Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893

5. “The Way They Talked in New Orleans in Those Days”: Voice and History in and on The Grandissimes

5 “The Way They Talked in New Orleans in Those Days” Voice and History in and on The Grandissimes The short opening chapter of George Washington Cable’s novella “Madame Delphine,” published in 1881 and included in subsequent editions of the collection Old Creole Days, makes explicit the geographical , historical, and linguistic project with which Cable’s early fictional works were constantly engaged. The four-page chapter, entitled“An Old House,”utilizes a striking second-person narrative voice found nowhere else in the novella (or the collection as a whole, for that matter). At first the chapter’s“you”seems to be simply a more elegant stand-in for“one,” as in the opening phrases: “A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to and across Canal Street, the central avenue of the city.” But it quickly becomes clear that the chapter is tracing not a generalized tour of New Orleans taken by a universalized figure, but rather a specific path followed by a particular “you”: the first paragraph concludes by noting that “the crowd . . . will follow Canal Street,” and the second opens with, “But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way.” Cable’s use of “instead” here is crucial, for the path on which he leads his audience in this chapter is constructed as an explicit alternative to the dominant New Orleans narratives. That path represents first and foremost a historical alternative, one pursued by “a lover of Creole antiquity , in fondness for a romantic past.” The past to which it leads is “ancient and foreign-seeming,” distant both chronologically and cultur- 204 Chapter 5 ally from that to which the reader is accustomed; and it is concurrently in danger of disappearing, both in reality (“every thing has settled down [into] a long sabbath of decay”) and memory (“names in that region elude one like ghosts”). But it is kept alive through the alternative languages , the multivocal history, it contains: the narrow way on which narrator and reader walk is still called “the Rue Royale” by the aforementioned antiquarian; while its residents note in their distinct dialect, referring to the chapter’s titular, seemingly abandoned house, that“Yass, de ’ouse is in’abit; ’tis live in.” That house, with its “quadroon” inhabitants descended from the beautiful and tragic Madame Delphine, who lived there “sixty years ago and more” (4), is the chapter and story’s destination (1–4). And the historical tale which the house and Delphine comprise, one connected to the race, woman, and South questions, exemplifies themes central to Cable’s early literary texts. Yet just as important as that destination is the journey itself, the alternative walking tour through a New Orleans whose histories and languages represent richly multivalent and -vocal alternatives to the dominant narratives but were in danger of disappearing by the late nineteenth century (a danger that has recently and powerfully reemerged). Guiding his readers to and through that city, constructing and revealing for them those histories and voices, were at the heart of Cable’s unique yet exemplary literary mission. Voice and history intertwine both formally and thematically through much of the American historical literature published in the postCentennial decade. And in no single text are those two interconnected elements more central, or the decade’s social themes more resonant, than Cable’s The Grandissimes, which was serialized in Scribner’s in 1879–1880 and published in book form in 1880. Cable’s sprawling novel of New Orleans in the years following the Louisiana Purchase deals with each of my four structuring questions: primarily the race question, but also the South, woman, and (to a lesser degree) Indian questions. And its form, a complex mixture of local color, romance, and realism that has continually defied critical attempts at definition, centers on the interrelationships of language, identity, communication, the construction of narratives, and the past’s power and presence. Moreover, the novel’s infamous editorial process, while containing elements of the conservative pressures that so many scholars describe, itself constitutes an ad- Voice and History in and on The Grandissimes 205 ditional level of dialogue, one in which the Scribner’s readers and Cable exchange their own views on voice and history and out of which arise important changes in and meanings of the text itself. Both in and on its pages, then, The Grandissimes exemplifies the intricate interactions of...