Urban phenomena as "sites of memory" in "Open City" by Teju Cole

Kulikov Evgenii Andreevich ORCID: 0000-0001-5037-7226 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Literature, National Research Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod 603022, Russia, Nizhny Novgorod region, Nizhny Novgorod, Gagarin Ave., 23 kulikov@flf.unn.ru

The end of the twentieth century was marked in the public consciousness by a new appeal to the issues of history and memory, which became a fundamental element of the social construct of "national identity". Being certainly not a new issue, the phenomenon of memory was re-actualized in the 1980s and 90s, the prerequisites for which were: social factors associated with "radical changes in the structure of society in the era of globalization and postcolonialism" ^{[1, p. 23]}; criticism of the ideologies of previous decades, which perceived "the use of images and representations (including images of the past) exclusively in a negative way as a means of inculcating "false consciousness"" ^{[1, p. 24]}; the gradual passing away of the "generation of eyewitnesses of the most severe crimes and catastrophes in the annals of human history" ^{[2, p. 11]}, requiring the fixation of the memory of the traumatic past, which is on the verge of extinction in its living, unadorned and unmusified guise; the rapid change of the socio-political system in European countries ("perestroika" and subsequent the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and much more); finally, the technical revolution and the rapid development of computer technologies that make possible reliable and almost or completely synchronous fixation of reality (for example, about electronic memory, which differs from human "very high stability" and becomes "an assistant and servant of human memory and reason," writes Jacques Le Goff in the book "History and Memory" ^{[3, pp. 124-126]}). Separately, we consider it necessary to focus specifically on addressing the topic of memory for the subsequent constitution of national/ethnic identity and/or ideology, as, for example, the Irish sociologist Benedict Anderson ^[4] or the German historian Fridtjof Benjamin Schenck writes: "the formation of "places of memory" in consciousness is a common phenomenon of the development processes of "we-groups". The idea of a common heroic past is fundamentally important, for example, for the self-awareness of ethnic minorities, religious groups, cities, regions and even classes" ^[5]. Emphasizing the need for memory specifically for these groups, Schenck nevertheless emphasizes that "the idea of a common past" is important for any "collective identity" ^[5].

In this regard, it seems productive to turn to fiction that reflects reality and serves, as the German anthropologist and cultural critic Aleida Assman calls it, as a "medial representation" of collective history, memory and trauma, existing in the form of "cultural constructs within certain social frameworks" ^{[6, p. 168]}. Of course, a literary text is never equal to reality itself, but multiple ways of commemoration, codified by artistic canvases, constitute public discourse when referring to history and/or memory. Even more revealing is the study of creativity, which, firstly, is an intentional appeal to these issues, and secondly, is created at the junction of fact and fiction. As V.I. Tyupa notes, "blurring the boundaries between the narrative practices of fiction and non-fiction" ^{[7, p. 35]} is becoming one of the dominant principles of modern literature. Therefore, we turn to the work of a modern American writer of Nigerian origin, Teju Cole, as indicative of the topics of interest to us (and to the writer himself) using optics proposed by historian Pierre Nora, which still remains relevant in modern memory studies. The object of this research is T. Cole's novel "The Open City", the subject is "places of memory", which make up the urban text in this novel. The relevance of this work is connected, firstly, with the growing interest in the genre of "auto-fixation", within which the "Open City" was created, and secondly, with the most important topic of national and individual identity as a social construct, raised in this text from the position of post-and decolonization; the novelty of the work is ensured by the lack of research on this aspect of the novel.

