The Symbolism of a Book within a Book in Teju Cole's Open City

One of the images in Teju Cole's novel Open City that functions as a microcosmic representation of the entire novel is The Monster of New Amsterdam, the historical biography written by Julius' patient, V.  In particular, V.'s book echoes many of Julius' reflections on death, and the effects of her research on V. illustrate many of Julius' most profound meditations on grief.

An avid reader, Julius often mentions the books that influence his thoughts, especially those on death and grief, and notices what others are reading.  Dr. Maillotte, who has lost a son, reads Joan Didion's memoir about mourning.  Julius himself reads Freud's Mourning and Melancholia for "literary truths" about grief, and several times mentions Barthes' Camera Lucida.  However, The Monster of New Amsterdam, which Julius reads to better understand his patient's depression, is the only book mentioned which does not exist outside the world of Open City, which suggests that it has a special function in the novel.  Another sign of V.'s importance as a symbol is Julius' comment that V. "was...the rare patient whose problems were not relegated to the back of my mind when I stepped out onto the street" (44).  V. stays in Julius' thoughts because she and her book connect Julius' various musings, and The Monster of New Amsterdam serves as a concise symbol for many of the main themes of Open City, including the harshness of a society which easily forgets the past, the presentation of serious themes with a detached attitude, and the human experiences of grief and death.

The title of V.'s book highlights its most obvious connection with Open City as a whole.  The Monster of New Amsterdam literally refers to one person who led brutal attacks that killed many Native Americans in the area, but it can also suggest that the city of New Amsterdam/New York is itself a monster, always moving forward, with no respect to the tragic destruction on which it is built.  From the brutality of the seventeenth-century Dutch colonists who murdered the Native Americans living on Long Island, to the Syrian diaspora displaced in the 1800s to make room for the World Trade Center, to the destruction of that same site on 9/11, New York builds callously atop the ruins of its previous occupants, and both V. and Julius seem constantly aware of the transience and the darker nature of their home.  For example, Julius remarks as considers the site of the World Trade Center, "And, before that?  What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble?  The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten….Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway" (Cole 59).  The monster-like side of New York's history weighs down emotionally on V., who studies it every day, and on Julius, who seems to reflect on it during each of his walks throughout the novel.

The second parallel between The Monster of New Amsterdam and Open City is the structure of the narrative tone.  The Monster of New Amsterdam is "written in calm and pious language that present[s] mass murder as little more than the regrettable side effect of colonizing the land" (26).  In this description, readers see that the tone of V.'s book parallels the tone of Julius' narration.  Julius' stream-of-consciousness-like narrative is calm, reserved, and distant; it betrays very little about Julius' emotional state.  For example, Julius has no reaction to Dr. Maillotte's use of an offensive word, and he also neglects, very conspicuously, to comment on Moji's rape accusation.  Like The Monster of New Amsterdam, Julius' narration presents serious topics with surprising detachment and little judgment.  

While V. writes calmly and distantly, Julius notes the toll her work has taken on her.  V.'s deep emotional involvement with her research produces a successful and acclaimed book, but it also contributes to her depression, as she struggles to untangle her own reality from the one she studies.  Julius believes in "an epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few" (208), and V. provides the perfect example of this: she seems unable to stop grieving over a tragedy which everyone else has forgotten.  She explains to Julius: "I can't pretend it isn't about my life...it is my life.  It's a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past….And it's not in the past, it is still with us today; at least, it's still with me" (27).  V. is obviously sensitive to the past, and Julius shares this quality; for example, he seems to take offense to the sign at Ellis Island reading "Show Your Kids Where the Aliens Landed," and the one at the Museum of American Finance ("Relive the Day America's Ticker Stopped"), noting the crassness of these "distasteful puns" (58), even though neither he nor his relatives were directly affected by these moments in history.  However, V.'s character takes this to the extreme, letting her studies overwhelm her personal life with sorrow, ultimately leading to her death, which is implied to be a suicide.  In this way, V. confirms Julius' understanding of his patients as individuals who carry the pain of the whole world alone.

        V.'s experiences and worldview, as shaped by her book and academic research, bring her sorrow and a connection to the past so deep that it disturbs her ability to live in the present.  V.'s story is the starkest example of grief in the novel, with all the other characters' tragedies overshadowed by V.'s struggle and probable suicide, and so her story is the one which best encompasses Open City's themes of the variety of forms that grief and loss take.  Moreover, her death is particularly important to Julius because he is likely responsible in part for her death; he refuses to communicate with her while he is on vacation in Brussels.  Julius summarizes Freud:

In mourning that does not proceed normally, mourning in which something has gone wrong…. The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living.  The neatness of the line we had drawn around the catastrophic events of 2001 seemed to me to correspond to this kind of sectioning off.  (208-209)

Although Julius gives the example of 9/11, it is clear that V. falls into the category of abnormal mourning as well, since she certainly is "haunted" and consumed by her sadness.  Julius himself gets a taste of this process of grieving when he hears Chinese music in the park and is flooded with childhood memories, saying, "To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone" (192).  In this passage, Julius admits to his own grief, as his memories transport him back to Nigeria and his boyhood.  For a moment, Julius experiences the nostalgic loss that V. felt constantly (and which is symbolized by her book), and he suggests that to live this way, as "reflection alone," is to be already dead.  These two passages are critical in developing The Monster of New Amsterdam as an image of mourning.  The book is V.'s expression of her own "abnormal" grief, the same sadness so strong that it affects Julius profoundly even though he only feels it briefly, and which also affects the city as a whole in the wake of 9/11.  

The Monster of New Amsterdam ties together many of Julius' rambling thoughts into one concrete symbol.  The book's title calls attention to Julius' frequent musings on the history of New York and his view of the city as a "palimpsest" where buildings and communities are swiftly and coldly erased to make room for new ones.  Julius' brief comment on the tone of the book suggests a stylistic similarity between The Monster of New Amsterdam and Open City itself in their shared reluctance to pass judgment or make passionate emotional claims about their serious content.  V.'s book is the defining element of her character, especially since the reader knows so little else about her.  Her book and research partly cause her depression and death, making way for a connection between The Monster of New Amsterdam and Open City's discussions of mourning, especially Julius' encounters with abnormal grieving in his society, which seems too quick to move on, and his patients, who seem unhealthily burdened with sorrow.  Overall, the unique image of V.'s historical biography connects many broad themes in Open City through a single concrete symbol.