Sold Down the River

Extract

in that city foreign and paradoxical, with its atmosphere at once fatal and languorous, at once feminine and steel-hard

—William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans

And miss it each night and day

I know I'm not wrong, the feeling's getting stronger

The longer I stay away

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans

Since that's where you left your heart

(And there's something more)

I miss the one I care for more than I miss New Orleans

—Louis Alter (music) and Eddie DeLange (lyrics),

“Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” (1946)

BOMBARDED BY THE DISCOURSE OF “TRAGEDY” FROM MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND GOVERNMENTAL OFFICIALS TRYING TO CHARACTERIZE post-Katrina New Orleans, I decided to reread William Faulkner. Ungluing myself from the computer screen, I hoped to distract myself with a literary version of another tragedy of the South. Faulkner's sense of the city's “paradox” and “foreign”-ness—in the case of this hurricane, the fury of climatic events that inexorably led to incomprehensible effects: much of its citizenry's forced migration, dispossession of property, and denial of the right of return as well as ecological catastrophe—was geographically and culturally resonant.