As mentioned above, the methodological basis of this study is memory studies and specifically the conceptual framework developed by the French scientist Pierre Nora. He made a significant contribution to the study of the phenomenon of memory by introducing the concept of lieux de memoire (places of memory) into scientific discourse and publishing a seven-volume encyclopedia of the same name with a volume of five and a half thousand pages in the 1980s and 90s. Separating the concepts of "memory" and "history", Nora interprets "places of memory" as boundary phenomena, boundary phenomena connecting these two spheres of human knowledge. "Places of memory" arise where it is necessary to stop the transformation of memory (living, relevant, evolving) into history (representative, reconstructing, intellectual). "If we ourselves continued to inhabit our memory, we would have no need to dedicate special places to it. They would not exist because there would be no memory carried away by history" ^{[8, p. 19]}, Nora writes in the preface to the first volume of her global research, talking about the tendency of turning "integral", "true" and "spontaneous" memory into a "myth" perceived as a legacy, but extremely far from the category of emotional experience and living. Finding it difficult to give a clear definition of the term he created, Nora defines it as places where "memory crystallizes and finds its refuge" ^{[8, p. 17]}, as "remains" and "illusions of eternity" ^{[8, p. 26]}, as "shells left lying on the shore after the ebb of the sea of living memory" ^{[8, p. 27]}. Only after the creation of three comprehensive parts – the Republic, the Nation and France – does the researcher come to an understanding after the fact of the tools used by him and many of his colleagues, which initially came into use intuitively and "spontaneously" ^{[8, p. 72]}. In the chapter "How to write the history of France?" in the third volume of the anthology, he gives the following definition: "places of memory are any significant unity, material or ideal order, which the will of people or the work of time has turned into a symbolic element of the heritage of a certain community" ^{[8, p. 79]}. The most important component, in our opinion, is precisely its symbolic meaning, since a symbol, as we know, is a multi–valued concept. The place of memory is not a permanent, fixed in time and unambiguous phenomenon, having stable semantics and connotation in all ages and epochs; on the contrary, the place of memory is a mobile formation endowed with a new reading and meaning depending on the recipient and the socio–cultural, political, economic and many other conditions in which he is located, as well as social and other identity groups to which he belongs. As Svetlana Alexandrovna Shapak correctly emphasizes, "the main characteristic of "memory places" for Nora is their ability to metamorphose, constantly update values, and the sudden appearance of new derivatives of already established values. The dynamics of the values of "places of memory" allows us to identify changes in the structure of national collective memory <...> the value of each "place of memory" at the time of its actualization will be inextricably linked with the subject of memories" ^{[9, p. 1220]}. It is from the point of view of the specifics of the perceiving (i.e., remembering) consciousness and its connections with social and "collective memory" that we would like to turn to Teju Cole's novel "Open City".

T. Cole (Teju Cole) was born in 1975 in the USA to a family of Nigerian students who returned to their homeland with little Teju after completing their studies. Raised in Nigeria, he managed to absorb his native culture before moving to America at the age of seventeen for the sake of subsequently abandoning medical studies at the University of Michigan and further education in the program of Oriental and African Studies in London and obtaining a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University. Now T. Cole is a professor of writing at Harvard, a photographer, a columnist for the New York Times and many other publications, as well as an author who received a Guggenheim Fellowship ^[10], the National Book Critics Circle Award ^[11] and the Hemingway PEN Foundation Award for his debut full–fledged novel "The Open City" (Open City), released in 2011. The novel is written in the genre of "auto-fiction", which is now becoming one of the fundamental genres of modern foreign literature (one can note the work of Olivia Lang, Rachel Kask, Sheela Heti, Karl-Uwe Knausgaard, Amy Liptrot, as well as Annie Erno, the Nobel Laureate of 2022). Autofiction is a genre created at the intersection of fiction and nonfiction, exploring extremely private stories and demonstrating the importance of an individual, proving that any person is worthy of interest and attention. As E.A. Ermolin says, auto–fixation is "a radical self-expression of personality in modern narrative discourse. <…> [He] is associated with a special understanding of authenticity, he is alien to the traditional criteria of heroism and ethical worthiness, which can be perceived as tools and means of alienation, as an unacceptable substitution of personal essence with a given norm <...> Autofiction is the self–realization of the author within the limits that he has defined for himself, identifying them with the limits of authenticity in his understanding based on an attempt to find the elusive edge of personal presence in a shaky, fluid world" ^{[12, p. 71]}.

