PRIMARY:
- Teju Cole, Open City (2011)
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)
SECONDARY
- Katherine Hallemeier, “To Be from the Country of People Who Gave”: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah“, Studies in the Novel, 47: 2 (Summer 2015), p. 231-245.
- Alexandra Kingston-Reese, “Ambient Moods”, ASAP/J, July 18, 2019 [here]
- Caroline Levine, “The Strange Familiar”: Structure, Infrastructure, and Adichie’s Americanah“, MFS, 61:4 (2015), pp. 587-605.
- Werner Sollors, “Cosmopolitan Curiosity in an Open City”, New Literary History, 49:2 (Spring 2018), pp. 227-248 *
- Pieter Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (2015)
Pre-Class Notes
––
In this week’s reading, I was struck by how both Adichie’s and Cole’s novels tie into last week’s discussion about belonging, and the idea of ‘returning’: in Amerikanah, to the homeland of Nigeria; and in Open City, to find his maternal grandmother in Belgium.
In both novels, the protagonists are constantly claimed by other Africans in America. In Open City, Julius manages to upset his cab driver by getting in without saying hello; the cab driver says to him: ‘Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?’ (Teju Cole, Open City, p. 40). Later, he meets the museum guard Kenneth, who is from Barbuda, who is ‘interested in African culture’, and who correctly identifies Julius as Yoruba. Julius thinks back to his previous exchange, noting their similarities; ‘I thought of the cabdriver who had driven me home form the Folk Art Museum – hey, I’m African just like you. Kenneth was making a similar claim.’ (Cole, p. 53). Only afterwards does it strike him that ‘his eyes were asking a question. A sexual question.’ (Cole, p. 54). The connection is severed – or, at least, Julius ‘felt a little sorry for him’, in thinking that they had a connection in the first place.
Similarly, in Amerikanah, Ifemelu finds herself claimed by fellow Africans in America, especially Nigerians. In an odd echo of the cab scene in Open City, when Ifemelu is going to get her hair braided, she worries that she will get a Nigerian cab driver, ‘because he, once he heard her accent, would either be aggressively eager to tell her that he had a master’s degree, the taxi was a second job and his daughter was on the dean’s list at Rutgers’ or, even worse, would drive silently, ‘nursing humiliation’ that a fellow Nigerian, and a woman, ‘was looking down on him’ (Chamamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amerikanah,p. 8). However, when Ifemelu meets the African women in the hair salon, the reception is much warmer: ‘Halima smiled at Ifemelu, a smile that in its warm knowingness, said welcome to a fellow African.’ (Adichie, p. 11). In contrast, Obinze, when thinking of Ifemelu’s new boyfriend, calls him only ‘the black American’ (p. 19). There is a definite sense that it is different to be an African in America than to be a ‘black American’.
I felt that the sexual and racial politics were more clearly and explicitly articulated in Amerikanah, whereas in Open City, they are only intimated. Julius, when he hears the women’s march outside his building, simply closes the window. He feels a pang of sadness about his relationship with Nadège ending, but barely speaks about it for the rest of the novel. It didn’t exactly feel cold, but certainly affectless – contrasted with the emotional depth and richness of Adichie, I was often struck by the sparse, unemotional prose of Cole. Not that one is superior to the other – but in a way, I felt that, when read together, the contrasts between the texts, the respective chill and heat of their prose, illuminated the texts in new ways for me.
