OPEN CITY, Teju Cole

…not wishing to be alone with the image of Death hovering in the room with its cheap suit and bad manners…

I started OPEN CITY a few years ago, and picked it up again recently, just because it was there and open. It is a series of journeys undertaken by a performatively melancholy psychiatrist-in-training, Julius. Much about Julius is performative. His narration is filled to the gunnels with gathered and displayed knowledge of history and the arts. His assuming of emotions began to read to me like quickly donned shirts from a costume box, the occasion for each intelligently guessed at.

Riemenschneider, Stoss, Leinberger, and Erhat brought a complicated material knowledge of lindenwood to bear on their carving of it, and their attempts to marry the spirit of the material with its visible form, craftlike though it is, is after all not so different from the diagnostic struggle that doctors are engaged in. This is particularly true in the case of those of us who are psychiatrists, who attempt to use external Signs as clues to internal realities, even when the relationship between the two is not at all clear. So modest is our success at this task that it is easy to believe our branch of medicine is as primitive now as was surgery in Paracelsus’s time.

Having recalled the film ROME, OPEN CITY, I decided to look up the strict definition of the term “open city.”

In war, an open city is a settlement which has announced it has abandoned all defensive efforts, generally in the event of the imminent capture of the city to avoid destruction. Once a city has declared itself open, the opposing military will be expected under international law to peacefully occupy the city rather than destroy it. According to Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, it is forbidden for the attacking party to “attack, by any means whatsoever, non-defended localities”.[1] The intent is to protect the city’s civilians and cultural landmarks from a battle which may be futile.

Attacking forces do not always respect the declaration of an open city.

The enemy, perhaps, is already through the gates, and the city has no defense.

I’m sure this would baffle and horrify Cole, but, after a while, my closest referent to this largely New York-based novel was AMERICAN PSYCHO.

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calIbration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.

The prose is beautiful, easy and riverine. It is concerned with identities, and also that 2010-ish point where Western life began its slide from the physical world to the flat screen. Julius haunts bookshops and record shops in their closing days like a serial visitor to terminal wards, and seeks out the experiential to ground himself. But those experiences are performative, and tend only to excite in him his cold oceans of book knowledge.

Julius is a sociopath, and when his original sin is thrown in his face he goes to see a concert, alone (in several ways.) After the concert, he finds himself locked out of the theatre:

My hands held metal, my eyes starlight, and it was as though I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away.

He goes to see the Statue Of Liberty and recites to himself his gathered knowledge about it, which centres around death.

It’s a fantastically written book, and I suspect I have taken away little from it that the author intended. Perhaps it was really a meditation on the flaneur, on the immigrant experience, on identity and psychology and history? But Julius chills me somehow, and, by the end of the book, I can’t help but suspect Teju Cole agrees with me a little bit.

OPEN CITY, Teju Cole (UK) (US+)

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