‎ “To Experience the Pain Afresh”

Metahistory and the Circling Movement of Melancholia
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‎Compared to the other novels I discuss in this book, Open City addresses the notion of race much less overtly. To a large extent, this is due to Julius’s self-fashioning as a “rooted cosmopolitan” apropos Anthony Kwame Appiah, as we see him repeatedly wrestle with and bristle at various racial and ethnic conscriptions. 47 Yet apart from these mostly unwanted interpellations, the aspect of race does not seem to play a hugely significant role. However, I conceive of Afropolitanism less as a cosmopolitan identity with African roots and more as a temporal mode of inquiry or ‘tool’ to think with.
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‎I suggest that the most interesting way Open City negotiates the subject of race and the politics of Blackness is not by explicitly referencing these topoi but through its juxtaposing of metahistoricist modes, or readings of history.
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‎This orientation toward questions of history and historicism rather than (merely) experience and ontology allows a reading of Open City that reconciles what may be indeed post-racial in its aesthetic with a rebuttal of the charge that it may not be concerned with race at all. Instead, the novel’s focus on issues like history, historicism, trauma, melancholy and recognition provides a very sophisticated metaliterary commentary on the post-racial moment and the temporal crux of such notions as post-critique and postmelancholy.
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‎Even if one were to describe the novel’s overall aesthetic as post-racial, the term would not necessarily foreclose its engagement of race. As Ramón Saldívar points out, the undoing of and moving away from seemingly eternal, essentialist racial identities is not a process of forgetting but rather marked by a thorough engagement with history or, in his particular example, literary history. He notes that the term “postrace” should therefore always be used “under erasure and with full ironic force” (2) – an irony, which can only become fully effective through the expansive historical knowledge of its source material. In a similar vein, Kenneth Warren’s polarizing What Was African American Literature? symbolizes anything but a clean cut with the past but, in its historicizing effort, an assessment of the current moment as one that is characterized by a move from the prospective to the retrospective (2011: 42). Before the legal and juridical achievements of the Voting Rights Act of 1964, Warren argues, African American literature typically projected into the future. He notes that, while the “past was indeed important,” it was primarily explored “as a way of refuting charges of black inferiority and only secondarily as a source and guide for ongoing creative activity” (42-43). Of course, this kind of neat categorizing is particularly antithetical to Afro-pessimist scholars, who are less interested in the shelving away of periods, but rather invested in the blurring of historical demarcations and the assertion of the past’s inevitable, constant return. Contrary to Warren, many scholars question the seismic effects of the Civil Rights movement. As Abdur-Rahman writes: “In the twenty-first century, the logics and implications of race have supposedly shifted, yet ongoing state violence and systemic exclusion expose racism as a lethal apparatus of psychosocial and material asymmetry superseding the legal remedy of recognition politics” (2017: 699). What Warren rightly exposes is the shift and turn toward the past, yet he errs in his interpretation of this shift’s affective components. Rather than being a “source and guide for ongoing creativity,” the past often figures much more problematically in contemporary African American writing. As
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‎Abdur-Rahman’s analysis of recent Black writing conveys, such novels rather
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‎express a profound “skepticism about accretive racial progress” (2017: 699), instead revisiting “histories that haunt and hurt” (695).