I was also interested in how Open City’s roaming protagonist, Julius, challenges these ideas about belonging – becoming something like Werner Sollors’ ‘cosmopolitan’, or Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot’s “cosmopolitain ou cosmopolite”, “un homme qui n’est étranger nulle part” (a man who is nowhere a stranger) (Werner Sollors, “Cosmopolitan Curiosity in an Open City”, p. 228). Amerikanah’s female protagonist, Ifemelu, embodies a much more (let’s call it) ‘traditional’ African immigrant experience: what drives her is her longing to go back home to Nigeria, not to roam new places. Early on, she describes a feeling of having ‘cement in her soul’: ‘an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.’ (Adichie, p. 7). Here, it’s almost as if the ‘borderlessness’ of Cole’s wandering protagonist evolves into a deeper (or different) desire for return. This makes me wonder: is the drive to roam and the desires to return linked in some way? I’ll be interested to discuss these themes further in our last class. [CRK]
I struggled with this text–Open City–not because it was necessarily composed of idiosyncratic content, but because of the sheer variety of its discussion, which is why I also ended up enjoying the read: How many characters? How many perspectives? This may be hyperbolic, but the range (or the feeling of reading such a range) can be akin to the European realist epics of the 19th century. We have discussions ranging from Palestine, Islamic relations, Japanese Internment, Brewster paintings, and the uses of Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, and Said to name a few: Set across not just New York but also Brussels and Nigeria; centers known for their worldliness or perhaps, especially in regards to our previous discussions, polyphonic voices. This narrative voice (or lack of Julius’s voice in certain parts) is emphasized by the obvious rejection of quotation marks while the dialogue is contained in normal paragraphs, which shows this interplay of voices taking control (I don’t know about you guys, but at times the uncontained “I’s” can sometimes blur the voice of Julius). Perhaps it relates the openness of the city; although I don’t know how to read the literal definition of the title regarding an undefended city to spare it from bombardment (I.e. Brussels in WW2). Maybe there are two meanings being conjoined towards some deeper meaning?
I felt that this structure, less linear, reads more like a series of short stories or tales (I got so enamoured when Julius listened in to each character— for me, Saito or Farouq particularly– in a very detailed way). It sort of gave a mosaic to the cityscapes, something akin to Joyce’s Dubliners…The aimless wandering through various street spaces giving a reading experience slightly similar to something like Mrs Dalloway. Yet, I think this aspect of the novel creates the pendulum between its ability to see huge swaths of cities to the more subtle, intimate moments of individuals: as Farouq mentions of good fiction, “what is important to me is that the world realizes that we are not monolithic either, in what they call the Arab world, that we are all individuals (Cole 126).”
But this wandering theme…It gives me the sense that Julius is trying to find his place in this larger story or monolith (intertextual, inter-historical, inter-city). We had this moment where Julius plays off the different stories of the Two Towers, specifically the hidden immigrant communities of Robinson Street, Laurens Street, and College Place that were obliterated by the original construction of the towers, which opens to other moments of immigration discussion. Importantly Kenneth relates the image of Ellis island: “Ellis Island was a symbol mostly for European refugees. Blacks, ‘we blacks,’ had known rouger ports of entry (Cole 55).” Julius is faced with different elements of story–navigating through monoliths that sustain metanarratives of the American story: one of which Kenneth tries to subsume Julius in as well: the African American experience which Julius is outside of. Therefore it makes sense the Julius would mention, “I, one of the still legible crowds, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories”–That bit of being “legible” being especially interesting which concerns one’s individual element amongst these larger stories (also a sort of meta moment in discussing the rest of the novel about what voice is legible) (Cole 59).
But all this is precisely why we get such an intimate look at Immigrant perspective, a sort of response to the usual narrative strategy that undermines this more individual, realistic look. The Monolithic ideology comes up again for Julius: “My presentation–the dark, unsmiling, solitary, stranger–made me a target for the inchoate rage […] I could, in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist or ‘Viking’ […] their violence in the name of a monolithic identity (Cole 106).” This book itself is set against a sort of racial politics about immigrant narratives. Farouq mentions, “Which Western publisher wants a Moroccan or Indian writer who isn’t into oriental fantasy or who doesn’t satisfy the longing for fantasy? That’s what Morocco and India are there for, after all, to be oriental (Cole 104).”
