‎”To Trace Out a Story”: Narrating Movement and the Movement of Narrative
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With its vast array of historico-ontological and metaphorical connotations, movement can easily be identified as a master trope of the Black Diaspora, be it the forced movements and removals of colonialism and transatlantic enslavement, the northbound movements of the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, Post-war emigration from the colonies, or the complex flows of contemporary migration. Theoretically, too, some hugely productive conceptualizations of Black or postcolonial culture have relied on notions of movement; from the ambivalent vacillation behind Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of liminality (2004: 5) to the “vertiginous movement” underlying the cultural practice Henry Louis Gates has identified as signifyin’ (1988: 55). In Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, the connection is made particularly explicit when he centers his exploration on the image of “ships in motion,” calling this particular
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‎chronotope of passage the “central organising symbol” of the diaspora (2002: 4). Apprehending Open City through the trope of movement, it appears as if it is movement in and of itself, rather than its aim, origin, or directedness that seems to determine its overall narrative structure. The protagonist Julius, repeatedly emphasizing the aimlessness of his urban strolls, could thus be interpreted as an embodiment of the most prevalent image of the Afropolitan – sophisticated, unfettered, and monied. Yet it is rather difficult to align this complicated protagonist with the glossy surfaces of that consumerist notion of Afropolitanism, showcasing a shiny and new generation of African immigrants who move swiftly and elegantly from country to country, cultural sphere to cultural sphere, seemingly at ease and carrying no grudges, creating no friction. The leisurely movements of Julius are indeed marked by the kind of agency, nonchalance, and self-possession that are not commonly afforded to the global movements of Black bodies, who have historically been imagined as either economically trafficked, externally driven, or coerced itinerant objects. What drives the following investigation, however, is how ‘unmotivated’ and ‘free’ any form of movement – particularly Black movement – can ever be.
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‎While Open City variedly explores movement, its most obvious instance is the physical movement of the narrator, which allows for the unfolding of most of the action, while also determining the narrative pace, temporality, and structure of the novel. In order to distinguish the temporalities of these levels, I operate with Gérard Genette’s narratological model of histoire, récit, and narration, or story, plot, and narrating, as well as duration, mood, and voice. Looking at the way that spatiotemporal configurations evoke formal conventions or constraints, I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, as developed in The Dialogic Imagination.
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‎Open City’s first-person narrator Julius is a young psychiatrist who roams the city like a restless flâneur, measuring its lengths and depths, an isolated and distant observer winding down after long days at the hospital. Apart from a trip abroad and a short visit to an immigration detention center in Queens, Julius traces out a map of Manhattan, staying true both in spirit and scope to the vastness of this “sea in the middle of the sea,” the “urban island” evoked in French historian Michel de Certeau’s much cited essay “Walking in the City” (2008: 91). The narrative momentum of Open City unfolds in a pedestrian rather than panoptic way, slow and subtle. Yet this is not to say that there is no action, no drive, no emplotment – or elevated viewpoint, for that matter. The particular movement of his purportedly “aimless wandering” (3) dictates a narrative rhythm that is somewhat monotonous, a lulling pace accompanied by his distanced and sophisticated musings on predominantly Western history, art, philosophy, and psychology. This rather cool and detached surface reading is punctured by violent
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‎intrusions that seem to force themselves upon the narrator, as he strolls through, or perhaps flees from, his own past and part in history.
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‎The novel comprises twenty-one chapters and is divided into two parts. The epigraph to the first part reads “Death is a perfection of the eye” (1); the second part is themed “I have searched myself” (147). Part one spans the beginning of Julius’s evening walks until the end of his visit to Brussels, Belgium – a trip of several weeks intended to bring about a reunion with his maternal German grandmother that is marked by extensive rain, more walking, a chance sexual encounter, as well as an engagement with Europe’s colonial heritage and post 9/11 islamophobia. In the chapters leading up to Julius’s lonely Christmas in Brussels, we learn that he is an avid listener of classical music, an eclectic reader, and an occasional birdwatcher, that he has few friends, one of them an 89-year old Japanese-American professor of Early English Literature, and that he has recently broken up with his girlfriend, Nadège. These biographical details are woven into his autodiegetic narrative in a piecemeal fashion; everything is filtered through reflection, little is shown in action, everything is told in retrospect. The telling, however, is intimate, often casual, omitting and passing over information in a mode more akin to that of a diary or internal monologue than that of a memoir or autobiography. The overall effect, however, maintains the impression of the narrator as author. In this sense, the intradiegetic world of Julius’s narrating takes on mimetic qualities. We learn that Julius is not white through the incidental observation that “[i]n the Harlem night, there were no whites” on page 18. We gather that he is African when he thinks back to his childhood memories of watching a movie about Idi Amin’s atrocities, and we find out that he is Nigerian when he recalls an uncomfortable situation in the house of a medical professor, an East African Indian who had been expelled by Idi Amin and who speaks with disdain and disgust of all Africans, “sidestep[ing] the specific” (31).
