming” process is tantamount to a movement into recovery; and insofar as the Wake city is “sensitive to the victim”, that quality is evidenced by this movement into recovery.
This “movement” is most easily explained in terms of “difference”, of the three ways in which Wake’s halves, its “first eleven” and “second eleven” stories, differ. They differ first in terms of what might be termed their “flavours”: their individual most idiosyncratic stylistic/thematic elements. Five of Wake’s first eleven are what we might call “domestic” stories, stories that centre on an isolated house: whether the “shingled isle” upon whose roof a narrator is marooned during the week of Katrina (in Farrelly’s so-titled story), a house being scouted out during the look-and-leave period (in Bill Loehfelm’s “Bourbon Street”), being rebuilt between Katrina and the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras (in Anderson’s “After the Muses Parade”), or the two houses between which a young girl is shuttled amidst rising flood-waters (in Inman’s “The Least Resistance”).66 Only one of Wake’s second eleven, Diaz-Medina’s marriage-in-decline story “Esther”, really embraces domestic action. Where the second eleven come into their own is with what might be termed “walking-tours”, stories which feature their leads traversing the city for their whole narrative duration. Three stories of this flavour exist in Wake, and all three occur amidst Wake’s second eleven: Gisleson’s “Boo” (traversing the Bywater), Katie Walenter’s “Tracks” (the Lower Ninth Ward to Press Street), and Skoog’s “Saint Claude” (the eponymous avenue).
66 Despite its title, Loefhelm’s story actually occurs in the Garden District, on Seventh Street: the title refers to an incidental memory the narrator recalls in counterpoint to his central conversation with National Guardsmen. Moreover, Wake’s interest in domesticity can be considered to inhere in this quality of its first eleven. 143
Wake’s halves also differ second in terms of average story length: on average, this is to say, Wake’s first eleven are “longer” than its second eleven. For the sake of structuring analysis, Wake’s stories are split here into three kinds of length: below ten pages, considered “short”; ten pages exactly, termed “neat”; and over ten pages, considered “long”. By this rubric, five of Wake’s first eleven are long, three are neat, and three more are short. By contrast, only two of Wake’s second eleven are long, five are neat, and four are short. Wake’s halves thus exhibit clear differing length tendencies. Its first eleven tend above the neat; its second eleven tend below the neat.
Wake’s halves differ thirdly in terms of which areas in New Orleans are privileged within them. Stories set in certain areas and neighbourhoods, this is to say, are nucleated in in one or the other of Wake’s halves. Wake’s cohort of suburban-set stories, for example, is nucleated amidst the text’s first eleven. Five stories in Wake are set in suburban areas — Lakeview, Metairie, sub-districts and arterial roads in Gentilly — and four of them can be found in the first eleven. Nucleated amidst the text’s second eleven, in turn, is Wake’s cohort of stories set in New Orleans’s eastern flank, comprising the Marigny, the Bywater, and the Lower Nine Ward. All five stories in Wake set in these areas are found amidst the second eleven.
Three things thus differentiate Wake’s first eleven and second eleven. First, where its suburbs are privileged in the first eleven, New Orleans’s eastern flank is privileged instead in the second eleven. Second, Wake’s first eleven are on average longer than the second eleven. Finally, where “domestic” stories enjoy special currency amidst the first eleven, walking-tours enjoy such currency amidst the second eleven. Put succinctly, Wake “moves” between its halves from longer stories privileging individuate houses and/or suburban areas, to shorter stories privileging walking-tours and/or areas of the Marigny, Bywater, and Lower Ninth Ward. It is a movement back into a fuller and more vital experience of the world: into diversification, reconstruction, and revitalization. It is perhaps encapsulated in the polar
144 contrast between Wake’s first and final stories, namely Farrelly’s ‘Shingled Isle’ — one man, one roof, one house — and Skoog’s narrative walking-tour of ‘St Claude’. In this way the Wake city is sensitive to the victim, and participates in the text’s recovery practice. Thus, all told, concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in Wake, flagship instance of grassroots literary culture’s re-emergence in post-Katrina New Orleans.
The Rising Water Trilogy
John Biguenet’s Rising Water trilogy, hereafter RW3, is a theatrical triptych of houses and relationships, romantic and familial, in different Katrina contexts. To quote the trade paperback blurb:
Each play — Rising Water, Shotgun, and Mold — incorporates the structure of a house as it examines the anatomy of love, moving from the hours just after the levees’ collapse to four months into the flood’s chaotic aftermath—and then to a year later when a family returns to their now mold-encrusted home.67
More plot detail shall be given in individual play analyses. Biguenet’s plays are where the previously theorized “domestic index” of ordinary texts comes into its own. Certainly, domesticity frames the character development in Ruined and composes Wake’s first eleven’s dominant “flavour”; but RW3 represents a significant step up, for all three plays take place within different houses, or in other words different domestic sites. Instructive in this regard are Biguenet’s own words as regards RW3’s domestic sites, in which Biguenet attests to ideas of domesticity having inspired a framework for the trilogy from the work’s inception:
67 Can be seen online at
Russian writers after Chernobyl, Japanese writers after the Kobe earthquake… used something deep in their own mythologies to address the destruction of whole cities. … We’re not old enough to have a substantial mythology. But I thought if I could find something characteristic of the city to tell the story of what had happened, something that might serve in the same way as a mythology for a bigger, older culture, I could address what we had lost. And it occurred to me that architecture could be used … (Biguenet, “Eleven Years”)
More than that, Biguenet’s own words serve to position RW3’s interest in domesticity “against” mythology: against mythos, story and word-of-mouth. His words thus serve to position RW3 as “anti-mythological”: as “mundane”, “ordinary”, and words of the same semantic timbre. Biguenet’s plays are unified, too, by the trope of what might be termed the “dysfunctional domus”.68 In other words, his plays all deal, albeit in different ways, with troubling the function/s of their featured domestic site, which is to say those sites’ common simple function as shelter and/or their more advanced one as fully-fledged habitation. All told, the ordinariness of RW3’s New Orleans arises primarily from the trilogy’s interest in domesticity.
The RW3 city’s ordinariness arises second from the world-building Biguenet effects across characters’ dialogues and group conversations, a process whose characteristics can be mapped rather neatly over the characteristics of ordinary texts identified at the top of this chapter. For one thing, Biguenet attends to distinctly non-touristic concerns of education — Shotgun’s teenaged Eugene’s discontent with his relocation to a black school in the Algiers neighbourhood fuels his conflict with his father — and bureaucracy, which is to say the real-life Good Neighbour Plan of 2006, which authorized the demolition of moribund houses such as that featured in Mold and which,
68 Latin root of domestic; Latin for “house”. 146 imperilling the Mold house as it does, operates as that play’s “ticking clock”. Elsewhere, Biguenet’s dialogue establishes a concertedly unromantic world, a world of strained and/or loveless individual and married lives: the lonely daughter Mattie in Shotgun comes to mind, likewise the married couples central to Rising Water and Mold. And across all three plays, in the anti- sentimental mode of Wake, Biguenet works a patterning of dead relations: daughters in Rising Water and Shotgun, spouses in Shotgun and Mold, and parents in that latter play. Into the RW3 world, too, Biguenet builds intra- narrative load-bearing beams inused with sense of continuity. Although they are self-standing works of art, Rising Water and Mold are written such that they play out like the endings of stories that began pre-Katrina: they are plays perhaps more preoccupied line for line with untangling the past than with responding to “real-time” developments, and consequently feel like catharses of stories “continuing” on from pre-Katrina periods. One of the sub-plots of Shotgun, meanwhile, traces secondary character Willie’s coming to acknowledge long-held personal deficiencies and resolving not to allow them to “continue” after Katrina.
The RW3 city’s ordinariness arises fourthly from the trilogy’s diminution of the city to a three-house microcosm: into a “microcosmic array” of houses. The play Rising Water takes place in the majority-black, nineteenth-century Lower Ninth Ward; Shotgun, both over the river in New Orleans’s racially mixed and second-oldest neighbourhood of Algiers, and allusively — interstitially, in the elliptical periods between scenes — in the similarly mixed Gentilly; and Mold, in an indeterminate area within the twentieth-century lakeside suburbs. What the specificity of detail here should evidence is this array’s “microcosmic” cache, that is, that across his triptych of houses, Biguenet touches on a solid lion’s share of the city’s temporal- spatial/historical-geographical touchstones. The essential point vis-à-vis “ordinariness” is that these houses are not the colonial-styled rainbow- coloured mainstays of the Treme, nor the likes of the Pontalba apartments, or the preserved plantation houses and Creole mansions of the Louisiana
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State Museum. Biguenet’s houses are standard, functional, and altogether non-descript. Such, in summary, are the four pillars of RW3’s practice of representing the city: its interest in domesticity, line in world-building, infusions of senses of continuity, and diminution of New Orleans unto non- descript three-house microcosm.
As well as working in this representational regard, RW3 works also towards the ends of recovering the victim. Like Ruined and Wake, its instrument in this recovery practice is its featured ordinary New Orleans, as encoded into its microcosmic array of houses. These houses, it is argued here, enact what are here generically termed “concentrations” of Katrina victimhood: a “stylistic shearing”, “intensification”, and “amplification” of RW3’s three featured conditions of Katrina victimhood, so that they become commensurately stronger “centres” of emotional gravity in their respective plays. Concentrating conditions of victimhood as they do, Biguenet’s houses both serve to be sensitive to the victim and work towards the ends of recovering the victim.
Instructive at this point is some theoretical positioning of “sensitivity to the victim” in the RW3 instance. Whereas the Ruined and Wake cities possess a more straightforwardly sympathetic kind of sensitivity to the victim, the RW3 city possesses a more abstractly phenomenal kind, one akin to that possessed by “the house” as characterized by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard conceptualizes “the house” as an epitomized form of human mental space, as that space is constituted by dreams, memories, and the “organic habits” (14) of experience. Houses, writes Bachelard, model “the topography of our intimate being” (xxxvi), and are “psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy” (38). This same kind of capacity to register and respond to human- inhabitant stimulus is actualized within the RW3 houses, and in their concentrations of Katrina victimhood. “Our soul is an abode,” writes Bachelard (xxxvii): with this, he invokes the same kind of metamorphic union
148 whereby conditions of Katrina victimhood find metaphysical purchase in the abodes of RW3, and thereby undergo their concentrations. Even without Poetics necessarily in mind, then, Biguenet creatively realizes the RW3 houses according to Bachelardian spatial poetics. The resulting creative product is the kind of systolic sensitivity to the victim identified above, which is distilled into the theorized concentrations of Katrina victimhood, and which the ensuing analysis shall consider in situ across RW3.
What follows discusses each play and its featured house in turn. It discusses the Rising Water house’s stylistic shearing of that play’s central characters’ week-of-Katrina victimhood; how the Shotgun house intensifies the criss- crossing tensions between that play’s featured families; and how the Mold house amplifies significant aspects of that play’s central characters’ victimhood. Each play’s line in the concentration of Katrina victimhood manifests its featured house’s sensitivity to the victim: elaborating these plays’ concentration processes thus illuminates the engines of RW3’s recovery project.
RW3: Rising Water
Rising Water (2007) follows working-class married couple Sugar and Camille through the immediate aftermath of the actual hurricane Katrina, first in their attic as the levees burst and the floodwaters rise in Act 1, then on their roof in Act 2, as the attic is submerged and they look out and wait for a rescue which, it is heavily implied, never arrives. What distinguishes Rising Water is its treatment of Sugar and Camille’s victimhood, and that central couple’s talking-through of what preoccupies the play outside of the immediate plot happenings. Instrumental to that treatment in practice is how Biguenet handles the play’s featured locations, namely the attic of Act 1 and the roof of Act 2.
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In order to describe Rising Water’s treatment of its central couple’s victimhood, worse could be done than refer to another Katrina auteur Paul Chan, who in 2006 staged an open-air Waiting for Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward, an event of some significance at the time.69 Where Chan brought a New Orleans twist to Godot, Rising Water might be understood to bring a touch of Beckett to New Orleans. To Sugar and Camille’s critical week-of- Katrina condition, that is to say, Biguenet applies what is here termed a “stylistic shearing” — a cutting-back of space to its most acute and austere and exposed terms, and to the phenomenological thinness of dream and memory — that might also be identified in numerous works of Beckett, not least indeed Waiting for Godot. As manifested in the locations of the attic and the roof, the Rising Water house is intimately involved in that shearing treatment.70
Act 1 of Rising Water sets and specifies the scene thus:
The dark attic of a narrow, one-story house at night, about 2:00 A.M, cluttered with old possessions. Moonlight sifts in through a vent in the roof. The sound of a folding staircase is heard being pulled down suddenly and splashing into water. Camille clambers up from below into the attic… (Biguenet, “Rising” 7)
There are two important specified elements here. The first is the aperture formed by the opened folding staircase between the attic and the rest of the house, exploited for numerous dramatic effects. Immediately the play begins the anxious attic-bound Camille is stirred to call down to the house- traversing Sugar, whose response Biguenet defers to suspenseful effect as below:
69 The definitive account of this production is Paul Chan (ed.), Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide (New York: Creative Time, 2010). 70 Re: use of Beckett as a point of comparison: consider the following from Biguenet’s introduction to the published trilogy: “The consensus of the talkback following the [staged reading of Rising Water] was to make my script more universal by pushing further in the direction of absurdism…”: 4-5. 150
Camille: The flashlight in the cupboard where it always is. Long, anxious pause. Sug? Silence. Is it where I said it was? Silence. Sugar, did you find it there? Silence. Sug? Sugar (from below): I got it, yeah, I found it where you said. (7)
Twice subsequently, the aperture acts as a focalizing point to which Sugar and Camille move so as to monitor, and drip-feed the audience updates on, the play’s eponymous threat of rising water:
Sugar: I’ll tell you what we’re dealing with: water, plain and simple. Sugar joins Camille and points his flashlight down the stairs. Lots and lots of water. (14)
And:
Camille: I didn’t hear a thing. Sugar goes to stairs and cranes his neck. Sugar: Are you sure? I thought I heard something Camille joins Sugar at the stairs. Camille: Just the water sloshing against the house, most likely. Silence. (28)
In this way the aperture spawns moments that exist as so many concentrated sense effects: as moments of waiting for Sugar’s voice to cut through silences, or reducing attention to a small, sightless, soundless hole in the floor.
The second important specified element is the attic’s being “cluttered with old possessions” and, as is presently established in the play, with boxes. Filled with either “memories, sort of, stored away” or “so much useless junk”, depending on who is asked (Sugar and Camille respectively, at 15),
151 these boxes and their contents serve as a springboard for Sugar and Camille’s reminiscences, and for conversations that shade into the phenomenological twilight zones of dream and memory via their unadorned exposure of things left previously unspoken. One such conversation concerns Sugar and Camille’s wedding day, prompted by Sugar’s discovery of Camille’s wedding dress in her “hope chest” (16): “in a way, you healed me … of being what I was,” confesses Sugar “as he hangs the dress up on a rafter” (17). Soon thereafter, Sugar and Camille converse about parenting vis-à-vis their errant son Frankie, upon finding his old toy toolbox:
Camille: What did we ever do to him, made the boy so angry? ... You think it’s all your parents’ doing, you turned out the way you did? Sugar: I think the way I treated Frankie, it wasn’t so different from how my father treated me. (30-31)
Act 2, meanwhile, sets and specifies the scene thus: “The dark roof of the house in moonlight. The sound of water sloshing. Camille begins to emerge from the hole where the vent had been.” (34). Terse as this stage direction is, there are two important specified elements within it. The first is the roof’s very non-descriptiveness, the very fact that it is in essence nothing but a flat plane. This non-descriptiveness of setting intensifies and complements such elements of stylistic shearing as are at play in the Act 2 dialogue. It complements the negative lexical chains that permeate Camille’s discourse, specifically her descriptions of the submerged cityscape: “nothing but roofs and treetops left … no dogs, no motors, no human voices. Nothing” (34); “I haven’t heard another sound: no breeze, no animals, no baby crying in the dark” (36). It complements too the minimalist aesthetic and imagery found elsewhere in Camille’s descriptions: of the roofs that “look like boats floating on the water. Like some wrecked fleet of ships” (34); or of the very condition of being on the roof, “like being marooned on some small island or – I don’t know – the sole survivor of a sunken ship, drifting in a lifeboat. … Wouldn’t
152 that be awful, Sug? To be the sole survivor when your ship goes down. Just you and all that water” (37).
The second important specified element of the roof is that second aperture, freshly formed by the axe in Act 1 by Sugar. Both literally and ontologically this aperture “frames” the de-familiarized presence of Sugar in this act, who cannot fit fully through the aperture and thus only “exists”, in terms of stage presence, as a dismembered/sutured head and single arm. This manifests in the text thus:
Sugar (laughing with only his head visible): I’m here with you – just not all of me. (36) Sugar (his arm and then his head emerging through the hole): You calling me? (38) Sugar: I tell you, my back is killing me, stuck here in this hole. Let me change arms. He descends and then the other arm emerges, followed by his head. (41) Important finally are the play’s climactic stage directions (emphases mine):
[Sugar and Camille] stop singing and look at each other. Wailing alarms grow louder and more numerous, and light brightens to full noon as they wait for help that does not come. They turn to face the audience. Alarms reach a crescendo. Blackout. (52)
Both the ending per se and the deaths implicitly detailed within it are “sheared” down to sheer sense effects, to the most acute degrees and most austere forms of lighting and sound (indicated in bold). So, in summary, manifests the Rising Water house’s sensitivity to the victim, and its intimate involvement in the stylistic shearing, as termed here, of Sugar and Camille’s victimhood.
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RW3: Shotgun
The shotgun is a form of house particular in North American to New Orleans: a long, narrow, single-level, two-roomed house extending away from the road, originally designed to maximise scanty usable building space in the city. Among numerous variants on this from is the shotgun duplex, an edifice comprising two shotguns, one side belonging to the property-owner, and the other usually rented out. It can be readily imagined how the shotgun duplex structure lends itself to the classic narrative engine of bringing strangers together into close-quartered camaraderie or conflict, and precisely that engine powers Shotgun.
Shotgun (2009) follows white father and son Beau and Eugene from Gentilly as, returning to New Orleans after Katrina, they rent one side of a shotgun house from black patriarch Dex and his daughter Mattie’s property in the Algiers neighbourhood until their own house has been rebuilt. In a nutshell, Beau and Mattie begin to fall ever further in love until an unmoved Eugene, aided by the equally unmoved Dex and Mattie’s shiftless local suitor Willie (also black), engineers his and his father’s return to Gentilly, pulling both families back from the brink of Tennessee Williams—style tragedy but thwarting any future together for the would-be lovers. All of that action is powered along by the multi-combination of characters, by Biguenet’s riffling through such a welter of such pairings and trios of characters as can be assembled from Shotgun’s dramatis personae. In essence, this means that multifarious interpersonal tensions fuel the play: ones between Beau and Eugene, Beau and the black father Dex, Dex and Mattie, and Beau and Willie, non-resident in the Shotgun house but a frequent visitor over the course of the play. To state the point simply, the Shotgun house intensifies these tensions, and acts as an emotional hothouse. Its doing so manifests the Shotgun house’s concentration of Katrina victimhood, and its sensitivity to the victim.
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Crucial to the Shotgun house’s intensification of tensions is Biguenet’s setting of scenes. This practice is essentially one long alternation between two locations cum aspects of the Shotgun house: the outside porch of the shotgun, encompassing both sides of the house; and the kitchen/living area on Beau and Eugene’s side. To wit: SCENE LOCATIONS FEATURED CHARACTERS INVOLVED 1.1 Porch All 1.2 Kitchen Beau, Eugene 1.3 Porch Beau, Mattie, Willie 1.4 Kitchen Beau, Dex 1.5 Porch Willie, Dex (Mattie) 1.6 Kitchen Beau, Eugene 1.7 Porch Beau, Mattie, Willie 1.8 Kitchen Beau, Mattie
2.1 Kitchen Beau, Mattie, Eugene 2.2 Porch Mattie, Dex, Willie 2.3 Kitchen Beau, Dex 2.4 Porch Beau, Mattie 2.5 Porch, kitchen, porch Mattie + Dex; Beau + Eugene; Dex + Eugene 2.6 Kitchen Beau, Mattie 2.7 Porch Willie, Dex 2.8 Kitchen Beau, Eugene 2.9 Porch All
If the multi-combination of characters is Shotgun’s narrative engine, then the alternation between porch and kitchen is like a materialized fan-blade, rotating continually between shotgun frontage (the porch) and shotgun cross-section (the kitchen, looking through the house’s horizontal plane). And only in the inverse instance is the intensification of tensions curtailed. In other words, the moment instrumental to defusing these tensions — Dex’s
155 talking Eugene through how to rebuild his and Beau’s home in Gentilly, both enabling and compelling Beau to move out of the Shotgun house, as he does in the play’s final scene — occurs in the only scene in Shotgun that wrenches the play’s alternating locations together: Act 2 Scene 5 (in bold above), which moves from Mattie and Dex arguing on the porch, through to Beau and Eugene arguing in the kitchen, to Eugene storming back out onto the porch, happening on Dex, and talking through his and Beau’s exit strategy. Only with the surcease of Shotgun’s alternation between frontage and interior, then, and only with the wrenching-together of those locations in one scene, is the intensification of tensions curtailed.
