Truly strange New Orleans: The unstable city in George Washington Cable's Strange True Stories of Louisiana

Abstract

The New Orleans that emerges from George Washington Cable's 1888 collection, Strange True Stories of Louisiana is effectively a Caribbean city as much as a US one, and European imprints are strong in both these strands of identity. Cable acts ostensibly as a collector of remarkable factual accounts of New Orleans and Louisiana, but his own narrative presence is at least as strong as the original tellers and characters of the tales themselves. While constructing a more or less chronological overall narrative of the city and the wider region(s), Cable presents a multitude of voices merging and clashing with each other, blurring lines of fact and fiction as they blur boundaries of identity. In these tales, as often poignant and tragic as they are melodramatic, Cable shows the many truths of New Orleans to be strange indeed, and emphasises its status as a nodal point in relations within and between old and new worlds.