Ostensibly, Open City is the narrative of Julius, a young doctor completing his psychiatric residency at a Manhattan hospital. He is of mixed race which gives him the advantage of a certain flexibility (he straddles cultures) while simultaneously giving him the burden of a certain aloofness (he belongs to nowhere and to no one). He grew up in Lagos with his father’s people, Yoruba, but lighter skinned than his peers, because his mother is German. However, he is estranged from his mother, as she is from him, almost a family tradition, a birthright of his European bloodline.
In his off hours, Julius walks the streets of Manhattan, rationalizing his newfound peripatetic compulsion by styling it a welcome antidote to the precision his work demands. As he wanders through the city, he reflects on all he sees, offering the reader a sympathetic, often erudite commentary. This determines the novel’s structure, or anti-structure, as it proceeds by association. Its aleatory style is reminiscent of Geoff Dyer. As with Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, in which the temptation to conflate Jeff the character and Geoff the author is clearly refuted at the end of the novel, so here the temptation to conflate the narrator Julius and the author Teju leads the reader nowhere. Julius is very much the author’s creature, the device Cole uses to draw the reader in for a darker purpose which has nothing to do with reflection or erudition.
If we knew nothing of the novel except that it concerns a young man’s wanders through a city, we might infer from the word “open” in its title that we are dealing here with an understanding of openness that falls within a vaguely liberal tradition. It signifies freedom—the kind of freedom that allows space for a young mixed-raced man to thrive without any more identity politics baggage than a vaguely liberal readership can stand, the kind of freedom that allows space for such a man to extemporize as he wanders and to set himself awash in his own aleatorical wake. It is a Peter Pan kind of freedom, childlike in its wonder and imagination, but childish, too, insofar as it has no guide and no self-discipline. But in the lexicon of Julius, the word “open” means something more specific and, naturally, more erudite.
Because of the family’s habit of estrangement, Julius has lost touch with his oma, his maternal grandmother and only surviving grandparent. He has reason to believe she lives in Brussels, so takes holiday time to search for her. As in New York, so in Brussels. He wanders, and as he wanders, he shares learned observations. Among these observations is the fact that Brussels is one of the few European cities to have emerged relatively unscathed from Europe’s many armed conflicts with the result that visitors can observe examples of architecture from all the major periods of its long and rich history. The reason, Julius informs us, is that Belgium has a history of accommodating invading powers. “Had Brussels’s rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble.” Julius is grateful for the outcome, the preservation of so many splendid buildings. What Julius does not turn his mind to is the psychic toll an accommodationist policy would exact from the citizens of Brussels and Bruges and Ghent as their homes were overrun by Nazi soldiers, ironic given his chosen profession. The political elite of Belgium opted for survival, but it cost them their soul.
I am reminded of a piece by Matt Aufderhorst which appeared in Brick 103 (“Sollbruchstelle House No. 4”). While reflecting on his wanders through East Berlin, Aufderhorst writes: “The superficial gaze serves as an urban survival strategy. Who, in a big city, can truly remember the faces of [a] passerby longer than a few seconds? We treat the streets through which we roam like the facial features of strangers. What we see does not inhabit our brain for long.” While Julius has been an endearing—even engaging—guide, midway through the novel, we experience our first twinge of skepticism. Maybe his banter is nothing more than the accompaniment to a superficial gaze, a survival strategy like the accommodationist policy of an open city, pragmatic, but costly in ways Julius may not grasp. Could it be that our narrator is not as reliable as we first supposed?
I came to Cole’s novel via his two later works of non-fiction, Known and Strange Things (2016) and Blind Spot (2017) where, in connection with his love for photography, both as critic and practitioner, he reveals a concomitant concern for blindness. For Cole, as a literary practitioner, blindness arises in a number of ways and has a number of meanings.
First, there is a general physiological fact that all human beings have a blind spot where the retina meets the optic nerve, the optic disc. We are unaware of our blind spot because our brains are keyed to compensate for this visual gap. In effect, our brains fill in the gap. In metaphorical terms, this physiological fact can be taken as an illustration of how objectivity is illusory. We are incapable of seeing things as they really are; our reality is constructed and that construction begins in preconscious processes.
