By Ikhide R. Ikheloa
Sunday, October 7, 2012.
I don’t think one can write from a
compromised moral position - W.G. Sebald
Random House, Teju Cole’s publisher,
in publicizing his book, Open City, urged
readers to read his prose and be reminded of the German writer W.G. Sebald who
died in 2001. From many of the reviews of Open City,
many took heed and agreed with Random House that the book reminded them,
perhaps too much, of Sebald. The gloves are coming off in installments.
Many readers have noticed the influence and they are muttering about it.
The opinions have varied from supportive references, coy hints of plagiarism to
outright outrage. I previously reviewed the book here. To be fair,
even cursory comparisons of Sebald’s Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn with Cole’s Open City provide plenty of ammunition:
Here
are the first lines of Sebald’s Ring of Saturn:
In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to
an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the
emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.
And in fact my hope was realized, up to a month; for I have seldom felt so
carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly
populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now,
however whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments
of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the
sign of the Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not
only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralyzing horror
that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of
destruction, reaching far back into the past that were evident even in that
remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I
began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total
immobility. It was them that I began in my thoughts to write these pages.
And
here are the opening lines of Cole’s Open City:
And so when I began to go on evening walks last
fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the
city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and
crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park. In the
other direction, going west, it is some ten minutes to Sakura Park, and walking
northward from there brings you toward Harlem, along the Hudson, though traffic
makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible. These walks, a
counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me
farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a
distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway.
In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellowship,
New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.
The
resemblance is more than thematic and stylistic, there are similarities of
substance. Sebald’s narrator starts out as a patient in a hospital, Julius,
Cole’s narrator, is a young doctor in a hospital. It goes on and on; the
similarities are plenty. Clearly Cole owes Sebald a huge debt; the least of
which would have been an honorable mention in an introduction in the book as
his primary influence and inspiration for an admittedly good book. That did not
happen, Cole does not share. The blog Bauzeitgeist observes:
The book is clearly influenced by the
writing of W.G. Sebald, and in many ways alludes to Sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz. Part of the novel takes place in Brussels,
and there is even discussion of King Leopold, discussion of ancestors surviving
war-ravaged Germany, passages about the Holocaust, and a number of other
discrete references to Sebald’s scenery, including mention of crossing the
English Channel–the opening scene of Austerlitz.
Bauzeitgeist is quick to conclude
that “Cole’s novel is very much its own work, however, with a more
contemporary, and American (and African) atmosphere, centered on a far less
anonymous main character, who in addition to his perambulations across
Manhattan and his four-week visit to Brussels, spends many parts of the novel
discussing his family and other relationships, including some wonderful
passages recollecting a childhood in Nigeria, including Lagos”
Jay
Caspian Kang writing here grumbles
about the “influences”:
I know it’s bad manners, but I find
it impossible to talk about Teju Cole’s Open City without bringing up a certain
dead German writer who wrote about taking walks, meeting professors,
eccentrics, immigrants, and people who said things like, “I walked around,
looking for an entrance, thinking of these nearby waters. Later, I would find
the story recounted by the Dutch settler Antony de Hooges in his memorandum
book.” The first 50 pages ofOpen City, in fact,
read so much like W.G. Sebald that my ADD-addled imagination began to paste
photos of funny owls and thoroughly unremarkable, vaguely European landscapes onto
the pages of the book… As the book moved out of New York, it shook off a bit of
the Sebaldian tone and that slow churn of significance, and moved into its own
skin. Which I enjoyed. But Sebald still hung over everything and once I put the
novel down, I wondered why an author would choose to create a voice with such
an immediate, and, frankly, obvious influence.
Thomas
Lewek here unwittingly, perhaps coyly, makes the point,
without as much as mentioning the ‘P’ word, that when you compare Cole’s Open City with Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, there is more than a stylistic resemblance:
Comfort with sensuality exposes
another noticeable disconnection between Cole and Sebald. Sexual relationships exist
in Open City whereas the Sebaldian universe remains
cold, and uncomfortable with the concept. Compare the following two scenes, the
first from Cole, the second from Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn:
In the faux Louis XV bedroom, her
shyness dissolved…Then we both went down together, by the side of the Baroque
bed, both pushed up against its satin shams, and I pulled the linen skirt
upward to her waist.
A couple lay down there, in the bottom of the pit, as I thought: a man
stretched full length over another body of which nothing was visible except the
legs, spread and angled. In the startled moment when that image went through
me, which lasted an eternity, it seemed as if the man’s feet twitched like
those of one just hanged.