Crucial too to the Shotgun house’s intensification of tensions is Biguenet’s cultivation of tensions between the play’s alternating locations themselves. One of these is nothing less than the essential racial tension of the play. As Shotgun’s scenes progress, the porch becomes ever more a “black” space. It is the space where Willie and Dex sit for extended interludes putting the world to rights (scenes 1.5, 2.2, and 2.7), and where Dex and Mattie argue with each other about his (perceived) profligacy and her (perceived) ingratitude (1.3, 2.5). By contrast, the kitchen operates as a “white” space: not only the white characters’ functional domicile, but also the space in which Beau and Eugene become fleshed out as characters and as speaking roles. Another tension is established in terms of the kinds of discourse associated with Shotgun’s locations. The porch emerges as a space of “public” discourse, particularly on Willie’s part, publically declarative of love for Mattie as he is, whereas the kitchen is a space of private discourse: the fricative man’s talk between Beau and Dex, in which the Beau-Mattie relationship is discussed in terms of Beau’s capacity to build a durable shed (2.3); the highly wrought arguments between Beau and Eugene about living in Algiers and the dead materfamilias Audrey (1.2, 1.6, 2.5); and the sustained heart-to-hearts between Beau and Mattie over their loneliness, intra-familial obligations, and guilt (Beau’s, over Audrey’s death in the week of Katrina: 2.6, as well as 1.8 and 2.4). With this, it has been fully addressed
156 how the Shotgun house intensifies the tensions between the play’s featured victims. This intensification process — this play’s line in the concentration of Katrina victimhood — manifests what this chapter has termed the Shotgun house’s sensitivity to the victim.
RW3: Mold
Mold (2013) follows married white couple Trey and Marie as they return to their house one year after Katrina to find that their ruined house — or more accurately, and saliently for discussion going forward, Trey’s parents’ ruined house — is days away from being demolished under city ordinance, cueing a marital conflict over whether to resettle or abandon the city. The stakes rise with Marie’s revelation halfway through the play that she is pregnant with Trey’s child. The play ends with this conflict unresolved, and with husband and wife perhaps terminally alienated from each other. Conversations with volunteer house inspector Amelia and insurance adjuster Edgar break up Acts 1 and 2 respectively: important in their fashions, these characters and interludes are nevertheless incidental to the ensuing analysis, and thus not discussed.
The singular quality of the Mold house is what is here termed its “double- sidedness”, the way in which its ground-floor living-room interior and its exterior porch are meant to be seen, in the context of a staged performance of the play, at the same time. By dint of its doubled-sidedness — notional when the play is merely read, but factored into the close reading here — the Mold house functions as a kind of echo chamber, a space that symbolically amplifies significant aspects of Trey and Marie’s victimhood.
The double-sided Mold house amplifies first the main operative tension between Trey and Marie, that is, between Trey’s being a native inclined to resettle in post-Katrina New Orleans, and Marie’s being a Texan-native
157 transplant minded to resettle somewhere else. One exchange especially crystallizes this tension:
Marie: You New Orleanians, you love this Godforsaken place. Trey: Can’t ever explain to someone it’s not home for, why we love it. (Biguenet, Plays: “Mold”)
This tension maps intuitively onto the Mold house’s double-sidedness: Trey’s attachment to his native city maps onto the “inside” of the house; Marie’s desire to leave the city, onto the house’s “outside”. Tellingly, too, Marie’s pregnancy is “revealed” within the plot in a conversation between Marie and Angela within the exterior porch: Marie’s most immediately self-compelling reason for wanting to move out of New Orleans, in other words, is associated spatially with the “outside” of the house. The house as a whole, though, amplifies this tension through the play simply through being the frame it is, most potently in the latter half of Act 2 when Trey and Marie’s argument over whether to resettle or remain takes extended and openly-voiced centre- stage.
The Mold house amplifies second the charged condition of Marie’s pregnancy itself, which is to allude to the emotional electricity of the fact that, until the middle of Act 2, Trey is unaware that his wife is in the early, thus not externally visible, stages of pregnancy. Essential to how the pregnancy device operates in Mold, then, and to its “charged” condition, is the invisibility of the “inward presence” of Marie’s embryonic child. Double- sided as it is, the Mold house intrinsically amplifies ideas of the in/visibility of an inward presence. In another instance of amplification, it also merits noting, Trey’s reaction to the pregnancy momentarily amplifies the native/outsider tension discussed above: “But it’s all the more reason we need to stay here. I’m not raising my child somewhere else,” he declares to an unmoved Marie upon hearing her news.
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The Mold house amplifies finally the play’s interest in “ghostliness”. This applies in the first instance to the presence of Trey’s parents in the narrative, to whom the Mold house legally belongs and who actually lived in it pre- Katrina. The script figures Trey’s parents directly in these generically ghostly terms: Trey’s father, says Marie near the climax, “didn’t want your mama and him to turn into two ghosts haunting us the rest of our lives”. Along with that of Trey’s parents, though, exists the ghostly presence of RW3 itself in its third and final constitutive play, or more precisely, ghostly traces of the trilogy’s first constitutive play, Rising Water. Through the living-room door into the otherwise unseen environs of the Mold house’s ground floor, Biguenet’s opening stage directions for Mold specify that “folding attic stairs, still down, can be glimpsed in the hall”. The student of Biguenet’s work might here recall Act 1 of Rising Water even before the latter Trey/Marie dialogue in Mold addresses Trey’s parents’ situation directly. It does so in terms both of the basis of Trey’s post-Katrina distress — “You made me drive you to Texas,” Trey laments to Marie latterly in Act 2, “and I leave my parents to die all alone in their attic” — and of Trey’s parents’ actual actions in the attic: how, as Marie recounts, Trey’s father attached his and his wife’s driving licences to their respective arms so as to enable their post mortem identification, ministering to his wife with the kind of intimacy briefly recovered by Sugar and Camille in Rising Water. In these moments of dialogue, those reading Biguenet’s post-Katrina plays as a discrete entity, as a more-than-notionally unified trilogy, can perceive quasi-ghostly traces of Rising Water. And in its threefold amplification of tension, pregnancy, and ghostliness, in summary, the Mold house’s sensitivity to the victim can be perceived as well.
Across these arrayed case studies thus glisten these houses’ common concentrations of Katrina victimhood. What these processes incarnate is what the Ruined city’s Rushing resemblance and the Wake city’s movement into recovery also incarnate: these cities’ being sensitive to the victim, and a distinctly “ordinary” manner of recovering the victim. On that note concludes
159 discussion of RW3, a theatrical triptych that translates the drama of Katrina into the purest, most humanistic kind of theatrical language.
Conclusion
Such is the ordinary school of original creative Katrina culture. It is perhaps the creative school that is most antithetical to ideas of exceptionalism, in its eschewal of “the exceptional” for “the norm”, as it were; and of overstatement for restraint, whether in terms of its muted representational palette, or in terms of a manner of recovery nucleated in the subtle territory of “sensitivity”. Across the ordinary school, the understatement of texts’ representational and recovery practices opens up space for a more conscientious kind of interest in New Orleans, specifically a “human interest” in Katrina victims and their victimhood. Through exposure to this human interest, Katrina victims are commensurately reinvested with voice, dignity, and agency: they are, in a word, recovered.
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Chapter 2: The “Microcosmic” and ”Globalist” Schools
Whatever else Katrina ensured — significant long-term upheaval in the lives of thousands; a generation’s worth of real-time case studies in the socioeconomic inequalities of urban renewal — it ensured for a time, too, uncommonly intense conversations, in America and across the world, about New Orleans. The Introduction set out how what was termed the microcosmic school of Katrina discourse explored, elaborated, and extrapolated one of the touchstone popular questions that arose during the week of Katrina: “Is this America?” Critic Ron Eyerman would take this touchstone question for the title of his own contribution to the school. The Introduction discussed, too, how various critical Katrina anthologies have considered New Orleans in relation to even more various U.S. trends, contexts, demographics, and historical patterns.71 A central motif of this school was Katrina media coverage. For the week of Katrina, as Section 1 surveyed in terms of Katrina narrative non-fiction, print and televisual U.S. media outlets immersed themselves in the city and ensured it airtime in houses around the United States. Several contributions to the microcosmic school, those of Diane Negra and Ron Cook in particular, were in essence dedicated critiques of this coverage.
Other critics, composing what the Introduction termed the “globalist” school, considered Katrina and New Orleans vis-à-vis locations outside the United States. Anna Hartnell and Junot Diaz, for example, compared post-Katrina New Orleans to Haiti after the great earthquake of 2010 (Hartnell “Reflections”; Diaz “Apocalypse”). As well, Katrina in its own right gave hitherto unrivalled exposure to New Orleans’s Vietnamese community, a living legacy of the Vietnam War. This community gained exposure more precisely from Katrina documentary A Village Called Versailles, and from its inclusion as a case study in Tom Wootten’s sociological work We Shall Not Be
71 See e.g. Hartman and Squires (eds.), No Such Thing; Wailoo (ed.), Katrina’s Imprint. 161
Moved (48-59, 153-164). During devastating floods in England in winter 2015, meanwhile, and Tweeting his way into honorary mention within the globalist school, author Robert Harris opined that “[then—Prime Minister] Cameron must be anxious that the northern floods are not to his reputation was Hurricane Katrina was to Bush’s”.
In criticism oriented more towards creative cultural responses to Hurricane Katrina, the microcosmic school finds some further purchase. Arin Keeble, reading between disasters, has theorized how certain authors responded to Hurricane Katrina by “cultivating and capturing the politicized moods of dissent that began with Katrina and focusing it back on 9/11”, in novels about that latter tragedy (9/11 15). Elsewhere, James Rhodes has discussed how post-Katrina New Orleans has been “figuratively tied” with Detroit in the cultural imaginary, in terms of a broad “urban disaster” metaphor (esp. 118); and Joseph Donica has considered the “ethics of representation” in Katrina culture vis-à-vis the analogous ethics that arose after 9/11 in terms of the value each set of ethics places on “the local” (esp. 12). The globalist school, it has to be said, is absent from this kind of criticism, save insofar as we can count the collective exegesis, by director Paul Chan and associates, of Chan’s charity production of European absurdist Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the post-Katrina Ninth Ward (Field Guide). What follows will differ from microcosmic Katrina cultural criticism by virtue of turning more concertedly into Katrina texts themselves; and will be an inaugural instance of what might be termed “globalist” Katrina cultural criticism.
This chapter deals simultaneously with the microcosmic and globalist schools of original creative Katrina culture: different in their approaches to “representing the city”, but united in their manner of “recovering the victim”. Their lines in representation will be limned first. Texts of the microcosmic school exhibit what is here termed, rather than a “microcosmic New Orleans”, an “American New Orleans”. The term’s tautology is symptomatic of the essential emphasis that structures this representation of
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New Orleans. The American New Orleans, in other words, is a representation of the city that emphasizes and foregrounds the city’s ties to the United States. The microcosmic project of representing the city is in essence one of bringing New Orleans into the U.S. national body. Texts of the globalist school, meanwhile, exhibit a “globalist New Orleans”, a city situated within any and all non-American, world-cultural, and exotic cultural currents. It represents an attempt to move away from Anglo-/white Caucasian/historical French coordinates and towards more multi-ethnic, multilingual ones.
A note on the American New Orleans: in practice, what constitutes “the United States” in microcosmic texts is in essence sweepingly white, working- to middle-class, and nucleated in a few states, namely New York, Illinois, Virginia, Missouri, and Texas. Clearly, then, the use of “U.S.” in this chapter comes with a sizable asterisk, namely that the microcosmic U.S. really represents only the predominant intersections of race and class in the United States, which is to say white and working-class, and white and middle-class. As a generic term, nevertheless, the term remains viable. The national and globalist contexts fashioned within these schools, it bears noting as well, are not ones marked by anxiety, violence, and fearfulness, such as those Susana Araujo and Susan Faludi depict in their respective examinations of 9/11 culture.72 Characteristically, Katrina-cultural iterations of these contexts balance out negatively coded/bleaker elements more liberally with positively coded/brighter ones: openness, frissons of the fantastical, and a willingness to receive Katrina victims qua “outsiders”.
Different in terms of representing the city they may be, but the microcosmic and globalist creative schools exhibit a common manner — or two strains of a single manner — of recovering the victim. That manner is here termed “situating the victim”, and amounts to a practice of texts both physically and
72 In Araujo, see esp. ch.7, where Araujo addresses War on Terror—related allegories set in Southeast Asia and South Africa. Indicative page: 170. In Faludi, see esp. 281 re: “myth of American impregnability”.) 163 symbolically situating Katrina victims, which is to say Katrina-blighted citizens of New Orleans, within either U.S. national or global contexts depending on the school in question. It amounts as well to the rupturing of classically exceptional and execrable ideas of New Orleans as an enclave, and to texts encouraging consideration of the city’s citizens not within their site alone, but within their broader national and/or global situations. Across the texts to be discussed, situating the victim works overall towards encouraging empathy on audiences’ parts for Katrina victims. In the microcosmic case, it does so by way of bringing New Orleans citizens into the U.S. national body, thereby making citizens of New Orleans more familiar to U.S. readers, and encouraging a rapprochement between Katrina victims and the U.S. national “family”. In the globalist case, it does so by way of refreshing spatiotemporally ossified ideas of New Orleans and Katrina victimhood, and by refreshing and broadening the imaginary parameters of these ideas. In practice, what is more, practices of situating the victim can catalyze and supplement what are here termed “unique recoveries”: the more text- and character-specific recoveries — movements towards recovering dignity and agency, movements towards happiness — evidenced in a given text.
What follows discusses microcosmic and globalist practices of representing the city and recovering/situating the victim — a practice that will sometimes be referred to as “situ-recovery” — across four texts. These texts are Tom Piazza’s 2008 novel City of Refuge; John Gregory Brown’s 2016 novel A Thousand Miles From Nowhere; Patricia Smith’s 2008 poetry anthology Blood Dazzler; and Elise Blackwell’s 2015 crime novel The Lower Quarter. These texts, all merit-worthy in themselves, have been chosen above others for analysis by virtue of, variously, their significance in Katrina culture (Piazza and Smith); their author’s established literary reputation, as well as their having grown up in New Orleans before moving away (Brown); and for the sake of range (non-New Orleans, female, genre-fictional author Blackwell). These texts will be analyzed in turn in terms of their featured American or globalist New Orleans; their microcosmic or globalist lines in situating the
164 victim; and the ways in which their lines in situating the victim supplement the more specialized unique recoveries of text-specific characters.
City of Refuge: microcosmic school
The chapter turns first to adopted son of New Orleans Tom Piazza, previously encountered exalting the city in Section 1’s featured text Why New Orleans Matters. Attention here turns to his Katrina novel City of Refuge, hereafter Refuge. In brief, Refuge tells in one narrative the stories of two families: the Williamses, black, comprising paterfamilias SJ, his nephew Wesley, and his sister Lucy; and the Donaldsons, white, comprising paterfamilias Craig, wife Alice, and children Annie and Malcolm. The narrative tracks each family’s experiences both during the week of Katrina — the Williamses in New Orleans, the Donaldsons outside it — and as part of the post-Katrina diaspora, specifically Texas (the Williamses) and Chicago (the Donaldsons). Although not explicitly vaunted as such, Refuge is in essence a social novel, a novel that dramatizes a prevailing social problem — the multipartite catastrophe of Katrina, in Piazza’s case — within a fictional narrative-worldly proscenium. Piazza’s primary project in Refuge can thus be considered one of writing the first social novel of Katrina. That said, he still participates in the Katrina-cultural projects of representing the city and recovering the victim; and he does so in a staunchly microcosmic vein. Throughout Refuge, Piazza insists on New Orleans’s right to a place in the U.S. spectrum, and on the city’s capacity to be bridged and brought into a compact with its U.S. hinterland. He insists no less on the fellowship of the citizens of New Orleans with Americans elsewhere in the U.S., particularly in practice in New York, Illinois, and Missouri. His novel realizes an American New Orleans and situates its featured victims accordingly, and pursues these ends in various fashions: sometimes together in sweeping ways; sometimes separately in specialized ways; and sometimes together and indirectly by way of his lines of work in social novel—writing. What follows charts these fashions in turn.
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In part, Refuge’s representational and recovery practices proceed not through any intricate or tightly wrought authorial artistry needing granularly close-read extrication from the text, but through the most basic features and operations of the narrative. Refuge is in essence a pair of family narratives running in tandem, two workings-through of a common question: to live or not to live in post-Katrina New Orleans? In Craig’s case, the impetus to work through that question comes from his wife Alice, worried about their children’s prospects in “that damaged, stunted city” (Piazza, Refuge 246); in SJ’s, from the exigencies of old age and associated difficulties of rebuilding a life which “was all gone anyway” (270). Much of Refuge’s post-Katrina narrative amounts to these two characters chewing through these questions in relation to themselves, their families, and Katrina victims in general. To wit:
Where was the loyalty to New Orleans, and to the life they had bought into together? … The last thing in the world he wanted was to give Annie a broken home. But would a broken parent be better? (Craig, at 255)
Could he imagine a life there without [Alice], which also meant without the children? The pain was more than he wanted to try to process … (Craig, at 261)
What did it matter where he was if that was all gone? And if it didn’t matter where he was, then what did it matter if he was anywhere? What was the point in living if it didn’t matter where he was? (SJ, 271)
Aside from himself, where would Lucy live? And Wesley? … Lucy missed New Orleans very badly. But what if there was nothing to go back to? … What if someday this life began to be your life? (SJ, 295)
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What about the hardworking people who were just hanging on… stuck two thousand miles from home? … How were they supposed to make a life? (Craig, 322)
What kind of person, Craig wondered … did it take to come back and get on a ladder and start making repairs? (Craig, 402)
Such questions, and the terms of those questions, necessarily situate the subject (New Orleans) and the people asking those questions (Katrina victims) within the U.S. context, said context being the substance of what “not to live” in New Orleans would actually mean. Moreover, when these questions are finally worked through, Craig and SJ come to positions that symbolically affirm the bridge-ability of the space between New Orleans and other American cities. Although Craig decides to resettle with his wife in Chicago, he is last seen in New Orleans having returned for the 2006 Mardi Gras “to join in while it lasted” (393): a pointedly symbolic moment, on Piazza’s part, of Craig bridging the space between the cities. SJ and Wesley, meanwhile, resolve to re-establish themselves in New Orleans and afresh in Houston respectively; yet the novel closes on a scene of their working together to rebuild SJ’s house in the Ninth Ward: ‘“It’s straight?” [SJ] said. Wesley nodded. “Good,” SJ said. “Hand me that hammer.”’ (403: last lines of book). This scene, like the final Donaldson scene, is a symbolic gesture on Piazza’s part towards New Orleans’s potential to be bridged with other U.S. cities, specifically here Wesley’s new home city of Houston.
Elsewhere, and more intricately throughout the narrative proper, Piazza sets his mind more exclusively towards matters of representing the city, and of crafting an American New Orleans. The Refuge New Orleans’s American character arises in considerable part from what is here termed a phenomenon of “bleeding” between places: an evocation of one place in a description of another. In Refuge, such bleeding occurs between New Orleans and other sites in the United States, in particular Chicago. Post-
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Katrina, the Donaldsons take shelter with Alice’s parents in Chicago, which city Craig and Alice resist and embrace respectively, and the prospect of permanently resettling in which city structures the Donaldson-narrative conflict throughout the middle and latter parts of Refuge.73 Piazza does not, though, diametrically oppose New Orleans and Chicago: repeatedly throughout Refuge, the former city is recalled in — it “bleeds into” — a description of the latter. Thus in Chicago’s gentrifying OffWabash neighbourhood, the “whole ensemble” of “stores with inscrutably South American or French-sounding names” and artwork-laden coffee shops “made [Craig] feel momentarily elated, as if it were the possible base for a new life, as Maple Street had been back in New Orleans, with the Riverbend so close by with the levee, and the Camellia Grill” (184).
In the ensuing sentences, New Orleans bleeds further and more concertedly into Chicago, as a growing eddy of stream-of-consciousness style swells into a current. Looking at the patrons of his choice OffWabash coffee shop, “Craig would find himself thinking about the Café Rue on Oak Street, or maybe about Vaughan’s or Little People’s, or Shakespeare Park” (186). So far, Craig’s recollection of New Orleans is so list-like, so restrained. But then
he would find himself thinking about the people who lived around Shakespeare Park, and Kemp’s park, and all those little grocery stores, and that soul food place that used to be right on the corner of Washington and LaSalle that had the great macaroni and cheese that Bobby had shown him when he had only been in the city a month, and the other restaurant in the lady’s living room that had the jukebox, and the parades going up Washington, and … (ibid.)
This sustained stream of consciousness picks up many more and smaller details in its course. Under the swell of it, the edifice of Chicago crumbles
73 Conflict nicely encapsulated at p.254, from Craig’s perspective: “to hear Alice so excited about beginning a new life in (Chicago suburb) Elkton was so jarring he didn’t even know how it express it.” 168 into a plunge-pool of New Orleans space-time. In other words, the one city bleeds into the other.
Elsewhere, without invoking the other city by name, Piazza describes Chicago in a way that recalls the classical tropes of describing New Orleans. He describes the Chicago of the later narrative period of October 2006 in terms of its cultural and characteristic distinctiveness: “The fall tang in the air, the sense of people heading someplace, the old steel and stone Chicago of Theodore Dreiser and Bix Beiderbecke. Not manic and hell-bent like New York, but solid in some hard-to-define Mid-western way” (319). The office of the old friend Craig is visiting in this interlude, furthermore, evidences a classically New Orleans quality of cultural cluttered-ness: “theater posters, a Walker Evans photo of a railroad yard, and, unmistakeable, a poster from one of the old UMich theatre productions they’d been in together” (324). Thereafter, too, Piazza recalls a New Orleans characteristic of associating establishments with famous cultural artistic patrons, describing the steakhouse where Craig and his friend then eat, a “1920s-era temple of beef abundance … that had supposedly been one of Nelson Algren’s favourite spots” (325).74
What the above passages do by way of “bleeding” descriptively, chapter 22 can be seen to do in more formal/thematic terms. The chapter comprises accounts of Alice in Chicago and Craig in New Orleans: the two end up fusing together as two variations on a theme of feeling out of place. The account of Craig details his un-reassuring trip to assize the reconstruction efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans, and registers both the “debilitating anxieties” his bearing-witness induces in him vis-à-vis the city’s reconstruction (305), and his starting, despite feeling “disgusted with himself” (315), to consider selling up and settling in Chicago. The account of Alice, meanwhile, details her
74 In the New Orleans context, see the close association of Tipitina’s with Professor Longhair, the promotional fusion of food and nightly performances up and down Frenchman Street, the association of the Upper Ninth Ward with Fats Domino in touristic discourse, and the Faulkner House Bookshop, named for William Faulkner. 169 attempting to enjoy a day shopping in Chicago but ultimately succumbing to a crying jag borne of conflicted grief, of ‘something inside her having betrayed’ her attempts to will herself into contentment (303). Each character’s activities and state/s of feeling echoes in those of their counterpart: feeling like trespassers, cuckoos, ersatz actors in their respective milieus. Each setting and situation, in other words, transfuses into its counterpart.