Second, there is the personal experience of blindness which Siri Hustvedt recounts in the foreword to Cole’s Blind Spot. In 2011 (the year in which Open City was published), Teju Cole woke up blind in one eye. He was afflicted by a rare disorder, papillophlebitis, which causes sudden and total blindness. While the affliction is temporary, Cole had no way of knowing this until he had obtained a diagnosis. And so he experienced an initial period, which we might describe as visual purgatory, when he was free to imagine himself blind in one eye for the rest of his life.
Finally, there is the literary experience of blindness which has as its archetype the healing miracles of Jesus and tends to be interpreted metaphorically as a lack of personal insight. As John Newton intones in Amazing Grace, “was blind, but now I see.” In the Christian context (in)sight is facilitated by the grace of God. In the secular context, insight has been resurrected through the Joycean epiphany and through modern psychotherapy.
Reading Teju Cole “backwards”, we find that blindness was already an important concern as he wrote Open City. Early in the novel, Julius engages us with an abstract riff on blindness: “Ideas of unusual sensitivity and genius were evoked by the names of Milton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Borges, Ray Charles; to lose physical sight, it is thought, is to gain second sight. One door closes and another, greater one, opens. Homer’s blindness, many believe, is a kind of spiritual channel, a shortcut to the gifts of memory and of prophecy.” He goes on to tell a story from his childhood Lagos about a blind man who was a wandering bard with spiritual gifts. After he sang his songs, Julius reports: “I imagined that I had seen something like an aura around him, a spiritual apartness that moved all his hearers to reach into their purses and put something in the bowl his assistant boy carried.” The “sensitive” Julius has offered us a fairly conventional interpretation of the bard’s blindness while revealing a blind spot all his own: the bard may have been nothing more than a common grifter. This should alert us that more of the same will follow.
Later, in Brussels, Julius befriends a man named Farouq, a Muslim who drinks and who acknowledges that, by drinking, he may be denying himself the rewards of an otherwise spiritual life. Nevertheless he offers an elaborate rationalization which mirrors the erudition we’ve come to expect from Julius:
I am drinking this now—he gestured to the bottle of beer—and I know that this is a choice I have made, and the consequence of this choice is that the wine of paradise will not be available to me. I am sure you know what Paul de Man says about insight and blindness. His theory has to do with an insight that can actually obscure other things that can be a blindness. And the reverse, also, how what seems blind can open up possibilities. When I think about the insight that is a form of blindness, I think of rationality, of rationalism, which is blind to god and to the things that god can offer human beings. This is the failure of the Enlightenment.
Julius hears the words, but does he note their ironic import as they ripple outward like the concentric waves from a stone tossed in a lake?
The novel’s aleatorical anti-structure is apparent only; in fact, it has a proper climax just like a conventional novel. In the penultimate chapter, Julius goes to a party at the instance of Moji, a girl he knew in his youth. He ends up sleeping over and, early the next morning, while sitting on the balcony of the 29th floor apartment, Moji joins Julius to gaze out over the Hudson River. She confronts him with an allegation of sexual assault. Years ago, when they were teenagers at another party, Julius had forced himself on Moji. Now, years after the fact, they reconnect and Julius behaves as if the incident never occurred. No acknowledgment. No appreciation of the pain he has inflicted.
Because this story belongs to Julius, there is no authorial comment to orient the reader. This reduces to a He said/She said scenario where, as is so often the case, She said is only reported by He because He controls the narrative. However, we have come to suspect that the over-intellectualized banter is no different than the carnie patter of a blind grifter. To put matters bluntly: Julius is full of shit.
The final chapter confirms our assessment. Now in private practice as a professional whose role is to help others leverage personal insight, Julius appears to have none himself. The banter continues. This time it’s Mahler. Das Lied von der Erde. His final Carnegie Hall concert in 1911. His death. Julius has bought a ticket to the Ninth Symphony under the baton of Simon Rattle. When the concert is done. Julius inadvertently uses the emergency exit and locks himself out of the building on the fire escape in the pouring rain. By the time he resolves his problem, the storm has passed and stars appear in the sky. Julius reflects on the fact that some stars are so distant we cannot see them because their light has not yet reached us. “I wished I could meet the unseen starlight halfway, starlight that was unreachable because my entire being was caught up in a blind spot, starlight that was coming as fast as it could, covering almost seven hundred million miles every hour.” Implicit in this reflection is the fact that all of us are caught up in this blind spot. In each of our lives, there are matters to which we remain irretrievably oblivious.