Most often, in an autofictional discourse, it is impossible to draw a clear demarcation line between the author and his character, since autofiction, in principle, has a therapeutic function in many ways – experiencing, reflecting, thinking about events significant to the author often coincides with the biography of the writer known to us. T. Cole, however, outlines this boundary quite clearly, calling his character by another name – Julius, which, however, seems to be a continuation of the author's name Teju – and both have nothing to do with the name given to him at birth: Obayemi Babajide Adetokunbo Onafuwa. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that Julius is a medical student who is completing his residency, undergoing permanent practice at a university clinic and preparing to become a full–fledged independent practicing psychiatrist (recall that T. Cole himself dropped out of this training). The writer seems to use the technique of the alternative history genre in his narration, telling about events that could have happened to him if he had not dropped out of the University of Michigan (hence the replacement of the informal Tedge with the official and, most importantly, the name Julius, familiar to the American ear, more befitting a respected doctor). There is no plot familiar to us in the novel – the narrator walks around the city, listens to music, communicates with people (although, rather, it is also better to use the word "listens" here, because his interlocutors mostly speak, and Julius speaks his thoughts inside himself). The only thread similar to the plot and leading the hero from New York to Brussels is the desire to find his maternal grandmother, whose traces were lost several years ago in Belgium. However, once there, the narrator makes almost no effort to find her, continuing to lead a routine observer's life. It is no coincidence that the city is included in the title – rather, it is the main character and the center of the narrative here, rather than the narrator, although, of course, the specifics of the consciousness perceiving urban locations in this novel are very important.

The action of the "Open City" takes place several years after the disaster of the "eleventh of September". The most important locus defining the general topos of New York is the site where the Twin Towers once stood, destroyed as a result of a terrorist attack. The 2001 terrorist attack had a great impact on the change of political and social views, forced us to address the problems of racism and religious hatred, showed Americans the fragility of their lives and social structure – and the gaping space on the site of the former World Trade Center ensemble continues to remind of the terrorist act. Moreover, this terrorist act had an impact not only on the American people, but also on humanity as a whole: for example, the French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in his study of anthropogenic and natural disasters "Small Metaphysics of the tsunami", writes about these events as follows: "On September 11, 2001, on American territory, there was an apocalyptic event. <...> On September 11, the whole world was stunned when an impressive image of evil was revealed – if not "created" – in front of him" ^{[13, p. 84]}. It is all the more surprising that just a few years after the disaster, this locus, which should still be a fresh reminder of the wound inflicted on America, has already become a "place of memory", that is, a space not of emotional response and deep experience, but a historical monument, a memorial that does not cause an acute reaction: "Around me, office workers were walking their way, Hunched over, looking at the ground, everyone is dressed in black and gray. I felt like I was being squinted at–I was the only one in the crowd who stopped to look at the construction site from the bridge. Everyone else was walking, looking straight ahead, and nothing separated them – nothing separated us – from those who were at work nearby on the other side of the street on the day of the disaster" ^{[13, p. 58]}. Initially, the hero himself doubts what he sees, but he strives to know the urban chronotope surrounding him, so he experiences a moment of recognition: "On the right there was a pedestrian bridge connecting a certain building not with another building, but with the earth's surface. And again, the same empty space, and now, looking closer, I still recognized the obvious explanation as correct: yes, these are the ruins of the World Trade Center" ^{[14, p. 52]}. However, only Julius is exposed to the visual effect of exclusion, paying attention to the gaping of empty space, for the rest it has already passed into the realm of the forgotten, that is, into the realm of history. To enhance this contrast, T. Cole introduces into the narrative the layout of New York recalled by Julius at the Queens Museum of Art, which has "a pair of gray boxes at the southern tip of Manhattan, each about a foot high: in the world of layout (that is, in the world of history, our note - E.K.) they symbolize the inviolability of the towers of the World Trade Center the center, already destroyed in the real world" ^{[14, pp. 148-149]}. This discovery led the narrator to realize the palimpsest nature of New York, since such a disappearance of objects from reality, as happened with the Twin Towers, is not something beyond the paradigm of everyday life for a city dweller. What is happening is what Yael Zerubavel calls "collective amnesia" in his article "Dynamics of collective memory" ^{[15, p. 19]}, which, in turn, brings us back to the words of Pierre Nord, who believed that it is the memory carried away by history that forms the places of memory.