Bleeding in Refuge has one more aspect. Across his omniscient-narratorial bursts of scene-setting, Piazza widens his perspective to rhetorically place New Orleans and its citizens in an American myriad of states and cities:
For days and weeks, the evacuees came … looking around, into a foreign moonscape in Phoenix, or Harrisburg, or Las Vegas, or Atlanta, or Hot Springs, or Chicago, or Albuquerque, or Cape Girardeau. (204)
Thousands of people from New Orleans had awakened that morning in Pittsburgh; or Salt Lake City, or Phoenix, or in a cousin’s house in Atlanta, … Seattle, Birmingham, Boston, Miami. (358)
And in counterpoint to the above two instances, to these images of departure from New Orleans, Piazza describes Katrina refugees returning to New Orleans for the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras “from Houston and Atlanta, from Dallas and Memphis and Chicago” (375). These place-name chains are as arteries and veins running from and to the “heart” of New Orleans: they can be seen thus figuratively to channel a process of bleeding between New Orleans and, more than Chicago, a myriad of other sites and states in the United States.
Amidst this work in representing the city, Piazza attends also to matters of recovering the victim. One initiative in particular stands out in this regard, namely his fashioning of what is here termed the “Williams triptych”: a set of three narrative case studies in “situating the victim”, built around each of SJ,
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Lucy, and Wesley. The richest panel of the triptych is in essence the whole of chapter 16, hereafter termed the “Albany chapter”, which focuses on Wesley. SJ’s nephew stays out of the spotlight in Refuge’s pre-Katrina period, and is seen only as and when SJ interacts with him across chapters 1-8. After the levees break, however, Piazza devotes chapter 9 to Wesley’s experiences outside of his father’s perspective in the flooded city. Eventually he is evacuated from New Orleans, and, as the Albany chapter begins, he arrives by plane in upstate New York to take up his assigned shelter with volunteer Samaritans Ell and Art Myers. As soon as these characters meet, Piazza foregrounds the consequent culture-clash for an easy early laugh:
Wesley sat in the backseat. … At one point he said, “Is that the Rocky Mountains?” Art and Ell exchanged glances in the front seat, unsure if the young man were joking with them. “Those are the Adirondacks,” the man said. (211)
In what unfolds rather like a separate short story within Refuge, the rest of the chapter charts the rapprochement between these characters, and charts the process of Wesley becoming ever more “situated” in the initially unnatural climes of Albany. An initially stray cat—like Wesley — “looking around like a cat in a cat carrier” (209), “examining each bite of food intently before eating it” (212) — comes to recognize his own mother in Ell — “sitting there now he recognized something else in (Ell’s eyes), which he previously seen only in his own mother’s” (216) — and to acclimate to the Myers’ mode of existence. He becomes more able to be “touched, despite his distraction”, by “the process of the day, the deniable reality of this woman’s kindness” (218). Piazza sets up what conflict there is between Wesley and the husband Art: “a frown came into (Art’s) manner, if not his face, at the rudeness of [Wesley’s] question, the lack of manners” (210). When Ell ends up in hospital, however, he and Art find common ground over model aeroplane construction (220-1) and classic Western cinema:
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They went and watched the news, and then Art asked Wesley if he liked Westerns and Wesley asked what he had, and they looked through Art’s stash and settled on The Searchers. They both fell asleep about halfway through. (228: chapter ends)
In these last lines, and that final sentimental snapshot, we can see the consummations of two stories: the direct story of Wesley’s gradually situating himself in Albany to the point where he can find genuine peace in a symbolic slumber; and the indirect story of an abrasive older white man learning to share his own domestic situation with a poor black New Orleans teenager. They are as two parts of a parable on the theme of situating the victim; and in telling this parable as it does, the Albany chapter is a significant and the single most striking panel in the Williams/s triptych.
Yet Wesley’s story does not stand sui generis: SJ and Lucy achieve similar harmonies within non-New Orleans situations. Lucy’s panel of the triptych occurs immediately before Wesley’s, and is in essence the whole of chapter 15. The chapter details her arriving in an emergency campsite in rural Missouri and, while occupying herself with clothing-distribution among other things, striking up a friendship with young white volunteer Steve. Working with Steve to get herself registered on an evacuees bulletin system, Lucy is moved to grant him her personal seal of approval: “his concern and concentration confirmed for Lucy that this one was alright. … Lucy liked the fact that he didn’t seem in a hurry to talk at her. He listened” (201-2). By chapter’s end, Lucy says as much on public record:
“Well,” [Steve] said, “I’m just glad we’re here to help.” She looked at him, guardedly. He was a specimen she had not seen before, and she wasn’t sure what to make of him. “Me too,” she said. (208)
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Terse as it is, what is more, Lucy’s response, in its non-qualification of Steve’s ”we”, tacitly acknowledges the possibility that still more white people like Steve might exist outside what Piazza sketches of her less-than-impressed pre-Katrina experience of that overly familiar, falsely solicitous demographic group (adjectives drawn from 200-1). To consider Steve here, too, is instructive. Piazza’s introductory character sketch renders Steve a relative misfit in rural Missouri: “he had a lightly cosmopolitan aspect that was not particularly appreciated by his family. His skin was so pale as to appear almost translucent…” (199-200). Although Steve’s characterization essentially begins and ends there, Piazza’s sketching Steve so can nonetheless be considered a token of Piazza’s humanistic impulse, and an attempt to intimate at a common capacity between both citizens of New Orleans and other U.S. citizens to feel out of place in a common situation.
Finishing the triptych is SJ’s tenure in Texas, and his fumbling towards a romantic relationship with one Leeshawn, a family friend, Houston native, and former long-term resident of California (potted bio at 277). Really the relationship is quite a cursory devise of Piazza’s, and not in itself that interesting. The element of interest here is how, although SJ does return to New Orleans at the narrative’s end, Piazza is at pains to establish how his doing so need not necessarily be permanent. Across Refuge’s home stretch, Piazza pointedly addresses the idea of SJ’s one day “re-situating” himself with Leeshawn so as to maintain — and tacitly affirm — its viability:
Maybe later [he and Leeshawn] could make a life together, a new thing. But first he needed to put his own life back together. (356: return visit to the Ninth Ward)
One of these days, after he had done at least some of what he needed to do, maybe he would ask her to marry him. But he was getting ahead of himself… (368: talking to Leeshawn in Houston)
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“Long-term, I don’t know. The house can be rebuilt, and I am going to rebuild it.” He looked around in the morning light. “I know I’m not ready to move to Houston. Not yet.” (399: with Wesley in the Ninth Ward)
It is significant to note here that SJ starts Refuge a long-term grieving widower, and his emotional journey throughout Refuge can be figured quite readily as his becoming able to leave his grief behind. In this light, Piazza’s affirmation of SJ’s capacity to re-situate himself, however untested that capacity may be, is a testament to SJ’s ultimate recovery. Such, all told, is the Williams triptych of case studies in situating the victim, and in the viability of rapprochement between citizens of New Orleans and other U.S. citizens: in other words, the viability of bringing the former category of citizens into the national body inhabited by the latter category. Attesting to this viability as it does, the Williams triptych naturally serves the ends of Refuge’s recovery work.
Outside the Williams triptych and the identified narrative feature of bleeding, Piazza’s representational and recovery practices are furthered and consummated not in isolation but together, indirectly, by way of specialized lines of work in Piazza’s social novelist’s playbook. One of these lines is here figured as the threading of a pattern of military service between different walks and walkers of life in the Refuge narrative world. Perhaps any social novel of Katrina written in the mid-2000s, with the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq having only begun in December 2007, could not have helped but address ideas of military service. After all, instances of that service loom large in the history of Katrina, from the enduring failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to adequately maintain the levees in New Orleans in the decades before Katrina, to the stationing of National Guardsmen in the flooded city latterly in the week of Katrina. The curious thing, though, is that Piazza does not address military service per se: it exists more as a spectre of backstory than as an immediate target of social-novelistic critique. Military service, as an
174 element in Refuge, functions less in the interest of any comprehensive social critique on Piazza’s part than in the interest of Piazza’s thematic preoccupation with trauma in a post-Katrina context. It functions as a kind of bridgework between the mutually traumatized milieus of post-Katrina New Orleans and the post-9/11 United States. It functions, too, as an institution whereby certain of Refuge’s (male) characters might be situated together in a symbolic “American union”.
The most significant of these characters in narrative terms is SJ. One of the first things revealed about him is his having come back from military service in Vietnam in the mid-seventies (10); habitually thereafter, he recalls and dwells in detail on his military service: “the army had given him mixed gifts,” he recalls pre-Katrina. “A pride in his physical abilities … [and] a permanent shame for some things that he had seen” (41). In the week of Katrina, meanwhile, “as the day wore on, former Specialist Four Williams wondered where the military was” (162); and at that day’s end, “he lay throbbing, in a darkness he had not known for thirty-five years, since patrols in the jungle” (163). Ultimately that night, too, SJ succumbs to, in everything but name, the PTSD to which servicemen can be so susceptible post-combat: “he shook, racked with spasms … and he didn’t stop even after the motorboat with the two policemen came” (164). This persists post-Katrina, too, as SJ becomes susceptible to “violent fantasies that crumbled apart into debilitating grief… ‘I get imagery, just like after discharge,’” he confides in a friend (273-4).
In this way Piazza weaves a thread of military service throughout the tapestry of SJ’s life; but that thread is only one part of a wider pattern that embraces also the lives of two old white Northern men. Art Myers, with whom Wesley takes shelter in Albany, is a veteran of ”the army in Germany in 1959, 1960” (227); Alice’s Chicagoan Uncle Gus, meanwhile, is established in passing early on as a Korean War veteran by “a photo of him in uniform” (181). The seeds thus sown blossom in an extended character moment set during Thanksgiving 2006 in Chicago, in which Gus reminisces about once
175 celebrating that holiday while serving in Korea. This is a moment that dovetails the post-Katrina survivor’s guilt of Craig and other citizens of New Orleans with that of soldiers – Craig’s fellow citizens, Gus’s brothers-in-arms - in the U.S. military. Says Gus:
“So many of your friends die, you can wonder you are still alive and they aren’t.” Craig listened with a poker face, but his first impression was that the old man had somehow been able to read his mind … (360)
Gus continues:
“We had a chaplain there with us, named Father Bill Joseph. He gave a blessing over dinner … he said, ‘We don’t know why we are here, and others are not … All we know is that’s how it works; we can’t know why...’ And I’ll tell you, that had so much of a difference to every man there. It’s like he put us back where we needed to be.” Craig sat looking at Gus, and in his mind he could almost feel the egg falling off of his own face. But you are not too old learn something are you, Craig? It was as if one light on Gus had been switched off, and another, from another side, switched on. (360-1)
Through the intercutting here of Gus’s confessional with Craig’s reactions, Craig’s Katrina experience is dovetailed into the empathetic weave of the military pattern proper. Another dovetailing of Katrina and service experiences occurs at 292, as woven free-indirectly through SJ:
There was a gulf between those who had their community smashed … and those for whom life still moved in an intelligible stream. It was not unlike the line that separated those who had come back from the war and those whose lives had been going on continuously while they had been away.
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Such are the threads of the military pattern woven throughout the Refuge narrative world. By weaving this pattern, Piazza works primarily, social-novel style, to explore both the muscle trauma incurred by the metaphorical muscle of the national body, and ideas of traumatic fraternity arising from that trauma. That said, Piazza’s pattern-weaving serves indirectly, too, his representational and recovery work. His doing so, and two particular elements of that process — SJ’s being a veteran, and the threading together of Katrina and military experiences — both brings New Orleans into the context of a national “muscle trauma”, and situates Katrina victims within that trauma’s attendant traumatic brotherhood.
Refuge’s representational and recovery work is further pursued via another of Piazza’s social-novelistic lines of work, namely his line in what is here termed the “Steinbeck tragedian” style. Douglas Brinkley was one of the first to compare Piazza to earlier social novelist John Steinbeck, on the Refuge book jacket: what follows runs with this fruitful comparison, thinking of Steinbeck as a national tragedian. Piazza’s tragedian style is one of grandeur, cinematic scale, and deep feeling, through which Piazza works to convey Katrina as a national tragedy. In terms of serving Refuge’s projects, it serves to both render New Orleans as a site of U.S. national tragedy, and to situate Katrina victims within the context of that tragedy.
The parts of Refuge of interest in this tragedian regard are what are here termed the text’s “inter-chapters”, a term drawn from the critical argot used in relation to Steinbeck’s classic novel of dispossession, The Grapes of Wrath (e.g. Valenti 93). Repeatedly throughout Wrath, Steinbeck pulls the narrative eye back from his central Joad family to encompass the rest of the Depression-era U.S. In turn, certain of Refuge’s chapters pull back from the Donaldson and Williams/s to take sabbaticals in the realm of narrative omniscience. Chapter 3 begins with an extended conversational account of the turning seasons in New Orleans: “Storms are a regular feature of late summer and fall, but they have to compete with the other ones—the
177 children starting school, the social aid clubs planning their parades…” (29- 30). Chapter 6 surveys the evacuation from New Orleans on the morning before Katrina’s passage over New Orleans, detailing the interstate highways and alternative routes taken thereupon by an impersonalized “some”, “others”, “they”, and “people who are rattled, distracted” (96-7). At one point, indeed, the chapter becomes a factual primer for the uninitiated on New Orleans: “”New Orleans is surrounded by water. The Mississippi River forms the crescent-shaped southern border, where the city’s highest ground rises…” (96).
Subsequent inter-chapters channel more potent tragedian tones. Chapter 21’s panorama of the post-Katrina diaspora and burgeoning inner-city reparation process is swathed in quiet desperation: “At the end of a day’s work clearing their houses, they drove back to their sister’s house in Houston, or their cousin’s in Hammond, and stood under the shower for half an hour” (289). Week-of-Katrina inter-chapters, by steadily starker contrast, channel that righteous social fury with which Steinbeck drops the title in situ in his own novel: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy … for the vintage.” Midway through chapter 10, as SJ and his sister Lucy survey the immediate aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans, Piazza’s voice breaks the fourth wall initially to inform us that “they couldn’t have known that the levees had failed … that both the design and construction had been flawed…” (141). Piazza continues to construct a catalogue of errors through writhing anaphora and righteously furious pay- off to make Steinbeck proud: “they very likely did not know that this exact scenario had been predicted … and so they couldn’t have known exactly how despicable a lie it was … that nobody could have predicted the levees breaks” (141-2).
Soon thereafter, Piazza condenses the worst of the week of Katrina into a three-page spread in Chapter 11. Along with chapter 13, analysed below, this section exhibits a distinctive subset of features that engender its overall
178 tragedian effect. It exhibits first impersonalized figurations of human subjects:
Some people made it out on the roof; some hung on until rescue boats came, and some never did make it out at all. … The people who were trapped in their attics, or on their roofs, had no idea of the scope of what had happened. (152-153)
It exhibits second the language of totality, as in its descriptions of a populace “immersed in constant information … everything bathed in the incessant double message of urgency and detachment” (153), and of a city “in which all bets were off and anything could happen” (151). Thirdly, it uses sentences of sprawling syntactic chains and occasional anaphora, detailing, for example, “streets empty of cars, trees empty of birds, all air-conditioning units still, no radios, no televisions, everything still except for car alarms …” (152-3).
Chapter 13, finally, represents Piazza’s tragedian acme. It is an extended panorama of the Superdome and Convention Center in the week of Katrina, and exhibits the same subset of techniques as chapter 11. Thus it evinces impersonalized subjects: “citizens streamed towards the Superdome. … they camped in seats, they camped in hallways … hundreds preferred to camp on the sidewalks” (165-6). It exhibits the language of totality: “everything was on overload … every narrative was twisted and mocked, torn out of any context” (167). And it evinces sprawling anaphoric sentences: “…then sunrise again and still no food, and no information, no news, no visit from any representative of a coordinated authority to give the comfort of…” (166). As well as these techniques, the chapter exhibits too a fire-and-brimstone register reminiscent of Steinbeck at his most Wrathful:
Rosa Parks is having a heart attack on the curb and Mister Rogers blows Paul Robeson. … What are they trying to tell us? Why have they all been placed together in this narrative? What do they all have in common? If the Depression didn’t reveal it, or the Holocaust, or the
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photographs of Emmett Till, or Goya’s Caprichos, why should these mismatched socks, this salvage, mean anything now? (167)
The mind cannot process all the disjunction (of the Superdome), a perverted inferno, set up by the guilty for the innocent. The mind goes on overload and only scraps adhere… (168)
… the Dome and the entire city and maybe the entire nation a ship without a pilot, battered and headed for disaster. (169)
Such, all told, is Piazza’s Steinbeck tragedian style: a grandiose, super-scaled, deeply felt style that both renders New Orleans as a site of national tragedy, and situates Katrina victims in the context of that same tragedy, thereby bringing them into the national body. Thus concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in Refuge, one of the relative epics of Katrina culture, and a text that vaunts itself as a relative epic of late-2000s American culture.
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere: microcosmic school
In an interview of July 2016 promoting his latest novel, John Gregory Brown makes very clear his simultaneous attachments to New Orleans, his birthplace, and Virginia, his subsequent area of long-term residence. Having lived there, Brown says, “doesn’t make New Orleans any less my home, but we raised our kids here, we have friends here. It really has become home in ways that still surprise me” (“Miles”). In a walking talking symbolic capacity, then, Brown bridges the space between New Orleans and the rest of the U.S. national body. So too does the novel Brown was promoting in that interview, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere.
The novel, hereafter 1000M, follows one Henry Garrett, a melancholic literature teacher born and based in New Orleans, as he flees the city in
180 advance of Katrina and ends up ensconcing himself in the unassuming Ganesha motel in rural Virginia.75 In a nutshell, the novel charts Henry’s coming to terms with his past and his recovering a sense of personal equilibrium. The novel charts also Henry’s doing so through the pursuit of love and art in the wake of Katrina.76 Although the novel takes place in the rural hinterland of the U.S., New Orleans nevertheless maintains a firm presence in 1000M’s narrative world; and this New Orleans is very much of the microcosmic school’s American design.
The 1000M New Orleans’s American character stems from sundry sources, the first being the nature of the city’s narrative presence. In the main, this is to say, Brown’s New Orleans exists less as an immediate presence than as something mediated through television sets and Katrina media coverage. Throughout the narrative, Brown frames his featured New Orleans consistently within both the national communications apparatus and the week-of-Katrina discourse occurring within that apparatus:
He could not stop watching the devastation on TV. Even the commercials that interrupted the news seemed part of the ordeal. … At first he tried to guess what the reporters must be saying as they stood on wet and dark French Quarter corners… (Brown, 1000M 19)
On the news they showed the buses arriving from out of town to take folks off to dry land. … Henry could not determine which areas were and were not still flooded. They showed maps, presented diagrams, but even the reporters often seemed confused about where they were. Again and again these reports cut to floating bodies… (184)
75 The autobiographical inflection here – Brown is an English professor based in Virginia — is interesting to note, yet little more than that for present purposes. 76 Some important details best established from the off: Henry has an estranged girlfriend called Amy; a notable secondary character is Marge, a close Platonic friend Henry makes in VA; he accidentally kills a man who jumps in front of his car, the effects of which play out over the novel; and his father, recollected in flashbacks, vanishes at a point before 1000M begins for reasons that are never explained. Other important details are established in the chapter proper as and when. 181
He watched the news and searched for the familiar. Hundreds of thousands of others, spread out across the country, must be feeling the same way, watching the news too, reading the signs that refugees held up before the news cameras, bearing names of those they hoped to find… (198)
He’d turned on the TV and watched a CNN report on how difficult rebuilding and recovery would be when residents were finally allowed to return. … The reporter was talking, explaining this and that, providing estimated costs… (215)
Through such invocations of Katrina media coverage, the city’s edges shade consistently into the national discursive-communicative medium. With every invocation of its mediated presence, through a kind of osmosis along those edges, it accrues an ever more American character.
The 1000M New Orleans’s American character stems second from the “sprawl” of Brown’s musical references in 1000M. By any credible measure, New Orleans is one of the great historically musical cities, one with a markedly musical DNA. Accordingly enough, then, myriad figurations of and references to music find their way into 1000M. What is significant here is that, as a rule, these figurations and references are dissociated from received ideas of “New Orleans music”. In terms of its practitioners, its sui generis qualities, its contexts of performance, the music Brown references throughout 1000M lies outside New Orleans in an intra-national sprawl. So Henry’s taste in music incorporates Lou Reed, Johnny Cash, fado singer Amalia Rodrigues, and Ines Bacan inter alia. Jazz appears only in the guise of Thelonius Monk, historical North Carolina-born, New York—based pianist and Brown’s choice symbolic coordinate for Henry’s mysteriously vanished father: “the night his father played ‘Round Midnight’, maybe Henry’s favourite Monk tune… Henry somehow knew this would be the end” (40);
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“…Monk’s dying meant his father must now be dead” (119). And as Henry dreams of a flooded New Orleans,
the roofs of houses bobbing up all around him. … On one of these roofs sat Bob Dylan, boot heels anchored against the shingles … strumming a guitar, singing in his nasally whine [fellow non-NOLA, Mississippi bluesman] Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”. (101)
By way of this sprawling approach to musical reference, Brown installs the classically distinctive “musical city” within an Americanized musical map. In other words, Brown denatures New Orleans’s classically distinctive musical culture within an Americanized geography, and thereby symbolically “Americanizes” the city in its musical aspect. Secondarily, too, this musical sprawl counteracts received wisdoms of New Orleans as a musical enclave, and being musically exceptional within the United States. New Orleans’s classic Domino-playing, Longhaired pianists and its second-lining Shorty brass virtuosos are left playing second fiddle in the 1000M soundtrack.