(BJS)
— Open City rekindled a question in my mind that has bugged me forever, and one that appeared again last week with Moving Kings. What is it about New York that attracts so many authors/makes it such a good setting for so many novels? The idea I usually return to is that, though the space can be overwhelming in a sensory capacity, it’s difficult to imagine being (geographically) lost there. Locations are defined by intersections that read like coordinates, plotting you to a point on a map. Such a strong sense of place – both geographically and in the sense of New York as a concept, in some way – then plays quite well with the literary representation of the feelingof being lost or uncertain. This metaphorically strong sense of place is also an anchoring device for the imagination of the reader, creating a recognisable space in which contradictory things can be simultaneously true. All of this plays out in Cole’s novel, but particularly so in the last chapter, with its speculative references to the future and its strange ending.
I’m particularly interested in the sections where the discussion on Mahler and music begins. It’s worth noting that this takes place in Carnegie Hall, an obviously iconic venue that again reminds us of where we are. Before any philosophising begins, we’re rooted to this place again. Julius refers to ‘Mahler’s sense of an ending’ (p. 250), recalling immediately for me Kermode’s 1967 book by the same title. The section of this I always refer to is the ‘tick’/’tock’ section which details how we as humans attempt to give form to time by differentiating between beginnings and endings with two different sounds. His point is that clocks don’t actually “say” ‘tick’/’tock’, though – they just keep ticking. This musters the idea of repeated beginnings and a resistance to endings, which works quite well with this text in which people from the past reappear.
Whether this constitutes a continuity in time or a fragmentation and subsequent overlap is up for debate, but the reason I find this to be relevant is the play between connection an isolation, of moments in Kermode and of both moments and people in Open City. (One of the articles I’ve read on the book touches on this idea, I’ll do my best to remember which one and add a reference here!) As the music continues, Julius is ‘steeped’ in the history of the piece and notes ‘how strange it was that, almost a hundred years ago, right there in Manhattan, just a short walk away from Carnegie Hall, at the Plaza Hotel, on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth avenue, Mahler had been at work on this very symphony.’ (p. 253) In doing so, Julius provides a feeling of longevity accompanied by the sense of the specific location. The place becomes a site for a history dragged into the future. In this moment, he ‘felt [he] could also detect the intense concentration, the hundreds of private thoughts, of the people in the auditorium with [him]’. (p. 253) The connection between one person in the past (Mahler) and one person in the present (Julius) is reflected in the connection between these great many people all existing in the same time, in the same place. To use a musical phrase, this moment feels somehow harmonious. The succeeding scenes are all the more effective for this. The chapter then starts to do some strange things with volume, and reading it is indeed sensory (what with the overwhelming smell of the perfume of the woman sat next to Julius and the sound of the music). Despite these overlapping senses, synaesthesia isn’t quite the feeling that springs to mind, just an idea of the loudness, and the sudden silence, and the alternation between the two. The music stops, there is silence, the applause ‘explodes’, and Julius steps out into silence on the fire escape.
Everything about this moment on the fire escape is liminal – he stands on something attached to a building but not inside it, off the ground but not as high as he could be and hovering at this height, looking both up at the sky and down at New York City, knowing that the stars he sees are all in the past and that those he can’t see represent some unknown future. (Maybe this is the instance between two of Kermode’s ticks?)
What I particularly like about this moment is the implication that the unknown infinite and New York City are supposedly in opposite directions, and yet when Julius steps back into the building (i.e. into New York instead of hovering above it) and therefore out of the liminality and back onto some temporal trajectory, he enters the future that was before so distant. Long descriptions of stars and uncertainty of the future is followed by two pages full of references to location that makes me feel like I know where I am –Central Park, Twenty-third Street, West Side Highway, the Chelsea Piers building, Wall Street, World Financial Centre, Upper Bay, Statue of Liberty.
Open City is, in this sense, open-ended, tending towards the unknown future but in a place that feels like it should be knowable. Maybe this is comforting. Maybe that’s why New York makes ‘emotional sense’ to Julius. (p. 248) This chapter thus encapsulates many opposites – sound and silence, past and future, connection and isolation, ending and continuation – as New York itself is able to.
Some questions I can’t get my head around –
- What on earth is that ending about?
