In his novel, Open City, Teju Cole conveys temporality–through both its form and its content–as an impersonal, indifferent, multi-directional, volatile force against which people struggle to maintain themselves.  Time is reflected as a dynamic expanse, comprised of material and reflected layers—the earth and it’s weather patterns, man-made structures, sound, memory, text, stories, and so on. These layers and reflections are constantly shifting; at any moment, in any space, or mind, a sudden fissure may break open, allowing the earth below to surge upward and overtake the surface. Although the newly emerging matter has always been there, supporting the surface, its new position alters the entire landscape. People have to navigate this unstable expanse. Some times, some people can sense a fissure—a blatant presentation of simultaneity.  They take note of shifts.  Other people, at other times, misinterpret them, or fail to notice them at all.  Apart from brief moments, or at least perceived experiences of a ‘bird’s eye view’ of this expanse, people are deeply and irretractably immersed in the landscape. Above, around, and within this expanse, with its moving people, is the inhuman, the elements—the sky, the cosmos, water, and life force.  It continues on, indifferent, yet directly impacting the traversal of people over the expanse.

Here, I will articulate four layers of the novel upon which the reader might ‘stand.’ Hopefully, in doing so, I will reflect how Cole’s volatile, simultaneous, histories cause the reader to lose her footing almost as soon as it is assumed to be gained.

1. Un-human Temporality

Throughout the novel, the narrator, Julius, directs the reader’s attention to un-human forces. These forces not only impact people, but influence their motions, shape what is perceive and how it is perceived. What is more, this un-human influence run so deeply that the motions of humanity itself, are reflected as an other-than-human mechanism.  In reference to cosmic and natural elements, such as the time of day, the season or the weather, Julius uses descriptions such as “unresponsive night” (54) and the “indifferent winter” (183).  In contrast to the impervious elements, the decisions and actions of Julius and his general trajectory, are highly responsive to those elements, in return.  Just as much, if not more,than his own mood or preference, the rain, wind, light and dark drive him from one street or interior to the next.  He takes note of these influences often.  In the Spring he writes, “I have noticed how much the light affects my ability to socialize” (193).  Recounting his father’s funeral, he remembers the impact of the stifling hot weather (224).  Julius is also influenced by people. He is repelled away by the gallery security guard and compelled toward others, such as the Czech woman in Brussels. Julius seems at times, to mindlessly float along these capricious paths motivated by external influences.  At others, he seems to do so with an accute awareness: “how petty seemed to me the human condition…this endless being tossed about like a cloud” (146). In one moment, as he lay in an ally, having been brutally beaten and mugged, the materiality of temporality, became viciously clear: “As I lay there, time became material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading, like something spilled, like a stain” (212). As the reader follows this narrator, who merges, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes jarringly, through others voices and other times, the novel begins “spreading…like a stain.” This spreading, upward and across, creates the sense for the reader, that she trapped in the limited perspective of a person deeply immersed.

2. Led by the Senses: Layers of Sound

Woven throughout Open City, the perceptions and actions of weather-affected human-machines are also described as being dependent on the senses. One of the senses of focus is the auditory. The novel is brimming with competing noise—the radio, the clatter of a briefcase, the symphony, and the rain on the roof.  These noises, like the temporal landscape, approach and recede, combine and separate or repulse or attract.  Even the absence of noise, seems at one moment, to be crippling, and at another, suggestive of some sort of posthuman connection.  Depending on a person’s situation, predisposition, preference, and the circumstance of that very minute, he/she will tune in or tune out, respond or not respond, to sound.  Competing noises in this “open city” sound uncertain, ethereal conflicts.

When Julius hears the chant of protestors, speaking out against violence against women, he closes the window (24).  But, as if their cries had drawn him into his past, beckoning his reach, he calls his ex-girlfriend. Her voice, in contrast with the self-assertion of the protesters, is “strained,” singular and distant. At moments like these Julius seems to be feeling something, but it is not clearly articulated to the reader, or perhaps, to himself.  At other moments, most specifically in relation to music, sound both constructs his mood in one sense, and shelters him from embedded emotion, in another.  Toward the beginning of the novel, Julius’ reaction to music playing overhead at a record store, further immerses him into his perceived present, fostering connections and pathways: “…every detail had somehow become significant…somehow seemed a part that intricate musical world” (18).  Yet toward the novel’s end, in the present tense, he has an emotional response to a symphony that seems to draw him out and up.  Over the world.  Both of these responses, nevertheless, inspire a response.  Yet when faced with words of conflict, such as Moji’s rape accusation, he responds not only with external silence, but with internal silence as well. He says and writes nothing.  Not to her.  Not to the reader.  Instead he leads into chatter about Camus (246), to fill the silence.