The 1000M New Orleans’s American character stems thirdly from Brown’s use of flashback. Numerous times throughout 1000M, Brown flashes back for pages at a time to Henry’s life in pre-Katrina New Orleans: to moments with Amy and in Henry’s childhood. He does so characteristically in the middle of chapters, with the notable exception of chapter 2, which wraps de facto flashbacks into a notional dream sequence. The important aspect of Brown’s flashback practice is his manner of transitioning between past and present. These flashbacks, that is to say, are introduced within given chapters by way of wormhole elements leading near-seamlessly from Marimore back to New Orleans, elements of dream, décor, music, and citizenry:
As usual, his sleep was fitful, littered with the fragment of dreams … Henry watched himself shoving his way through teeming streets …
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And then the girl appeared… the girl, unnamed then, had begin to appear in his dream three months ago—In May, when Amy had finally given up and left New Orleans. She hadn’t cried when she told him she was leaving … (25-7: continues to end of chapter)
Even in the dark (in his room at the Ganesha motel, Henry) could see the pattern of thick swirls on the ceiling, the same design as the one inside the old theater on Prytania Street where he and Amy had sometimes gone on Monday nights. Amy loved movies, though she’d told Henry when they first met … (95: continues to 98)
(Stepping inside the Marimore funeral home,) Henry could faintly hear music playing, a hymn on an organ—“Deep River”, he thought, and then he was sure. He remembered hearing it as he ran around outside of a church somewhere, his father inside, as he’d tried to pluck figs from a tree. Was Mary with him that day? She was—she’d bet him he couldn’t reach the figs … (144: continues to 145)
The effect of these wormhole transitions is to figuratively “suture” New Orleans into the U.S. national tissue, through phenomenological details so particular that the suturing of space-time seems that much more seamless. (This seamlessness = a positive symbol of New Orleans’s consanguinity with, situation within the U.S. national body.)
Under the microcosmic umbrella of 1000M’s representational practice, still further and finally as regards this text’s American New Orleans, can be divined an ancillary project in rendering a more specifically Southern New Orleans. As well as the generically American New Orleans, in other words, an “American-regional” or “Southern” New Orleans can be identified in 1000M. This secondary project proceeds through gradual accretions of associations, and in practice it can be thought of as a “spiraling-out” of place. From a
184 closed central site of New Orleans, in other words, Brown slowly unspools the circumference of surrounding space so as to establish the city within a Southern U.S. entity. Brown sets up the springboard to this project early on, when introducing Henry’s father as a Southern states—spanning anthropologist “who’d begun, long before Henry was born, frequenting churches throughout Louisiana and Mississippi” (12). The springboard proper comes nearly 100 pages later, as, in casual conversation with Henry, the Marimore police deputy casually elides “New Orleans” and “the Gulf Coast”:
The deputy looked back over his shoulder and said “I’ve got family there, sir.” … “I’m sorry?” Henry said, leaning forward. “In New Orleans, sir,” he said. “Or nearby, on the Gulf Coast. Pass Christian?” (106)
The next two pages deliver the pay-off, as Henry reminisces about trips he took as a child with his father around New Orleans’s satellite milieus, both Gulf-Coastal and in neighbouring parishes. To wit:
Once his father had taken him for a drive along the Gulf Coast not long after it had been hit by a hurricane. … [His father] had seemed to somehow seek out the old railroad stations and abandoned warehouses and overgrown cemeteries and, once, an empty lumber mill … (107)
And:
Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, he’d hustle Henry out to the car, and they would head west out of the city on River Road, staying on that two-lane highway as it followed the curve of the Mississippi, the flames from gasoline refineries alternatively illuminating and darkening the sky … [towards] towns like Maringouin, Wallace, St.
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Gabriel, and Killona. These were towns where his father would drive past ramshackle houses and junk-strewn lawns until he spotted someone sitting out on a front porch, smoking or shucking corn. He’d stop the car then, get out, and wave. (ibid.)
Across these instances and pp.107-8 in sum, Brown spirals out from New Orleans so as to situate it as a single site within a bridgeable community of Gulf Coastal and neighbouring parish milieus.
Following and in fact preceding this precise moment — so that the full spiraling effect does not proceed sequentially but is in fact cumulative, it should perhaps be noted — Brown effects a further spiraling-out of place. Brown’s writing spirals out from the Gulf Coast, that is to say, to encompass the Virginian fringe of what might be considered the American South. The Gulf Coastal and River Road highways of Henry’s recollections — poor, blighted, abandoned — find a common macro-parallel in the stretch of Route 29 outside Marimore, and its assorted “ramshackle buildings, used-car dealerships, clapboard houses,” and homespun “signs facing the sign… announcing sales and specials, births and deaths” (49). They find a further macro-parallel in the roads around nearby county town Lovingston: in the “dilapidated clapboard homes with wide porches”, and in the hay barns, farms, and silos painted-on with No ethanol and Jesus Saves (175-6). Indeed, Marimore itself, as described by town judge Rusty while conversing with Henry, seems momentarily infused with a genre de vie different only in latitude and longitude from that of Henry’s laissez-faire, one-time roguish colonial hometown:
“Here in this part of Virginia is near about the worst place in the world for holding onto your reputation. The worst place in the world,” Rusty said again, and now looked back at Henry, “but I’ll tell you what. It’s about the best place to be once you’ve gone ahead and lost it.” (141)
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Brown’s spiraling-out of place reaches its apogee at pp.159-60, as the townspeople of Marimore turn out en masse to give Henry “one gift after another: shirts and pants and jackets… boxes of cereal and granola bars, bags of potato chips,” etc. (159). This moment enacts in miniature the process it caps: from the immediate beneficiary of Henry, human synecdoche for New Orleans, Brown’s writing spirals out to establish that synecdoche within a Southern U.S. entity.
Such is 1000M’s line in the American New Orleans. As well as working in this representational regard, 1000M works also towards the ends of situ- recovery, which is to say situating its featured victim Henry in the U.S. national context and bringing him into the U.S. national body, thereby working towards encouraging empathy for Katrina victims. Although located in Virginia, Marimore functions in the narrative less as a symbolically “southern” space than as a synecdoche for the classically imagined U.S. national “heartland”: the “country” in “country music”, as it were. Brown’s line in situ-recovery serves less to situate Henry within a simply Southern context, therefore, than to bring him into the thoracic heartland or “country” territory of the U.S. national body. The ensuing analysis proceeds on this basis. Additionally, at the dramatic climax of 1000M, Brown’s situ-recovery practice supplements Henry’s more text-specific “unique recovery”, to rehearse the term introduced at the top of the character. This will be discussed presently.
In the first instance, Brown situates Henry in a U.S. context through some fairly familiar plot manoeuvres, those of a stranger (Henry) coming to town and shedding his estrangement as he makes emotional connections, in particular with the Ganesha motel owner Latangi and churchgoing citizen Marge:
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“I will prepare your meals, Mr. Henry, and keep your room in order. You will stay as long as you would like to stay. There is nothing else of this to discuss.” … She raised one hand, as if she were offering him, in the quiet of night, a final blessing… (Latangi, 93-4)
“We’re going to start setting things straight, Mr. Garrett,” Marge said. “Lord knows you deserve it.” (130)
Ultimately, Henry finds himself being brought into the national body. Perhaps the signal moment of this process is the scene limned above of the Marimore townsfolk bringing gifts “saying they were ashamed at what the government was allowing to happen down there in Louisiana and the whole Gulf Coast … and couldn’t they just send in every soldier or National Guardsman …” (160). Sentimental as he may be, Brown renders a townsfolk possessed with a sense of intra-national community, and moved to bring Henry’s situation into the empathetic bosom of their own situation. In this way, Brown models the empathetic response he seeks to encourage amid his audience.
As well as working on Henry’s situ-recovery in isolation, Brown brings his Henry-specific recovery practice into a more systemic exercise in “situating the victims”. Relative to situating “the victim” in the singular, situating the victims can be considered an especially concerted attempt to encourage empathy for Katrina victims, by establishing a correspondence between Katrina victims and others, elsewhere in the U.S., who could be considered “victims of circumstance”. Beyond the basic aim of situating Katrina victims within the U.S. national body, Brown, in this more systemic fashion, works to situate those victims and other U.S.-based victims of circumstance within one indiscriminate communal bloodstream within that body.
This more ambitious situ-recovery practice comprises two lines of work. The first is in essence the plaiting of the fortunes of a particular family in
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Marimore, the Hugheses, into Henry’s character narrative. At this point, some plot précis is required. Through no fault of his own — simply in the service of the dramatic action demanded by 1000M’s authorial Fortuna — Henry kills a state-pen convict who, while on road-building duty, deliberately jumps in front of Henry’s car. Chance encounters with the deceased’s family drives Henry to seek absolution. He adopts their restitution as a personal project, taking on the newly fatherless son Katrell as a kind of protégé. In this way, Brown plaits together Henry’s and the Hugheses’ respective fortunes; and in so doing, he serves to situate Henry and the Hugheses, specifically Katrell, as agents in each other’s recoveries. Katrell activates the empathetic component of Henry’s weathered mind: “Though he was a child, wouldn’t he soon, in the blink of an eye, be a man? ... Didn’t he have something he might offer this boy?” (230). Henry, for his part, enables Katrell to get a job, specifically at a local restaurant (264), and start extricating himself from poverty. Through this line of work, then, Brown brings Henry and the Hugheses into one communal bloodstream, so as to situate Henry that much more intimately within the U.S. national context.
Brown’s second line of work in situating the victims is in essence a commingling in the mind’s eye of the Hugheses, again, and not just Henry, but Katrina victims in the abstract en masse. Brown’s work in this regard begins on p.226, in his evocation, routed through Henry’s helpfully expositional ruminations, of Marge’s telling her local congregation “why their help was so needed, not just for Henry’s sake, she’d tell them, but for any and all others — any and all others — who found themselves in dire need…” (226). Prima facie, as Brown lets his readers infer as Marge does her congregation, Marge’s “others” refers to Katrina victims. In the ensuing pages, however, Brown shifts this paradigm in a way the register of which commingles the basic situation of diasporic Katrina victims with that of socio- economically disenfranchised Virginians. Says Marge, as she pulls up outside the Hugheses’ trailer with Henry:
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“I know folks meant this money to go to someone in New Orleans, but I know who I meant it for all along and I said as much, if not directly. It breaks my heart we’ve got this family – and who knows how many others – living right here [in this county] in such poverty and despair.” (227)
Through this small yet striking bit of work across these two pages, Brown collapses and commingles situations in a way that situates Katrina victims within a U.S. context, and within the same symbolic communal bloodstream as other U.S.-dwelling “victims of circumstance”. In this way Brown stages in rhetorical terms the national rapprochement that is the ultimate aim of situ- recovery practice.
Such are Brown’s practices of representing the city and recovering the victim in their separate fashions. Heading into the third narrative act, it yet remains to be said, Brown brings these two lines of work into an interrelated exercise in paralleling city and victim, and consummating Henry’s unique recovery. Much is going on in Brown’s orchestration of 1000M’s finale, but the thing of immediate interest is how, put succinctly, Brown structures Henry’s catharsis, the consummation of his unique recovery, on a symbolic bridging of the space between New Orleans and North America. The traceable figure of this exercise is the word ‘clatter’, the choice narrative figure of Henry’s Katrina-heightened psychological trauma. For the lion’s share of the narrative, Brown’s use of the clatter figure is sporadic and stylistically ad hoc. From 225 on, though, as Henry returns to New Orleans, Brown invokes this choice word in more sustained style in the course of Henry’s journey:
And the highway rolled by beneath them. He was tired of resisting. Let the words come, the images. Let sound and music, clamor and clatter. Anything. (225)
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He drove through the darkness, Katrell and Marge asleep behind him, and he listened to the clatter in his head … (238)
How easy it would be to get up and walk out of the hotel, disappear down the highway into the brush? … How could he say goodbye to the dead, to the clatter, to the chaos inside him? (244-5)
Henry shut his eyes. He shut them not to quiet but to register the cacophony, the clatter and clamor … (249-50)
He could feel the entire city circling him, the clatter now turned to a familiar pitch, not of the ruin around him but of memory … (252)
After this fifth invocation, simultaneously with Henry’s arrival in New Orleans, the clatter figure is invoked no more; and by narrative’s end, the narrative, assures us, Henry is able to move on in his life without being blighted by clatter: “the clatter in his head had grown quiet, the faint murmurings of New Orleans, and he was in no hurry now” (276). The 1000M narrative world, then, is one in which the subject, Henry, cannot move past his traumatic “clatter”, cannot start over in North America, without going back to New Orleans: without a bridging, in other words, of the space between New Orleans and North America. Structuring Henry’s unique recovery in this way serves both of 1000M’s representational and recovery practices. It serves the first through its basic success in bridging New Orleans and the United States, thereby bringing the one into the body of the other; and it serves the other insofar as it establishes Henry’s ultimate unique recovery, his finding peace and harmonizing his inner clatter, as his attaining the capacity to situate himself in a U.S. context, and to take up a managerial station at his one-time refuge, the Ganesha motel. On that note concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in 1000M, bonsai study in the nature of Americanism vis-à-vis New Orleans after Katrina. So too ends discussion of the microcosmic school overall. Full due will be paid to it at the
191 end of the chapter, but right now the discussion presses on into globalist territory.
Blood Dazzler: globalist school
The chapter turns now to texts of the globalist school of both representing the city and recovering/situating the victim. The first of these is Patricia Smith’s poetry anthology Blood Dazzler. Written in 2008 and winner of the National Book Award, Smith’s anthology, hereafter Dazzler, moves linearly from immediately before the Sunday of the week of Katrina to a nebulous, medium-term point of Katrina’s aftermath. To talk about New Orleans per se in Dazzler’s case, to invoke a concrete entity that can be identified as that city, is less effective than to imagine a kind of stained-glass New Orleans: one that takes form only as a collation of so many poetic panels. Elliptical as it is, Dazzler’s New Orleans is less well understood as simply “being globalist” than as being suffused with what is termed here a globalist “Geist”. The term is chosen as the neatest immediate shorthand for “sweeping sense of”. What follows discusses first how Dazzler figures a globalist New Orleans, then the text’s globalist line in situ-recovery, that is, recovery as achieved through “situating the victim”.
The Dazzler city’s globalist Geist arises first from Smith’ range of featured poetic forms. No restraint merely to iambic pentameter and free verse here: the ghazal, tanka, and sonnet forms all feature in the text. Individual analyses of the salient poems will feature in discussion of Dazzler’s situ-recovery practice: the salient thing in the representational regard is simply these forms’ presence, and the basic globalist energies their presence infuses into the Dazzler city.
The Dazzler city’s globalist Geist arises second from a distinct sub-series of Smith’s poems, here termed the text’s “voodoo-spell series” of poems. This is a series of eight poems inspired by supposed voodoo spells in which each
192 poem dovetails their featured spell, in separate and idiosyncratic ways, with the phenomenon of Katrina. Thus “Voodoo II: Money” figures the worthlessness of magically summoned money in terms of its inefficacy against a Katrina-like weather event: “If magick (sic) brings it, it will be tainted, damp, ill-hued … it will appear green and viable/just for a second … it’s too thin to hold tomorrow back.” (Smith 24) “Voodoo III: Gambling and Lucky Lotto” figures its magical predictions in terms of the elements of a Katrina-style event:
The digit combos suggest warped wood, brick dust, wind tunnels, devilment. Numbers say mud and hurricane, But drowning most of all” (32).
And the imagery of “Voodoo VI: Healing” combines the generic pastoral — “Grind wildflowers until they/have misted … rub the bursted smell into the harm” — with the potently Katrina-connotative: “Blood in the water./Blood cleanses the water” (59). By attending in such a sustained and formalized way to an Afro-Haitian syncretic religion, Smith invests the Dazzler New Orleans with a spirituality that is non—European Catholic: is not that spirituality embodied and still enduring in St Louis’ Cathedral (in the French Quarter), St. Augustine’s Church (the Treme neighbourhood), St. Joseph’s Day (celebrated by Italian-Americans city-wide), and in the tectonic forces of Mardi Gras. In this way Smith’s voodoo-spell poetic series invests the Dazzler city with a non-American, world- (specifically Afro-) cultural spirituality.
The Dazzler city’s globalist Geist arises finally from another sub-series of poems: a “hurricane series” more loosely formalized than the voodoo spell series, and one distinguished by Smith’s giving voice to Hurricane Katrina itself. Considering how explicitly anthropomorphic the practice of naming hurricanes is, sustained anthropomorphic treatments of Katrina, which is to say the hurricane specifically, are surprisingly rare in extant Katrina culture.
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Smith’s stands alone, and, more saliently in this context, carries considerable globalist cache. In the first instance within Dazzler’s introductory tranche of poems, Smith moves out of New Orleans into the Atlantic ocean, following the metamorphosis of “tropical depression twelve” into Hurricane Katrina’s Category 5 zenith.
My eye takes in so much — what it craves, what I hoped never to see. It doesn’t care about pain, is eons away from the ego’s thump, doesn’t hesitate to scan the stark, adjust for distance … (“5 P.M., Thursday, August 25, 2005”: 4)
I have crammed my mouth with buildings, brushed aside skimpy altars, snapped shut windows to bright shatter with my fingers. And I’ve warned them, soft: You must not know my name. (“8 A.M., Sunday, August 28, 2005”, 11)
Smith’s anthropomorphized hurricane recurs a few times thereafter, in “She Sees What It Sees” (18), in “Katrina” (31) — “Scraping towards the first of you, hungering for wood” — and at 58:
Now everything that breathes Knows my given name, the full of it, The scars it leaves on the skyline They know my moments of mercy, And yes, how calmly I can kill. (“Their Savior Was Me”, 58)
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In this way, Smith gives voice to Hurricane Katrina, and alchemizes that supranational meteorological phenomenon into an anthropomorphic entity and significant globalist devise. The nature of that voice itself supplements this globalist effect: it outreaches and looks as illimitably down upon individual nations as the eagle does the fly. In Dazzler’s last tranche of poems, what is more, Smith briefly begins to alchemize the whole global meteorological system into a globalist Parnassus of the skies, with poems giving voice to Betsy, and paying tribute to Katrina’s historical peers in abecedarian fashion:
No nuance. Got no whisper In you, do you girl?
………………………….
So if this was your way of erasing me, turning me from rough lesson to raindrop, you did it ugly, chile. (“What Betsy Has To Say”, 67-8)
Arlene learned to dance backwards in heels that were too high. Bret prayed for a shaggy mustache made of mud and hair. Cindy just couldn’t keep her windy legs together. (“Siblings”, 75)
In these assorted ways, all told, the hurricane series situates the Dazzler New Orleans within a fantastical, stratospheric context and thereby consummates the city’s globalist Geist.
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Such is Smith’s representational practice. As well as working in this representational regard, Dazzler works also towards the ends of recovering the victim. It does so in accordance with the general way set out at the top of the chapter: it situates its figured victims in a global context, ruptures received ideas of New Orleans as an enclave, and encourages empathy by way of refreshing ossified, alienating ideas of New Orleans citizens and Katrina victimhood. What distinguishes Dazzler’s practice of “refreshment” is how it enacts a kind of symbolic ennoblement, of both Katrina victims themselves and the circumstances of their victimhood. Smith’s situ-recovery practice works so as to transfigure the mean and petty human and institutional forces that exacerbated the tragedy of Katrina into forces operating and conceivable only in global-perspectival, metaphysically rarefied terms. Katrina victimhood thereby has conferred upon it a sombre nobility, and senses of occasion and dignity.
Smith’s situ-recovery practice proceeds first from, again, her voodoo-spell series of poems. The crucial thing this time is one of the series’s structuring elements, specifically how its constitutive poems are characteristically written as if addressed to Katrina victims. Voodoo II hinges on how the money will “turn you into a certified fool” before its ultimate failure “to hold tomorrow back” as above. “Voodoo IV: Power and Domination” figures the effect of using the featured spell as the user’s becoming a Katrina-like force of ferocity: “An envelope rubbed with sage will give you/a whip of words. You will become a monster,/ And their small selves will be swallowed” (37). And with Katrina clearly in mind, “Voodoo VII: Develop Psychic Powers” details a spell “which will allow you to whisper the next visit,/ to pick up your picture frames and pills,/ to point your battered car toward the mouth/of the interstate” (62). Thus Smith situates Katrina victims within an international exercise in spell-craft, that is, spells associated with a religion of African origin working their effects across the Europe and the Atlantic in the United States. The circumstances of Katrina victimhood are thus transfigured into ones commensurately expansive, metaphysically heightened, and ennobling.
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More than that, that “you” has a supplemental Russian-doll effect of situating Dazzler’s readers themselves as victims, thereby broadening the parameters of who “victimhood” may be applied to. And the final poem in the series, “Voodoo VIII: Spiritual Cleansing and Blessing”, consummates this perspectival effect with its broadening out from the second person singular into the first person plural:
In the seconds after storm, we sign on for brash little resurrections.
……………………………………..
And we are comforted until the sun blazes the stench forward … (“Voodoo VIII”, 77)
Smith’s situ-recovery practice proceeds second from certain instances of formal work. More precisely, it proceeds from Smith’s fashioning poems out of her globalist subset of poetic forms so as to serve, however independently of Smith’s designs, to unlock symbolically ennobling energies contained within fashioned poems’ various forms. The first instance of this formal work is “Ghazal”. Taking shape in Arabia and South Asia of centuries of yore, the ghazal form constitutes a series of discrete couplets ending with a common refrain word. In her own example of the form, Smith figures the advance battery of rainfall early August 28th, about 24 hours before the levees break:
There were early indications that this was no mere rain when the B-boys stopped their balling to shout Yo! You hear rain?