- Does this work with any city? Perhaps this is something we can discuss in class. I can’t quite conceive of this working with London in quite the same way, for example, but I am more than aware that this could just be because in my mind New York does function as a concept as much as a place. [RF]
I’m really interested in the metaphysics that Teju Cole develops through his depictions of New York in Open City. There’s this sense of constant movement, creation, and destruction in the City, such that no single thing exists as fixed in the world he develops. He writes of “the swiftness and dispassion with which the market swallowed even the most resilient enterprises” and of the “Lenape paths [that] lay buried beneath the rubble? [sic] The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten” (19, 59). Time is collapsed in the work, so that we can see the total re-creation of the City across centuries and generations.
My sense is that this depiction speaks to more than just the nature of New York. This might be too much of a jump, but I read the lines above as Cole hinting towards a cyclical vision of history, where all mores are destroyed and replaced such that no single system of belief ever attains permanence or becomes absolute truth. I was reminded of a line from Wallace Stevens: “there is no such thing as life; what there is is a style of life from time to time” (Letters, 48). The idea that Stevens makes explicit here is that no object, no idea, exists permanently — all things exist in a state of flux, waiting to be replaced or superseded by the next thing. This fluxional depiction of reality is effectively a form of existentialism.
This vision of reality, or metaphysics, then suggests a particular way of thinking about the world. Cole develops the normative implications of this fluxional City through the metaphor of his walking. He writes “My futile task of sorting went on until the forms began to morph into each other and assume abstract shapes unrelated to the real city, […] The walks met a need: they were a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work […] The streets served as a welcome opposite to all that. […] I covered the city blocks as though measuring them with my stride, and the subway stations served as recurring motives in my aimless progress.” In the first line we get the futility of trying to develop any stable abstractions from fluxional reality. When Julius started going on walks, he tried to impose an abstract structure on it, develop some sort of stable mental model. But he finds that this task is “futile,” because the City has no intrinsic structure, its culture and patterns of movement don’t align with any particular model — they simply exist for a moment before they change. And so he adopts a different mode of being: he gives up trying to theorize the City, and instead walks aimless, just appreciating its pulses. We might read this as something like an artist’s statement, or maybe just an argument for the supremacy of literature over philosophy; the essential suggestion being that thought shouldn’t serve to fix reality into permanent structures, but should rather enhance and appreciate reality’s flow.
The last thing I want to mention about this idea is the way in which it inflects on Cole’s cosmopolitanism. If Cole had subscribed to, let’s say a Platonic metaphysics, then I think there’d be a lot less room for the sorts of “conversations” that Sollors points out in the work; instead we’d have a couple philosopher-kings enlightening the rest of the group. The work would be hierarchical, conveying pure knowledge downwards. But the work’s epistemic humility conveys a more horizontal view of knowledge. Since there is nothing fixed or finally true about reality, each culture’s central mores can be equally valid. Conversation here has no need for persuasion, since multiple worldview’s can be equally valid.
This comes through particularly clearly in the scene where Julius reflects on his conversation with Khalil. He writes, “because I knew that my own fear of anti-Semitism, like my fear of racism, had through long practice become prerational. What I would impose on him would not be an argument, it would be a request that he adopt my reflexes, or the pieties of a society different from the one in which he grew up, or the one in which he now functioned” (124). Julius’s sense here is not that his beliefs are correct, but instead has a particularly socialized mode of talking about specific issues. His disagreement with Khalid, then, is not one in which either party is right or wrong (or needs to be convinced), but rather becomes an actual conversation as Appiah defines it: one “undertaken without the hope of persuading others or of reaching an agreement with them” where the sole goal is “to get used to one another” (230, 231). The essential thing I’m trying to point out here is that this mode of conversing is undergirded by an existentialist metaphysics, where no cultural truth is final and so all are equally valid. [MP]
——
[Disclaimer: to get this in on Friday night, I actually wrote this with about 50 pages of Open City still to go (very busy week) – so, unfortunately, right before the Moji twist. This completely changes most of what I wrote, since -obviously – it completely changes the idea of Julius. I’ll try amend if I have time, but just wanted to point this out!]
