In the Swirl of Other People’s Stories

Toward an Ethics of Listening
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‎Benjamin develops his Angel of History – the historical materialist view of history – apropos the dominant historicism of his time, which not only claims to understand the past “the way it really was” but naturally sympathizes with the victor’s story (2003: 391). Notably, while often being attentive to the histories of the oppressed and marginalized, there are also those crucial moments in Open City that remind us how Julius is the hero of his own story. For Benjamin, the “process of empathy” with a historical epoch is already suspect because the historicist inevitably sympathizes with history’s victors and thus becomes complicit in the lineage of rulers stepping “over those who are lying prostrate.” Knowing this, the perspective of the historical materialist should be characterized by a “cautious detachment” (Benjamin 2003: 391-392). Considering Benjamin’s wariness of emotional transference, and echoing Stephen Best’s concerns with melancholic historicism, an important question arises: To which degree does an ethical relation to the past actually predicate an emotional response?
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‎As noted above, Julius’s capacity for moving and thus writing and weaving this urban text relies on his sense of integrity, and his progress appears to be contingent on others’ arrested development. Furthermore, his authorial distance from the stories of others is purportedly engendered by the fact that he has no place in them, or at least that his connection is not
‎legible to him (59). Julius wanders through New York like an Isherwoodian camera, simply recording the city’s everyday life, passing little or no judgment whatsoever. In conceptualizing chapter 5 even further, one might ask what it means to hear ghostly voices, to simply record and not comment on them, as if they were present. Julius, in many ways, is a chronicler, if not a storyteller, confronted with the loss experienced by others. One might even go so far as to consider the entire narrative as being motivated by the recording of loss. Open City is not what Goyal has termed a “comforting narrative of hybridity and redemption.” Most established notions of collectivity are, if not negated, at least questioned by the atomized diasporic model embodied by Julius (2010: 208). Moreover, while stressing the pervasiveness of individual and collective trauma, the model of subjectivity proposed here also foregrounds the predicament of rooting one’s sense of individual and group coherence in a fetishized notion of loss, or, in Julius’s case, the fetishistic disavowal of loss. The notion of fetishism is important here because of its ethnographic connotations and allusion to the linkage between primitivism and the avant-garde, but also because it introduces the aspect of visibility and the danger of transmuting violence into a reified and aestheticized spectacle of suffering.
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‎At this point, it may be helpful to briefly recollect the concept of fetishism in the writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin. In Capital Vol. 1, Marx draws attention to the strange faculty of commodities to denote value in the “fantastic form of a relation between things,” thus substituting relations between people and masking the actual constitution of their value through largely exploitative social relations and modes of production (165). 55 With reference to the religious origin of the word, Marx called the curious quality that attaches itself to commodities fetishism. The concept of the sexual fetish developed by Freud in the eponymous essay of 1927 is a result of the (male) child’s disavowal of what is fantasized as the mother’s castration, in which both perceived lack and denial are mingled and transferred onto another, fetishized object. 56 Laura Mulvey notes that despite raising different issues – Marx being concerned with the want of indexical value, Freud with an excessive inscription of value – both use the term to explain “a refusal, or blockage, of the mind, or a phobic inability of the psyche, to understand a symbolic system of value, one within the social and the other within the psychoanalytic sphere” (1996: 2). It is this aspect that informs my use of the term here. Both notions of the fetish conceal a laborious or traumatic condition with a glossy surface; they both stand in for and suppress a violent history.
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‎Open City, adopting what many commentators describe as a Sebaldian tone, foregrounds a general preoccupation with historical trauma that corresponds with what Roger – Luckhurst has dubbed our “contemporary trauma culture” (2008: 2). Yet it also appears to subtly critique the very
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‎pervasiveness of this fascination, its fetishization of the archive and memory and perhaps also the melancholic circularity, claustrophobic reassurance, and potential reification that may result from this. It does so by routinely uncovering and recording violent and marginalized histories – yet refracted through the lens of an unreliable and most likely morally reprehensible narrator.57
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‎This in turn raises the question of what might ensue if everything is rooted in loss, everyone is guilty, every people’s history marked by trauma. Does this notion not promote the very blurring of distinction, the kind of pervasive, flattening fascination with history and trauma that arouses in scholars like Andreas Huyssen the urge to properly “discriminate among memory practices”? (2003: 10). While this would appear to be a rather fruitless endeavor, one might ask instead how the hard backdrop of the systemic becomes visible apropos such fleeting yet particular concepts like experience, memory, and culture. In many ways, the ectoplasmic traces of past violence have congealed into grooves that not only shape certain ways of thinking, seeing, and doing. They also channel flows of wealth and stratify societies in manners so rigorous that the imaginative act of tracing back their originary moments will hardly undo them. As Goyal notes, when diasporic subjects are linked by “feelings of shame, guilt, and loss, rather than by skin color, or a political identification […] the historical specificity of slavery as a transnational system of labor disappears from view” (2010: 208).