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But air just danced wrong around them. Doomed brick and wood shivered a little. Children saw no reason not to go near rain.
……………………………………………………….
Everyone else tried hard to vanish the sight of dripping nomads rowing cardboard boxes. No, this was not mere rain. (“Ghazal”, 16)
Classically, the ghazal was the great Persian vehicle for expressions of acute romantic, unrequited, and spiritual feelings. By deploying the ghazal form as she does, then, Smith sharpens, makes more acute in affective terms, the sense of augury that pervades the advance rains of Katrina. At the same time, the form implicitly puts Katrina victims at an associative remove from Western-traditional, Christian-cultural sources of deliverance. The cumulative effect is to at least accentuate the empathetic appeal that the poem makes on behalf of its limned victims.
The second instance of Smith’s specialized formal work is “Tankas”. Coming directly midway through Dazzler, the week of Katrina at its acme in terms of the collection’s internal chronology, this poem is a series of eleven tanka giving voice to anonymous victims – and not necessarily survivors, it is sometimes implied – of the week of Katrina. Each tanka ventriloquizes one of these victims, as in the indicative array below:
Never has there been a wind like this. Its throaty howl has memorized my name. And it calls, and it
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calls, and lamb to ax, I come.
I have three children, but only two arms. He falls and barely splashes, that’s how incredibly light he is— was. How death whispers.
I lie on my back on this roof, dazed by the stars blazing on pure black. I croon feverish, off-key to drown out the water’s teeth. (“Tankas”, 38)
Classically, the tanka was the choice form of Japanese imperial society, and of courtly literary culture: The Tale of Genji, for example, or the writings of the four courtly women covered by Hishashi Nakamura in a recent centuries- spanning lecture of his. By exhibiting the form it does, then, “Tankas” serves to poetically ennoble its ventriloquized victims. They receive from their formal treatment the dignity denied Katrina victims en masse in their week- of-Katrina abjection; and they are formalized into a kind of federation standing in distinction against the federal-institutional failures that exacerbated Katrina. Smith’s placement of the tanka in situ — staggered parallel columns, replicated in the quotation above — might be fancied to supplement this ennobling effect.
The final instance of Smith’s specialized formal work occurs in ‘Ethel’s Sestina’. Put briefly, the sestina form hinges on a very specific rotation of six “end-words” around six stanzas of six lines each. In her take on the form, Smith applies this treatment to the true story of Katrina victim Ethel Freeman, an elderly wheelchair-bound woman who died awaiting evacuation
199 from the Superdome and whose case Spike Lee picked up in When the Levees Broke. An extended excerpt follows:
Gon’ be obedient in this here chair, goin’ bide my time, fanning against all this sun. I ask my boy, and all he says I wait. He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep. Trust his every word. Herbert my son, I believe him when he says help gon’ come.
Been so long since all these suffrin’ folks come to this place. Now on the ground round my chair, they sweat in my shade, keep asking my son could that be a bus they see. It’s the sun foolin’ them, shining much too loud for sleep, making us hear engines, wheels. Not yet. Wait.
………………………………………………..
[Envoi:]
Wish you coulda come on this journey, son, Seen that old sweet sun lift me out of sleep. Didn’t have to wait. And see my golden chair? (“Ethel’s Sestina”, 45- 6)
At its root, however widely used nowadays, the sestina is a troubadour’s form, borne of medieval Occitan troubadour culture and expounded earliest by troubadours Arnaut Daniel and Guilhem de Caortz. By giving Ethel’s death the sestina treatment, then, Smith assigns to Ethel’s story the status of
200 troubadour material: a status of deserving to be metaphorically “sung” with brio, sensitivity, a sense of occasion. It is a status, too, of deserving such time, personal investment, and thought as necessarily goes into crafting a sestina. Smith’s use of the sestina form, in a nutshell, serves as a symbolic attestation to the value of what Smith pointedly preserves as Ethel’s demotic voice. Consistently across Smith’s globalist subset of poems, then, this specialized line of formal work serves to ennoble the Katrina victims figured within those poems.
Smith’s situ-recovery practice proceeds third and finally from Dazzler’s creative poetic centerpiece. It takes as its raw material the death-by- drowning of thirty-four residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home in New Orleans’s adjacent St. Bernard Parish during the week of Katrina. Amidst the many petty, squalid institutional failures characterizing Katrina, this was one of the more infamous cause celebres, ultimately receiving its own dedicated publication.77 In “34”, Smith gives voices to those victims, in verses marked by a lyricism, obliquity, gnomic register, and esotericism that cumulatively have an ennobling effect in their own right:
11. Daughter, son, I am bursting with this. I am straining to celebrate the links of blood. I am wide loud craving something like you.
12. There are no bridges.
13. We are stunned on our scabbed backs.
77 See cited work by Cobb. 201
There is the sound of whispered splashing, And then this:
Leave them. (“34”, 50-7 at 53)
Immediately after this poem, Smith pointedly places “Their Savior Was Me”, a poem which, it becomes apparent, gives voice to the hurricane Katrina as she rips through St Rita’s and encounters the previous poem’s eponymous subjects:
I was all the seconds they had left. They should have smothered me with kneeling. Instead, in their old scratched voices […] they cried Lord, Lord, Lord, Until I was forced to show them my face. (“Their Savior Was Me”, 58)
In these lines, Smith refigures victims from a perspective that transfigures the meanness of the circumstances of the deaths — their abandonment in spite of their incapacities — into something that confers upon their deaths a sense of scale, special metaphysical significance, and sombre nobility. What is more, shifting perspective so gives Smith the scope to reinvest these victims with an extent of ennobling personal agency, as encoded into the quiet intractability, as it presents here, of their appeals to the divine over Hurricane Katrina. On that note, all told, concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in Dazzler, exercise in Katrina impressionism shot through with the winds of the worlds.
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The Lower Quarter: globalist school
The chapter turns finally to Louisiana-raised, South Carolina-based Elise Blackwell’s crime novel The Lower Quarter (2015): in essence an exercise in twenty-first century noir, New Orleans—fried. The Quarter narrative unspools three sets of interrelated criminal intrigues: the murder of Czech criminal Ladislav in a New Orleans hotel; human trafficking, specifically of young women for sexual exploitation; and international art smuggling, specifically vis-à-vis a missing painting that Ladislav had come to New Orleans to recover. Two characters are central to the narrative overall: art- restorer Johanna and anti-heroic dilettante Clay. Important too are reformed art thief Eli and masseuse Marion. From the first page onwards, a whole intricate tissue of plot and backstory emerges at the story-level of narrative. For the present purposes, the only elements of this story-tissue needing to be mentioned are that Johanna was once kidnapped by Ladislav and forced into sexual slavery in Belgium for two years, and that she is the one who stole the missing painting mentioned above. What follows discusses Quarter’s practices in both representational and recovery regards, in terms of two lines of works — one operating at what is here termed a “macrocosmic level”, the other at a “microcosmic level” — which each work towards the text’s dual ends of representing the city and recovering the victim.
At the macrocosmic level, Quarter’s representational and recovery work proceeds in terms of Blackwell’s cultivation of a globalist network culture throughout her narrative world. Much of the sense of this culture stems from two of Quarter’s basic sets of intrigues as detailed above: those concerned with trafficking and art smuggling. The point of analytical interest is that both practices are conditional on and proceed via networks: via the routes between points of departure, arrival, and exchange, as traversed by the human actors of these sub-processes. Blackwell’s New Orleans, more saliently still, emerges as a key hub of these networks. In plot terms alone, it
203 is the site in which both of Quarter’s featured smuggling and trafficking practices come together in a way allowing each to be set out and seen with some clarity.
Away from these broad tectonic plates of story, Blackwell cultivates ideas of New Orleans as a hub of globalist network culture, hereafter shortened to “net/hub ideas”, in sundry smaller ways throughout the narrative. She does so first by way of inserting choice aphorisms into her characters’ thought and speech processes, aphoristic musings on the globalized nature of New Orleans:
Despite claiming tourism as its main trade, the Lower Quarter was a place where you could become a local faster than in most places. (Blackwell 28)
“Maybe it’s a coincidence and [Ladislav] was here for reasons people usually come to New Orleans. The world isn’t that big a place. You can run into someone you know on a street in Shanghai…” (Clay to Johanna, 99)
That was what New Orleans had always been: a receiver of outsiders and immigrants, a blender, a granter of new identities… (130)
Blackwell amplifies net/hub ideas second by way of her thematic work vis-à- vis the visual arts. Without laboring the details, the location of three fictional paintings is the great McGuffin of Quarter’s crime narrative: in relation to it, Blackwell has characters hold court on matters of ownership and appropriation:
“I used to steal works of art. Not for the money, but to give them back to the people they really belonged to. Or the place: Puerto Rico.
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So I never really thought of it as stealing. But legally the definition of belong can be tricky…” (Eli, at 179)
The painting belonged to her. Clay might say she had earned it, but that idea was disgusting to her. It was simple: the painting belonged to her in a way that did not need to be explained. (Johanna, at 250)
Such matters of “the conditions and determinants of ownership” naturally embrace and amplify net/hub ideas.
Blackwell amplifies net/hub ideas third and finally by way of stitching ephemeral instances of globalist culture into the narrative fore- and backgrounds. Some of these instances convey a casual, spontaneous fluency on the part of the Quarter city’s denizens with a globalist lexicon of origins:
Peter was cleaning the bar with a white towel… the green of his eyes surprised [Johanna] against his black hair. “Black Irish except we’re French,” he’d said to her once…” (10)
“As for art repair,” [Anonymous Shop Proprietor] said [to Eli], “pretty much everyone goes to that Polack looker on Decatur.” (75)
Other instances — inconsequential in themselves, but salient in the present regard — give colour to Blackwell’s principal character work. On two occasions, for example, Blackwell details Clayton’s extracurricular initiatives of playing Machiavelli in the virtual lives of, inter alia, “the British graphic novelist he had tortured into obliterating his own web presence” (35-8; see also 191-3). In a late chapter, meanwhile, Eli receives a phone call from his estranged Puerto Rican paramour of old, notable only for some incidental character building (287-9). And Marion has a quietly profound character moment, moving her “to return to the unexamined life” she lives, with a politically persecuted “aficionado of scars” called Samuel, located vaguely
205 yet discernibly within the British Commonwealth: “his voice was deep, the accent the Queen’s English after being transported to some part of the world being colonized” (152). However subtly, the above instances nonetheless amplify net/hub ideas; and indeed that subtlety rather testifies to the extent of Blackwell’s globalist world-building.
In these ways, Blackwell’s cultivation of a globalist network culture furthers her globalist representational practice. As well, it furthers her situ-recovery practice vis-à-vis her principal quartet of characters. Of immediate salience globalist network-wise, the members of this quartet are in and of themselves a globalist group: Johanna is a native of the Balkans; Eli is a native of Puerto Rico; and Clay’s family, particularly his father, has contacts and assignations over the world.78 More than that, though, they are each drawn into and implicated within Quarter’s operative criminal networks. Johanna’s life pre- New Orleans was blighted by her experience under Ladislav’s duress in Belgium. Indeed, her presence in New Orleans owes wholly to Clay, who only meets her and buys her freedom from Ladislav through availing himself of Ladislav’s salubrious international services. Eli goes to New Orleans on behalf of the Lost Art Register hunting down the painting Johanna stole from Ladislav (who had himself stolen it). And Marion becomes implicated by way of becoming friends with Clay. The effect of all this is to situate the novel’s principal quartet within a very recognizable global village, existing in an empathetic fellowship with this novel’s readers. In so doing, Blackwell opens the quartet up to a commensurate wellspring of potential reader-responsive empathy, and thereby works to the ends of situ-recovery.
Another aspect of Blackwell’s net-culture cultivation oriented towards situ- recovery is the interweaving of the text’s four principal character narratives. Johanna and Clay’s narratives come together in relation to Ladislav and his criminal enterprise in Belgium and beyond; and Johanna and Eli come
78 The remaining principal, masseuse Marion, is the sole New Orleans native. 206 together first in their art-related capacities, as finder and restorer respectively, then as romantic partners. In addition, Clay and Marion build up a peculiar intimacy through BDSM (provided by Marion for Clay); Marion approaches Johanna in her capacity as art restorer hoping to have her storm- damaged paintings restored (134-5); and in Quarter’s home stretch, Clay and Eli meet outside St Louis’ Cathedral to discuss the safety of their by-this-point imperiled mutual friend Johanna. And as the narrative comes to a close, at the high-watermark of the interweaving process, all four characters meet essentially en masse, with Jo, Eli, and Marion moved to come together to discuss the anti-heroic machinations of Clay (335-8). Such, all told, is Blackwell’s interweaving of character narratives. It is a practice that situates individual principals’ character narratives within a multi-ethnic, multi- national skein, the more concertedly the closer those narratives come to their heads. In this second of two ways, then, Blackwell’s cultivation of a network culture serves Quarter’s situ-recovery practices.
At the microcosmic level, Quarter’s representational and recovery work proceeds in terms of Blackwell’s line in globalist micro-geography, or in geographical micro-sites within not merely Quarter’s general narrative world, but the confines of its featured New Orleans. Such work naturally furthers Quarter’s representational practice. More than that, it furthers the text’s recovery practice, in terms of primarily Johanna’s and secondarily Clay’s unique recoveries. It does so by establishing a model of recovery in which “situation” is a key dimension of recovery, and in which Blackwell’s figured/specialized globalist sites themselves are key in relation to these characters’ recoveries.
Blackwell’s line in globalist geography comprises first Belgium. Belgium is the site of Johanna’s traumatic backstory, her sexual exploitation under the aegis of Ladislav. In the narrative argot of Quarter, the term “Belgium” itself functions analogously to the term “Katrina”, that is as a spatiotemporal shorthand, in a way that Blackwell addresses explicitly when she first
207 establishes the term: “Johanna could understand this language of ‘Before the storm. After the storm’. She had long described her life to herself by a similar equation. Before Belgium. After Belgium” (41-2). The use of “Belgium” in this associative way recurs throughout the narrative (e.g. 91, 132, 137, 139). This usage serves to position New Orleans against the real and symbolic site of “Belgium”, and more precisely to establish it as being essentially synonymous with “after Belgium”. As well as furthering Quarter’s representational work, this positioning of site against site quietly attests to the importance of “situation”, which is to say Johanna’s shifting situations in the world over time, in Johanna’s unique recovery.
Blackwell’s line in globalist micro-geography comprises also the Hotel Richelieu. An original creation of Blackwell’s, the Richelieu is where Ladislav is murdered, where Eli stays while visiting New Orleans, and where he and Johanna end up sexually consummate a budding romance (230-1). Saliently as regards Blackwell’s representational practice, the Richelieu is a site where three different characters of narrative importance, all of non-Anglo nationalities, symbolically cross at a kind of globalist crossroads. More than that, saliently as regards Blackwell’s recovery practice, it is the site where a watershed moment of Johanna’s unique recovery occurs, and moreover does so specifically in the conceptual territory of “situation”. The Richelieu, this is to say, is where Johanna’s present situation in New Orleans symbolically exorcises her past situation in Belgium, at least to some extent, in the symbolic terms of Johanna initiating sex with Eli in the same site where her past persecutor Ladislav has met his own, mortal consummation.
Blackwell’s line in globalist micro-geography comprises two final sites. The first of these sites is the Isle of Birds, a real-life feature of Audubon Park, where Johanna and Clay meet early in the narrative to discuss their mutual bête-noire Ladislav. As they converse, Blackwell figures through Johanna an image of mass avian exodus:
208
“I had a dream about this place, that one day all the birds just flew away for a whole year. The newspaper was full of theories, but nobody really knew why they flew away. The birds were just gone— all the species— and Bird Island was empty.” (96)
Not only striking in isolation, this image is more powerful in the context of how, immediately before hailing Johanna and initiating their conversation, Clay recalls their having met once in the zoo immediately across from the Isle of Birds. The zoo moves the Johanna of Clay’s recollection to declare: “I admire these animals. They make do with this small life they are allowed. But I think they sense it. The breeze blows and they smell something else, know the world is larger” (94-5). Coupled to this conceit as it is, the Isle of Birds is that much more freighted with globalist-tinted frissons of freedom — of variety, exoticism — and of Johanna’s some day securing the airy, unabashed self-assurance she betrays when Clay asks:
“What kind of egret is that?” “Snowy,” said Johanna, who had learned the birds’ names in English right away. “You can tell because of the black legs and yellow feet— very at odds with the pretty white feathers.” (98)
Many pages later, Johanna and Clay meet again by the banks of the Mississippi near Jackson Square, in an encounter that exists in essence to trigger the upwards movement of the anti-heroic Clay’s character arc. Clay begins it by confessing to having murdered Ladislav, and ends by resolving to accomplish “a single act of reparation, of real justice’’(242) for both Johanna’s sake and the ends of self-atonement. Although Blackwell’s predominant interest as regards the backdrop of this encounter is pathetic fallacy — grey skies, general despondency — she accompanies what is also a watershed character moment for Clay with imagery of openness, freighted with possibilities of change and interchange:
209
To their right sat spikes of corporate hotel desperate for the return of conventioneers. Perhaps the city’s best-known bridge to the West Bank crossed the river there… The river was nearly free of traffic: just a lone tugboat heading slowly towards the river’s mouth into the Gulf. (234)
These conduits and sites of coming-together quietly pulse with globalist background energy. Such, all told, is Blackwell’s microcosmic line in globalist micro-geography, which directly works in the text’s representational regard and indirectly establishes Johanna and Clay’s unique recoveries within a model of situ-recovery. Thus, all told, concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in Quarter, Katrina crime fiction at its most cosmopolitan.
Conclusion
Such are the microcosmic and globalist schools of original creative Katrina culture. They are schools defined by their rupturing of the “enclave” characterization that is indivisible from exceptionalist paradigms of New Orleans. Each school uses both the city and its citizens — sometimes named individuals, sometimes invoked en masse — as agents in that rupturing process. They do this in one fashion by way of representing New Orleans as a site that exists not within a bubble but very much within U.S. national and global contexts. They do so in another fashion by way of not just statically situating Katrina victims within these same contexts, but having them actively register and participate within them: by establishing an interchange of energy between Katrina victims and their situational contexts. Insofar as situating the victim amounts to a rupturing of the enclave characterization of New Orleans, then these texts’ Katrina victims are the avatars of rupture. This symbolic status of theirs opens up the space for them to be transformed: whether into reabsorbed elements of the U.S. national body, or into refreshed historical actors, exhibiting profiles beyond the prescribed
210 palettes of the classically exceptional and execrable paradigms of New Orleans.
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Chapter 3: The “Neoclassical” School
With this chapter, the section comes to the final school of representation and recovery in original creative Katrina culture, the neoclassical school. It comes back round, too, to the conceptual lodestar of New Orleans exceptionalism with which this thesis started. So far in this section, exceptionalism has taken a back seat to alternative ways of conceptualizing the city and its citizens. Here, though, it returns in the form of its “neoclassical” legacies: the ways of thinking about New Orleans that renew the classically exceptional paradigm for the post-Katrina moment.
The character of the classically exceptional New Orleans, to rehearse what the Introduction established, arose from six identified attributes: its demographic and cultural kinds of heterogeneity; its geographical distinctiveness; its sexually and philosophically laissez-faire attitudes; and its colonial Catholicism. The character of the neoclassical New Orleans arises from a radical refashioning of the classical paradigm, across texts of this school, along more poetic-metaphysical lines: a process akin to the one that produced the Dorian mode as discussed in the first section of the thesis. As in the Dorian instance, then, the neoclassical New Orleans refashions the romantic core element of the classically exceptional city into a poetic- metaphysical one. This core element’s precise nature can be understood best in terms of one of the great historical vehicles of New Orleans metaphysics: Carnival.
Carnival is less a single phenomenon than a compound entity. It is a festival marking the threshold between both Christian liturgical seasons, formally speaking, and between the natural seasons of winter and spring, informally speaking. As understood by Mikhail Bakhtin, it amounts to a symbolic renewal of the world and worldly ideas as mediated through a destructive,
212 ritualistic inversion of orthodox socio-religious orders.79 In somewhat looser symbolic terms, too, Carnival can be conceptualized as a spatiotemporal slice of “life” between iterations of a state here termed “deathliness”. It is a period, that is to say, that seeks both to rejuvenate those weakened by winter and to help them enter Lent in the halest possible condition, and that is sandwiched between both the symbolically “deathly” winter and a Lenten time that, although oriented towards the celebrations of Easter, is in itself a deathly-inflected period of self-mortification, shrived sins, symbolic sacrifice, and abnegation. In all these capacities, Carnival can be considered a vehicle of “life-in-deathliness”: the essence of a relationship in which “life” asserts itself in symbolic forms and mounts defiant incursions against what has here been termed “deathliness”, which is to say the “symbolic field” — the associated thematic, conceptual, and symbolic territory — of “death” per se.80 This life-in-deathliness is the core element of the neoclassical New Orleans.