One of the most likely explanations for this process seems to us to be an appeal to the theory of "trauma" and "traumatic experience" experienced not only by an individual, but also by an entire nation. The mechanism of displacement of traumatic experience is oblivion, "collective amnesia", which is opposed by commemorative practice, since the phenomenon of memory and interest in it, as M.M. Fedorova rightly notes, is associated "with the need to comprehend the largely cruel experience of mankind in the twentieth century, which was hushed up and hidden for a long time. We are talking primarily about totalitarian regimes and dictatorships, the atrocities of fascism, the genocide of entire peoples or their forced resettlement" ^{[16, p. 112]}. Terrorist attacks are organically intertwined with this series of collective shocks and traumas. Aleida Assman also writes about this: "Like memory, the concept of trauma has been firmly embedded in the consciousness of a Western person since the 1980s and has profoundly changed his intuition, his values and emotionality. The bloody conquests and destructive wars of Western empires and peoples constitute a "hot past" that does not disappear automatically only because of the passing of time, but remains with us in our present on the "bloody fields" of Europe and in many other places around the world" ^[17]. However, the specificity of memory lies in the fact that it "gets along only with those details that are convenient for it", as well as "memory by its nature is multiple and indivisible, collective and individual" ^{[8, p. 20]}. All this leads us to realize that T. Cole shows the gap between social (that is, collective, conditionally universal) memory and individual memory, colored by the specifics of the recipient's perception and of importance to the individual, but not to the whole society. P. Nora himself, in his work, records this transition, which marks the emergence of places of memory, which are created, as we have already noted, at the junction of two mental spaces of memory and history. "Instead of the historical, the psychological, instead of the social, the individual, instead of the universal, the subjective" ^{[8, p. 34]} – this is exactly what we see in the "Open City" in relation to the September 11 disaster.

By the way, the metaphor of the city as a palimpsest plays another role (and it is no coincidence that T. Cole calls this void left by the destroyed towers a construction site): A few years later, a new skyscraper will appear on this site, even taller and standing out against the background of the city, symbolically named "Freedom Tower". However, Julius, a descendant of Nigerian migrants, is more important not even the traumatic experience experienced by all US citizens after the attack on the World Trade Center, but the fact that "this was not the first time that something was completely erased in this geographical point. Before the construction of the towers, there was a whole network of streets where life was in full swing. Robinson Street, Lawrence Street, College Place: in the sixties they were razed to the ground to make way for the buildings of the World Trade Center, and now they are all forgotten. The old Washington market, active marinas, fishmongers, and the enclave of Sicilian Christians that arose here at the end of the 19th century have also disappeared. Syrians, Lebanese and others from the Levant were pushed across the river to Brooklyn, where they took root on Atlantic Avenue and in Brooklyn Heights. And before that? Which Lenape trails are buried under the rubble? The construction site is a palimpsest, and the whole city is too: written, erased, rewritten" ^{[14, p. 59]}.

Julius feels a close connection with all migrants, while not identifying himself with them completely (we wrote about this in more detail earlier ^[18]), however, remembering their victims, traumas and violence experienced, the slave position, long ago abolished, but still becoming the subject of attention in modern times. For example, Broadway becomes a similar place of memory, creating a vivid antithesis between the present and the past, for Julius: "The park was filled with the voices of children, very young, of preschool age. Mothers were fussing around the children on the playground. In the middle of the XIX century, the shopping district was bustling here. Since 1820, the slave trade has been classified in the United States as a crime for which the death penalty was imposed, but New York remained for a long time the most important port for the construction, equipping, insurance and sailing of slave ships" ^{[14, p. 160]}. The contrast is created not only on the basis of a peaceful and calm present with a sad past, but also due to the striking discrepancy between the slave trade and one of the main symbols of democratic America, located within the same locus.