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‎While a central concern of Open City seems to be the possibility of understanding both the insight and the blindness of a given perspective on history – and indeed Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight is directly referenced – it seems as though the novel refrains from presenting the past as a transformative key to unlock the problems of the present or provide a different future. Especially, one might add, if this transformation relies on the process of uncovering, witnessing, and working through trauma in a way that attaches surplus value or excess desire to the past’s open wounds.
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‎Although Julius’s meandering narrative seems to be motivated by the acknowledgment of his guilt, this retroactive realization neither changes the course of history nor necessarily informs his present. “I don’t think you’ve changed at all, Julius,” Moji finally says to him, “[a]nd maybe it is not something you would do today, but then again, I didn’t think it was something you would do back then either. It only needs to happen once” (245).
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‎When Julius appears almost entirely unmoved by Moji’s accusation, it becomes apparent that there are other important forms of movement that are mostly lacking, and conspicuously so, from this spatiotemporally invested novel. In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai offers a definition of the category of “tone” as “a literary or cultural artifact’s feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience
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‎and the world” (2005: 28). Looking at Open City’s tone, it is striking how the effect of the lulling, pedestrian rhythm of Julius’s recounting could be best described as atonal or lacking affect, similar to the way that Julius himself relates to the world. Especially, but not only, in his reaction to Moji, Julius shows barely any immediate signs of emotional investment, displaying instead the very same “flat affect” (244) or “affective disorder” (7) he ascribes to Moji’s accusation or researches in his clinical study on the elderly. While the additional qualification of Moji’s delivery as being “emotional in its
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‎total lack of inflection” perhaps belies his own emotional equilibrium, his manner throughout the narrative is one of distance and detachment (244). Only the individuals whose stories he records are emotionally invested; loss and “irrational” attachment are to be found in others. At one point, Julius reflects on the Moroccan shopkeeper Farouq and the dangerous pull of political vehemence on young people: “It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?” (107).
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‎A key to interpreting Julius’s pronounced solipsism and his ostensible lack of affective transference lies perhaps in Open City’s particularly dense descriptions of aesthetic experiences, as well as the manner in which Julius aestheticizes moments of commonality and potential understanding.
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‎Transference does occur in the novel, repeatedly, yet it is the kind of emotional transference engendered by an aesthetic experience, converting even uncomfortable and painful emotions into an aesthetic spectacle and potential source for consumption. In “Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism,” Pieter Vermeulen further discusses the scene of Moji’s revelation. He notes: “Julius’s response, when it comes, is startling in its inadequacy. Rather than speaking, he imaginatively converts the river, at which Moji had been staring during her monologue, into an aesthetic spectacle: “the river gleamed like aluminum roofing” (2013: 53). Julius bars the possibility of understanding by actively digressing and invoking the notion of solipsistic, aesthetic pleasure. Overall, Open City is marked by thick, often exaggerated descriptions of Julius’s aesthetic experiences. It is interesting how movement is employed here, too, when Julius professes that he is “rapt” by the opening movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde or when the meditation on John Brewster’s paintings, “outside the elite tradition” but imbued with “soul” (36), causes Julius to leave the museum “with the feeling of someone who had returned to the earth from a great distance” (40). Overall, the effect of Open City’s extensive use of ekphrasis is markedly not that of communal experience, stressing instead the sense of isolation inherent in Julius’s aesthetic consumption. 58 There are instances when that communality is evoked, it seems, only to
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‎provide a contrast to his pronounced solipsism. For example, when he
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‎remembers his visit to the opera: “And a few minutes before this, I had been in God’s arms, and in the company of many hundreds of others, as the orchestra had sailed toward the coda, and brought us all to an impossible elation. Now, I faced solitude of a rare purity” (255). This emphasis on solitary spectatorship also harks back to the figure of Benjamin’s alienated flâneur and is particularly evident at the points where this modernist sentiment is employed to aestheticize everyday experience, instances where the narrator appears to enter into a cathartic moment of commonality.
