Sustaining New Orleans

Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City

Barbara Eckstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135403393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is an expansive interpretation of New Orleans– America's most unique city. Eckstein pursues meanings of the phrase 'sustaining New Orleans' from the images that remain through media activities to the competing demands of social justice.

1

The Claims for New Orleans’s Exceptionalism

One of New Orleans’s many informal historians begins her 1973 outsider’s guide with a description of signage “mercilessly bludgeoning” the tourist entering the city. Visible there is what she calls clashing legends: an elegant Latin culture doing battle with corruption and turpitude. Both are for sale.¹ “A dreadful whimsy assaults the stranger’s intelligence, threatens everything of beauty in the city, peers out between the pages of the countless ‘stories of new Orleans.’”² Determined not to write a booster’s book, she introduces New Orleans’s merciless advertisements for itself before she has a sazerac in hand, shrimp remoulade in her mouth, and the scent of urine-soaked pavement and sweet olive in her head. She will not succumb to these charms. The corruption and violence that are as endemic as the poverty contribute to a frontier atmosphere, whose other aspects—an untarnished landscape, a simplicity, a friendliness—an outsider finds hard to resist; he is even hypnotized by it all, as if the heavy scent of the flowers, the rank acridity of the Delta, the heat and haze and humidity had lulled him like a lotus-eater to forget the harsher realities.³ No lotus-eater, she purports to correct the work of other writers who do not separate fact from fiction about the city.

If, like most visitors to New Orleans of the last decades, she entered the metropolitan area at the airport, then she approached the city from the west on Interstate 10, which floats above the swamp and above the physical barriers on the ground that separate more affluent suburban Metairie from lower-income central city Gerttown. Traveling I-10, she would have run parallel to a suburban stretch along Veterans Memorial Boulevard that has, for a number of decades, been cultivating the Los Angeles look. Where New Orleans could most easily extend, it has developed US outposts as typical as Home Depot. Although Lake Pontchartrain to the north; the Mississippi River to the south; swampland south, west, and east; and the threat of major hurricanes and floods to the whole metropolitan area create some obstacles to sprawl, even these have been largely overcome (or ignored) in the pursuit of medium-density housing subdivisions and commercial strips, health facilities, and shopping malls. New Orleans is a twentieth-century city in the US automotive grain. Yet, even as the US attachment to standardization is visible in the greater New Orleans metropolitan area, a unique place “arising from the sediment of history” and geography continues to assert and to advertise itself.⁴

Given the typical US land use in the greater New Orleans area, abundant and persistent claims for the city’s exceptionalism are noteworthy. Take our informal historian, Sarah Searight. Having entered New Orleans via the billboards, she then seeks words for New Orleans’s difference. She finds a foundational answer not in facts about housing density or private space, not even in environmental conditions or political practices. The distinction lies in New Orleans being impervious to criticism, more than sensual in pursuit of pleasure, more than usually tolerant of human frailties, she proffers.⁵ City fact and fiction, or fact and feeling, as Carlo Rotella has observed, cannot be kept apart after all.⁶ New Orleans is a place that elicits in its human inhabitants and even in visitors a distinctive somatic and affective response to the place, a relation that Yi-Fu Tuan has labeled topophilia.⁷

Folkways and Technicways

The city’s affect arises from a network of folkways linked to the rivers and bayous that flow toward and away from the Gulf, into and out of the swamps. In negotiation with this fluid and fragile bioregion and its powerful regional folkways, the city maintains its existence. The interaction of geography and histories, formal and informal, is visible in the decisions made about the city’s transportation, social practices, land use, and governance and in the stories and other public discourse about the city—including literature. In reading widely circulated literature about New Orleans in dialectical relation to some decisions made about the city and the public discourse around those decisions, I position literature within the flow of the city’s folkways.

I borrow this term from the 1930s southern social scientist and public intellectual Howard Odum. Arguing in the 1930s for a regionalism that was the product of local folk practices enacted in a particular geographical setting, Odum had some success in persuading Franklin Roosevelt’s federal government to take a regionally sensitive, which is to say also folkways-sensitive, approach to national planning. The Odum of the 1930s believed technicways—the machine-driven, standardizing industrialism and media of modern (national) society, most often manifest in urban locations—should be encouraged and analyzed always as coexistent with regional folkways.⁸ It is true that, despite his collecting African American folkways as well as white, he shared a short-sightedness common to his time and place about the multiplex folk defining the region. He was not eager to see, for example, the synergism between African American and southern white folkways.⁹ And he practiced—even initiated—a social scientific method mostly about collection and taxonomy. His vision of an interrelation among expanding national technologies, regional geography, and local folkways serves, nonetheless, as a significant guide for analyzing history and geography, folkways and technicways together.