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‎Apart from numerous passages that indulge in erudite soliloquies on urban and art history and, in their ostensibly calm and collected objectivity, resemble the style of historiography, frequent excursions into Julius’s recent and more distant past accompany his narration. Curiously, they appear to be both central and accidental to character and plot motivation. When the narrating comes to an end, a year later, it seems as though not much has ‘happened,’ at least on the surface. Julius has completed his fellowship at the clinic and taken up an opening in a private practice in Manhattan. We have reached the present tense of the narrative; he is organizing his new office (248). His final memory ventures only so far as the previous night, a visit to the opera to see one of “Mahler’s final works – Das Lied von der Erde” (250). Following the memory of getting locked out on the fire staircase of Carnegie Hall, gazing at the starry skies and evoking strong notions of futurity, he recounts the unexpected experience of a boat trip on the Hudson River later
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‎that night. Moving onto the Upper Bay, the boat comes close to the Statue of Liberty, triggering in Julius a train of thought on the statue’s history as a lighthouse and the fatal danger it presented to migrating birds. This passage appears to be embedded in the frame of remembering the “[I]ast night” to Julius’s present, yet, unlike countless other historical digressions, this one closes the narrating and narrative as a whole:
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‎A large number of birds met their death in this manner. In 1888, for instance, on the morning after one particularly stormy night, more than fourteen hundred dead birds were recovered from the crown, the balcony of the torch, and the pedestal of the statue. […] On October 1 of that year, for example, the colonel’s report indicated that fifty rails had died, as had eleven wrens, two catbirds, and one whip-poor-will. The following day, the record showed two dead wrens; the day after that, eight wrens. […] On the morning of October 13, for example, 175 wrens had been gathered in, all dead of the impact, although the night just past hadn’t been particularly windy or dark. (258-259)
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‎With this cumulative account of the generic names and numbers of birds that perished, disoriented by the Statue of Liberty’s gleaming light, the novel ends not merely in the intradiegetic past tense of recent memory but also in the distanced authorial mode of historiography – and a strangely inverted invocation of a bird’s eye perspective. Again, recalling de Certeau’s distinction between the panoptic overview of a city, in his case initiated by the view from the World Trade Center, and the street-level perspective of the pedestrian or flâneur, this particular instance of another iconic New York City building and the interesting blurring of perspectives functions as a peculiar coda to the novel. Without actually leaving the street or, in this case, sea level of the narration, without being offered an untroubled, totalizing overview of Julius’s account, we are still left with a somewhat elevated perspective and narrative voice that is not one or no one’s and could thus be ours. This perspective also questions the kind of narrative situation invoked in Open City, and the ground the narrating actually attempts to cover. Modeled on the ambling movement of the pedestrian, Julius’s narrating forecloses a final interpretation for himself in the same way that de Certeau asserts that the bodies of urban Wandersmänner “follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (2008: 93).
