Open City

“And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster.”

Here, Julius establishes that the novel exists in a post-9/11 world, later revealing the year to be 2007. The literary device of the metonym means something standing in for something else. In this case, the absence of the twin towers metonymically represents the terrorist attack.

“Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met.”

This is one example of how Black people in New York City, like his cab driver and post office worker, try to connect with Julius, who sees his identity has fundamentally different from theirs in that he grew up in Nigeria and his family was not directly affected by the slave trade.

“We owe ourselves our lives.”

This quote comes after a brief moment when Julius considers self-harm in the Hudson. As a mental health professional, and someone who has experienced trauma, he holds this argument against suicide.

“The stranger had remained strange, and had become a foil for new discontents.”

In this passage, Julius connects his Moroccan friend Farouq with other immigrants who are subject to anti-Muslim sentiments. Over time, different peoples are portrayed negatively as unknowable (“strange”) and stand in contrast with people who are politically dissatisfied. This develops the theme of Race, Ethnicity, and Difference.

“A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something.”

Here, Julius thinks about Farouq as part of a larger political group who are focused on action. Julius argues that this kind of activism is rooted in “rage and rhetoric” (107). People who exhibit their rage end up with political followers, Julius believes.

“No one likes foreign domination.”

This is a quote from Farouq as he talks to Julius. The two men are in Farouq’s internet and phone shop, discussing international politics. Farouq makes a point that Palestine would not accept help from Egypt or a western power—they want to rule themselves.

“The same portrayal [...] but that’s how power is, the one who has the power controls the portrayal.”

This is something Julius says to Farouq and his boss Khalil, as they have a political conversation at a restaurant. They are comparing how Black men in the US are portrayed with how Muslims are portrayed. Both are subject to stereotypes perpetuated by those in power, which develops the theme of Race, Ethnicity, and Difference.

“Everything interesting was in the books; it was books that made me aware of the variety of the world.”

Here, Farouq explains that he preferred self-directed reading to attending school. Books help him learn about diverse cultures and ideas, and this develops the theme of Race, Ethnicity, and Difference. Julius responds to this by inviting Farouq to visit the US, but Farouq is uninterested in seeing the US after 9/11.

“How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud.”

This passage comes at the end of Part 1, shortly before Julius leaves Brussels and returns to New York. He thinks about how external factors change one’s mood, and how the mind categorizes experiences, and thoughts, as happy or sad. This is part of the theme of Physical and Mental Wandering.

“They were Hasidic Jews. I had no reasonable access to what being there, in that gallery, might mean for them; the undiluted hatred I felt for the subjects of the photo was, in the couple, transmuted into what? What was stronger than hate?”

Here, Julius looks at a photo that features the Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels at an exhibit of work by the Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi. He ends up leaving the International Center of Photography shortly after this, feeling like he was intruding on the couple’s emotions, which he tries to describe in this passage.

“I couldn’t bear to look at them, or at what they were looking at, any longer.”

This passage comes shortly after the previous quote. It is part of the motif of vision, which develops the theme of Race, Ethnicity, and Difference. Unlike the Rwandans in a club in Brussels, Julius does not want to see the couple in the art museum.

“She assured me that I would hear from her again, and marveled once more, in what had become a quite irritating way, that we had run into each other.”

This is when Julius runs into Moji, who he doesn’t remember, in a NYC grocery store. Her marveling is not joyful as Julius assumes here. Later, she confesses that Julius sexually assaulted her in Nigeria. This quote foreshadows the crisis that is to come.

“His recent encounter with bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, homophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life. The bedbugs trumped them all. The feeling was subconscious, contemptible.”

This passage occurs during Julius’s final visit to his former professor. Saito—who has lived through traumatic experiences including imprisonment in an incarceration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II and the death of his partner—now has to suffer the indignity of bedbugs. This passage develops the theme of Race, Ethnicity, and Difference.

“I experienced the sudden disorientation and bliss of one who, in a stately old house and at a great distance from its mirrored wall, could clearly see the world doubled in on itself.”

This quote appears after Julius hears a song in New York that reminds him of something in the Songs of Praise that he sang in his Nigerian Military School. Looking into a mirror is part of the motif and symbolism of vision. Later, “blind spots” symbolize the darkness of psychiatric practice (illustrating how most of the mind is unknown), but here the distortion is due to mirroring and distance.

“Nature is infinitely patient, one thing lives after another has given way; the magnolia’s blooms die just as the cherry’s come to life.”

This is something that Julius thinks while at a picnic in Central Park with his unnamed friend, Lise-Anne, and Moji. It speaks to the theme of New York City as Palimpsest, where nature appears in a park that functioned differently in the past.

“We were a part of a crowd of city dwellers in a carefully orchestrated fantasy of country life.”

This passage connects people with the nature of Central Park described in the previous quote. The pastoral, an ideal based on country life, is part of urban planning in NYC. However, Julius notes that the country life they experience is not real—the literary ideal is unachievable.

“But almost all that day’s detail was soon lost to me, and what remained most strongly was the sensation of being all alone in the water, that feeling of genuine isolation, as though I had been cast without preparation into some immense, and not unpleasant, blue chamber, far from humanity.”

This is Julius’s memory of saving a boy in a Nigerian pool. As with other examples of memory, this quote develops the theme of Physical and Mental Wandering. Furthermore, it speaks to how faulty Julius’s memory is, which becomes important when he does not recall Moji or remember what he did to her.

“Do any of you know El Espiritu de la Colmena?”

Lise-Anne alludes to a Spanish film from the 1970s, directed by Victor Erice. In English, the title is The Spirit of the Beehive. The allusion comes as Julius, his unnamed friend, Lise-Anne, and Moji have been discussing the bees in the park and the mystery of colony collapse disorder. That Lise-Anne immediately thinks of a film in this context—a fairly obscure film in another language and from another era—speaks to the densely allusive nature of this book: For Julius and his friends, life is always mediated through art.

“We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster.”

In a novel that comes after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, but before the Covid pandemic, this quote is especially poignant. The US has responded poorly to a variety of disasters, but Julius imagines a past where this was not the case. Julius’s assertion could be considered a logical fallacy of golden age thinking, which romanticizes the past.

“Insanity is used as an excuse for suppressing dissent, just as it has always been.”

This claim, made by Julius’s unnamed friend, develops the theme of Race, Ethnicity, and Difference in that society silences dissent by categorizing certain modes of thought as aberrant or disordered.

“What I was steeped in, on that warm morning, was the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York.”

This passage is part of Julius’s thoughts as he notices a monument to commemorate an “African burial ground” (220). The fact that buildings now cover what was once part of this burial ground develops the theme of New York City as a Palimpsest.

“This is particularly in the case of those of us who are psychiatrists, who attempt to use external Signs as clues to internal realities, even when the relationship between the two is not at all clear.”

Here Julius is thinking about the German Renaissance philosopher Paracelsus’s Theory of Signs, which has historically been cited by racists due to its belief that the external reflects the internal. Instead of using the Theory of Signs to promote eugenics, Julius claims that psychiatrists use the same theory in a more positive—but nonetheless flawed—way, to try to help patients.

“I have felt most of the work of psychiatrists in particular, and mental health professionals in general, was a blind spot so broad that it had taken over most of the eye. What we knew [...] was so much less than what remained in darkness.”

This is the culmination of the motif of vision that runs throughout the novel. Julius believes that one cannot see clearly into the mind, and he uses ocular (eye-centered) imagery—obscured vision—to describe this phenomenon.