Teju Cole, Open City: breaking the rules of fiction?

Photo by Siegfried Poepperl on Unsplash

This novel, Cole's first, is a remarkable leisurely depiction of urban life, seen from a single perspective. It’s something like W G Sebald for cities. The narrator has a job as a psychiatrist, but for most of the novel we accompany him as he walks around New York, a true flaneur in the style of Baudelaire, observing and commenting on people he knows, but as well, observing city life – the people usually ignored in fiction.

The narrator, like the author, is Nigerian-American, which means he has a multiplicity of viewpoints with the people he interacts with. One of the fascinations of the novel is how the narrator appears seamlessly to be part of different communities: the classical music buffs at Carnegie Hall (he knows all the major Mahler conductors) as well as strolling around the Bronx and Harlem (and getting mugged by teenagers in Central Park).

Most of the novel is set in New York, except for a few  weeks in Brussels, another city, when the author has a fleeting sexual encounter with a stranger. It’s rather peculiar that he makes sure he is anonymous – he uses a  false name for the encounter. Come to think of it, there is a common theme of names throughout the book. He is constantly repeating names, forgetting the names of people he met, even the woman he has sex with:

Afterward, she told me her name:  Marta, Esther? I forgot it immediately.

All this is fascinating.. The narrator is a sensitive, reflective, rather passive, observer of events. The same seems to apply to his own relationships. He has a kind of girlfriend, Nadege, but she doesn’t make an appearance in the book, and they break up early in the story: “It  was painful, this breaking apart, but it surprised neither of us.”

To be honest, the narrator’s passivity drives me up the wall – I can’t help feeling he prefers to run away from any involvement.

But Cole commits, to  my mind, a fundamental error in a fiction title, a breach of the rules of fiction. It all the more astonishing since, right at the end of the novel, we learn something about the narrator that is totally out of keeping with what has come before. He is at a party, and meet a woman, Moji, who he knew many years before. She accuses him of forcing himself on her when he was only 14 and she was 15. While, she claims, he never mentioned it again, she has lived with this harm ever since.

Before this episode is introduced, the narrator appears to exonerate himself in a characteristically long-winded aside that turns out to be relevant to what follows:

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy … whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.

And he concludes this long discussion:

From my point of view, thinking about the story of my life, even without claiming any especially heigtend [sic] sense of ethics, I am satisfied that I have hewed close to the good.

Immediately afterwards is this bombshell of an accusation. What jars is not simply that he should be accused of behaviour so diametrically opposed to everything we have learned of the narrator to date. It is that he does not rebut what his accuser says; he simply moves on, and we get a long account of a Mahler performance that seems to me to be avoiding the issue. If someone claims you violated her, should you not respond? Or, if this is a novel, should you not think to yourself (we are granted the narrator’s ability to reflect and review his own thoughts, in the narrative structure) about what has been said?

Instead, we get absolutely nothing: no mention from the narrator if this accusation is correct or false. Surely we have a duty as humans to respond, not simply to run away from such claims? By the end of the novel, my thoughts are not about the sensitivity of this observer of city life, but the weird fictional structure by which the narrator is accused but refuses to respond. It’s deeply unsatisfying.

A visit to Manchester Museum

 

This is what you see in the South Asian Gallery: members of the Manchester community with links to South Asia, and objects that are significant to them (but not chosen for high artistic value). 

A visit to the Manchester Museum – my first – was quite an eye-opener. The place was full of visitors! This kind of popularity for museums is only seen in a few exceptional locations, such as the Tate Modern, the British Museum, and so on; but outside London it is rare. The Whitworth in Manchester, for example, however good a museum it might be, never gets this kind of footfall. But equally surprising were the collections themselves. Whether a temporary exhibition (“Wild”) or a quick tour to the presumably permanent galleries for China and South Asia, there was little to be seen from the Museum’s own collection. This is probably the future for museums.

I guessed that the Manchester Museum would be full of glass cases and old pots. It was very different – and it made me wonder what the museum actually about.

You won’t find this out immediately from the “about” section of the Museum website. Here is stated  proudly: “Manchester Museum is on a mission to become the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you’ll ever visit.” That much was clear, when you see the exhibitions. But it doesn’t tell you what the remit of the museum is. You have to go to Wikipedia for this:

Manchester Museum is a museum of archaeology, anthropology and natural history, owned by the University of Manchester.

So ancient implements and exotic peoples, reimagined for the present day, is what I would expect – that is, after all, what I see at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, but perhaps with a few stuffed birds added in Manchester.

But in Manchester, there was an almost total abandonment of precious objects, concentrating instead on topics of current interest (rewilding rare or extinct species), or on the communities living within and around Manchester. Various communities are represented by a big picture of someone from that community, alongside some everyday objects that are significant for them, such as an old LP, or a parent’s military uniform. In other words, this is the anthropology of the present-day, the ethnic groups in our midst. There were almost no precious objects on show. The Wild exhibition, similarly, had very little from the Museum’s own collection (although you could stroke a  stuffed badger).

It was quite a surprise, but  you couldn’t deny how popular it was. This is the museum, not as a display of fine objects, but as a tool for reflection and consideration, and for recognition – hey, that’s us!

What do I like about the Manchester museum?

-          It’s free

-          It’s popular (around 430,000 visitors per year, or 35,000 per month. By comparison, the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge is around 30,000 per month; the Tate Modern is 401,000 visitors per month, the British Museum around 550,000 per month. The Cambridge MAA has around 8,000 visitors per month.

-          The Manchester Museum makes a genuine effort to engage with the many groups that exist outside its doors. Art galleries increasingly attemp to do this, but their efforts to engage with other communities than art historians is frequently pitiful. The Fitzwilliam does little to engage with Cambridge communities, although you could say that Cambridge (and Oxford) is a special case, with no immediate parallels with other major English cities. The Manchester Museum provides stories, and we all love narratives. 

One major factor in the growth of the Manchester Museum seems to be the director, Esme Ward, who joined the Museum in 2018 after being Head of Learning at Whitworth Museum, just down the road, where she set up the education service. The entire museum seems to have been transformed in the last few years.

Still, I can’t help feeling a touch of regret that the museum has abandoned the principle of making objects explained and interpreted. It has substituted for this providing individual accounts, which provide some immediacy, but which lose the principle of showing exceptional artefacts. Of course, this is an approach that befits an anthropological collection, showing the familiar, rather than the exceptional,  but it makes the museum a kind of one-time only experience. Perhaps it is true that most people only visit a museum once, so this is the best way to use the museum experience: to make the most of that one visit. But I’d like to think that at some point the Museum can begin, alongside the community stories, to tell the stories of its own collections, rather than just being embarrassed by them and hiding them.