The element that first most stood out for me after having read several plague works is that the books, whether fiction or non-fiction, were almost all presented from an interior, isolated perspective, no matter how detailed the observation of the events and atmosphere external to the narrative voice.
This is an effect of a plague, historically, to divide people, to isolate them from one another, from fear of death and fear of violence and predation.
This is so for both Journal and for Fever Season, but in such very different ways, if only because one is fiction and the other is journalism on the spot.
Knowing New Orleans and its traditions very well, Hambley's Fever Season, which was her second Benjamin January-New Orleans work, her research is always declaring itself loudly. She hadn't lived with the place and the material long enough to have internalized the milieu, so it was flat reading. You saw her period map of the city open next to her keyboard.
However, in terms of Fever Season, that January could make an alliance with a white man in authority made some sense. However, in reality, it was the Americans in that era post the Louisiana Purchase, who instituted the strict and rigid and relentless separation of race, and the declaration that any one with 'one drop,' was a n*gger, no matter what. These matters were seen very differently by the Americans, who were protestants, than by the older, European tradition Catholic 'creole' population, whether white or colored, slave or free.
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Date: 2009-07-02 06:27 pm (UTC)This is an effect of a plague, historically, to divide people, to isolate them from one another, from fear of death and fear of violence and predation.
This is so for both Journal and for Fever Season, but in such very different ways, if only because one is fiction and the other is journalism on the spot.
Knowing New Orleans and its traditions very well, Hambley's Fever Season, which was her second Benjamin January-New Orleans work, her research is always declaring itself loudly. She hadn't lived with the place and the material long enough to have internalized the milieu, so it was flat reading. You saw her period map of the city open next to her keyboard.
However, in terms of Fever Season, that January could make an alliance with a white man in authority made some sense. However, in reality, it was the Americans in that era post the Louisiana Purchase, who instituted the strict and rigid and relentless separation of race, and the declaration that any one with 'one drop,' was a n*gger, no matter what. These matters were seen very differently by the Americans, who were protestants, than by the older, European tradition Catholic 'creole' population, whether white or colored, slave or free.
Love, C.