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‎Yet who is the receiver or interpreter of this text and what is the motivation for it being written? In the very first chapter, Professor Saito evokes the spatial dimension of a text in a striking reversal of de Certeau’s notion of the “long poem of walking” (2008: 101), alluding to it as “the environment created by the poems” (OC 14). Julius also affirms this notion, along with the unintelligibility of a textspace with regard to the body that
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‎produces it: “I told him a little about my walks, and wanted to tell him more but didn’t have quite the right purchase on what it was I was trying to say about the solitary territory my mind had been crisscrossing” (12). This passage is also interesting in that it casts Julius in the role of reader or interpreter in a way that might signify an interpretative model for his own narrative. From listening to the memories of his former mentor, Julius notes, he has “learned the art of listening […] and the ability to trace out a story from what was omitted” (9). Throughout the entire narration, Julius places subtle and not so subtle reminders that his narrative, too, is built on lapses and omissions that might be central to reading it as a whole. Only two paragraphs in, he already admits that he “couldn’t trust his memory” (4), but it is finally through the rape accusation made by his childhood friend’s sister, Moji, that we realize with more clarity that Julius is an unreliable narrator. In an interview with scholar Aaron Bady, Cole sheds light on Julius’s particular unreliability: “I wasn’t going for regular unreliability: “I was thinking more in terms of a formalized testimony, of the kind that might happen on a psychiatrist’s couch. In other words, a plausible framing device for Open City is a series of visits by Julius to his psychiatrist” (2015: para. 11).
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‎If we are to take this kind of framing seriously, we will have to adapt both the aim of Julius’s purportedly unmotivated meandering and the narrative situation to that of a serialized confession, resting on the pivotal axis of Moji’s disclosure. Thus, while most readers might experience the revelation as happening close to the end, it is in truth the end, at least the end of Julius’s intradiegetic narrating. It is the culmination of a recollected story and occurs just before we reach the present tense of the narrating instance, in the final chapter. Furthermore, the temporal intervals between the two bracketing ulterior narrations and the narrating instance render the latter not merely a subsequent, but an interpolated narrative instance. Julius is telling this story as “a series of visits” and, as he cannot trust his memory, he also remembers it in a way that will influence the story. Genette describes this narrating instance as particularly complex, because “the story and the narrating can become entangled in such a way that the latter has an effect on the former” (1980: 217). In addition, Julius performs the narrating in a particularly cunning manner; he is a psychiatrist, after all. Asked by Bady if a therapist would not push him toward exploring the issues he is avoiding, Cole answers:
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‎Not in psychoanalysis. They’d let him unfold. They’d let him circle and digress. All the pushing will come from within himself. And since the patient is also a psychiatrist, he’s naturally going to brood over questions like whether he has a blind spot, or come up with a statement like “I have searched myself.” He would present with that kind of self-deceiving self-awareness. (2015: para. 15)
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‎This temporal structure of Open City, organized around the disavowed rape of Moji, reveals a narrating instance that takes on crucial importance for interpreting the story as a scene of confessing or confiding and, on the part of the narratee, witnessing and constructing. Even though Julius never explicitly acknowledges his guilt, the novel’s narrative structure renders his confession if not the story’s ‘point’ or ‘purpose’ then at least the fundamental moment that motivates its telling. The implicit reader of Open City, as a psychotherapist, would, of course, be able to anticipate or trace this kind of pivotal moment through the narration’s momentum and structure, as well as the following clues.
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‎Moji enters Julius’s story at the beginning of Open City’s second part, whereas the revelation appears at the very end. In-between these brackets we gain a very restrained sense of agitation, a subtle acceleration moving toward a climactic break, not only when Julius observes that he “had the ulcerous sensation of too many things happening at once” (184), but also in the form of a denser succession of action. Following the chapter in which Julius runs into Moji, we learn that his favorite patient V. has died, quickly followed by the death of Professor Saito, spanning two chapters. After a brief, and, as we will later see, illusory moment of leisure, Julius is robbed and injured by a group of teenage boys. The next externally motivated plot point is already Moji’s telephone call, inviting him to a party at her boyfriend’s apartment and leading up to the scene where she will confront him.