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‎By having these violent histories come back and haunt the present, this kind of retrospective perspective reveals itself less as a self-congratulatory taking stock of historical milestones than as a deliberate abandonment of what one might call the cruel optimism of emancipation. Thus viewed, the political depression of Black America arises in large parts from what Lauren Berlant has called a “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility” (2006: 21). Accordingly, looking back and dwelling on a history of racist compromise, backlash, and continuity sustains rather than heals the “open wound” of melancholia, and prompts a “refusal of nourishment” in the form of past achievements (Freud 1989: 587-589). Indeed, the term “melancholic historicism,” coined by Stephen Best in “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” seems apt in describing what Best similarly identifies as an “affective conception of history” (2012: 464). Framed as an auto-critique of what he sees as concomitant with his own “ethical imperatives and political commitments,” Best queries the paradigmatic dominance of this affect as well as its metahistoricist usefulness (ibid.). With regards to confronting the predicaments of the present as well as assessing the past, he asks: “Why must we predicate having an ethical relation to the past on the idea that there is continuity between that past and our present? What kind of history would permit one not only “to stay” with the dead but to rouse them from their sleep?” (ibid. 464-465). Answering with Leo Bersani’s tackling of criticism’s theological latency, exposing its “will-to-redemption” (2015: 465), Best concludes that this “kind of history,” focusing on the ‘healing powers’ of repetition, springs from the “inability to reckon with the true alterity of the past.” He argues that, in order to treat historical experience aptly, one must forego or short-circuit the redemptive function (ibid.).
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‎On an even broader level, these debates can also be placed on a continuum responding to the humanities’ turn from historicist, suspicious readings to reparative or surface analyses that question both mood and method of a form of critique that has, as Bruno Latour opts, supposedly “run out of steam” (2004). Questions of historiography become paramount when scholars like Rita Felski circumscribe this turn, emphasizing that “[t]he trick is to think temporal interdependency without telos, movement without supersession: pastness is part of who we are, not an archaic residue, a regressive force, a source of nostalgia, or a return of the repressed” (2011: 578). While the turn from suspicious to surface reading appeared tangible enough for the editors of Representations to dedicate an entire issue to “the way we read now,” the definition of the critic’s proper or improper historicism is fairly unclear. Similar to Best’s critique of melancholic historicism, he and Sharon Marcus argue against an ideologically inflected historicism à la Jameson and advocate for “a clearer view of the past” (2009:
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‎19). Yet at the very point where “the way we read now” perhaps promotes too clean a break with Jameson’s “moral imperative” to “always historicize,” Jennifer Fleissner detects an implicit hyperbolization of the concept, a claim to actually historicize more “rigorously” (2013: 700-701). That the purging of historicism seems rather futile, given the elusive nature of its aim, ties in with her observation that “[e]very time we believe we have made [history] our focus […] it slips once again from our grasp.” Equally persistent seems to be the historian’s tendency to oscillate between a “fetishization of the archive” and a somewhat supercilious presentism (700). These debates throw into sharp relief how no positionality toward history can be conceptualized in a way that is not susceptible to methodological changes and critique. One way to circumvent this difficulty may be to change the conversation in the manner pointed out by Felski and also Fleissner, who wonders why, “if literary texts are to be neatly shelved as exempla of historical formations, we still place value on the moment of repeated reading” (2013: 703).
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‎Open City actually always contrasts at least two ways of reading. One is indeed the archeological, deeply historicizing and unearthing of, for example, urban history, the other is accumulative, descriptive, and often engaged in the aesthetic experience of surfaces. These modes, however, are often so self-consciously enmeshed and conflated that none of them gains the epistemological upper hand, let alone moral authority. Interestingly, this process extends to the very notion of referentiality and reading itself. Open City is a markedly metafictional text, it is “a reader’s writing” (Bady 2015). It recurrently addresses reading and aesthetic consumption and is brimming with high literary and cultural references – to the point of a hyper-referentiality that has led Giles Foden to call Julius an “intellectual show-off” (2011: para. 9). Perhaps in respect to frequency, this device may function as an end-in-itself, but in terms of content, the selection of quoted artworks is far from arbitrary. In many