Julius of Open City is elusive: he begins the novel with the ‘photographic eye’ so often mentioned in discussions of Cole – and all the potential limitations of this attached. Sharp and literal, it captures, stops, and considers, almost without feeling. The Guardian review mentions the Isherwood analogy, the author as camera ‘with its shutter open, quite passive, recording’, and passive here is right. It’s remarkable how often the governing verb of a sentence or introductory sentence to a paragraph represents that I/eye as something governed by alien motive, by something outside the governing self: ‘made me think of’, ‘I knew then I was no longer heading home’, ‘I found myself all alone on the platform’, ‘one image drew me back in’. This is the flaneur who follows crowd and chance to the utmost extreme, almost to the point of impersonality: early in the novel, emotion rarely enters, it ‘flits’ in shadowy fashion (as by the river) only to disappear in the concrete of another immaculately rendered image. That’s not to say the prose is minimal though, or deliberately one-dimensional in a Robbe-Grillet type fashion – an ideological stance against surface, etc. In fact, there are numerous, rather grandiose philosophical leaping-offs, erudite cultural references, slightly hackneyed moments of lyrical transcendence (Mahler at the record shop). But because there’s a deficit of feeling, or because these references seem somehow loose, gratuitous, originally untethered in a greater or particularly likeable character, it all feels somewhat empty to start with, and hints at the pretentious in Julius.
My scepticism however, proved quite unfounded: the book proved far, far more subtle than I originally suspected, and far more brilliant. The development of Julius, and the blossoming out of the text, works by the moments when he begins to listen as well as look. He’s a character who works in a strange gestaltic fashion: he’s filled in as the shape of other people’s lives cluster around his. He works as a strange magnet for confession, for the (almost) passive collation of many voices which begin to give us an idea of him from the negatives, from his reticent responses to urgent, moving, intellectually and emotionally stirring appeals. There are emotionally wrenching stories of African immigrant internment in New York (Saidu), hard, cold stories of wartime Europe and upper-class bourgeois society (his mother, Annette Maillotte), falteringly incendiary, strenuously thought-provoking political discussions with the Islamic Farouq in Brussels – these and many more are told to Julius, who vacillates in the gaps between their words, constantly torn by ‘the skein of argument [which begins] to feel like futility piled on futility’.
Through most the book, the odd but immaculately handled role of Julius is as the facilitator of many mouthpieces, and the maker of bizarre, brilliant, highly idiosyncratic links across centuries and cultures – leaps from Walter Benjamin to Palestine to Van Eyck. The conversations give weight to the connections, the ballast missing at the beginning: the vivid personality of the encounters balance with the occasionally flavourless intellectualism of Julius and together they unfurl a muted, humble, massive scope of view which never forgets to interrogate itself for assumptions. As an ear as well as an eye, Julius reveals himself as the perfect intermediary.
He takes on voices incredibly easily. His passivity is even in the punctuation: there are very rarely speech marks or other notices of who exactly is speaking; direct speech is grammatically indirect, and the ‘I’ of the interlocutor invariably hijacks Julius’ paragraphs, taking it over with the stylings of their own speech and the ideology that entails.
Julius knows this, however, and the flip-side of the coin then is the reticence that accompanies (or, more often, follows) the potential passivity. Julius is always scared of being ‘claimed’, and so every conversation meets an undermining, mediating current of scepticism. This might be the African taxi driver who calls him ‘brother’, the prisoner who seeks him as possible intimate (he is guarded about ‘the idea of myself that I presented in that story … the listener, the compassionate African’ … ‘I said that I would visit, but I never did’), mother as confidant (‘I listened with only half an ear, embarrassed by the trembling and emotion’), political radical as ally (‘it was hard to escape a feeling that we were having a conversation before the twentieth century had begun’; ‘I looked at my watch, though I really had nowhere to go’). He continually draws back before quite believing, quite giving himself over to anything, and changes his mind constantly: one moment Farouq is intimidatingly subtle, the next ‘a cancerous violence has eaten into every political idea’, he is one of the ‘thwarted’. We see that what Julius is really doing is searching: all his mighty leaps of cultural connection are just ways of trying to work out the incredibly uncertain world, and every thought is just process, constantly to be scaled down, modified, refuted. As such, he is unfailingly thorough, and we get exploration rather than explanation
The novel, in this, is almost endlessly discussable: its panoramic scope is such that it disdains the idea of a ‘great American novel’ which might haunt the fiction around it. It will not separate American identity and history and issues from the European from the African from the everything, and it is far too cynical to allow this vague notion of greatness. Its representation is fragmented, and – to use a Julius-like artistic intellectual leap – almost cubist. We get all these voices thrown at us as different angles, different views or experiences of the world, and each is offset, modified, thrown into relief by the others that collide against it. It is a refusal of the single ideological perspective, the single answer, and it requires a narrator like Julius to be the difficult, elusive, lonely artist/curator/camera/recorder/wanderer who bumps them all together, takes them to pieces, and forms the desperately subtle and far-reaching overall picture.