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‎Instances that anticipate Moji’s accusation and Julius’s disavowal are especially poignant in the scene of their reencounter in New York, as well as in Julius’s delayed reaction to it in the following chapter. Here, Julius’s attachment to a self-contained, coherent – and innocent – sense of self not only barely conceals, but actually highlights his own sense of lack and fear of disintegration. The passage opens with a reflection on one’s relation toward the past and the deceptive integrity of a coherent life story:
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‎We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. (155)
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‎The ensuing evocation of a singular, isolated present is contrasted with a different kind of temporality, one that questions the former’s disjuncture and contingency by providing the kind of continuity that is neither simply coherent nor convenient, but in its estranged familiarity, is uncanny and repetitive, and invested in the “reiteration” of things “that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts”:
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‎But there was another, irruptive sense of things past. The sudden reencounter, in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa. […] She appeared (apparition was precisely what came into mind) to me in a grocery store in Union Square late in January. I didn’t recognize her […]. At the same moment that I confessed to having blanked out on who she was, she accused me of just that, a serious accusation, but jocularly expressed. (156)
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‎Julius reacts politely, lightheartedly, “mask[ing] the irritation” he “suddenly” feels (156). Yet his actual response will work its way out only a few pages later, in the following chapter. Here, Julius experiences an explicit bout of amnesia. Trying to withdraw money at an ATM machine, he is unable to remember the correct four-digit code and is deeply disturbed by this “sudden mental weakness” (161). He detects an “unsuspected area of fragility” in himself that poses a threat to his sense of integrity and wholeness, rendering him “incomplete” in the same way that walking would be “suddenly lessened” by “a broken leg” (ibid.). After repeated, unsuccessful attempts, he gives up and eventually returns home. There, he tries to find the code amongst his documents and then, he claims, “forg[ets] all about the incident” (166). The following day, a call from his bank causes the embarrassing failure “to become fresh again, and this time more heavily, and this time without witnesses or an official record” (ibid.). When he repeats, only a few lines down, that he “had forgotten the incident,” this creates an uncanny resonance within the paragraph and also, in its conspicuous tautology, echoes both the memory lapse of the previous day and another uncomfortable and equally inevitable return. In repetition, Julius links this incident to others like it, to the disavowed rape, Moji’s “serious accusation” (156). An event that is part of his past, and that is not really forgotten, but merely “hovering […] out of reach” (167).
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‎We find two notions of coherence established in these passages that are both threatened by disintegration. The first is a sense of the past or history that is particularly interesting in its spatial qualification as “empty space” in which people or events “float” (155). This notion of history, echoing Walter
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‎- Benjamin’s “homogenous, empty time” of progress (2003: 395), is penetrated by “another, irruptive sense” of the past, in the form of Moji’s ghostly “apparition” (156). The second illusory coherence is that of the psyche as a governable realm, of an imagined ideal ego, threatened by the irreversible blow of an uncontrollable memory lapse. By comparing this to the effect of a broken leg to a body’s movement (161), Julius is recapitulating the idea of memory, or personal history, as a textspace, traversed by an abled body, moving freely. Both the movements of walking in the city, and the “fixtures in [his] mental landscape” (19) are spatiotemporally mapped
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‎and subject to the differing models of linearity and progress or recursiveness and gridlock.
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‎Even though the disavowed rape of his childhood friend’s sister renders the narrator of Open City as unreliable as any narrative of unfettered progress, this discrepancy is not part of the immediate telling and generic structuring of the novel, where he presents himself as the hero of his story, albeit mediated through reflection and self-awareness. In the passage ushering in the story’s climax, Julius reflects on this:
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‎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. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. (243)
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‎Writing about the journal and the epistolary confidence as the genres that are also characterized by Open City’s interpolated narrative instance of “quasi-interior monologue and the account after the event,” Genette asserts:
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‎Here, the narrator is at one and the same time still the hero and already someone else: the events of the day are already in the past, and the “point of view” may have been modified since then; the feelings of the evening or the next day are fully of the present and here focalization through the narrator is at the same time focalization through the hero. (1980: 218)