As I pursue that vision in New Orleans and its environs, the importance of multiplex folk quickly emerges as a necessary complication of Odum’s categories. In fact, the interracialism and other boundary violations that emerge in the mongrel tales and informal histories that claim exceptional status for New Orleans are arguably the defining characteristic of the city’s folkways. Pursuing the meaning of New Orleans’s so-called creolization, historians Joseph Logsdon and Arnold Hirsch conclude that “[New Orleans] is an intellectual hinge connecting the two interracial systems [of the French and Spanish empires and of the US empire] that appeared in the Western Hemisphere.”¹⁰

I focus here on a dynamic site of production not of the book artifact per se, but of the literary art that represents and inscribes the relationship between the dynamics of place and the circulation of that dynamism across space and time. That circulation occurs through the distribution of a literary text as idea or as book, but also through the distribution of rumor, reputation, film, advertisement, or any reference to a place wherever and however it occurs. That dynamism of place and space over time and in relation to economic, environmental, social, and cultural forces that impinge on a place is one way of describing what I am calling the pulse of the place-tone. I say pulse, because this dynamism produces a variable rhythm, not a constant hum; place-tone, because it is an ongoing dialectic of materiality and representation. The pulse of the place-tone is not then only a cultural force; it is as much a social one. But, in either case, it is not normative.

In the post–World War II years of the mid-twentieth century, while David Riesman asked “Abundance for What?”, Odum feared that abundance produced by national and international technicways was overwhelming regional folkways and so, sadly, turned toward the Agrarians, hunkered down in a pastoral golden age.¹¹ But if we keep our eyes on his earlier vision of folkways and technicways acting together, on the regional place-tone audible through the sounds of modernization and urbanization, then three-quarters of a century later, we have a good model for platial analysis generally. Applied to New Orleans in particular, his model is especially appealing if we also expand his definition of folk to recognize not only diverse but also evolving mongrel urban folkways drawing from the city’s emplacement within greater transAmerican, Third Coast, and transAtlantic territories.¹²

Beyond the end of the twentieth century, this foundational, regional dialectic of capital and culture has survived, even in predominantly economic analysis in which it has emerged as a telling paradox: extraordinary innovations in transportation and communication have produced a smaller globe on which all points could be in close contact, and yet many social and economic transactions are problematical and fail when executed across great distance. The globalizing, netocratizing trends have not, argues Allen Scott, simply undermined “the region as the basis of dense and many-sided human interactions (though they have greatly affected many of the qualitative attributes of those interactions), but in many respects have actually reinforced it.”¹³ One effect of these geographic circumstances has been, Scott continues,

alternative approaches to practical governance which spring out of civil society as spontaneous responses to the search for collective order, or as cultural accretions that in one way or another come to function (well or badly) as regulatory institutions of the economy. In any case, they help sustain capitalism as a functioning social system.¹⁴

Capitalism, he adds, would implode if it depended upon profitability and price signals for its “social reproduction.” Although sustaining capitalism, understood as economic expansion that leaves uneven development in its wake, is pointedly not my mission, Scott’s observation about regionalist economic folkways does usefully temper a neoconservative (and neo-Marxist) view that sees only globalization and sees it, whether with anticipation or alarm, only as a monolithic opportunity for hyperprivatization and anticollective choice in economic matters.¹⁵ Those who develop a good ear for the pulse of the place-tone stand to influence whether it is uneven development or a sustainable alternative that will shape the future of a place.

Regional folkways and technicways, and conceptions and expressions of them, are transforming over time and space and society, because neither history nor territory nor people are inert. The two terms of Odum’s binary are no more neatly oppositional than other distinctions whose differences matter. This said, in this binary is a means to begin understanding, from our present globalist presumptions, the stories of a city’s exceptionalism, the ways literary texts have taken up these circulating claims, and the place of both in the evolving material conditions of the city in the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginnings of the twenty-first. How, specifically, have the folk claims for New Orleans’s exceptionalism and the technicways that have produced, by some measures, a typically US metropolitan area coexisted? What has been the place of well-known literature in the reproduction of that platial exceptionalism and typicality? This book analyzes together the work literature does amid a local discursive context and some of the nondiscursive realities of a city’s survival.

