Open City

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-5

Part 1, Chapters 6-11

Part 2, Chapters 12-16

Part 2, Chapters 17-21

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Sociohistorical Context: 9/11

The events of September 11, 2001, have come to define the beginning of the 2000s, in both the United States and the world at large. While New York was not the only target of the attacks, the visibility of the World Trade Center and the enormous number of lives lost there have made the city the focal point of the world’s collective memory of that day. The World Trade Center had been considered a synecdoche for the city as a whole, often appearing in advertisements for media set in New York City. Pre-9/11 and post-9/11 media are often identifiable by the presence or absence of the twin towers, with some works using their presence or absence to indicate time period. This split between before and after 9/11 also gestures to the cultural implications of the attacks on the American psyche.

From a post-9/11 vantage point, the last years of the 20th century are often seen as a time of naive optimism. The Cold War had ended, Francis Fukuyama had declared “the end of history,” and it was widely assumed that capitalism and liberal democracy would rule unchallenged for the foreseeable future. The attacks on 9/11 punctured that innocence, inaugurating a War on Terror that shaped global history for over two decades. As a corollary to the nebulous war abroad, there was a dramatic increase in racism against Arab and Muslim people within both the United States and Europe. Changes to airport security and increased restrictions around international borders dramatically wrote racist practices into law, with the judicial system supporting these changes as necessary in the face of terror. Teju Cole utilizes several of these elements, with the narrator remarking on the presence or absence of the World Trade Center at various times in his memories and considering antisemitic and anti-Muslim views proposed by people around him.

Cultural Context: Allusions

In Open City, the narrator and other characters allude to many pieces of music, visual art, and literature, both directly and subtly. These allusions give insight into Julius’s refined and cosmopolitan tastes. At the same time, they place Open City in conversation with a long tradition of literary works that treat the city—whether Paris, New York, or Lagos—as the engine of modernity and the repository of cultural memory. When thinking about his father’s funeral, Julius recalls what he knows about the life and death of Gustav Mahler, a famous composer with Jewish heritage whose works were banned by the Nazis. Mahler is also the composer of the symphony that Julius attends in the last chapter of the novel and is remembered when the narrator considers how much he otherwise forgets.

Visual arts are also important to Julius, who, for example, sometimes describes other characters by alluding to paintings by Renaissance masters like Johannes Vermeer. When Julius tries to remember his father’s funeral, he thinks instead of El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Courbet’s Burial at Ornans. The significance of this very particular form of memory loss is two-fold: There is the suggestion that art is more lasting and, in some sense, more real than one’s direct experience, even and perhaps especially one’s most emotionally intense experience. At the same time, there is the recognition that personal experience is always mediated through the cultural history that gives it meaning.

There are many references to fiction and nonfiction literature. For instance, Julius notices someone on the subway reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred (45) and Moji reading Anna Karenina (194) in Central Park. Julius reads Freud’s work as fiction or, in other words, “only for literary truths” (208). Near the end of the novel, Julius thinks about Paracelsus and his “theory of Signs in the debased forms of phrenology, eugenics, and racism” (237). The wide variety of allusions in the book reflects something the character Farouq says. Books made him “aware of the variety of the world” (125).