The New Venice: What New Orleans Might Have Been

This really smart article is about New Orleans and its post-Katrina potential to adopt the Venetian water street system.

I've been only to Rome and nowhere else in Italy, but I can't help but remember Elizabeth Gilbert's critique of Venice in Eat, Pray, Love, which I happened to read while studying abroad in Athens.

Here are her thoughts on the "stinky, slow, sinking, mysterious, silent, weird city":

"Venice seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic death, or to lose a loved one, or to lose the murder weapon with which the loved one was lost in the first place. Seeing Venice, I'm grateful that I chose to live in Rome instead. I don't think I would have gotten off the antidepressants quite so quick here. Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it [...] The beautiful young Venetian woman who owns the restaurant near where we are staying is miserable with her fate. She hates Venice. She swears that everyone who lives in Venice regards it as a tomb."

"Invisible Cities" breaks down and refutes this reaction, which is not a new one:

"When we insist that these cities are doomed, perpetually dying, we manufacture sublime visions of distress that prevent us from understanding how they might be saved... We develop a tourist's gaze, which allows us to feel a bittersweet pity for 'doomed' people and 'vanishing' ways of life that we will never know, nor be forced to feel responsible for. When we travel to such cities, we believe that we might learn something about ourselves, 'other' cultures, 'human frailty' - but often we are learning precisely the habits and ways of seeing that will preserve us from such experience."

But how did people begin to get this idea? "I had no idea Venice had that association," my boyfriend said to me.

Apparently, it's rooted in Venetian literary history, "which has developed since the city's end in 1797 at the hands of Napoleon. Thereafter Venice became little more than a backwater in European politics, occupied first by Austrians and, ever since, by tourists. Outsiders like Lord Byron began to develop an aesthetics of the city that focused less on its imperial past and possible future, and more on its apparently depressed, moribund, and timeless present. The idea of a 'sinking city' became irresistible as symbol [...] [John] Ruskin's successors - Henry James, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Mary McCarthy, among many others - have merely confirmed and reconfirmed his view of a dead, Narcissus-like city, so much so that McCarthy was able to declare in 1963, perhaps wistfully, that 'tourist Venice is Venice,' and attempts to find the 'real' city would always already be forfeit."

The notion that perceptions of different places are often manipulated and cemented into place by literature is not a new one either. In The White Album, Joan Didion observes:

"Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itslef, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and ot only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones."

I agree with the latter notion that people's perceptions are so often determined (without them realizing it) by people who came before them. "Invisible Cities" reveals a harsh truth about the rhetoric and 'romance of doom.' It's an easy out for many Americans to liken New Orleans to Venice, cities that are talked about and visited often, but are also subconsciously accepted as having fates that are out of our hands.

For me, Memphis belongs to Elvis and Paul Simon; Concord to Louisa May Alcott; Walden Pond to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The French Riviera belongs to Scott Fitzgerald and Los Angeles to Joan Didion. Indeed, people with sufficient talent can take a place, mold it like clay with their words, and give it entirely new meaning. But can a city like New Orleans break from the chains of perception? Is it people who make the cities they live in, or do some places have a life of their own?