“It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond,” writes Homi Bhabha in the introduction to The Location of Culture. Elaborating on this “realm of the beyond,” he continues:

The ‘beyond is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past . . . Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years, but in the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth. (Bhabha 1)

The reader of Teju Cole’s Open City is immediately aware of his narrator, Julius’s “restless movement” within this realm of the beyond – the au delà, the here/after. Indeed, in the novel’s very first line, as Julius sets the scene of his seemingly aimless wandering that will characterize the whole novel, the name of the New York City neighborhood of Morningside Heights stands out as an incommensurable confusion of time and space (the heights on the side of morning?). As “an easy place from which to set out into the city”(1), it is from within this very confusion that Julius guides his readers through the “open city”­ (a place, and title, that unsurprisingly also connotes the dissolution of time and space borders) that he inhabits, and indeed, that he never escapes: on the last page, the reader finds him still aimlessly wandering, still inhabiting a disorienting, liminal space (and time). Just as it began in media res, the narration also leaves off in transit. 

Time-space confusions are inescapable throughout the entirety of Open City. They appear as other places and times (re-) present themselves to Julius and the reader through the city’s architecture (as with the Loews 175^th Street Theater), in seemingly irrelevant asides—9/11 being described as a “great empty space”(52)—and in more direct reflections: “The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space”(155) or “they left, and time’s shape was restored”(213). In fact, Julius’s musings at moments seem to echo Bhabha directly: where Bhabha says that being in the beyond is “to touch the future on its hither side”(Bhabha 7), Julius wonders, “Why did I feel suddenly that they were visiting from the other side of time?”(55).

It is thus within a framework of Bhabha’s beyond, I would probably argue, that the novel’s major themes (which certainly include transnationalism, globalism, and post-colonialism) are best understood. Conversely, it is perhaps only through fiction’s manipulations, fragmentations, and concentrations of time that Bhabha’s beyond can truly become palpable, present, for the reader.

As he introduces the scene in which he crosses paths with Moji for the first time in New York, Julius muses, “we experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities”(155). The reader later recognizes this musing as foreshadowing for the disturbing, forgotten fragment of Julius’s life that reveals itself later. These two episodes (the first meeting, which foreshadows the later revelation) thus appear as discontinuous both in the novel and in Julius’s life, but they later reveal themselves to be part of a continuum—albeit an invented one. In the very recognition of foreshadowing, the reader thus realizes that the experience of reading the novel is much like what Julius has just described life to be like. It first appears as continuous: one reads novels linearly, just as, on a day-to-day level, she experiences time linearly. But in the life of the mind, one’s life becomes disjointed; some moments return, others are lost, and time, spaces and history are reconstructed out of simulacra.

It is a full 75 pages earlier (from his place in New York) that Julius has revealed an episode from his past in Nigeria, in which his mother “decided to take [him] with her into her memories”(79). His memory of his mother’s disjointed memories become part of his own narrative as he discloses to the reader that he has pieced together his mother’s past (perhaps much like his readers later piece together the fragments of the novel) to realize that his mother was a child of war—a child likely born of a rape. Here, he similarly reflects on his and her overlapping past: “It was an entire vanished world of people, experiences, sensations, desires, a world that, in some odd way, I was the unaware continuation of”(80). The reader must wonder: is Julius’ past act, which re-presents itself much later in the novel, a repetition of his past? Regardless, this fragment seems to join in the continuum with the other two episodes presented above, despite its displacement and disjuncture from them in the time and space of the novel.

“The present,” Bhabha asserts, “in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced”(4). The reading of novel itself seems to perform this return to the present, then, that the inhabiting of the beyond entails.