Sustainability

A city’s survival, in today’s urban parlance, inevitably evokes the term sustainability. Leaving for others the extensive debate about the term’s ubiquitous use and abuse, I take as its central tenet the goal of balancing competing claims for environmental health, social justice, and economic viability. Often functioning to repel one another, these three values are too important to be left to fly apart, particularly if the presumption of economic growth is mindfully reconsidered.¹⁶ In many places our human need is not for economic growth but a “need to redirect our economic engine into paths that are restorative rather than exploitative.”¹⁷ This said, juxtaposing the three competing values as an interactive triangle, as planning scholar Scott Campbell does, has considerable value. He acutely observes,

sustainability … can become a powerful and useful organizing principle for planning … if, instead of merely evoking a misty-eyed vision of a peaceful ecotopia, it acts as a lightening rod to focus conflicting economic, environmental, and social interests. The more it stirs up conflict and sharpens the debate, the more effective the idea of sustainability will be in the long run.¹⁸

The critical and elusive goal of integrating these claims—these ideals and practices called sustainability—gives one set of meanings to sustaining New Orleans and provides one set of questions to guide the interpretive work of this book. In short, how has widely circulated literature set in the city participated in public discourse and actions in and about the city? How has literature even participated in decisions that impinge on the city’s sustainability? How, in turn, have those decisions emphasized New Orleans’s places in historical time, those chronotopes that give meaning to the literature’s narratives for its national and international audiences?¹⁹

Sustaining New Orleans also refers to the function of literature in the development of public memory, which percolates the circulating discourse, beliefs, institutions, rituals, social relations, and power structures shaping the past and envisioning the future. What images and ideas of the city, for good and ill, does well-known literature help to sustain in public memory within and beyond the city? How does this public memory contribute to the setting of problems addressed within the city, such that it also affects the solutions that are possible? Michael Kammen’s comprehensive Mystic Chords of Memory draws conclusions not unique to the scale of the US nation. He could be writing specifically about the city of New Orleans when he repeatedly warns that the details of commemorative practices are in excess of any general conclusions. When studying memory and commemoration, the best deduction possible puts the binary of tradition and progress in an ambivalent and not always dialectic relation.²⁰ Public or collective memory is, like sustainability, bound to be an elusive object of study. Yet it is the geological foundation, however shifting, on which environmental health, social justice, and economic viability interact.

With clear-eyed skepticism, Campbell notes the tendency to locate sustainable development in preindustrial and non-Western cultures. This so-called undeveloped world is not the desiderata some scholars would have it be, he insists.

The international division of labor and trade, the movement of most people away from agriculture into cities, and exponential population growth lead us irrevocably down a unidirectional, not a circular path: the transformation of pre-industrial, indigenous settlements into mass urban society is irreversible. Our modern path to sustainability lies forward, not behind us.²¹

Although I do not doubt that transformations of the kind and of the scope Campbell describes are and have been afoot for some time, I question that the result of those transformations is and will be worldwide, monolithic mass urban society, the triumph of modernizing technicways that Odum feared. One of the dimensions of human place-connectedness Lawrence Buell delineates, in his twenty-first century extension of Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of topophilia, is the accumulation of platial experience by a mobile individual or diasporic population that inflects their lives and perception in each new location.²² And this is only one manifestation of place-connectedness. Folkways, changing in place and mobile across space, are repeated and reformulated in the crucible of urban geographies with their diverse and protean populations. If some set of cross-national urban practices called cosmopolitanism offers hope for peaceful coexistence, it is because they reflect the place-tone of history modulated by the folkways of new diasporic populations, not because the elite of urban Asia, America, Europe, Africa, and Australia share the same technology.

Cities and city-regions, of which New Orleans and its metropolitan area are a provocative example, teem with folkways that re-create the past in the present, thus transforming the future—for good and ill. Literature, which is often asked to serve the analysis of sustainability only in its fantasies of the future, has more to offer as a compelling expression of the historically produced place-tone in a critical present. As a conduit of evolving local folkways, literature conveys its version of the stories to a national and international audience. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Claims for New Orleans’s Exceptionalism
• 2 “Indiscourageable Progress”: The Decline of the New Orleans Streetcar and the Rise of A Streetcar Named Desire
• 3 Sex and the Historic City: A Walking Tour on the Wild Side
• 4 Malaise and Miasms: Dr. Percy’s Moviegoer and Public Health in New Orleans Environs
• 5 The Spectacle Between Piety and Desire: The Place of New Orleans’s Black Panthers and Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDooism
• 6 The Vampires’ Middle Passage: The World of Anne Rice and the Promise of New Orleans’s Coast
• 7 Mapping the Spirit Region: Sister Helen, the Dead Men, and the Folk of New Orleans’s Environs
• 8 Epilogue
• 9 Notes
• 10 Bibliography
• Index