[MBW]
—
What I liked most about Adichie’s Americanah is its candour.
It doesn’t force the reader to adopt a moral position with which one then indulges in reading-activism. It isn’t wrestling to erase the trace of a colonial past by chasing after a pre-colonial identity, or looking to create a new postcolonial identity through a vehement opposition to the legacy of colonialism. It presents its socio-political and cultural moment not as one flowing from a colonial and imperial history but more as a circumstance into which its characters are thrown. Perhaps the reason for this is that Adichie’s is the post-postcolonial generation. What does that mean? Homi Bhabha explains, “If the jargon of our times—postmodernity, postcoloniality, postfeminism—has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use of the ‘post’ to indicate sequentiality—after-feminism; or polarity—anti-modernism. These terms that insistently gesture to the beyond only embody this restless and revisionary energy if they transform the present into an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment (The Location of Culture 6).” If I were to explain Bhabha, I’d say that he means to view the present as a site where experience happens the naturally muddled-up way, without being pre-emptively bracketed into neat theoretical categories. Because the pre-emptive bracketing of experience into neat theoretical categories maroons us on the “Now what?” island, where our inability to answer the very question spells the opposite of empowerment.
The Afropolitan novel – as Katherine Hallemeier believes Americanah to be – is very attuned to the moment it is in. Its middle and upper-middle class characters grow up listening to American music, watching American television shows and planning their futures in the West. This is shown as a matter-of-fact, not as a tragic present attitude that needs to go in order for something nationalistic to take its place (which, for me, is reminiscent of India in the 90s and the early-00s. If I were to do a purely historicist reading of the American aspiration in Americanah, I would dive into Nigerian cultural history and look for something on the lines of the Unipolar Moment of 1990 and the Indian economic liberalisation of 1991, when the Soviets stopped flooding the Indian market with 19th century Russian literature and the Americans started flooding it with heavy metal). The projection of a future elsewhere, removed from the barren and mundane here-and-now (the desire for a temporal and spatial displacement), can be counted among one of the earliest assertions of the self – the realisation of the individual. What then is the critique of individualism is also a critique of the Afropolitan novel – that it is out of touch with the realities of class privilege and the access it brings. Americanah does not make any pretensions at being a universal novel. This brings me back to my first point in this note about the reader’s unfounded need to adopt a moral position in order to read the novel through it: the novel isn’t a Victorian instrument of moralising anymore. The modern, postmodern, postcolonial, post-postcolonial (et al.) novel simply problematises. [M.S.]
I was irritated by the framing of the sudden rape allegation towards the end of Open City, because it seemed to be an inescapable challenge to the critic; to force one to decide to go back and reinterpret the text in light of this revelation, or to ignore it and continue with an interpretation that is already fairly established by page 244. Either is an awkwardly political act (I note that Werner Sollors chooses the latter course).
