The Withered Toe of Louisiana: Transatlantic Decadence in the Big Uneasy

The summer of 2013 was a particularly uneasy one in South Louisiana. The upcoming hurricane season was predicted to be especially active, the so-called dead zone was expanding to record circumference along the Gulf Coast, and fertilizer plants seemed to be literally exploding all over the place. “Nitrogen anxiety” entered into the language with little regard for the proper procedure of the DSM, and the integrity of the vast levee system that purportedly held back potential surge was again cast into doubt. The summer of 2013 came eight years after Katrina, and three years after the BP oil disaster, but South Louisiana was still on edge. Amidst all this unease, a journalist for the Baton Rouge Advocate articulated yet another level of anxiousness. The source of this anxiousness was always there; it did not arrive seasonally with the heat of summer. “We also look with concern,” the journalist writes, “if not outright fear, at the satellite images of Louisiana. The toe of Louisiana dipping into the Gulf of Mexico now looks like the skeleton of a toe, most of its flesh having withered away, leaving only a frail bone there.”¹ The image of a human toe losing flesh, desiccating in the salty waters of the Gulf, is striking. It sounds like the world of pure imagination, the sheer fancy of a decadent mind, but the journalist assures us that the satellite image is there for confirmation. The southernmost tip of Louisiana running along the Mississippi River does indeed look like a withered toe, a dying and expendable part of the body.

The representatives of industry said little and did less to quell the fear during the uneasy summer of 2013. In fact, at the company’s annual meeting in May of that year, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, exasperated the unease by asking his employees and investors a surprisingly direct question: “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”² In theory, these few words could have formed an excellent question about the nature of good and bad, suffering and enjoyment, who and what matters. But Tillerson, of course, wanted no answer; he did not want his audience to wax philosophical about the Anthropocene, the interdependency of planet and humanity, or the fundamentals of ethics. He wanted instead to perform two tasks: first, to cast “saving the planet” as antithetical to human happiness; and second, to conjure an image of the equitable distribution of human suffering all across twenty-first century Earth. We do not expect Exxon’s CEO to be extensively trained in environmental studies, but this question would probably trouble even the most conservative, anti-EPA bayou folk.

How do these two concerns — the journalist’s and the CEO’s — relate to the concept of decadence? To answer this question, let me begin by exploring the unruly nature of the concept. At first glance, decadence seems to be easy to spot. It names the spectacle of physical and moral decay on display all over New Orleans: buildings crumbling, water rising from the ground, mold and chipped paint, and the litany of “vices” like prostitution and miscegenation, homosexuality and gender deviancy. Historians and literary critics have long noted this type of decadence in the city and its vicinity.³ The odd thing about the term, however, as critics such as Matei Calinescu and Richard Gilman show, is that it contains multiple meanings and slippery connotations that are fundamentally paradoxical.⁴ There is a beauty in these forms of decay. The excessive, the degenerate, the unhealthy — all signs of ostensible decline — hold a peculiar attractiveness in the modern psyche. To be sure, that attraction may be ultimately disavowed in a more sober state of mind, but decadence remains a seductive siren song despite all the marks of danger.

Thinking about the concept of decadence awakens a vast archive of imagery: the fall of empires, late-night cigarettes and Pernod, dark chocolate, the color purple, Caligula’s leather boot. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to trace a single thread that runs through all...