ways, the various references present themselves as keys to unlock or as mirrors to reflect and contrast Julius’s state of mind. They are offered up as props, in every sense of the word, to support certain, perhaps even pathologizing, analyses, as well as functioning as theoretical prostheses that fetishistically direct to and conceal Julius’s psychological wounds. On the level of character, if not also of form, the novel ostentatiously indicates its autopoiesis and intertextual moorings via this referential density. Julius, who is estranged from his mother and appears to be a lover of photography, reads Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida on various occasions. Frequent mention of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello evokes the concept of sympathetic imagination and echoes the centrality of rape in Coetzee’s Disgrace. A mention of Bruegel’s Landscape with Falling Icarus recalls W.H. Auden’s and William Carlos Williams’s poetic treatment of the same, lamenting humanity’s indifference to suffering. Without suggesting that the
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‎intertextual and metafictional references are thus exhausted and are not in
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‎most parts and many ways much subtler and covert, it is one incident of name dropping that most distinctly indicates a blueprint for Open City’s play with temporalities, while shedding light on Julius’s own concept of history. On the day Julius and the Brussels shopkeeper Farouq engage in conversation for the first time, Farouq is reading “a secondary text on Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History” (103).48
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‎The distinctly Benjaminian frame adopted in Open City is remarkable in its scope. The treatment of mobility in a metropolitan environment immediately connects Julius’s ambling movements to Benjamin’s understanding of Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur. In Julius’s melancholic gaze, his pronounced alienation even, or especially, among the urban crowd and his weaving of urban space into the “long poem of walking” (de Certeau 2008: 101), we hear a distinct echo of Benjamin praising Baudelaire’s allegorical genius in The Arcades Project. Instead of narrating a sense of national or local belonging, the “gaze which the allegorical genius turns on the city betrays, instead, a profound alienation. It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life conceals behind a beneficent mirage the anxiety of the future inhabitants of our metropolises” (Benjamin 1999: 20). In Open City, Julius’s observation of urban masses mirrors the disenchanting “shock experience”49 Benjamin identifies in Baudelaire’s irritation at being jostled by the crowd, turning the dazzling luster of a “crowd with soul and movement” (Benjamin 2003: 343) into a somber, threatening occurrence:
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‎The sight of large masses of people hurrying down into underground chambers was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counter-instinctive death drive, into movable catacombs. Aboveground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified. (OC 7)
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‎Interspersed with Julius’s documentation of contemporary urban life are also numerous passages like this that link his concept of history to the bleak accumulation of tragedy evoked by Benjamin’s Angel of History. In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin develops this figure apropos a painting by Paul Klee, showing an “angel who seems to move away from something he stares at,” hurled backwards by the irresistible pull of a storm blowing in paradise. Before his eyes, the seemingly teleological chain of events that one might call moments in history transforms into “one single catastrophe.” Benjamin’s Angel desires to stay with and “awaken the dead,” to “make whole what has been smashed” ( Benjamin 2003: 392). With this image, Benjamin develops a historical materialist view of history that, instead of
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‎relating the past only to itself by rigorously containing each moment within its epoch, instead thinks in the “tradition of the oppressed” and understands how the current state of emergency “is not the exception but the rule” (ibid.). Looking out the window on the drive from Brussels airport, Julius recalls the on-flight conversation with Dr. Maillotte of the previous night. In the mode of Benjamin’s Angel, Julius concentrates on the historical trajectory of one moment in 1944, the single tragedy of human history:
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‎I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders’ retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: the Nigerians, the Germans. Three were by now gone, for sure. But what of the fourth, my oma? I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half century ahead and, better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment. (96)
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‎While Open City’s adoption of a Benjaminian reading of history also coincides with the novel’s decidedly modernist motifs, 50 this particular text has been related to diasporic theories of history and trauma in profound and lasting ways.