As an attempt at compromise (without doing any justice to the feminist issues at play here), I will take the issue of Julian’s lack of memory of the alleged assault as symptomatic of a central flaw in Julian’s character, and his homodiegetic narrative. I disagree with Sollors slightly regarding his reading of the ‘question at the heart of the novel’ being ‘whether there can be cosmopolitanism after the Holocaust and the many other twentieth-century atrocities that it overshadows.’ While I see the centrality of this to the text, I would argue that the most prominent concern is in fact the limitations of Julian’s empathy and perception of the subjective experience of others. In some respects Julian occupies an enviable position in his detatchment, cultural hybridity, and incredibly broad intellectual knowledge; he is able to observe his surroundings with both particularity, a clinical intensity borne of his medical training, and a strong sense of the historical. And yet his interactions with others seem troubled by his intense interiority, almost to the point at which the characters are in some sense a part of himself – the lack of speech marks heightens this effect, demonstrating through similarity the difference between characters’ speech and free indirect discourse.
The Farouq section is particularly interesting in this regard. I am particularly interested in the connections suggested by Farouq’s anecdote at being forgotten by the principle after a conversation (the incongruity of which the man seemed aware of at the time) about Deleuze; ‘when I saw him next, he not only refused to speak to me but actually pretended he had never seen me before’ (pp.112-3). This strange amnesia – its interruption of a human connection across the barriers of race, culture, and class – relates to the Beckettian nature of Julian’s first meeting with Farouq, which almost resembles a dream vision in its lack of contextual congruity; ‘our conversation had happened without the usual small talk. […] The biographical details had been irrelevant to our encounter’ (p.106). While the men have a connection, partly due to their experience of being immigrants in Western cities and partly their intellectual interests, Julian remains emotionally detached, even in their last meeting, not sharing Farouq’s sense of rage. And from here he, like most other characters, disappears from the narrative. While Farouq does have his place in a web of connections regarding Islamaphobia, terrorism, racism, scholarship and translation that run through the novel, there is seemingly minimal human development to this encounter. This detachment, a type of amnesia, may be reflected in the final accusation – I look forward to hearing what other people think about that episode.
This is a complete contrast to Americanah, in which the possibilities of an international cosmopolitanism are framed within human relationships. I’ve realised it is the only novel on our course to be centred on a romance plot. Adichie’s movement from the present back into the past throughout the narrative is the opposite of Cole’s narrative wandering; ‘Memories of him [Obinze] so easily invaded her mind […] Each memory stunned her with its blinding luminosity. Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss’ (p.473). While I follow Hallemeier’s argument that ‘their reunification would seem to demarcate a political collectively that is undoubtedly capitalist’, in the final chapter I think there is a specific resistance to Ifemelu’s ‘reaching back to her past’ (p.475), largely against the violence of capitalist development as presented in her last blog post; ‘They walk under a cluster of trees which, only hours ago, housed the livelihood of food hawkers. […] But now the shacks are gone. They are erased, and nothing is left’ (p.474). The present tense gives the scene a mythic, atemporal quality, suggesting the post is an attempt to hold onto this past – and livelihood – and the people who still inhabit it. Is she moving into a Jamesian allegory here, by which the final invitation to Obinze becomes a victory for an imagined peaceful cultural continuity? Perhaps it is not so much allegory as a recognition of the significance of human relationships in shaping one’s views of a city and countering an isolating self-obsession.
As a final thought, I wondered if it might be worth discussing the classification of Adichie’s novel as an American text? I am aware that she splits her time between Nigeria and the US, but I had thought of her as a Nigerian writer – I note that she is central to the reading list for the course on African Literature next term. [RJ]
Post-Class Notes
We opened with Jane’s excellent presentation on Open City. A little Kant and a few quotes slipped by my notes but the major themes discussed were cosmopolitanism and the idea of race in urban space. Can the idea of cosmopolitanism survive the Holocaust, the many atrocities of the 20thcentury? Jane ran briefly through a fraught and fascinating history of the concept: the ‘commitment to communication beyond rather than between nationality’ which seemed central to the legacy of the Enlightenment, to Diderot and the possibility of a universal humanism; to its later ambitious applications in chequered projects like that of Esperanto, the League of Nations; and then the confrontation with totalitarianism (Hitler, Stalin, our difficult last century) from which it could hardly continue unchanged. The possibility of a more modest, realistic goal was discussed: in which a dialogue remains with ‘other’, in which local difference is preserved while a wider sense of community achieved. Can the individual remain under the theory? Can community occur between the consciously ‘different’, might cosmopolitanism be used as an evasion of the ethics individuality demands? These are all concerns for Cole, as was nicely demonstrated in examples like his use of internet cafes, flights, radio stations – places where a multiplicity of voices are almost taken for granted.