As well as through Carnival, the nature of life-in-deathliness can be further understood in terms of one of the great abiding New Orleans traditions: the jazz funeral. In a nutshell, the tradition dictates that following a funeral service, a body is driven most of the way to its resting place accompanied by the attendees and a brass band playing standard mournful music. At a predetermined point, though, the hearse breaks off to complete the journey by itself and the service-goers return to the point of departure dancing to upbeat music played by the present brass band, in what is known as a “second line”. Tom Piazza waxes lyrical about this tradition in a chapter of Why New Orleans Matters. Writes Piazza,
79 See Bakhtin 7-8 re: Carnival as “a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal”, and 21 re: Carnival’s “destructive aspect” and how “degradation builds a bodily grave for a new birth”. 80 See also Roach, Cities. Roach’s notion of “surrogation” is infused with life-in-deathliness in terms of the perpetuation or “keeping alive” of socially remembered pasts; and he identifies the New Orleans Carnival, as concretized in the city’s Mardi Gras season (10) and parading “krewes” (18), as a vehicle of this keeping-alive of memory. 213
So which is real, the grief or the celebration? Both, and that is why it is profound. Most funeral traditions exist to remind us we are dust. In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the time your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps for God’s sake. This isn’t escapism or denial. … It is the map of a profound relationship to their grief that is a part of life … (Piazza, Matters 31)
Here, Piazza captures particularly nicely how the jazz funeral tradition seeks to find life — to assert its continuity, its indefatigability — in the face of death. In this way the tradition, particularly its second line component, can be considered a vehicle of life-in-deathliness. Iterations of a third vehicle can be identified in New Orleans’s characteristic, St. Louis—style above-ground cemeteries, inasmuch as above-ground burial, relative to the standard subterranean style, intensifies a given cemetery-visitor’s sense of being alive amid the basic deathliness of all cemeteries.
The neoclassical New Orleans is characterized by life-in-deathliness, and operates as the arena within which texts of this school stage instances of life- in-deathliness, of life symbolically asserting itself against deathliness. It is worth emphasizing here that neoclassical cities can bear extensive inflections of deathliness — melancholy, hardship, inimicality, bleakness —without being intrinsically “less” neoclassical. The crucial thing as regards their characterization is that these cities are ultimately characterized more by a symbolic assertion of life amid that deathliness. Neoclassical texts’ manner of recovering the victim, meanwhile, operates in the same conceptual territory. It is one of what is here termed “rejuvenating the victim”: imbuing Katrina victims with new life — a new capacity for voice, dignity, and agency — by way of a symbolic exposure to death and deathliness, that is, to both death per se and its symbolic field. The term is inspired by the horticultural practice of “rejuvenation pruning”, which is the extensive pruning-back of distressed and fundamentally compromised plants — analogous here to Katrina victims’
214 symbolic exposure to deathliness — so that fresh, uncompromised stems can spearhead healthier regrowth (French): analogous to a victim’s personal recovery. Precisely how rejuvenation manifests in a given context depends on a given victim’s unique circumstances. In general, though, the “rejuvenated” victim ends up in a condition conducive to healthier personal regrowth.
Life-in-deathliness and the associated ideas vaunted here, it bears noting, do not amount to the “sacralising” or “making-sacred” tendencies certain critics have observed in early mainstream responses to 9/11 (Randall 16, 92; Bond 64-67), nor to these tendencies’ banal attempts to knit 9/11 into the U.S. civic religion and thereby contain that event. Insofar as these concepts amount to anything quasi-spiritual, they amount to a considered faith in the city blighted by disaster, and in blighted citizens’ capacities to come through that disaster. What follows, in any event in the main regard, discusses neoclassical representations of New Orleans and practices of rejuvenating the victim in two texts: the first season of long-form serial television drama Treme (2010-11); and C. Morgan Babst’s novel The Floating World (2017).
Treme season 1
Treme is a long-form serial television drama that, running from 2010 to 2013, was coordinated and overseen by David Simon and Eric Overmyer, celebrated contemporary U.S. televisual auteurs. In brief, it details the variously interconnected lives of certain principal characters in post-Katrina New Orleans. These characters are jobbing musician Antoine, romantically involved buskers Sonny and Annie, bar-owner LaDonna, DJ Davis, restaurateur Janette, working-class citizen Albert and son Delmond, and married lawyer and academic Toni and Creighton. Over the four seasons Treme ultimately ran, “post-Katrina” came to signify “up to 2008”; in the first season alone, though, the narrative runs only to an indeterminate point in
215 early spring 2006. In a post—season 1 broadcast interview with the mainstay New Orleans magazine OffBeat, co-creator Simon, although making very clear a clear-eyed and conscientious understanding of the city, betrays a secondary affectionate wonder for it. He does so not least when he characterizes Treme as “a very patriotic piece in a weird way. … If you watch New Orleans attempt to restore itself after a near-death experience… [it] couldn’t help but touch on something vaguely patriotic” (Simon “Interview”). What Simon figures as the “weirdly” and “vaguely” uplifting feeling of a city recovering from “near-death” glints within the waters of Treme season 1, it is merely proposed here, in the neoclassical ambience of a city characterized by life-in-deathliness.
At the outset, a significant way in which what follows differs from preceding analyses of Treme should be set forth. Academic criticism of the show heretofore has tended to address as much of the show as was available to given critics at the time of their writing. After 2013, this is to say, critics of Treme have tended to discuss all four seasons of the show en masse, and to scrutinize the show through a wide-angle lens.81 This tendency has fostered various problematic habits: generalizing, a glossing-over of specifics, and at- best-sketchy instances of close reading. In certain cases, too, it encourages the dilution of critical merit to the point that it evaporates. Michael Bucher stands out in this regard: writing about music in Treme over all four seasons, he wraps his analysis around a critique of Treme’s “scant treatment of New Orleans hip-hop” (80) and its insufficiently discriminating treatment of bounce, basically the city’s homegrown, brass-based style of hip-hop.82 Certainly this is true, but no reasonable critic could expect the show to introduce a national audience to a highly local variant of hip-hop when a majority of people watching would, it is surely fair to say, have little
81 See e.g. Samuel, esp. 45 and his compression of multiple four-seasonal character arcs; also Keeble, “Won’t bow” esp. compression of two four-seasonal character arcs pp.58-9. 82 See Thomas, “‘Tourism” 218-19 for similar critique. 216 specialized knowledge of the genres of jazz or hip-hop in the first place.83 In contrast to the likes of Bucher, what follows here takes a more usefully circumscribed approach to its analysis. It restrains itself to a close reading of the first season alone.
As well as sharpening analytical focus and the merit of analytical observations, to study the first season alone registers a simple fact that very few critics in this writer’s experience have explicitly acknowledged: that the first season of any show is written as a 90% self-contained entity, one which, for all its creative team knows before public reaction is assessed, may be the only ever season of an envisaged show. Should a show be renewed for at least a second season, of course, the nature of the creative process changes. Show-runners, writers, et al. start having to deal with the vagaries of time — the annual questions of renewal or cancellation by a parent network; actors deciding to leave roles, necessitating new ones having to be brought in — and start to write all subsequent seasons with such functional, contextual matters in mind. However a show proceeds after its first season, though, that first season abides, and can still be considered ex post facto, as an essentially self-sufficient entity. What follows considers — and in the wake of characteristically seasons-synthesizing Treme criticism heretofore, reconsiders — Treme’s first season as such an entity.
What follows discusses first Treme season 1’s work in representing the city, and its featured neoclassical New Orleans. In practice, this amounts to an analysis of the two main running threads of Treme season 1 as a whole. The first is what is here termed the show’s “terpsichorean thread”, its creative line in song-and-dance and musical interludes.84 Treme season 1 abounds in extended musical interludes, at least one per episode, and it is not unusual across the season for all narrative progression to stop dead for several
83 Although a generalism, it is a sadly true one. 84 The identified thread is named after Terpsichore, the Muse of dance: perhaps pretentious, but evocative and fitting. 217 minutes simply to accommodate one. An interlude latterly in the second episode interweaving a local Sixth Ward bar gig, a gig for the trombonist Antoine in Bourbon Street, and a formal event hosting the young trumpeter Delmond is an early indicative example of the form. The second of Treme season 1’s main running threads is the story-thread of one Daymo, brother of bar-owner LaDonna who was arrested immediately pre-Katrina and went missing sometime over the week of Katrina, and the pursuit of whom by LaDonna and the Uptown lawyer Toni progresses episode by episode. Their fears of his death are ultimately borne out in the season’s seventh episode; the three subsequent episodes detail the fallout.
Such are the two main running threads of Treme season 1. Although unrelated in the immediate order of things, these threads almost spontaneously align themselves with the symbolic abstractions identified at the top of the chapter. To wit, the terpsichorean thread — communal, exuberant, and kinesthetic — is a symbolic form of “life”; and the Daymo thread operates in the field of deathliness. What follows is undergirded by this symbolic alignment. It discusses how Treme season 1 interrelates its terpsichorean and Daymo threads over episodes, and how in so doing, it stages the instances of life-in-deathliness that characterize its neoclassical New Orleans.
For the season’s first four episodes, it must be said, the terpsichorean and Daymo threads do not “interrelate” in the full, symbiotic sense of that word so much as they more simply coincide. Worthy of note nonetheless is how certain of these episodes’ musical interludes do inhabit the Daymo-thread territory of deathliness. The first of these is in fact the first scene of the season: a jazz funeral for an incidental character, participated in by the gigging trombonist Antoine. Stylistically, the interlude is characterized by close-ups of either instruments being warmed up and played, or legs and feet in motion, walking or “cutting shapes” as jazz funeral dance practice is informally known. Insofar as death represents a coming-apart of things,
218 these close-ups can be thought to anatomize and disintegrate proceedings to symbolically deathly effect. Of more substantial symbolic effect is how, towards the apogee of the funeral, the band pauses to play “on the spot”, the local argot for “while not moving”, under the Claiborne overpass (Treme, episode 1 minute 11).85 This real-life cause celebre was constructed in 1964 despite cutting through a space historically renowned and established as a space of African-American culture and commerce in New Orleans. This space’s functions promptly ceased upon the construction of the overpass.86 Notwithstanding certain real-life beautification efforts — local artists’ paintings nowadays festoon its supporting pillars — the overpass itself, as a result of the context of its construction, still connotes deathliness: inertness, vacancy. Antoine and the band’s stopping under it to jam for the funeral second-line thus works symbolically as an instance of Treme’s citizens “finding life”, or generating energy through their terpsichorean second-line activity, “in deathliness”, which is to say under a site marked like Cain with the connotation of civic death.
Another interlude that inhabits the territory of deathliness in these first four episodes occurs in the third episode. The working-class Sixth Ward citizen Albert Lambreaux is the chief of a local (fictional) Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and the third episode details the fallout from the death of one of his tribesmen owing to Katrina. In the episode’s final scene, Albert calls his tribe to the deceased’s house for a tribal memorial service, an event less upbeat than the jazz funeral but still involving a communal, vocals-and-percussion performance of historical New Orleans standard “My Indian Red”. As can be imagined, this in itself stages an instance of life-in-deathliness. The effect is then enhanced, though, by the abrupt arrival of a tour bus:
ALBERT turns as tour bus pulls up. INDIANS’ singing stops. Shot of camera flashes from behind bus window.
85 Timings are given here and hereafter in rough minutes. 86 Potted history in Rivlin, 91. 219
DRIVER: How you doing, sir? What’s this about? ALBERT: You tell me what this here’s about. DRIVER: Well, people want to see what happened. Is that your house? INDIAN: Drive away from here, sir. DRIVER: Now we was just coming around- INDIAN: Just drive away! Pause. Touristic hubbub can be heard. DRIVER: “I’m sorry… You’re right… I’m sorry…” Bus drives away. Tight shot of INDIANS from behind watching bus drive away. Fade out. (E3 52+: transcription mine)
Taking its cue from the coarse historical tradition of “Katrina tours”, this ending serves to stage an instance of life (the animated tourists) asserting itself (in the intrusive bus) against deathliness (the immediate ravaged milieu, the timbre of the Indian service).
The fifth episode is when Treme season 1’s terpsichorean and Daymo threads start to significantly interrelate. In this episode, the irascible DJ Davis assembles a band to record his reworked version of New Orleans RnB standard “Shame Shame Shame”: the ensuing recording session is depicted in real time in what constitutes this episode’s central interlude. Davis’s version reworks the lyrics, originally directed against one Ms. Roxie for her wily womanly ways, into an attack on both then-President George Bush and faceless institutional forces for their failures in the week and wake of Katrina:
DAVIS: We was on the ropes/We were down and out/You flew on over/never did come down
Shame, shame, shame on you, now, Dubya (x3)
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Shame, shame, shame what you have done
DAVIS speaks freely over vamping band: Now we got people from New Orleans living on air force bases and in grainy-ass motels from Utah to Georgia, and people in Washington are talking about keeping the housing projects closed. Yeah, that’s right: they don’t want no more poor people coming back to New Orleans … (E5 21-25)
Meanwhile in this episode, the Daymo thread continues to unspool. In brief, this episode reveals that Daymo not only has been registered under the wrong name in the prison system, but remains untraceable even under that wrong name. Over the course of their associated experiences — a courtroom session (14-15), a conversational contretemps with Toni’s police-captain acquaintance (51-53) — Toni and LaDonna start to function as more than agents of narratives. They start functioning as vectors through which this episode works to convey to its audience just how “shame-shame-shameful”, as it were, institutional failures were in both the historical and the season’s featured post-Katrina New Orleans. Around the thematic leitmotif of “shame”, then, Treme season 1’s terpsichorean and Daymo threads interrelate in this fifth episode. They twine around a shared sentiment: that what is “shameful” might be criminally, even fatally negligent, but a vital riposte can yet be vaunted against it. Such is the sentiment of life-in- deathliness.
The sixth episode interrelates Treme season 1’s terpsichorean and Daymo threads again, and this time concretizes this interrelation on screen. This episode builds up to and climaxes with the annual, real-life Krewe du Vieux parade, the first of the classic parades in the annual six-week Mardi Gras calendar. The real-life case of the 2006 Mardi Gras season, scheduled for just six months after Katrina in the ensuing February, elicited strong feelings for and against. Ultimately, though, the season was considered too significant,
221 culturally and emotionally, to suspend that year. As Gary Rivlin recounts (emphases mine):
[Mayor Ray] Nagin assembled a committee to advise him about Mardi Gras. They had plenty of reasons for cancelling that year. The city had no money … hotels were full with relief and evacuees. Some worried about how it would look. … Yet there was never any question the city would be holding its annual bacchanal. … Mardi Gras was good for business, and it would be good for psyche. Nagin didn’t waffle. Of course they would parade. (Rivlin 234)
Such is the vein of social history that informs this episode, and the episode’s execution of Vieux ‘06 converts the real event’s significance into a commensurate sense of on-screen terpsichorean spectacle. The most appreciable non-visual measure of this “spectacular” effect is the striking coming-together and direct-interaction of numerous principal characters: Davis and his mother, Antoine and his sons, and Toni, Creighton and their daughter. Meanwhile in this episode, the Daymo thread has continued to unspool, particularly in terms of Toni’s resorting to truth-seeking measures as desperate as breaking into Daymo’s abandoned car (E6 28). When the parade arrives, Toni puts her increasingly infuriating investigation to one side and joins her husband Creighton in the parade:
CREIGHTON: May I ask what changed your mind? TONI: (pauses, then:) Fuck those fucking fucks. CREIGHTON (recognizing his own words from episode 4): I second that emotion. TONI laughs. (E6 54)
The clear catharsis here amounts to Toni’s finding what can be considered a moment of life-in-deathliness, insofar as she finds brief release from her Daymo-narrative function through a terpsichorean moment of carnival time.
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The next interrelation of Treme season 1’s terpsichorean and Daymo threads occurs not in a single episode, but across the seventh and eighth. The seventh episode ends with the revelation that Daymo died in the week of Katrina, and has been lying anonymously in one of several corpse-filled shipping containers. The final act of the episode is taken up with this discovery, complete with evocative static shots of the containers and the magnified humming of refrigerators on the soundtrack. Deathliness suffuses the whole (E7 49-50). The ensuing eighth episode takes place wholly on Mardi Gras Day, and is essentially one big showcase of that period. Notwithstanding certain character work blended into the whole, the episode is at heart a celebratory evocation of, more than Mardi Gras Day itself, the symbolism of the first such event after Katrina.
The only kind of counterpoint to this tribute comes courtesy of the Daymo thread. Threaded underneath the day’s public events is LaDonna’s withholding news of Daymo’s death from her family until after Mardi Gras Day has passed. Although the episode spends nearly fifty minutes on a carnival high, it ends with LaDonna disclosing her news to her family; and the last shot of the episode is of LaDonna arriving for an appointment at a mortuary the morning after Mardi Gras. Thus the episode interrelates the season’s terpsichorean and Daymo threads at perhaps their respective apogees; and more precisely, he interrelates them so that “deathliness”, as iterated in the uncovering and disclosure of Daymo’s fate, is obliged to wend around the symbolic form of “life” that is Mardi Gras. Deathliness might carry the final moments of the episode, but not before a vital civic anima has had, as it were, its Mardi Gras day.
This threadwork culminates in the season’s final episode. This episode, indeed the season overall, concludes with Daymo’s funeral, attended by LaDonna, Toni, and Antoine as well as various nameless mourners. The funeral is of course invested with deathliness in and of itself, but its
223 connotative cachet is intensified by what is inserted into the middle of this sequence: an extended flashback to immediately pre-Katrina New Orleans, depicting the show’s principals preparing to either escape or wait out the hurricane. Depicted also, piquantly, is a still-alive Daymo, and the moments in which he is arrested for a minor speeding infraction (E10 1h02-1h11). In light of this latter element in particular, the pre-Katrina flashback serves to alchemize the nature of the funeral sequence in which the flashback occurs. Daymo’s funeral becomes “haunted” by both the past iterations of the principals we have seen through to their tenth-episode selves, and the spectral sight of the once-alive Daymo himself.
In this way, Treme season 1 ties off its Daymo thread. Immediately thereafter, though, the terpsichorean thread reemerges as the formal funeral service moves into its cathartic, second-line portion. This portion of events is not treated as a one minute–and-done feel-good lagniappe: it plays out in something close to real- and full-time, and ends with an aerial cinematographic panning-out shot of the second-line’s climactic arrival at a cross-roads (E10 1h16). In light of the service and extended flashback immediately before, this final second-line interlude functions not only as a catharsis, but also as a symbolic exorcism of the constitutive elements of the season’s Daymo thread in sum. Thus the season ends on an instance of life- in-deathliness; and thus Treme season 1’s New Orleans consummates the neoclassical characterization that unspools over the season as detailed above.
As well as working in this representational regard, Treme season 1 works also towards the ends of rejuvenating the victim: reinvesting Katrina victims with new life and new capacities for voice, dignity, and agency through symbolic exposure to death and deathliness. Treme season 1 has nine principal characters, and a majority undergoes so many unique recoveries over the
224 season.87 In each case, a principal’s recovery can be understood to follow some significant symbolic exposure to death and deathliness, and thus can be understood in terms of their being rejuvenated. What follows discusses how a lion’s share of the season’s principals, seven out of nine, can be profiled as “rejuvenated victims” by the end of their season-long character arcs. It does so by way of grouping principals’ “rejuvenations” together by shared “schemas of exposure”.
The rejuvenations of LaDonna, violinist Annie, and restaurateur Janette, in the first instance, share a schema of “focused exposure”, whereby their symbolic exposure to deathliness is sustained over multi-episode arcs in relation to one potent narrative element. In LaDonna’s case, that element is of course Daymo, as discussed above. In Annie’s, it is her relationship with Sonny, whose post-Katrina personal deterioration — drug abuse (E4), slapping Annie (E6 30) — steadily hastens the metaphorical “death” of his and Annie’s relationship, finally formally dissolved in the cold open of the ninth episode. In Janette’s, it is her restaurant, a straitened business venture which, despite consistent efforts across the season’s first five episodes, Janette closes down by the end of the sixth episode. By the end of the season, though, all three characters cut rejuvenated profiles. Janette, last seen in the city airport, recovers enough gusto and agency to commit to restarting her career in New York; and Annie, as mentioned above, ends up on Davis’s literal doorstep of new hope. Even LaDonna, in the season’s dying minutes, achieve catharsis through the second-line for Daymo. The stasis she has been in for most of the season symbolically shatters under the contortions and physical cutting-of-shapes, intuitive movements of limbs LaDonna, and actress Khandi Alexander, displays on the screen (E10 1h15).
The rejuvenations of trombonist Antoine and laborer Albert, meanwhile, accord with a schema of “generalized exposure”, whereby their symbolic
87 Term “unique recoveries” used here as used in the previous chapter. 225 exposure to deathliness is diffused over multiple, less individually potent elements on a looser episodic basis. In the main, it exists as so much background radiation limning their weekly travails. In Albert’s case specifically, too, for the first few episodes at least, it exists in the background of Albert’s efforts single-handedly rebuilding his gutted shotgun house, in scenes laden with evocative chiaroscuro cinematography (e.g. E1 31). That said, both Antoine and Albert also undergo a more concentrated exposure to death. For Antoine, it comes via reuniting with his old dying music teacher, whose death and funeral Antoine bears witness to over episodes six and seven. For Albert, it comes via the planned demolition of a housing project after Katrina: an indignant Albert, working-class himself, stages a sit-in protest in the seventh episode so that it cannot be reduced to ashes and dust. For all these travails, though, Antoine and Albert ultimately come through to keep on keeping on by the end of the season. Introduced to us as an estranged father and straitened Indian chief, Albert exits the season heading up his tribe’s annual St Joseph’s Day parade alongside his son Delmond (E10 41-43, 49-51). Antoine, meanwhile, sees out the season still playing the trombone and being the season’s archetypal “lovable rascal”. The very last shot of the season is an extended dumb-show of Antoine, continuing what has now become a running joke in the season, pleading a cab driver to put a fare he cannot pay for on his tab. That the season closes with the nth iteration of this joke not only affirms the indefatigability of the season’s favored rapscallion, but also symbolically assures it for the narrative world’s notional future.