Even more important to us is the correlation of the past and the present of another "place of memory" near Broadway. If in the previous passage we can at least isolate the meaning of the locus in the present (apparently, this is Central Park), then in the next scene the present "place of memory" is unidentifiable even for the hero of the novel: "on the other side of the street, in front of the largest of the federal administrative buildings, there was a queue, winding like a snake. <...> Coming out of the diner, I saw that it seemed to be a crowd of potential immigrants; an alternative option would be a crowd of potential jurors: in such buildings it is one of two" ^{[14, p. 214]}. It is no coincidence that Julius focuses on the nationality and ethnicity of the people in the queue ("a lot of Bangladeshis", "an unusually large number of mixed-race couples. One couple consisted, according to my guesses, of an African-American and a Vietnamese", "a mother with two children, judging by their appearance, Hispanics" ^{[14, pp. 214-215]}), who are forced to go through humiliating procedures ("people are trying to demonstrate readiness for upcoming interrogations", "once again they checked if they were okay they have papers", "everyone was ordered to take off jewelry, shoes and belts, take keys and coins out of their pockets" ^{[14, pp. 214-215]}) for the sake of possibly obtaining permission to stay in the United States; it is no coincidence that this building is guarded by the same private firm, "which guarded immigrants in the temporary detention center in Queens" ^{[14, p. 214]} (in fact, a prison for illegally crossing the border). The official system creates the most uncomfortable atmosphere for BIPOC people (a term that has no analogue in Russian, stands for Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in the same place where Julius discovers the most correlated with the situation "place of memory" – "memorial on the site of the cemetery where Africans were buried" ^{[14, p. 216]}, which occupied 6 acres of land a couple of centuries ago and where up to 20 thousand blacks were buried. "The bodies exhumed at the Negro Cemetery, as it was called at one time, and in other similar places in the coastal part in the east of the island, bore traces of torment: injuries from blunt force trauma, grievous bodily harm. Many skeletons have bone fractures – evidence of lifetime ordeals. Diseases were also commonplace: syphilis, rickets, arthritis" ^{[14, p. 217]}. It is important for Julius to remember this: he is not subject to "collective amnesia", he believes that the injustice that his ancestors fought for so long, the pain and suffering that they endured, are significant not only in a historical diachronic aspect, but also in synchrony: the imperial state is always looking to the future, so it tries to purify itself from the past, since "imperial ideology largely blocks memory as such" ^{[19, p. 84]}, however, this cannot be done if history repeats itself in modern times and is found in synchrony. The historical parallelism is obvious, and therefore the dissonance between the declared and the real becomes even more noticeable. In ideal places of memory, "the associative connection of memory contents with spatial objects, whether geographical locations, streets, or the location of rooms in a building, made it possible to organize the storage of knowledge" ^{[20, p. 36]}, however, in this case we see a critical gap between a spatial object and its semantics, emphasized as an impassive narrator's voice: "but then the site was built up, and the residents of the city forgot that there was a cemetery here", and by the very short description of the locus: an unguarded "piece of land overgrown with grass" ^{[14, p. 216]}.

We see a similar gap between the social and the individual when analyzing other "places of memory" found in the novel: the absolutely empty American Museum of Folk Art ^{[14, pp. 36-40]}; the monument to Alexander Hamilton near Trinity Church, which stands out so much from the rest of the cemetery adjacent to the church that it seems to make the lives and deaths of the rest of the buried there are insignificant people there (but Julius notices them: "and also a lot of women who have died over the centuries since the Europeans climbed the Hudson River and settled on this island, Eliza, Elizabeth, another Elizabeth – these are the names of those women. Some died at an advanced age, others – in their youth, often during childbirth, and others – very young, from childhood diseases. There are many children buried there" ^{[14, pp. 48-49]}); Ellis Island, a symbol of European refugees, on which Africans were not allowed to land ^{[14, pp. 54-57]}; United Palace, formerly called the "Lowe Theater on 175th Street" and formerly a "chic" "massive building of outlandish architecture", and then it became a refuge for several unorthodox Christian communities (in fact, sects and cults), and now it looks "alien" and "neither to the village nor to the city, architecturally infinitely far from the surrounding shops, its magnificent columns and arches are uninteresting to tired immigrants who rarely look up" ^{[14, pp. 229-230]}.