Julius, perhaps inevitably, then took centre-stage: the highly-educated black immigrant post-colonial cosmopolite; the dubiously philosophising, morally evasive rapist. His particularly Western erudition was marked as unusual in such post-colonial narratives – (Cole in an interview: ‘[one] can oppose white supremacy and appreciate gothic architecture at the same time’) – but equally uneasy. There was a wide feeling of the spuriousness, the hierarchical pretension, of many of his cultural connections, which become increasingly apparent as devices of diversion from emotion, guilt, the uncomfortable matter-at-hand – discourse as escape from the responsibilities of reality. Historicism and abstraction as defence mechanism: bed-bugs to look away from death, and a Nietzsche anecdote to refuse the past.
Michael drew our attention to De Man: the insight as a form of blindness, and blindness as a form of insight – a curious hinge for Julius and his selectively blinkered intelligence, his Enlightenment commitments and genuine occasional insights. There was also the idea of the ‘post-humous revelation’: De Man as the anti-semite, and Julius as the misogynist. All this anxiety, this blind/insightful/blind narrative, manifests in some fascinating modes of writing: the classic family-search strand which dissolves almost immediately in Belgium, the collapse of that lyrical realist sense of purpose, the ‘fugue state’ which might take over the story, encounters lapping into the realm of dream (Farouq) and unreality.
Curious too was the psychiatrist element: we discussed Judith Butler, the possibility of grief as the binding element of a certain idea of cosmopolitanism – grief doing the cultural, political work, being the intrinsic universality. Open City as a book generally haunted by a sense of mourning – a dark, internalised sense which spills into the tone, which creeps up in contingent narratives and inserted references (the Joan Didion book on the plane, etc.)
Martha gave us a great introduction to Americanah in view of some intriguing, if potentially over-reaching, critical perspectives. A lot revolved around ideas of genre, and the novel’s mode of discourse with social/political/economic realities. Was it a classic romance story? Was it a plot presentig a possibility of capitalist success outside the supremely white model? Does it make a political statement through its refusal to structure plot directly around political event? Adichie’s insistence, perhaps, is that ‘Americanah’ can be a novel in just the same spheres as a ‘first-world’ novel, with the same techniques and same freedoms. Her reticence to fall into some sub-set, potentially compassionate category – ‘postcolonial literature is something made up by professors to give themselves work’ – is a variation on this, an assertion of the self-as-writer above any smaller distinction.
Americanah’s concerns with the global book-market, the relationship between writing and capital, were discussed, with a nice life-reflecting-art point towards Adichie’s 2014 blog (highly similar to Ifemelu’s). Martha noted Adichie’s repeated claims of observation not theory – the writer as social realist rather than social theorist. This opened out the conversation onto the topic of the novel generally: the plight of realism today, the flimsy and difficult-defined categories of avant-garde, highbrow, middle-brow, the necessity or pretension of obscurity and the radical in today’s literary world. The conversation was open-ended and strongly felt – it really seemed like we were drawing on a great amount we’d learned and read together over the term. It was a deserved conclusion to a wonderful run of seminars.
My apologies for the late post (my timekeeping will never improve), but I’d like also to send a genuine thank you to everyone. I thought the contributions the last six weeks were consistently brilliant, and it really was such a welcoming environment to talk and think in – nothing of the sterile academic silence that pops up in some other seminars, and that was thanks to everyone around the table. Much love, thanks again, and a round of applause for our incomparable host Mr Michael Kalisch! Good luck on the writing, it’s been a pleasure.
[MBW]
AMERICAN FICTION NOW - 2019 