Dislocation: Teju Cole\'s Novel Open

Dislocation: Teju Cole's Novel Open City

Teju Cole's Open City is a novel of displacement and dislocation: the main character, who has recently broken up with his girlfriend, embarks upon a journey of epic nightly wandering in a manner which symbolizes his estrangement from the rest of humanity. The multiracial narrator Julius (his mother is German; his father African) is already somewhat 'different' from his colleagues because of his multiracial ethnic heritage. He feels more at home in the anonymous diversity of New York City when he interacts with a host of other characters with similarly unstable identities. The novel functions as a kind of modern "Wasteland," in which the main character is lost in a sea of fragments of his own identity and random encounters.

The narrator was not born in America and is studying to become a psychiatrist. This partially explains his astute ability to study other people, as well as his sense of reserve. Through walking, he is able to find transient connections with strangers and with the city itself that he lacks with people in his real life. "These walks met a need: they were a relief from the tightly regulated mental environment of my work, and once I discovered them as therapy, they became the normal thing, and I forgot what life had been before I started walking" (Cole 7). Julius feels a need to have intimate conversations with others, but prefers those conversations to have a sense of emotional distance. Even the dialogues with which he engages within himself feel cool and academic: for example, he sings the praises of reading aloud and hearing the sound of his own voice as he reads when he communes with St. Augustine and Roland Barthes, rather than talking about himself directly.

Julius is thus a man emotionally dislocated from himself and his family, as well as dislocated as he wanders. As well as depicting his wanderings around New York City, the book also catalogues Julius' adventures in Brussels, where he goes to find the grandmother from whom he has been estranged for many years. Little is said about the relationship Julius has with his grandmother until mid-way through the book. The details of Julius' life are only sketchily filled out and are mainly illustrated through the stream-of-consciousness thoughts which transpire while he wanders. Often Julius' thoughts about critical theory and existentialism are recorded in more detail than the events of his past life.

Perhaps this is because the central theme of the book seems to be the 'unknowable' nature of others and our emotional dislocation from even friends and families. "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" says Julius (Cole 243). This suggests that the people Julius meets are not necessarily significant in and of themselves, or even accurately depicted. Rather, Julius chooses to include them because of what they symbolize about his own perspective of himself and his own emotional needs at the time of the encounter.

One of the longest extended dialogues is Julius' meeting with a former graduate student in Brussels named Farouq, whose dissertation was unjustly rejected, leaving him devastated and bereft of any profession. The fact that Julius is also a graduate student suggests a parallel existence with Farouq. But despite the amount of time they spend together, the two men do not become friends, and like most of the people Julius brushes against, he does not seem to retain any emotional connection to Farouq, but merely feels satisfied musing about him in a cool and distanced fashion.