3. Perceived Volition of Humans across Layers

Within the novel, we are alerted to how people select–sometimes with intention, but most other times via causes outside of their control–how they will negotiate time.  People write papers, books, tell stories, post words, and name word. Julius tells his reader, “Names matter.  Everything has a name” (233).  It is difficult to know if Julius is critical of this “matter,” or is indifferently naming it as a reality. There is a moment wherein he thinks that the human forced resolve to self-knowledge, or to put it in his words, to “articulate ourselves to ourselves,” is “perhaps…what we mean by sanity” (243).  And in the same way that donors donate to put their names on buildings, to be not only named, but named as heroic, Julius suggests that sane, articulate, people must make themselves the heroic protagonist of their own story, not only for themselves, but for others. To earn their own trust and the trust of others, or, the “sympathy of an audience” who is “ready to believe the best about us” (243).  Julius successfully earns his own trust; he assesses himself as “hewed close to the good.”  And he may have successfully earned the trust of his reader. He narrates this concept of sanity and self-heroism right before (potentially) violating the reader’s trust by recounting Moji’s rape story.

The reader cannot know if her story is true. We know nothing, but that Julius has nothing to say. That being said, suddenly moments in previous chapters emerge in our memory, reshaping how we interpret the present.  The reader is becoming one of the people being tossed around through the pages. As the humans being depicted lose their place as the master of the universe, the reader finds it difficult to project blame. Because, In which direction would it be launched? Julius, and the “open city” are always on the move.  And each place and moment alters perspective.  Julius goes from the 3^rd floor of the professor, to the subway below ground to M’s apartment on the 29^th floor.  But even within one level, the experience changes, from on train to another, from one day to the next.  The heterogeneity not only spreads, but also collapses. The narrator describes the layers of the city.  He uncovers time past, that is still in the present, only lying, unacknowledged, below.  Time passed also rises above, layers of history piled high, in the midst of swarming people too caught up in their perceived present to notice: “the grand columns and arches irrelevant to the fatigued immigrants who rarely raised their heads to look above street level” (235).

The human memory is also presented as unreliable and unpredictable–unplaceable. In almost the same manner that one cannot predict how the weather will change history, the human cannot know within which time he/she is functioning.  In a memory, a launch into a past that is thrust upon the narrator, and his reader, we are brought to his mother’s response to her husband’s funeral.  Within that memory the reader is launched into her memory, which recedes further and further.  She speaks in “a faraway voice, because it could not talk about the death that had just shattered us, had begun to describe long-ago things” (79).  Although circumstances can uncover hidden pasts, like an ATM number, it can also veil them, like the rape of a friend’s young sister (167).  Temporality becomes dependent on what humans can access, what they are willing to access. Yet, how can one access a moment in time, when time is in constant simultaneous motion?  Different pasts suddenly collide, like the “echo” of Moji and Nadège: “two individuals separated in time and vibrating on a singular frequency” (61). Julius critiques the view that time is a continuum, saying that “The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float” (155).  And suddenly all of these reflections and assertions of the past that creates the present, are mere reflections of nothingness: “the world doubled in on itself.  I could no longer tell where the tangible universe ended and the reflected one began” (192).

The author simulates this folding over in time, its confusion, by using dialogue without quotations, that merge into the dialogue of others as well as non-spoken thought.  How could these voices be clearly distinguished? They are layers of reflection, with an absent author, putting the words of fictional characters into the mouth of another fictional narrator, who dictates to an unknown reader.  How is the reader to designate one, true voice or story?  Perhaps she shouldn’t.

4. The Ephemerality and/or Fiction of Seeing from the Outside

There are brief glimpse in the novel of an outside, an apartness from the volatile landscape.  If not homogenous, or overarching, it is a frictionless calm and is something that Julius seems to privilege. Throughout the narrative, Julius expressed enjoyment in high vantage points, where he can “take in, in a single glance, the dwellings of millions” (240).  Toward the end of the novel, after Julius begins speaking in his present, he describes a brief moment of wherein he experiences a sense of the vastness and depths of history.  This experience–created by a combination of the emotional high from hearing a symphony, the bodily rush of being high up on a fire escape and having an uncommonly clear view of a starry sky– lead Julius to understand that, despite his inability to perceive them all, there was a vast expanse simultaneously existing stars: “But in the dark spaces between the dead, shining stars were stars I could not see, stars that still existed, and were giving out light that hadn’t reached me yet, stars now living and giving out light but present to me only as blank interstices” (256). Cosmic matter and human history merge together, and the reader is ready for the novel to articulate connection, finality.  But, the moment is quickly lost: “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” (257). Julius looses, once again, his sense of proximity. And the reader is bellied a fastened, stabilizing summation of the story.  Because it simply cannot be.

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