The Catastrophe to Come: Prefiguring Hurricane Katrina's Public Memory through the Anxious Melancholic Rhetoric of "The Big One"

Abstract:The city of New Orleans has long narrated its own demise through reference to "the Big One," a singular hurricane that would destroy the city for good. The "catastrophe to come" is a more or less permanent spectral presence for many of its residents, evidence of which can be traced as far back as the city's founding in 1718. When it comes to memorialization of Katrina, the central question of this essay is: how does one analyze public memory of an event so thoroughly anticipated, indeed, whose historical anticipation is fundamental to the later memory of it? Rather than merely acting as the historical context within which public memory comes to be interpreted, this anticipation and the anxiety that marks its form figures directly into the reading of the later memory object itself. In this essay, I argue that the repeated narrativization of the Big One is an anxious rhetoric that prefigures post-Katrina memory objects through a process of melancholic rhetorical incorporation. I first engage the history of New Orleans and this anxiety, extrapolating my usage of anxiety and melancholy as rhetorical concepts along the way. Then, I tender a critical analysis that first reads two narratives of such destruction to describe memory's prefiguration and then turns symmetrically to two post-Katrina memory objects to demonstrate the work of incorporation in the production of memory objects.