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‎In his discussion of Benjamin’s Angel of History, Stephen Best credits this notion of redemption apropos the “theater of the historical situation” (2012: 464) for constituting the prevailing mode of melancholic historicism in African American and Black Atlantic studies. Throughout Open City, we encounter this specific mode on several occasions, often related through the pathologizing eyes of Julius’s profession. Initially, it is the mention of Julius’s patient V., a historian and member of the Delaware tribe, that most explicitly transports Faulkner’s notion that “the past is never dead – it’s not even past.”51 V. has written a historical biography of a particularly brutal colonizer of Manhattan Island, chronicling gruesome torture and genocide in the “calm and pious language that presented mass murder as little more than the regrettable side effect of colonizing the land” (26). Julius makes clear that V.’s depressive condition is in part a product of the psychological toll these studies take on her, a work she describes, according to Julius, as “looking out across a river on a day of heavy rain, so that she couldn’t be sure whether the activity on the opposite bank had anything to do with her, or whether, in fact, there was any activity there at all” (26-27). In a similar
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‎way that Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” from 1940 warns that “even the dead will not be safe” (2003: 391), V. verbalizes her fear of historical erasure: “I can’t pretend it isn’t about my life, she said to me once, it is my life. It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past. […] And it’s not in the past, it is still with us today; at least, it’s still with me” (27). Later in the narrative, Julius’s mention of V.’s death suggests that she has committed suicide (165).
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‎While V. clearly suffers from her particular form of melancholy, it is important to note that the presentation of her case allows for an interpretation that locates the source of her anguish not in the inability to let go of the past, but in the academically prescribed constraint to treat the past as past. This constraint entails writing about it in the form of a “strict historical record” (OC 27) rather than voicing the simultaneity of past and present and perhaps even working through this trauma, in a subjective, repetitive mode recalling the “affective conception of history” that → Best criticizes (2012: 464). Because Julius empathizes with V. more than with other patients, his own position toward her case remains unclear. Equally ambiguous is his attitude toward his patient M., who, like V., is one of the rare patients whose problems “were not relegated to the back of [his] mind when [he stepped out onto the street” (44). Both V.’s and M.’s cases inflect and tinge Julius’s experience of walking in the city and thus resonate in the way he conceptualizes history and memory. His thoughts on M’s case punctuate the entire course of his longest urban excursion in chapter 4, where, instead of heading home at nightfall, he takes a train to lower Manhattan and spontaneously gets off at Wall Street. From the moment he passes the “ancient wall” hemming in the graveyard of Trinity Church, it appears as though he somehow enters an older, historical version of New York, echoing the way Walter Benjamin excavates the ancient Paris that literally underlies the surface of the modern metropolis in his Arcades Project.
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‎Here, Benjamin conjures an underworld that surfaces at night, ushering the nocturnal pedestrian through dream-like narrow passages into a darker, older realm of urban consciousness. After reflecting on the US-American forefathers buried in the graveyard, Julius enters an alley on his way toward the waterfront:
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‎When I crossed the street and entered the small alley opposite, it was as though the entire world had fallen away. I was strangely comforted to find myself alone in this way in the heart of the city. The alley, no one’s preferred route to any destination, was all brick walls and shut-up doors, across which shadows fell as crisply as in an engraving. (52)
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‎As he passes the ruins of the World Trade Center, Julius’s preceding thoughts on New York’s early beginnings as a trading post intersect with his
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‎encounter of contemporary memorials, again recapitulating the sense of pastness in the present. Interspersed with this literal and metaphorical meandering between past and present are the thoughts on his patient M., “thirty-two, recently divorced, and delusional,” and, as Julius asserts, “completely in the grip of the delirium” (48). M. repeatedly recounts to Julius the painful story of his divorce, each time crying and experiencing “the pain afresh” (56). Julius naturally pathologizes his patient in a way that would seem innocuous, were it not for the fact that he himself has recently split up with his girlfriend and seems unable to confront his grief directly. Thus, while thinking about M.’s compulsion to repeat, Julius experiences an “unexpected pang” of his own: “a sudden urgency and sorrow, but the image of the one I was thinking of flitted past quickly” (56). Quickly too, does he assert himself: “It had been only a few weeks, but time had begun to dull even that wound” (56). Yet this professed equilibrium is belied by his unexplained behavior in the chapter’s opening passage, where he feels compelled to lie underneath a rock in Central Park, “as though led by an invisible hand” (42).
