Open City by Teju Cole 0

review
A novel about spatial relations, it is also effective at
dramatising the relationship between objective and
subjective experience
Giles Foden
Wed 17 Aug 2011 19.00 AEST

J
Illustration by Clifford Harper

ulius is an American psychiatrist training in Manhattan. Of German and Nigerian

extraction, he is rootless in New York. Entranced by the city, he is anxious not to
fetishise his outsider status. He is also on the rebound from a relationship. These
states of mind connect with walks that he makes across the urban grid, now for a
purpose, now aimlessly.

Along with seemingly profound reflections on cultural forms, descriptions of these walks
constitute most of Open City, the first full-length novel by Teju Cole, which has been much
praised in the United States for its prose style and for its take on the city as a site of power,
desire and community. It is akin to one of those "spatial stories" identified by the
philosopher Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life.

Breaking through the anonymity of the crowd, Julius has encounters with strangers,
acquaintances and friends. These include Moji, a woman he knew as a girl in Nigeria, but
had forgotten, or chosen to forget. He remembers his time in the Nigerian Military School,
goes to Brussels, has sex with a middle-aged Czech woman there, comes back, has a picnic,
gets mugged.

Saving a climactic invasion from Julius's past, that's about it so far as action goes. But action
is the wrong spoor by which to pursue this book. What comes strongest off it, instead, is a
cosmopolitan range of reference. Moments of genuine narrative are most often the
springboard for a jump into book chat, music trivia or historical disquisition.

This dangerous gamble pays off. The environment of which Open City is mostly mimetic is
the hall of semiotic mirrors inside our heads, and the proliferating data now so easily
accessed by our fingertips: twin arenas of information which, at once dazed and delighted,
we struggle to connect both to everyday life and an overall interpretative code.

Dramatising this, Cole recommences a process of synthesis between two aspects of the novel
which have long consorted and contested with each other: between (as Malcolm Bradbury
once put it) "on the one hand, the novel's propensity toward realism, social documentation
and interrelation with historical events and movements, and on the other … its propensity
toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination".

Cole further calls on at least three city walkers out of literary history: the "strolling
spectator" type which has informed the novel from its earliest days; the Baudelairean
flâneur which transferred into fictional prose with tales such as André Breton's Nadja
(Julius's ex is called Nadège); and the roving "I" of European romantic modernism, which
has found its most eloquent recent exponent in the work of WG Sebald.

Open City is also effective at dramatising the relationship between objective and subjective
experience. In one fabulous scene, Julius is stranded on a fire escape, high on the edge of
Carnegie Hall. It's night-time. He finds himself lost in relativity, plunged between the
wailing of an ambulance "reaching me from seven floors below" and "starlight that was
unreachable because my entire being was in a blind spot".

These are the limits of being open. The book's title comes from the declaration by defenders,
in the event of imminent capture, that a city is "open" and the enemy can march in. Reading
Open City, it is important to bear the title in mind, and not become impaled on fixed ideas
about what kind of person Julius is. Otherwise one might assume that his contemplations
should be taken at face value.

For as well as being an excellent novel about spatial relations (compare Tom McCarthy's
equally satisfying Men in Space) and layers of urban history and immigrant experience, Open
City is a novel about an intellectual show-off. And if what Moji says is true, he is something
much worse.

Negative space (the space between forms or around utterances) is key. We are disposed to
read Julius's reflections for their so-called content, whereas we do better to read them in
relief, for what they say about him. This is the real juice. We have to work hard to get it,
searching in the gaps for what Julius calls "a double story". At the same time, it's in the
nature of language and experience that the totality will elude us.

Part of the delight of Cole's book is how it exploits refinement until Julius reveals himself as
a poseur through intellectual over-reaching, disclosing an irony for which readers may not
be prepared. One instance of this comes when Chinese musicians in a park remind him "of Li
Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch's pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir's opera The
Consolations of Scholarship".
How to read Open City is obliquely signalled by these pretentious pratfalls. In the notes of
the trumpet of another Chinese band, Julius hears the "spiritual cousins of the offstage
clarion in Mahler's Second Symphony". I'm not a musician, but I suspect that's twaddle. But
when he hears, in the same tune, the "simple sincerity of songs I had last sung in the school
yard of the Nigerian Military School", and is returned, trembling, to a state of childhood
innocence, the observation has the force of something genuine. The little emotional space to
which no one else in the city is likely to have access is much more important than the public-
facing attitudes of the cultural dandy.

Giles Foden's Turbulence is published by Faber.

Topics
Fiction
Teju Cole
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