Other characters’ rejuvenations, finally, accord with a schema of “role- related exposure”, whereby their exposure to deathliness is tailored to roles they serve in the season’s overall narrative. Local DJ Davis is consistently Treme season 1’s go-to for comic relief, whether as a disastrous hotel clerk, in the second episode, or as pot-championing candidate for city council, over the fifth, sixth, and seventh. The character has tended to annoy many observers, with more than one condemning him as a reductive, naive, white-
226 privileged irritant.88 While their criticisms have some grounds, what these critics perhaps fail to fully appreciate is the underlying pattern of Davis’s exploits, that is, how Davis spends the season serving a curiously noble role counteracting aspects of deathliness: stasis, decrepitude, and post-mortem torpor. Upon learning that Janette means to start over in New York, for instance, Davis arranges a day of “perfect moments” — po’-boy sandwich lunches, private John Boutte concerts — to try to convince her to remain in New Orleans (E9, over first half: quote at 44). Although Davis fails to convince Janette to stay, his efforts still symbolize an effort to counteract deathliness vis-à-vis post-Katrina New Orleans. The season ends with Davis returning home from work to find hitherto-fledgling paramour Annie, newly available as of thirty minutes in screen-time ago, on his doorstep looking to move in. “What did I do to deserve this?” Davis wonders (E10 1h): within the identified schema, it is akin to a karmic reward for his role counteracting deathliness. Such is the role-related nature of Davis’s rejuvenation.
Another role-related rejuvenation, although a more ambivalent instance of rejuvenating the victim overall, is that of Creighton Burnette, Toni’s husband and literature professor at Tulane University. Creighton serves as the season’s source of deep feeling, whether throwing a disrespectful news reporter’s equipment in the Mississippi River (E1 16) or, in a YouTube video, exhorting President Bush to “keep your fucking promise” to abet New Orleans’s reconstruction (E5 4). Intrinsic to Creighton’s serving in this capacity are his depressive tendencies. For all his affirmations that “we got more culture in one neighborhood than [Houston and Atlanta] got in [their] sorry ass sprawling suburbs put together” (E4 24), and that New Orleans “conjures moments of artistic clarity and urban transcendence” (E7 6), Creighton’s character arc is ultimately one of sinking ever more deeply into depression. “New Orleans was a soap bubble,” he laments after Mardi Gras
88 See Thomas, “Tourism” 217 on Davis reducing “complex issues to comic interludes”; Courtney George, “Keepin’ it ‘Reals’” 230-1 on Davis being “naïve” and “deluded” about the U.S. being a melting-pot society. 227
Day, “a soap bubble born on a zephyr. … Whatever comes next is just a dream of what used to be” (E8 50). Creighton’s descent into depression is precisely the intensification of his symbolic exposure to deathliness: these dual processes culminate in the ninth episode with his drowning himself in the Mississippi River (E9 final scene).
Clearly then, Creighton’s arc bends away from rejuvenation in the long term; in a certain sense, though, it can be understood to touch at a tangent. Creighton begins the ninth episode mounting an earnest college-lecture defence of Edna Pontellier’s own suicide-by-drowning in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening:
“it is a transition, a rejection of disappointment and failure. The farther Edna walks away from the constraints of society and convention, the more free she becomes. She’s not moving towards the darkness … she’s embracing spiritual liberation.” (E9 4-5)
Creighton’s eventual self-drowning is thus a distinctly self-conscious homage on this character’s part to Chopin’s heroine. That self-consciousness is crucial: it unlocks a “life-in-deathly” interpretation of Creighton’s suicide. To wit, between two periods of deathliness — his extended slide into depression and his actual death — Creighton inhabits a moment of renewed personal agency, and of vitally animated “re-creation” through the act of homage, and “recreating” Edna’s “rejection of disappointment” with a final fleshly flourish. Certainly Creighton undergoes no long-term personal regrowth, but he does experience one last personal bloom. In a certain sense, then, Creighton can be accommodated within the rejuvenated victim profile.
Across the lion’s share of its principals, all told, one can appreciate how Treme season 1 commits to a general manner of rejuvenating the victim. Thus concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in
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Treme season 1: ultimately the first chapter in a four-season televisual saga, but still able to be appreciated as a standalone encomium to New Orleans after Katrina.
The Floating World
In a confessional essay of summer 2017, author C Morgan Babst recounts her years living in a state of suspended grief after Katrina, specifically for her native New Orleans while living afresh in Brooklyn: “When our daughter was just a month old, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the eastern seaboard. … Your first hurricane, I whispered into her bald head. See, you’re a New Orleanian after all” (Babst, “Preservation”). One process of emotional decline ending with “a crazy lady weeping in the rain, a breakdown, a breakthrough” later, Babst and family end up “home now, in New Orleans, in a house on the natural levee, with … tall windows that let in all that green.” Without wishing to sound pat, it would seem that for Babst as self-profiled in her essay, at least as far as her peace of mind was concerned, there was truly “no place like home”, like her native New Orleans, after Katrina. At the start of the essay, Babst mentions she “was writing a novel about Hurricane Katrina” during her pregnancy. What follows will presently discuss the novel that eventually emerged, The Floating World (2017); and merely proposes here that there having been “no place like home” for Babst after Katrina — no place with the special significance of her home city — contextually backlights her novel’s neoclassical treatment of the post-Katrina city.
In an earlier and less personal essay, it bears noting as well, Babst ruminates at length on New Orleans’s funeral culture, particularly in terms of the agency of the living within that culture, which
insists upon the value of life even against its inevitable end. … Dancers wearing memorial t-shirts aren’t disrespectfully informal — they bear the dead man’s image, enacting with their living bodies the
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raw absence of the departed. … The defiant dance of a mother over her son’s dead body is a screaming, healing truth. (Babst “Death”).
And in relation to the unrecovered dead of the immediately post-Katrina New Orleans, she writes of the “subtle truth that, unseen, unnamed, un- eulogized, the dead could not truly die. We, the living, imagined their escape. We searched the Internet for their names. We heard their voices. We set their place at the table….” This essay thus embodies a certain sensibility that, it is again merely proposed here, finds some reflection in the life-in- deathliness of the Floating New Orleans.
The Floating World is perhaps best described as a family narrative with a sororal centre. The narrative swirls around five members of the Boisdoré clan: paterfamilias Joe, materfamilias Tess, Joe’s father Vincent, and the daughters Del (elder) and Cora (younger); but although each character is of interest in their own ways, the two characters of greatest import, particularly as far as rejuvenating the victim is concerned, are the sisters Del and Cora. Like Treme season 1, The Floating World picks up in Katrina’s aftermath; but unlike Treme, it picks up only about two months into the aftermath. In brief, it details the post-Katrina buckling both of the Boisdoré family as a whole and of individual Boisdorés: Del the prodigal daughter back from New York; the unhappily married Joe and Tess; the psychologically infirm Vincent; and the Katrina-traumatized Cora, newly mute survivor of the week-of-Katrina in New Orleans, whose midnight flit at the end of the first narrative act becomes the narrative’s key pivot plot- and characterization-wise.89 The second act, it should be established here, is an extended flashback to Cora’s immediately pre- and ensuing week-of-Katrina experiences in New Orleans. The third and final act picks up immediately after Cora’s flit and unspools linearly to a conclusion.
89 The novel has three “parts” which are here figured as “narrative acts”. 230
What follows, as well as giving fuller flavors of the novel as a whole, will discuss The Floating World’s neoclassical practices of representing the city and its practices of recovering the victim, which is to say rejuvenating its five featured Boisdorés. The text’s representational practice is discussed first. In this regard, what follows identifies three “engines” of life-in-deathliness in the Floating narrative, all geared towards ideas of “place”. Taking each in turn, it discusses how these engines generate forms of life-in-deathliness that feed the core element of the Floating New Orleans. It is perhaps worth reiterating here that the neoclassical city can be extensively inflected with deathliness, as the Floating city is much more than the Treme city is, without being “less” neoclassical. The crucial criterion representation-wise is that the city ultimately works to generate a sense of life symbolically asserting itself against a given form of deathliness.
Floating’s first engine of life-in-deathliness is its line in sites of spectral energy. Where life-in-deathliness is the essence of a particular relationship between life and deathliness, spectrality, understood here in the Derridean sense, is the essence of an entity that itself exists between life and deathliness, or in Derrida’s analogous terms, between being and not being as “the becoming-body … of the spirit” (Derrida 5). Insofar as a spectre is indeed a “becoming-body”, then the assertion or “coming-through” of life vis-à-vis deathliness is a priori latent within that entity: to generate spectral energies, then, as the sites to be discussed do, is to generate a latent life-in- deathliness.
While Babst’s novel ranges around the city — being nucleated in French Quarter and Uptown areas, but diffusing occasionally into the poorer wards of the city — much of the actual story action unfolds in and around certain select narrative-worldly amphitheaters. Two stand out: both rich in plot currency and both sites of spectral energy. The first is the working-class Broadmoor-district house of one Reyna, the psychologically damaged sister and mother-of-two of Cora’s friend Troy. Del happens on this house after
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Katrina and finds it in the usual postdiluvial condition, save one striking addition: Reyna’s dead body in the kitchen, dead from a shotgun blast. The who-and-why of this tableau shapes the subsequent primary plot of the narrative; the house itself, as the frame of this tableau, comes to matter commensurately more in the novel’s narrative economy. Crucially, though, it does so in essentially spectral terms, “being” very much an active topic of discussion, yet “not being” active in an immediate “per se” sense. This changes only at the end of the first narrative act, when Del burns the house to the ground in an attempt to hide what she suspects is Cora’s involvement in Reyna’s death:
Phosphorous and sulphur bit into the air. In the haze of match light she could just make out Reyna’s shape. … “Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies,” [Del] said aloud as she rained the heaps of paper over Reyna’s body. … She struck one more match … and watched as the flame grew stronger, a yellow sheet… (Babst, Floating 150-1)
Here Reyna’s house seems to be transfigured out of its unremarkable squalor and becomes a symbolically charged kind of funeral pyre. In a commensurately symbolic capacity, the house’s spectral energies dissolve into the Floating narrative ambience: so too in that capacity does those energies’ latent life-in-deathliness. In the second narrative act, it must be said, Reyna’s house does appear directly during her and her children’s rescue by Cora and her super-Platonic friend Troy (201-03). Even then, though, the terms of this importance set it as something that has “passed on”, as something that can only be “flashed back” to in the terms of The Floating World. The house’s second-act importance thus exists in an essentially spectral state between “being” and “not being”.
The second of the Floating world’s spectral sites is the Boisdoré family house itself. This grand construction — upper gallery, portico, and all — stands on
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Esplanade Avenue, the historical urban corridor separating the (monied) French Quarter from the (non-monied) Faubourg Marigny. Grandeur aside, the distinctive characteristic of the Boisdoré family house is that the Boisdoré family do not in fact inhabit it for the course of the novel: it is functionally uninhabitable after Katrina, not least because a tree has crashed through the kitchen. Instead, Tess stays with her daughters in the house of family friends, while Joe lives with Vincent in the latter’s cabin on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain. As with Reyna’s house, the Boisdoré family house has relatively little immediate page-time, at least in the narrative’s post-Katrina passages: a nostalgic visit from Del (35-8); a nocturnal two-page liaison between Del and paramour Zack (137-8); a brush- by from Tess searching for the absconded Cora (222-5); and as the site where Tess reveals an extramarital affair to Joe (253-57).
The house itself thus has little immediate presence in the post-Katrina narrative; yet both the thought of it and thoughts of what has or might have happened inside it percolate through the whole narrative. Tess and Joe might be critically estranged; Del might only have returned to New Orleans from New York because of Katrina, and even Tess and Del live at semi- permanent loggerheads; but the family home operates as a spectral centre of mass that, although a functionally uninhabitable “dead zone”, still keeps the members of chez Boisdoré in active and overlapping orbits after Katrina. Like Reyna’s house, it should be acknowledged, the Boisdoré family home does have an immediate presence in the second narrative act, as the site in which Cora is based for the duration. Even then, though, as with Reyna’s house, its importance again exists only in terms of “having passed on”, and thus in a spectral state between “being” and “not being”. In these tandem fashions, all told, both Reyna’s house and the Boisdoré family house exist as spectral sites within the New Orleans of the narrative present. Generating spectral energies as they do, they serve as well to generate a latent form of life-in-deathliness, and of the Floating city’s core element. Thus Floating’s line in spectral sites serves the text’s representational practice.
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The second engine of life-in-deathliness in The Floating World is a recurring fashion in how the Boisdorés themselves imagine New Orleans. At least once in the narrative, each Boisdoré envisages the city as it was sometime in its past — sometimes twentieth-century, sometimes even earlier — in the course of private ruminations. More than that, though, each envisages the city through a lens that is in some way fantastical, typically in terms of frissons of time-travel or alt-history. The Boisdorés thus serve collectively to animate the past — to breathe new creative anima into visions of New Orleans in times dead and gone — through the induction of fantastically charged elements. Their doing so serves to generate a life-in-deathliness that feeds the Floating city’s core element.
Ruminating on a fractious argument he has had with Del, about his having failed to recover Cora from the flooded city before it was officially reopened to the public, Joe pushes past the fronds of post-Katrina experience into a vista of the colonial-era New Orleans:
But what could he have done? Held off the paramilitary thugs with Vin’s 9mm? Nobly gone to jail? … Or was he supposed to raise a rebellion in the river parishes and burn down The Royal O, tear down the scaffolds set up for the auction of slaves? Was that what she expected of him? (109)
Immediately before that argument, meanwhile, a frustrated Del has been standing outside Joe and Vincent’s Northshore cabin processing her angst in relation to having left New Orleans for New York in the first place. She does so in terms that are first purely fantastical before becoming fantastically nostalgic:
If she could become a nymph again and burrow down … into the forest floor. If she could be reborn every seven years, her sister next
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to her. If they could come running out of the forest, two children with baskets full of blackberries, wearing their old twig crowns. She would not leave. Never leave. (100)
Where Joe and Del imagine a past moment leavened by the fantastical, Tess fantasizes an entire imaginary alternative life history. Some hours after having mortally wounded her marriage to Joe by confessing to an affair, a dazed Tess stands on a street in the uptown St. Charles area and ruminates on the
houses she could have lived in with other men, other children. With an ordinary man, there would not have been mosaics laid on her porch … but they would have had children together, her and this ordinary man. … As fragile as she was [,] Cora might have turned out differently … with a different father…. (303-4)
Where her sister and parents each have single fantastical visions, Cora has multiple. Left alone at her own insistence in the immediately pre-Katrina city, Cora ruminates on how “an empty city sounded pretty great to her. … Since childhood, she’d liked imaging herself as one of [New Orleans founder’s] Bienville’s crew, stepping … onto the empty shores of Bayou St John” (165). Like Joe, Cora imagines a vista of colonial New Orleans; unlike Joe, though, her thoughts unroll on the page in the present tense: “When the duke and Indian guide turn away, she parts the curtain of willow leaves and crouches down in the sand … Once they are gone, she builds a house of palmetto fronds and cypress, learns Choctaw …” (ibid.). This shift into the present tense, more sudden and the more striking in situ, intensifies the sense of life- in-deathliness: it induces a sense of the present-day New Orleans, as embodied by Cora, having a literal and vital foothold in the past as Cora has envisaged it.
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A similar effect occurs at the start of the third narrative act. Cora’s flit takes her at first to Bayou St John: although her ensuing reverie is not recounted in the present tense, Babst’s writing still works to evoke a passing-between eras of New Orleans in tactile terms: “Once upon a time … the Choctaws had rowed the length of [this bayou] in their birch bark canoes. ... She remembered this as if she had done it herself: the pole in her blistered hands bending as she pushed against the bottom of the channel” (221). The reverie ends, what is more, in terms of a concrete element of the past morphing into a phenomenological fragment redolent of week-of-Katrina, crowds-outside- the-Superdome imagery: “She remembered a drift of leaves that changed to a flock of gulls, one that changed to a horde of people waving dirty cotton flags” (ibid.).
Away from these hypnagogic fantasies of hers, it bears noting as well, Cora herself is a walking dynamo of life-in-deathliness. In the first narrative act, as if in advance of her extended flit from the city, Cora is revealed to sleepwalk nightly through the city and specifically to Reyna’s house and back. Graciously, Babst utilizes Tess to give her readers a terminological footing in this regard: “Tess imagined Cora tracing the paths she’d taken during the flood. She was sure that’s what this was: compulsive reenactment” (89). The term itself conveys the inherent life-in-deathliness of Cora’s actions, her nightly resurrections of happenings and events interred in historical time.
Where Cora reenacts the past in a single compulsive fashion, Vincent, finally among the Boisdorés in the present regard, reenacts the past in a much more systemic way over the narrative. Vincent’s character arc is one of steady personal decline: he enters and exits the narrative subject to the serious possibility of being relocated from Joe’s cabin to a care home. Many times in the interim, Vincent finds himself inhabiting years gone by and acting as if amidst the bygone detritus of time. Immediately he is introduced, he is walking along a generic lakeside road hollering for a dog, his Sheba of old, that is in fact dead (12-3). Subsequently, Vincent registers Joe returning
236 to their cabin of an evening thus: “he believed he heard his father’s feet climb the porch, opening the door. “Pop?” the man called— he believed it was his father, but he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t prove anything” (57). Finally for present indicative purposes, while Joe and Tess thrash out their dying marriage, Vincent, left to entertain himself on the portico, relapses into a full, physically involved reenactment of the past:
He wanted a pocket pie from Moe’s. … He got out of his chair and went down the steps. No need to tell the ladies goodbye. … He had plenty money, if a pie was still a nickel. Could maybe even stick around ‘til Sheep’s opened. … All was as it should be until he looked up: a highway roaring above where Claiborne should be. (250-2)
To bring him back, what is more, Joe finds himself entering into the back-to- the-future illusion:
“I got a call, for a taxi pick-up,” Joe tried. … “Your wife’s looking for you. Wants you to come on home.” “You know my wife?” [Vincent] turned towards Joe. “Sure do. Sylvia,” Joe said. “Great soul.” (266)
What all these instances of Vincent’s delusions amount to is so many instances of a lived state of “past-in-present”, or in other words, a kind of “life-in-deathliness”. In their different fantastical ways, then, all told, the five Boisdorés envisage past iterations of New Orleans so as to generate a life-in- deathliness that feeds the Floating city’s core neoclassical element.
Floating’s final engine of life-in-deathliness is its line in creatively animated imagery of deathliness, one based very much in “place” and particularly New Orleans. Throughout the narrative, Babst does not tend to indulge in panoramic descriptive pans of New Orleans a la Tom Piazza in City of Refuge,
237 but she does spotlight the city on passing occasions. Common to these occasions is a sense of creatively animated devastation:
[The water] had snuck in along channels dug to lead it away. It had acted as if with the intent to swallow, to smother, to ruin, to uproot, but most of all, to lift. It had raised sewage, dirt, … homes, [and] families high above the ground if to allow God to get a better look, and the things He had rejected it had dropped…. (34)
Finally the bark of the tress would smooth to brown paper and the birds’ voices would lose the birds, the lake and river would evaporate into the clouds, and the cars and streets would roll away over the edge of the earth until nothing was left but their roar. (122)
See my father pulling himself over the broken trees with his trembling hands, now that the mule has vanished into the rain? We don’t have time for the future, Doctor. The only thing to do in the desert is keep walking. (296: Joe, conducting an imaginary tour of post-Katrina New Orleans for his father’s psych nurse)
Such animated imagery occurs also in post-Katrina e-mails of Cora’s to Del and friend and secondary character Troy, where they are as place-based visual analogues to Cora’s Katrina-conditioned angst:
[Mom and Dad] don’t understand that this is the way ghosts live, among the memories of the things they’ve lost. … A haunting of brass bands and churches, a haunting of buttermilk drops and purple plastic pearls strung from telephone lines. Soon, though, they’ll … understand the quiet shock of ruin. (259)
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The storms just keep coming. One day the seas will come to walk on land, I don’t care how far you go. Run, little chicken, run, run, but the sky’s still gonna fall. (268-9)
As well, this line in imagery extends to the eponymous image of the “floating world”. Prima facie a poetic evocation of New Orleans in the week of Katrina, the term pertains more precisely in situ to the historical artist Hokusai’s “Thirty-Six Views Of Mount Fuji”: an instance of the Japanese genre ukiyo-e or “pictures of the floating world”, and the print-series that Del turns to immediately after hearing about the levees breaking in New Orleans (245). Babst’s description of the “Views” series illuminates it as a symbolic fieldwork exercise in deathliness: “[Del] finally understood what [ukiyo-e] meant: that even a mountain was ephemeral. … Snow would eventually wear Fuji away, its eruptions would break it apart. Eventually even the stones would turn to dust” (246-7). At the same time, the “Views” series per se still embodies a creative imperative qua work of art, and generates a creative anima out of, as Del interprets it, the “flooding … fracturing … drowning” of Fuji by natural forces across prints (246). The series per se is, then, a symbolic expression of life-in-deathliness: those energies, through associative slippage, are conferred upon the informal “floating world” that is New Orleans in the week of Katrina. Thus Babst consummates this specialized line in place-based imagery, the third and final of the engines that feed the Floating’s city core neoclassical element. Such overall is Babst’s representational practice, and a trio of narrative engines which work to one neoclassical end.
As well as in this representational regard, The Floating World works also towards the ends of rejuvenating the victim, of investing the Boisdorés with new life, new capacities for voice, dignity, and agency, through symbolic exposures to death and deathliness. The nature of these exposures has already been intimated at in the above analysis, enmeshed with chez Boisdoré as that analysis was. Nevertheless, what follows shall duly and
239 more fully reiterate them, as well as accounting for the Boisdorés’ individual rejuvenations. At the outset of this analysis, the text was described as a family narrative with a sororal centre. That description is especially salient to the text’s recovery work: although each family member undergoes some symbolic exposure to deathliness, they are not rejuvenated to equal extents. Rather, Del and Cora — the narrative’s sororal centre — are rejuvenated to a greater extent than their parents or their grandfather, whose rejuvenations are altogether more tempered.
Vincent’s symbolic exposure to deathliness unspools throughout the narrative, as has been delineated hitherto. By narrative’s end, he has been briefly committed to a care home before being brought home to live with Joe and Del, and his final appearance sees him scratching around on paper like the furniture-maker he once was: “‘That’s fine, fine, We could make this line a little sharper though…’ And he rubbed his eraser against the paper, penciled in a new and stronger graphite line” (361). This hardly signifies a full and long-term rejuvenation of Vincent but it is, at least, the best possible ending that could have been plausibly conceived of for the character. For Vincent, there is the promise of at least one last period of relative bloom.