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‎The opening scene of chapter 17 is such an instant. It is set in spring, at a “picnic in Central park with friends.” From the narrative distance of retrospection, Julius notes how the burgeoning sunlight makes him more sociable, actively seeking out the company of others. He is, for the first time in the narrative, part of a ‘we’ that is not the anemic, heteronomous ‘we’ of pensive abstraction but denotes an active, concrete collective. Reclining on a blanket in a group of four and watching the happy scenes of family life around him, Julius merges not only with his group, but with the entire city around him. “We were part of a crowd of city dwellers in a carefully orchestrated fantasy of country life” (194), he notes, playing on the illusiveness of this idyllic urban moment and his own performance in it. While this passage harnesses certain modernist sensibilities in its aestheticized consumption of a colorful, vibrant mass, those moments are also interspersed with acute feelings of isolation and separateness, the kind of cosmological loneliness that perhaps only occurs among large groups of people. This peculiar mélange of sensations, and the modernist blueprint to this urban experience, is skillfully signposted by the opening paragraph to this serene scene, which evokes Ezra Pound’s In A Station of the Metro. Lying in the grass, gazing through the “petals of the cherry blossom,” Julius becomes aware of “a sudden apparition of three circles, three white circles against the sky.” The circles turn out to be parachutists, illegally landing in Central Park. While watching them descend, Julius feels “the blood race inside [his] veins” and is suddenly transported back to a childhood memory of rescuing another boy from drowning. Even though the occasion is one of a positive, altruistic connection, Julius dwells on the sensation of being “all alone in the water, that feeling of genuine isolation, as though [he] had been cast without preparation into some immense, and not unpleasant, blue chamber, far from humanity” (196).
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‎In a scene during Julius’s time in Brussels – a trip which could be read as a reverse journey into the heart of darkness59 in its listing of European barbarisms – Julius enters a church and is mesmerized by the sound of Baroque music: He is soon startled, however, by “distinct fugitive notes that shot through the musical texture” (138). The “unsettling half step of a tritone” he perceives is in fact the sound of a cleaning woman’s vacuum, intermingled with the sound of recorded organ music (ibid.). The woman, he
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‎assumes, is most likely part of the African immigrant communities he has encountered in Brussels. Julius wonders whether her “presence in the church might doubly be a means of escape: a refuge from the demands of family life and a hiding place from what she might have seen in the Cameroons or in the Congo, or maybe even in Rwanda” (140). While Julius identifies the “fugitive” (138) blues notes of her presence and perceives them in their tension and dissonance with a “European” idea of harmony, it is only later, during his lunch with Dr. Maillotte that the echo of the tritone, or the flattened fifth, morphs into the commodified pleasure of jazz. Sophisticated Maillotte, brimming with life stories featuring royals and millionaires, may be an outspoken connoisseur of jazz, but she is not particularly fond of difference and dissonance in society. When Julius confronts her previous assessment of a colorblind Europe with Farouq’s experience in Belgium, she brushes him off:
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‎Our society has made itself open for such people, but when they come in, all you hear is complaints. Why would you want to move somewhere only to prove how different you are? And why would a society like that want to welcome you? But if you live as long as I do, you will see that there is an endless variety of difficulties in the world. It’s difficult for everybody. (143)
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‎Julius launches into a feeble attempt to convince her otherwise, but finally succumbs, sinking into the comforts of refinement, “the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherry-wood of the tables” (142). This bleak vision of an open society is rarely lifted, as Julius’s ability to record difference never suggests an engagement with it.
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‎Yet, as Theodor Adorno notes in relation to the social role of art, “what does not exist, by appearing, is promised” (1999: 233). And perhaps this is how we can read the prospects evoked by Farouq, who, for all his shortcomings, wants to understand “the historical structure that makes difference possible” (114) and for whom the telephone shop functions as “the test case” of how “people can live together but still keep their own values intact” (112). In Julius’s eyes, however, this minor cosmopolitan space still looks “like fiction” (ibid.).