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‎This kind of focalization can also be analyzed by looking at the dominant chronotope of Julius’s narration. Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the chronotope, literally “timespace,” as a prerequisite unit of any narrative and also “a formally constitutive category of literature,” we may align at least some aspects of Julius’s narration with a distinct generic convention (1986: 84). Especially certain temporal indeterminacies of Julius’s wanderings and his pedestrian recording of interchangeable, temporally reversible vignettes on everyday life in New York City, do in fact echo the “simplest time” chronotope of “adventure time.” Bakhtin identifies this particular spatiotemporal configuration with certain forms of classical Greek romance. This chronotope exhibits a “sharp hiatus between two moments of biographical time, a hiatus that leaves no trace in the life of the heroes or in their personalities” (ibid.: 90) and is predominantly marked by an “enforced movement through space” (ibid.: 105). Action, thus, is characterized simply by
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‎”a change in spatial location” (ibid.). Here, the lack of initiative or motivation on behalf of the character opens up room for fate, for chance encounters (as with Moji), or failures to meet (as in his trip to Brussels). We can sense in the ostensible aimlessness of Julius’s walks, his pronounced alienation and unmoored, billiard-ball like passivity, an echoing of the “random contingency” that marks the chronotope of “adventure time” as an ancient narrative form (Bakhtin 1986: 101). This is emphasized even more so by Julius’s avowed understanding of life as a series of disjunctures, of linear amnesia, rather than that of recursivity, continuity, or historical and social embeddedness. However, folding in the overarching structure of the narrative as serial confiding, the particular world-making of Julius’s confession can perhaps better be described with the Bakhtinian notion of an “adventure time of everyday life.” Here, time and space do in fact leave traces and bear significance on the development of the character, precisely through the pivotal moment we can identify as confession, if not even retroactive redemption. Elaborating on this particular chronotope, Bakhtin writes:
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‎In this everyday maelstrom of personal life, time is deprived of its unity and wholeness – it is chopped up into separate segments, each encompassing a single episode from everyday life. The separate episodes […] are rounded-off and complete, but at the same time are isolated and self-sufficient. The everyday world is scattered, fragmented, deprived of essential connections. […] These temporal segments of episodes from everyday life are […] arranged, as it were, perpendicular to the pivotal axis of the novel, which is the sequence guilt → punishment redemption purification blessedness (precisely at the moment of punishment-redemption). (1986: 128)
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‎In thinking about the effect of Julius’s story as a whole, it is important to register that different chronotopic modes – the simple chronology of “adventure time” and the vignette-like yet cathartic structure of the “adventure time of everyday life” that revolves around the pivotal axis of Moji’s accusation – are contrasted, conflated, and questioned in a way that essentially foregrounds their function as modes of storytelling. Moreover, we can now understand Julius as the author of a particular kind of narrative, one that ostensibly develops and invests in a narrative movement akin to a “pedestrian unfolding of the stories accumulated in a place” but also follows a particular generic logic and motivation that is betrayed by its narrative levels (de Certeau 2008: 110).
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‎Open City is, as Cole asserts in the aforementioned interview with → Bady, “a narrative troubled from beginning to end by Julius’s origin in Africa” (2015: para. 7). The sudden “apparition” of Moji causes Julius to encounter
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‎”some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa” (156). Hence, Africa, as the repository of childhood memories, dreams, and distant traumas, plays hardly any role outside of Julius’s past and is relegated to his understanding of immaturity, origin, and youth. 45 At the same time, his linear, progressive movement away from Africa is troubled by Moji’s presence, who confronts his capacity to forget, to simply move on and maintain his “secure version of the past,” with the encumbering spell that his acts have cast on her own evolvement (156). While Julius had acted like he
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‎knew nothing about it, had even forgotten her, to the point of not recognizing her when [they] met again […], it hadn’t been like that for her […] the luxury of denial had not been possible for her. Indeed, I had been ever-present in her life, like a stain or a scar, and she had thought of me, either fleetingly or in extended agonies, for almost every day of her adult life. (244)
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‎In the same way that Julius’s luxury of forgetting is related to Moji’s curse of remembering, various diasporic encounters throughout the novel highlight how Julius’s purportedly autonomous motions correspond to other, more conflicted and obstructed movements. The fact that his narrative, too, is “troubled from beginning to end by Julius’s origin in Africa” belies the motivelessness of his ambulation and renders these encounters particularly significant. It is possible, as many critics have, to read Julius’s flânerie as a failed performance of cosmopolitanism, highlighting instead how his hyper-individualism is fundamentally, and fatefully, connected to others. 46 Having established the crucial role that Moji’s disclosure plays in relation to narrative progress, it is possible to link this postlapsarian allegory to a more general, metahistorical notion of trauma, which situates particularly African American and postcolonial discourses within a wider debate about literary criticism.
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