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‎Only the unpremeditated mention of his breath returning to normal, quieting the “bellowing” in his ribs, suggests, by omission, the turmoil behind his calm and collected persona. His obsessing with M.’s case, then, allows us to doubt the emotionally flat tone Julius deploys in respect to his recent break-up as well as his professionally distanced attitude toward the dangerous, delirious grip of a traumatic past.
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‎Generally, Julius puts some emphasis on the line that separates his avowed melancholic disposition, his “heavy mood” (43), from the pathological conditions of his patients. In many ways, this endeavor is so overdetermined that we can sense the degree of self-deception that is taking place. This does not mean, however, that Julius’s attitude does not generally express a level of ambiguity that forecloses unequivocal diagnoses. In a section that opens with Julius’s thoughts on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” he affirms the grip of melancholia cloaking New York City, its inability to internalize the dead and complete the process of mourning, by drawing too neat a line “around the catastrophic events of 2001” (209). This sectioning off, he claims, has rather resulted in the incorporation of loss, creating an atmosphere of anxiety. He then goes on to discuss the memory of another patient of his, setting against “this bigger picture, the many smaller ones.” Mr. F., an eighty-five-year-old veteran of the Second World War, had been diagnosed with depression late in life, after showing symptoms of appetite loss, low moods, and experiencing, as Julius recounts, “a racing of his thoughts that he described, with great difficulty – he was a reticent man – as an effort to keep from drowning.” Mr. F. soon moved on to psychotherapy, and on one of the few occasions Julius had met with him, he had interrupted his medical assessment and spoken with “sudden emotion” in his voice: “Doctor, I just want to tell you how proud I am to come here, and
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‎see a young black man like yourself in that white coat, because things haven’t ever been easy for us, and no one has ever given us nothing without a struggle” (210). This memory is presented without Julius’s reaction to it, concluding the chapter. As far as we know, Julius may have never corrected Mr. F.’s reading of him as African American. It remains equally unclear whether Mr. F. actually misinterprets Julius’s German-Nigerian ancestry or if he extends this redemptive moment to Julius nonetheless. The way that his comment is framed, however, how Julius describes him as someone bearing the “faraway look of those who had somehow gotten locked inside their sadness,” suggests that he considers Mr. F.’s vision to be clouded, in the grip of repetition.
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‎In these passages, Julius expresses a critique of melancholic historicism akin to Stephen Best’s, for whom the emphasis on repetition results in a failure to treat the past adequately “as it falls away, as that which falls away -a separateness resistant to being either held or read in melancholic terms” (2012: 466). While Jennifer Fleissner points out that simply adhering to such a model may reinstate “the neatly periodized version of history […] which these depictions of repetition legitimately critique” (2013: 706), she identifies in Best’s account an important exposure of how that mode of criticism’s assumptions have been relying on the transferability of past and present to such a degree that they may now even resemble the historicist ideology critique they set out to oppose. Even more importantly, she notes how this “twinning of past and present” (ibid.) also generates a certain affective mood through its flattening of history that may be claustrophobic but, in its repetitive sameness, perhaps equally reassuring. Fleissner quotes Eve Sedgwick’s illustration of that particular Gothic sameness across history: “it happened to my father’s father, it happened to my father, it is happening to me” (2013: 706). Extrapolating and reading the scene of Mr. F. as him reducing Julius to his version of repetitive history, Mr. F.’s historical conceptualization would seem to be both limiting and self-assuring. At least in Julius’s interpretation, his presence and present denote for Mr. F. a Benjaminian constellation or struggle that is actually different and that he fails to recognize in its difference. On the other hand, a Benjaminian concept of history that alternates between the messianic moment of redemption and the repetition of sameness would only recognize redemption as repetition with a change. In this reading, Mr. F. has seen Julius quite clearly.