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‎These explicit musings on the fugitive notes created by contrapuntal presences encapsulates much of Open Citys particularly dire sense of hope, including the sliver of hope embodied by literature and its simultaneous inclination toward commodification. These scenes project yet another notion of fugitivity that transcends an understanding of Julius as a suspect fugueur fleeing from a shameful history but limns the promise of Black life as a different kind of life, Black ways of living as alternatives to the way life is commonly ordered, and as something that can be glimpsed in fiction. Viewed
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‎temporally, or musically, the diasporic master trope of ‘movement’ thus acquires additional meaning. In “Fugitive Justice,” Best and Hartman examine the distinct mélange of hope and resignation in Ottobah Cugoano’s slave narrative “from the retrospective glance of our political present” (2005: 3). Thus viewed, fugitivity, the “master trope of black political discourse,” transpires “in the interval between the no longer and the not yet, between the destruction of the old world and the awaited hour of deliverance” (-Best and Hartman 2005: 3). Here, they write, “we find the mutual imbrication of pragmatic political advance with a long history of failure; in it, too, we find a representation in miniature of fugitive justice” (ibid. 3). Or, as Fred Moten writes in “The Case of Blackness”: “Black […] is the victory of the unfinished, the lonesome fugitive; the victory of finding things out, of questioning; the victorious rhythm of the broken system. Black(ness), which is to say black social life, is an undiscovered country” (2008: 202).
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‎In Farouq, Julius encounters someone who wills this undiscovered country into existence with a perhaps too literal vehemence, and he finds in the character of Maillotte someone who is simply unable (and unwilling) to listen, to discern the alternative order from the commodified chaos of jazz. In its general emphasis on art and aesthetic pleasure, Open City could perhaps be read as an exaltation of cultural and aesthetic refinement, yet one that self-consciously confronts the limits of aesthetic consumption by contrasting it with (the lack of) an ethical understanding that comes to fruition through listening and responding. In a way, the novel also foregrounds its own commodity form, its proclivity toward a fetishistic distraction from and reification of suffering, without entirely undermining the utopian potential of art.
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‎Open City, one could say, stages the tense conversation of postmodernity by bringing various historicist modes and ways of being in dialogic relation while suspending the finite judgement of a totalizing viewpoint. Tracing its genealogy as a literary or linguistic concept back to Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination, the dialogic primarily describes the way that a literary work is in open exchange with other discourses. Grounded, however, in the understanding that “[e]very utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ […] and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia” (1986: 217), the dialogic extends well beyond the communication between two parties, or discourses, but denotes the socially stratified orientation of all words or utterances. According to Bakhtin, dialogism thus accounts for the diversity of voices in a novel, rendering it a particularly “distinguishing feature of the novel as a genre” (ibid. 300). The dialogic in a novel may describe the relationship between the author and the narrator’s story, the double-voiced discourse inhabited by character speech and also the social embeddedness of the novel’s heteroglot background. Moreover, dialogism is encountered in the very condition of language, as any “object is always
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‎entangled in someone else’s discourse about it, it is already present with qualifications” (ibid. 330). Rather than begetting monolithic or monologic conceptualizations, the spectral dispersion of the artistic “image” creates an “atmosphere filled with […] alien words, value judgments and accents,” allowing the “social atmosphere of the word” to sparkle (ibid. 277). Such open-endedness and complexity is necessarily opposed to the closedness of value judgements.
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‎Understanding how the narrative situation of the novel informs the way that information is presented reveals the dialogic nature of Open City. Read as a series of sessions with a therapist revolving around the pivotal moment of confession, the role of the implicit reader of Julius’s account is that of a purportedly neutral witness or patient listener rather than that of a judge afforded with the morally invested, elevated, and totalizing bird’s eye perspective that is both evoked and rebuked in the novel’s coda. This patient-therapist relationship is mirrored in, or rather transferred onto, Julius’s numerous encounters with other people’s stories that cast him in the role of witness or chronicler, rather than passer of moral judgments. In his review of Open City in The New Yorker, Wood conflates these differing modes, interpreting Julius’s neutral detachment as