Joe’s symbolic exposure to deathliness comes in two strains: his dealing with his degenerating father, and his dealing with the metaphorical death of his marriage to Tess. This latter process culminates in a symbolically potent scene in which he burns the various sculptures of Tess — Tess while young, Tess while pregnant — he had hitherto sculpted over their relationship: “the smoke turned black and dense with sap. … He saw the garbage bag melted away around the sculptures of Tess, its black residue clinging to their scorched faces” (329). Although he exits the narrative still altogether raw, Joe has nonetheless been rejuvenated insofar as he finds himself beholding a new frontier in the visual arts: “He would have to figure out, then, a way to carve holes in the air, to create chambers of such blackness that the viewer would be forced to replace what was gone with whatever he had retained”
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(363). Joe’s resolution here can be more fully appreciated as a personal milestone in relation to an earlier rumination of his, in which he defends his post-Katrina pursuit of artistry on the grounds that “something should result from this [disaster]. Some good should come, and art was good” (109). Through his Katrina experiences, in other words, Joe comes to resolve to substantiate his belief in the power of his life’s vocation and to achieve new personal agency qua artist.
As well as through the metaphorical death of her marriage to Joe, Tess’s symbolically significant exposure to deathliness to death comes through her reaction to Cora’s midnight flit. As the duration of Cora’s disappearance lengthens, Tess comes to believe Cora has died, or at least that the probability of her having died is so great it should be treated as fact until being disproved. Consequently she enters a period of semi-mourning, and into a condition of suspended grief that inter alia occasions her “alternative personal history” ruminations as excerpted previously. Tess’s exposure to deathliness thus — to her marriage’s metaphorical and Cora’s presumed ones — move her, by the time the novel calls last orders, to have initiated a new relationship with one Augie Randsell, a secondary character in the narrative. Augie has hitherto been associated throughout the novel with Tess’s personal roads not taken: at one point, she recalls the precise moment she lost his heart to another school friend so as to suggest a continuity between Augie and the alternative life of her St. Charles ruminations: “She wouldn’t necessarily have even married him, but the fact that she had never even had the chance had ruined everything” (303). Tess’s ultimately coupling up with Augie can thus be seen as her entering into a new act in the play of her life, one that might make her at least marginally happier than she had otherwise been.
Where their parents and grandfather are rejuvenated to relatively tempered extents, Del and Cora undergo much more concrete kinds of symbolic exposure and personal rejuvenation. Del’s exposure to deathliness is
241 mediated through an array of symbolic forms, in one part through her purgative burning-down of Reyna’s house — and of Reyna’s corpse inside it — as detailed above. It is mediated further through her very act of returning to New Orleans. ”It was obligation and obligation only, really: go be with them, go help,” she muses immediately she appears in the narrative, as she arrives in the city by plane (15). For Del, having gone to New Orleans “to make a life for herself. To escape,” as her motivations are formulated at one point (19), the return to New Orleans represents a regression from life back into stasis, torpor, the field of deathliness. Her exposure to deathliness comes in final part by way of her close relationship with Cora, a relationship that combines easy physical intimacy with commensurately affectionate sentiments on Del’s part for her Katrina-traumatized sister:
“We could go to San Francisco, Oaxaca, Tokyo. I don’t care, just somewhere we can make our own lives.” … She propped herself up on her elbow and brushed the hair back off of Cora’s face … pulled her hand through her sister’s hair … (125-6)
All of the above is established in the first narrative act: Del’s subsequent journey through this and the third narrative acts is one of coming to appreciate both the magnitude of the loss she has already incurred, and the value of what she can still claim. As Del expresses it to her paramour Zack at a latter narrative point:
“I’ve already lost too much. Maybe half of it? Twenty-seven thousand acres of cypress forest a day? My sister’s gone and my grandfather’s halfway out of his mind and my parents are done and the house I grew up in — they’re going to gut it, sell it — and I have literally two friends here, but I’m not going to lose the rest of it. I can’t.” (312)
And as the narrative closes, Del has resettled in New Orleans with Joe and Vincent in the Northshore cabin: a decision which she explicitly rejects as
242 being deathly-inflected in favor of it being something essentially, vitally intuitive:
“I didn’t want this for you, Del,” said Joe. “I didn’t want you to sacrifice yourself to the ruins.” “It’s not a sacrifice,” Del said. It wasn’t an obligation, either. It was hardly even a choice. (361)
Cora’s symbolic exposure to deathliness, finally, is essentially of a piece with the traumatized state in which she spends most of the narrative’s first and third acts. In this state, she spends the first narrative act in a semi-comatose, barely articulate waking condition: ”’I don’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to talk about it. I won’t ever want to talk about it,’ said Cora as if it were a conjugation drill” (27). The only exceptional moments are Cora’s nighttime instances of compulsive reenactment, traversing the city to Reyna’s house and back again; after Del burns this house, an act Cora witnesses from afar, she breaks out of stasis and spends much of the third narrative act as a runaway. As well, her week-of-Katrina experiences as recounted in the second narrative act constitute an symbolic exposure to deathliness: not only in terms of the wide storm- and flood-related death and devastation across New Orleans, but also in terms of a chain of events that, to put it briefly, sees Cora coming to believe she has killed Reyna when in fact, as the third act reveals, Reyna takes her own life. Summarized as above, then, the deathliness that pervades Cora’s experiences across all the narrative acts, and the extent of Cora’s exposure to it, can be fully appreciated.
By close of narrative play, though, Cora has managed to work through her trauma, in no small part by way of moving with super-Platonic friend Troy and his nephews to Illinois, with an eye to resettling there. Her Katrina- traumatically triggered flit from New Orleans thus presents in retrospect as a precursor to her final choice to start over outside of New Orleans, a choice
243 enabling her to take up the mantle, here coded “rewarding”, of proxy motherhood to Troy’s nephews. In this way, like the other members of her family, Cora is rejuvenated qua Katrina victim through her exposure to deathliness. Thus, across the full Boisdoré coterie but particularly within the narrative’s sororal centre, the novel exhibits the theorized manner of rejuvenating the victim. With that concludes discussion of representational and recovery practices in The Floating World, lyrical chamber study of one family’s post-Katrina journey into day.
Chapter/section Conclusion
Such is the neoclassical school of original creative Katrina culture. Clearly it is the school closest to the tradition of New Orleans exceptionalism; but even then, it radically refashions the particular classically exceptional paradigm it is close to, distilling and refashioning its latent metaphysical energies into the life-in-deathliness this chapter has theorized. And it openly abjures the other execrable paradigm through its essential uplift: its essential sentiment of life abiding in defiance of deathliness, as intrinsically encoded into life-in- deathliness. This life-in-deathliness, what is more, functions as the catalyzing fuel of this school’s recovery practices of rejuvenating the victim. Rejuvenation practices embody the same essential uplift against deathliness as does the neoclassical city; and in their own right, they promulgate an optimistic credo that however blighted, distressed, and fundamentally compromised they may be owing to their experiences, Katrina victims are capable of at least some personal regrowth.
The neoclassical school is the last school of four in original creative Katrina culture, alongside the “ordinary”, “microcosmic”, and “globalist” schools theorized previously. In four corresponding fashions, then, original creative Katrina culture advances “ordinary”, “American” “globalist”, and “neoclassical” possibilities in representing the city of New Orleans, instead of the classically exceptional and execrable paradigms of yore. As well, original
244 creative Katrina culture works in four distinct manners towards the ends of recovering Katrina victims. These manners encompass fashioning a line in cities that are sensitive to the victim; practices of situating Katrina victims in U.S. national and globalist contexts; and practices of rejuvenating Katrina victims through interplays of “life” and “deathliness”. Such, in summary, are the dual representational and recovery projects of original creative Katrina culture.
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Thesis Conclusion
By and large, the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina eschews New Orleans exceptionalism. When its legacies can be felt, as in the representational modes of narrative non-fictional Katrina culture and in the neoclassical school, it does so only in radically refashioned forms: forms that are more conducive to more sophisticated portrayals and understandings of New Orleans. Elsewhere, Katrina culture offers outright alternatives to classically exceptional and execrable paradigms: the ordinary, microcosmic and globalist schools discussed in the second section of the thesis. Particularly the ordinary school incarnates an outright rejection of those paradigms, its intrinsic impulse being to aestheticize and humanize the ostensibly unexceptional. The microcosmic and globalist schools operate more specifically against a crucial aspect of exceptionalizing paradigms: the characterization of New Orleans as an exceptional enclave, a city that exists in a sui generis cocoon. More so than New Orleans itself, it has however become clear in this thesis, the element of central importance in Katrina culture is the figure of the Katrina victim.
Insofar as this thesis has advanced one takeaway point, it is that in the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina, practices of representing New Orleans eschew and refashion strains of exceptionalism in ways that illuminate and are indivisible from Katrina culture’s overarching project of recovering the victim. The first section discussed narrative non-fictional Katrina culture, and how texts’ modal treatments of New Orleans interrelate with texts’ recovery practices, with their enhancements and etchings of conditions of Katrina victimhood. The first chapter discussed how Eggers’s symbolic site of emergency, Piazza’s Benjaminian city, Rose’s deteriorated psycho-scape, and Trouble’s raw conditional city interrelate with these authors’ treatments of the experiences of, respectively, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the free-floating citizenry of Matters, Rose himself, and Kimberly and Scott Rivers Roberts. The second chapter discussed how
246 representational and recovery practices become integrated within Katrina group biographies’ treatments of their constitutive character narratives.
The second section discussed creative Katrina culture. In immediate terms, these chapters were dual-track exegeses of different schools’ representational and recovery practices. As well, it can now be appreciated in retrospect, these chapters served to demonstrate the thesis’s takeaway point as identified above: that is, they served to demonstrate the specific aspect of how indivisible the discussed texts’ representational practices are from their recovery practices. To wit, the first chapter of this section demonstrated how across the ordinary school, ordinary iterations of New Orleans directly enact texts’ recovery practices by way of their states of sensitivity to the victim, or more text-specifically, their Rushing resemblance, their movement into recovery, and their concentrations of conditions of Katrina victimhood. The second chapter demonstrated how across the microcosmic and globalist schools, both American and globalist lines in New Orleans representation reinforce texts’ practices of situating the victim, or more precisely, the two featured families of Refuge, 1000M’s Henry Garrett, the free-floating citizenry of Dazzler, and Blackwell’s quartet of principal characters. The third chapter, finally, demonstrated how across the neoclassical school, neoclassical cities are the indispensible arenas for the symbolic exposures to deathliness whereby Katrina victims, namely the lion’s share of Treme season 1’s principal characters and Babst’s Boisdorés, are rejuvenated. Thus, in what is perhaps its most significant single intervention within Katrina studies, this thesis has demonstrated how fundamentally Katrina culture is governed by the secular missionary work of victim- recovery.
At the start of this thesis, to conclude on a personal note, I mentioned having undertaken fieldwork in New Orleans in February 2017. Certainly I remember the jazz, gumbo, Krewe du Vieux parade, and the early-morning coffee-and- beignet experience. My more potent memories, though, are of mornings
247 spent admiring communal food-garden and rain-collection initiatives in the Lower Ninth Ward and Hollygrove districts; of taking lunch in a community bookshop in Algiers on the West Bank; of dinners watching U.S. college basketball in a Uptown-adjacent Vietnamese restaurant; of nights spent taking in primarily folk and country music at a volunteer-run evening coffee house; and of the downtime spent with those volunteers and my Airbnb hostess. In short, I remember New Orleans for its multidimensionality, and for its citizens. Both elements are remembered too, and are indeed immortalized, in the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina.
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Works Cited
Texts from the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina
Babst, C. Morgan. The Floating World. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2017. Baum, Dan. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. Biguenet, John. “Rising Water.” Katrina on Stage: Five Plays. Eds. Suzanne M. Trauth and Lisa M. Brenner. Illinois, Northwestern UP, 2011: 3-52. ---. The Rising Water Trilogy: Plays. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. London: Penguin, 2010. Friedmann, Patty. A Little Bit Ruined. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. Longo, Joe, and Jarret Lofstead, eds. Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post- Katrina New Orleans. New Orleans: NOLAFugees Press, 2007. Neufeld, Josh. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009. Piazza, Tom. City of Refuge. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. ---. Why New Orleans Matters. 2005. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Rose, Chris. 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Treme: The Complete First Season. Dir. David Simon, Eric Overmyer, et al. HBO, 2011. DVD. Smith, Patricia. Blood Dazzler: Poems. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2008. Trouble the Water. Dir. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. ICA Films, 2009. DVD. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Dir. Spike Lee. HBO, 2006.
(All other references: over page)
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Anderson, Sherwood. “A Meeting South.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 343-353. Araujo, Susana. Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Capacity. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Ashe, Thomas. “Golden Petticoats.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 87-91. Audubon, John James. “New Orleans Journal.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 112-116. Babst, C. Morgan. “Death is a Way to Be.” guernicamag.com. Guernica, 15th June 2015.
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Brown, John Gregory. “Miles from Home with John Gregory Brown.” Interview with Erin Z. Bass. deepsouthmag.com. Deep South Magazine. 27th July 2016.
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Cannon, C. W. “I Want Magic: A Defense of New Orleans Exceptionalism.” knowlouisiana.org. Louisiana Cultural Vistas, 10th Feb 2015.
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Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. de Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: California University Press, 1988. 91- 110. De Forest, John William. “A Volunteer’s Adventures.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 239-256. De Genova, Nicholas. “Antiterrorism, Race, and the New Frontier: American Exceptionalism, Imperial Multiculturalism, and the Global Security State.” Identities 17.6 (2010): 613-40. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge Classics, 2006. Diaz, Junot. “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal.” bostonreview.net. Boston Review, May 2011.
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Elie, Lolis Eric. “The Whys.” bittersoutherner.com. The Bitter Southerner, Aug. 2015.
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After the Storm: The Cultural Politics of Hurricane Katrina. Eds. Simon Dickel and Evangeline Kindinger. Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2015. 113- 130. Germany, Kent B. New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Giroux, Henry. “Revisiting Katrina.” truthout.org. Truthout, 8 Sep. 2015.
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Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. 3rd ed. Routledge: New York, 2007: 477-487. Hannigan, John. “‘It’s the end of the city (as we know it)’: Katrina as metaphor and template for the urban apocalypse.” The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe. Eds. William M. Taylor et al. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 73-90. Harris, Cheryl and Devon Carbado. “Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?.” After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina. Ed. David Dante Troutt. New York: New Press, 2006: 87-110. Hartman, Chester W., and Gregory D. Squires. “Pre-Katrina, Post-Katrina.” There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, And Hurricane Katrina Eds. Chester W. Hartman and Gregory D. Squires. New York: Routledge, 2006. 1-12. Hartnell, Anna. After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century. Albany, NY: State of New York Press, 2017. ---. “New Orleans, 2005 and Port-au-Prince, 2010: Some reflections on trans- American disaster in the twenty-first century.” The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe. Eds. William M. Taylor et al. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 49-70. ---. Rewriting Exodus: American Futures from Du Bois to Obama. London: Pluto Press, 2011. ---. “When the Levees Broke: Inconvenient Truths and the Limits of National Identity.” African American Review 45.1-2 (2012): 17-31. Hirsch, Arnold R. “Fade to Black: Hurricane Katrina and the Disappearance of Creole New Orleans.” Journal of American History 94 (Dec. 2007): 752-761. Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. New York: Random House, 2006. Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. Discovering the Urban Landscape. London: Yale University Press, 1984. ---. “Urban Circumstances.” Design Quarterly 128 (1985): 1-31.
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---. “The Vernacular Landscape is on the Move… Again.” Places 7.3 (1991): 24-35.
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Letort, Delphine. “Documenting Stories of Reconstruction in New Orleans: Spike Lee and Jonathan Demme.” After the Storm: The Cultural Politics of Hurricane Katrina. Eds. Simon Dickel and Evangeline Kindinger. Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2015. 25-42. Levine, Michael P. “Witnessing Katrina: Morbid curiosity and the aesthetics of disaster.” The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe. Eds. William M. Taylor et al. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 145-173. Levitt, Jeremy I., and Michael Whitaker. Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Lewis, Peirce. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. 2nd ed. Santa Fe: Center for American Places, 2003. Lightweis-Goff, Jeannie. “‘Peculiar and Characteristic’: New Orleans’ Exceptionalism from Olmsted to the Deluge.” American Literature 86.1 (2014): 147-69. Littlefield, Robert S., and Andrea M. Quenette. “Crisis Leadership and Hurricane Katrina: the Portrayal of Authority by the Media in Natural Disasters.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 35.1 (2007): 26-47. Lloyd, Christopher. “Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun and Katrina’s Southern Biopolitics.” Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effects on American Culture and Identity. Eds. Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. 153-170. Long, Alecia P. The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Lyell, Sir Charles. “A Geologist at the Mardi Gras.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 139-142. Mabrey III., Paul E. “Hurricane Katrina and the Third World: A Cluster Analysis of the ‘Third World’ Label in the Mass Media Coverage of Hurricane Katrina.” Thesis in Communication, Georgia State University, 2009.
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Maira, Sunaina. “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms.” Feminist Studies 35.3 (2009): 631-656. Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. London: Doubleday, 2005. Marina, Peter J. Down and Out in New Orleans: Transgressive Living in the Informal Economy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Marotte, Mary Ruth, and Glenn Jellenik. “Introduction: Reading Hurricane Katrina.” Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effects on American Culture and Identity. Eds. Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. vii-xiv. Martineau, Harriet. “The Haunted House.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 121-132. McClendon, Robert. “Busing in the band: Will New Orleans culture survive the post-Katrina boom?” nola.com. The Times-Picayune, 27th Aug. 2015.
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Nakamura, Hisashi. “Japanese Women in Tanka Poetry: From the Fourth Century to the Thirteenth Century.” City of London Festival. Gresham College, UK, 6th Jul 2006. Lecture. Transcription at
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Russell, William H. “The Camp at Chalons.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 200-219. Sakakeeny, Matt. “Privatization, Marketization, and Neoliberalism — The Political Dynamics of Post-Katrina New Orleans.” Perspectives on Politics 10 (2012): 723-6. Samuel, Michael. “‘The Storm’: Spatial Discourse and Katrina Narratives in David Simon’s Treme (2010-2013).” Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effects on American Culture and Identity. Eds. Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. 33-56. Schwartz, Stuart B. Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Seidman, Karl F. Coming Home to New Orleans: Neighborhood Rebuilding After Katrina. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Simon, David. “David Simon of HBO’s Treme.” Interview with Alex Rawls. offbeat.com. OffBeat Magazine. 1st April 2011.
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---. “Rebuilding the ‘Land of Dreams’ With Music.” Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons From Hurricane Katrina. Ed. Eugenie Birch. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006. 305-328. Stanonis, Anthony. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Stanton, John. “A Tale of Two New Orleans: Is Post-Katrina Gentrification Saving New Orleans or Ruining It?.” Buzzfeednews.com. BuzzFeed News, 19th August 2015. < https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnstanton/is-post-katrina- gentrification-saving-new-orleans-or-destroy>. Stock, Paul V. “Katrina and Anarchy: A Content Analysis of a New Disaster Myth.” Sociological Spectrum 27.6 (2007): 705-726. Swenson, John. New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Taylor, William M., and Michael P. Levine, “Catastrophe and the ‘Katrina effect’.” The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe. Eds. William M. Taylor et al. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 1-24. Thackeray, William Makepeace. “A Mississippi Bubble.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 157-159. Thomas, Lynnell L. Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. ---. “‘People Want to See What Happened’: Treme, Televisual Tourism, and the Racial Remapping of New Orleans.” Television and New Media 13.3 (2012): 213-224. Thompson, Mark L. “Locating the Isle of Orleans: Atlantic and American Historiographical Perspectives.” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 5.3 (2008): 305-333. Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth. Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. London: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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Tierney, Kathleen, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski. “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604.1 (2006): 57-81. Twain, Mark. “The Metropolis of the South.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 265-76. Valenti, Paul. “Steinbeck’s Ecological Polemic: Human Sympathy and Visual Documentary in the Intercalary Chapters of The Grapes of Wrath.” Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Eds. Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffany Jr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997: 92-112. Vest, Jason P. Spike Lee: Finding the Story, Forcing the Issue. Denver, CO: Praeger, 2014. Von Mossner, Alexa Weik. “Reframing Katrina: The Color of Disaster in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke.” Environmental Communication 5.2 (2011): 146-165. Wailoo, Keith. Introduction to Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America. Eds. Keith Wailoo et al. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Warner, Charles Dudley. “Sui Generis.” The World from Jackson Square: A New Orleans Reader. Ed. Etolia S. Basso. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. 307-315. Watts, Lewis and Eric Porter. New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary.” Resources of Hope: Culture Democracy, Socialism. London: Verso, 1989. 3-14. Wills, John. US Environmental History: Inviting Doomsday (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Wimberly, Ronald. “Ten Years After.” newyorker.com. New Yorker, 24th Aug. 2015.
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Woods, Clyde. “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source.” American Quarterly 61.3 (Sep. 2009): 427-453. Woods, Clyde. “Les MIsérables of New Orleans: Trap Economics and the Asset Stripping Blues, Part 1.” American Quarterly 61.3 (Sep. 2009): 769-796. Wooten, Tom. We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. Yousaf, Nahem. “Regeneration through Genre: Romancing Katrina in Crime Fiction from ‘Tubby Meets Katrina’ to ‘K-Ville’.” Journal of American Studies 44.3 (2010): 553-571. Zeitoun, Kathy. “Kathy Zeitoun decries ex-husband’s acquittal on charges he tried to kill her.” Interview with Naomi Martin. nola.com. The Times- Picayune, 31st July 2013.
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