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‎Nevertheless, the framing of this incident and Julius’s emphasis on melancholy as an incomplete process of mourning suggests the latter, as Julius’s reaction excludes the possibility for redemption, aligning Mr. F’s concept of history with Best’s understanding of melancholic historicism. Here, Benjamin’s replaying of a historical moment is stripped of its messianic intention, as what is repeated is not necessarily the memory of a revolutionary moment, flashing up “in a moment of danger,” but rather that
‎of a trauma, accompanied by the kind of circling and lingering movement ascribed to Freud’s pathologically melancholic person (Benjamin 2003: 391). In Open City, Julius gives us no clear perspective but again embodies ambiguity, moving swiftly on a continuum comprising the position of Benjamin’s positivist and materialist historian, the simultaneity of present and past and their radical difference.
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‎While Julius also attempts to adopt a melancholic mode, voicing the bleak critique of modernity that “atrocity is nothing new […]. The difference is that in our time it is uniquely well-organized” (OC 58), his often distinctly objective, historiographical mustering of traumatic data ostensibly bars a meaningful reckoning with it in the present. Here, his concept of history resembles that of a positivist accumulation of historical events. Yet at the same time, Julius longs to savor the mood and atmosphere of a given period. More often than not, Benjamin’s dialectical image is reversed when Julius’s nostalgic gaze, emulating the sensitivities of the modernist flâneur, has to adapt the historical aura of an urban space to the lively complexity of the current moment. Upon entering a Portuguese restaurant in Brussels, Julius renders its contemporary international immigrant scene into a 19th-century tableau vivant, “an exact Cézannesque tableau […] accurate even down to the detail of one man’s thick mustache” (116). At other times, Julius is so transfixed by his meditations on history that he notes his surprise at how “the past had suddenly transformed into the present” (233). Generally, even though he frequently uses a Benjaminian perspective that is rooted in remembrance or mourning, he seemingly distances himself from it as a method to work through trauma in the present.
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‎In a passage in which Julius switches from the usual soliloquy of his historical excursions to a conversation with friends, he holds forth at length on the absence of loss and atrocities in the present, compared to preceding histories. He elaborates on his theory with the historical example of the city of Leiden, which, during the time of the plague, “lost thirty-five percent of its population in a five-year period in the 1630s” (200). Julius asserts the relative luxury of living in the contemporary moment: Leiden, German for suffering, is of the past. That this contention only holds true for Julius’s particularly periodizing view on history becomes clear when his African American friend adds: “What you said about Leiden, well, in a way, my family was Leiden” (202). He goes on to recount the details of, as Julius describes it, “the appalling family background my friend had had to overcome to go to university and to graduate school, and to become an assistant professor in the Ivy League,” ending the brief synopsis of a tragedy marked by harsh violence and loss with “a peaceful expression on his face” (203). Julius notes that he has heard this story before. This situation is different from the scene with Mr. F, as he cannot so easily diagnose his friend with the unhealthy repetition of traumatic events. In the absence of his scientific toolbox, he is
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‎asked to make sense of the social realities expressed by his friend, rather than attest a pathological behavior.
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‎In grappling with the ubiquity and effect of racism, diagnosing his friend with melancholia would attribute the effect of trauma to his melancholic attachment to loss instead of the circumstances engendering it. Julius is uncomfortable and appears to find this situation embarrassing, and this is also shown by his reaction to Moji’s emphatic yet clear-sighted remark on how, for Black people who have lived in the United States for generations, the racist structures must be “crazy-making” (203). When his friend’s white girlfriend tries to smooth over the situation by joking: “Oh, man, […] don’t give him excuses!” Julius feels relief and an instant liking toward her. Moji, however, he finds abrasive, and he is “struck” by her “brittleness” (ibid.). The fact that Moji is willing to be moved by a past that is not hers, while Julius endeavors to treat the past only in relation to itself speaks to their complicated mutual history but is also indicative of Julius’s conflicted attitude toward a traumatic diasporic past and present. While being attentive to and knowledgeable of history, he finds it difficult to concretely connect present grievances with their violent pasts. That this kind of preemptive emotional transference might indeed have its limits is shown by a particular noteworthy scene from the latter part of the book.