However, this contrast is most evident in the image of the Statue of Liberty. Julius sees her 3 times throughout the novel, and each time she gradually approaches him (both the statue itself and what it means): if at first "the Statue of Liberty seemed like a phosphor-green speck against the sky" ^{[14, p. 54]}, then – "behind the water surface was visible the shimmering green figure of the Statue of Liberty ^{[14, p. 160]}, then at the end of the novel, in its metaphorical finale, when Julius, as a lost soul on Charon's boat, takes a walk on a riverboat, he encounters the main American "place of memory" closely, and the image seems to us quite ominous: "a green ghost in the dark, very quickly became material and loomed over us; a monument worthy of its sonorous name; the massive folds of the statue's robe are majestic like columns" ^{[14, p. 252]}. A symbol of fundamental importance to the American nation, offering the basis for the ideology of American democracy and the dream, a beacon that many immigrants sought in search of a better life, is perceived quite differently at the end of Cole's novel. Through a hidden comparison of immigrants with birds, the author shows the collapse of hopes and an alluring light that turns into tragedy and death: "Then the fire of her torch showed ships the way to Manhattan harbor; and the same light, especially in bad weather, fatally led birds astray. Birds – and many of them had the sense to circle around a cluster of skyscrapers in the city – for some unknown reason lost their orientation in space after seeing a single monumental torch. So many birds lost their lives" ^{[14, p. 253]}. Continuing the study of this metaphor, we can find a parallel between these "birds" and the fate of Africans who were buried in the "Negro cemetery". "The bodies of blacks were often hunted by body snatchers who supplied them to surgeons and anatomists" ^{[14, p. 217]}. The same thing eventually happens with the carcasses of birds that crashed against the Statue of Liberty: "Colonel Tassin, the military commander of the island, began to resolutely insist that the dead birds, all of them, be transferred to the needs of science, and not sold. Carcasses – whenever there were at least two hundred – should be sent to Washington, to the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution and other scientific institutions" ^{[14, p. 253]}. This analogy clearly emphasizes the ambivalence of this "place of memory", and if for the whole world the Statue of Liberty is a tourist attraction, for Americans it is a symbol of national ideology, then for Julius it is an insidious lighthouse luring with its false light "water shepherds, wrens, thrushes and nightjars" colliding with the statue and dying – what, However, it is a component only of the individual memory of the hero, being displaced from the social memory.

So, in our study, we stopped at only one – the material – variety of "places of memory" (Nora also distinguishes the immaterial and ideal). "Places of memory" arise as a result of the intersection of memory and history, which leads to the exteriorization of the former "in the form of public institutions and commemorative gestures designed to preserve representations of the past, since the living connection with them has been lost" ^{[1, p. 68]}. The specificity of the perception of these places of memory in the novel "Open City" is emphasized by the contrast of its hero-narrator, Julius, to the rest of the faceless crowd: for them, these loci are nothing more than, returning to the definition of the Burrow, "remains", rarely noticed and even less often causing a desire not just to look, but also to see, while how Julius inextricably connects "places of memory" with both the past and the present. Although his perception is replete with historical knowledge and concrete data, it is much closer to memory, because it is alive and emotional, and also does not perceive the past as a "myth". His perception is what Nora calls "memory–duty" ^{[8, p. 35]}, that is, it is an individual and extremely psychologized memory of the past, bordering on the commitment to memorization. The other two components of the triad of memory in Nor's "Open City" also function: the "memory archive" is created by endless political and social services that multiply "places of memory" not for a functional or commemorative purpose, but simply for the sake of preserving evidence of the past, and people around Julius become carriers of "memory distance", meaning "a radical break with the past" ^{[1, p. 70]}. Teju Cole's novel fully confirms the theory of Pierre Nord, demonstrating how "places of memory" are "meant" only by the subject, therefore any reading of them cannot be universal, but only individualized or collective on the basis of certain social groups united by a common vision – however, in Cole's novel they are rather subject to "collective amnesia", than the ability to emotional and intellectual reception.