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‎Shortly after being robbed and injured, Julius stumbles upon the memorial for the African Burial Ground, marked by a solitary monument in the midst of Manhattan. Due to renovation, Julius is unable to approach it directly, standing instead “a few yards” away (220). It is no coincidence that Julius finds himself cordoned off from the burial site, having, as he states, “no purchase on who these people were” (ibid.). The distance, marked here by a physical barrier, signals Julius’s desire to treat the past as past, maintaining his aloofness and rooting his position in the notion that the past remains citable, yet unobtainable. However, instead of interpreting his inability to engage with the continuing presence of the past as an obstacle to understanding the present, one could also interpret this moment differently.
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‎Not having access to the past here might signal a vital necessity because its aims, ambitions, and futures need to be reformulated through the present moment. In Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott calls for this kind of adaption in respect to narrative modes, proposing a turn from the teleological agenda of romanticist anti-colonialism, which seamlessly merges a fixed past with an equally fixed future, toward a certain “tragic sensibility” that is more “apt and timely” to register the complexities of the current moment in decolonial and antiracist struggles (2004: 210). For Scott, a reiterated historical argument may not “have the same usefulness, the same salience, the same critical purchase, when the historical conjuncture that originally gave that argument point and purchase has passed” (2004: 50).
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‎At the monument, Julius finds himself “steeped in […] the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York” (OC 221). Slavery, here, is a legible trace or reflection of things past. Julius recounts the physical “traces of suffering” found on excavated bodies, “blunt trauma, grievous bodily harm,” but he finds it “difficult […] from the point of view of the twenty-first century, to fully believe that these people […] were truly people” (220). As he tries to overcome this distance, to bridge time, by stepping across the cordon, bending down and lifting up a stone, pain shoots through his injured left hand, rooting him firmly, instantly, in the present. This could be read as another reversal of Benjamin’s dialectical image, where instead of the past flashing up in the present, the complexities of a charged present assert themselves and arrest the “flow” of transference into the past. Instead of reading this passage as another instance of Julius’s chronic aloofness, one could thus interpret this detached curiosity as a clear demarcation and starting point from which to transfer an ‘archeological’ endeavor of excavating the past to one revolving around “the question of desire in relation to the dead […] rather than the dead (or buried) themselves” (Ranjana Khanna qtd. in Fleissner 2013: 716).
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‎These complex historicist configurations of Open City may be best understood as meta-historicist commentary that probes rather than definitively evaluates specific relations with and perspectives on the past. As such, the novel contextualizes a moment of calibration, in which the extent to which historical atrocities may bear on the present is measured apropos its own brand of melancholic retrospective – a nostalgia for the safety of an alleged ideological common ground, perhaps, or the redemptive promises of an archeological working through trauma. As Goyal notes, Open City “may easily be read as writing in the wake of the desire to connect or to believe, a work in synchrony with our post-critical times” (2017b: 66).
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‎As such, the novel mirrors important debates in the humanities concerning the value or effect of a specific hermeneutics of history, while remaining skeptical and impartial toward either. Not entirely embracing a Benjaminian or messianic view of history by questioning its melancholic revolving around the originary site of loss and proclivity to conflating past and present, the novel equally reveals the danger of a positivist, linear or additive, mere mustering of history that severs the present’s ties to painful pasts – while remaining wary of the ideological implications of either mode. While the call for replacing suspicious with surface readings may challenge the moral safe ground and performative mastery of ideology critique, it doesn’t exempt that way of reading from similar mistakes. “[I]n the cool distance it assumes from the past,” as Fleissner notes, such a model “no less attempts to deny its implicatedness in the issues it studies than do the more morally charged distancing gestures of ideology critique” (2013: 708).
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