(By
the way, Mark O’Connell has a great piece on Sebald in The New Yorker, Why you should read W.G. Sebald.) James Woods,
the respected critic who knows both writers’ works extremely well (he wrote the
Introduction to Sebald’s Austerlitz) observes
in his New York Times review:
So the novel does move in the shadow of W. G.
Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the
form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though
people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation
marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the
narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not
event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness
(which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to
write, to defeat solitude by writing). The first few pages of “Open City” are
intensely Sebaldian, with something of his sly faux antiquarianism.
In
the end, Woods pronounces Open City “a
beautiful, subtle and… original novel.” I agree. Woods notes:
[T]he novel soon begins to throw off its obvious
influences. The prose relaxes into a voice rather than an effect, and it
becomes apparent that Cole is attempting something different from Sebald’s
project. Eschewing the systematic rigor of Sebald’s work, as well as its
atmosphere of fatigued nervous tension, Cole has made his novel as close to a
diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and
repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would
botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching
look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake.
Edwin
Turner in his review agrees also and observes similarly:
“If it needs to be said: Yes, Open City recalls the
work of W.G. Sebald, who crammed his books with riffs on history and melancholy
reflections on memory and identity. And yes, Open City is flâneur literature,
like Sebald (and Joyce, and Bolaño, perhaps). But Cole’s work here does not
merely approximate Sebald’s, nor is it to be defined in its departures. Cole
gives us an original synthesis, a marvelous and strange novel about history and
memory, self and other. It’s a rich text, the sort of book one wants to
immediately press on a friend…”
Not all of Turner’s readers are that
generous or objective. “Squinto13” commenting on Turner’s review says ruefully:
“I remember seeing that Cole had made
a top ten list of “solitude” and that Rings of Saturn was
his numero uno [here]. The Sebald similarity actually bothered me
substantially. I don’t know. As someone who cherishes RoS as one of those great
hidden gems, knowing that Open City is
probably more well-known now than RoS is (or ever was) feels like the
brilliantly original prose/tone of RoS was stolen and re-directed for greater
consumption. Like Google stealing an idea that a smaller company got right or
something. I wouldn’t accuse Cole of intentionally doing this, and the book has
many merits – it’s still probably my favorite book of 2011, though I haven’t
read many beyond some of the other prize winners, and the conversation with
Farouq was top notch and non-Sebaldian – but I can’t help feeling like praise
for this book owes more to Sebald than to Cole himself.”
Eric
Shanfield dismisses it as reading “almost like a parody of Sebald.” The
angriest comment however is on Amazon in the customers’ review section of Open City:
This is less an homage to W. G. Sebald’s novel
Rings of Saturn than a wholesale picking of his literary pocket. I found it
difficult to read a single page without having to put the book down in mortal
outrage because of each passage’s semblance to a similar passage, done better,
in Sebald. I don’t know how people aren’t taking to the streets.
I
honestly believe that talk of plagiarism is over the top (Cole and Sebald are
two distinctly different authors with different messages), but the relationship
between Teju Cole’s works and Sebald needs further plumbing and analysis by
scholars. It is fair to say that Cole appropriated Sebald’s styles and literary
vehicle and adapted them to suit his own unique (yes, unique) literary burden.
You read Sebald’s works and you are taken by how much Cole clings to Sebald
like white on rice. Examine the following passage from Sebald’s Austerlitz and it is hard not to think of Cole’s
prose:
My memory of the fourteen stations
which the visitor to Breendonk passes between the entrance and the exit has
clouded over in the course of time, or perhaps I could say it was clouding over
even on the day when I was in the fort, whether because I did not really want
to see what it had to show or because all the outlines seemed to merge in a
world illuminated only by a few dim electric bulbs, and cut off forever from
the light of nature. Even now, when I try to remember them, when I look
back at the crab-like plan of Breendonk and read the words of the captions – Former Office, Printing Works, Huts, Jacques Ochs Hall, Solitary
Confinement Cell, Mortuary, Relics Store and Museum – the darkness does not lift but
becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything
is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world
is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and
objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never
described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw
mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had
become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the
years, shrunken – and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea
occurred to me at the time – as if they were the mortal frames of those who
once lay there in that darkness. I also recollect now that as I went on
down the tunnel which could be said to form the backbone of the fort, I had to
resist the feeling taking root in my heart, one which to this day often comes
over me in macabre places, a sense that with every forward step the air was growing
thinner and the weight above me heavier. (p 29).
What
do I think? If you ask me, Cole definitely needs to wean himself of Sebald. Too
much of everything becomes more than just influence. Read Cole’s beautiful
essay,Blindspot in Granta (August 20, 2012) about
medical issues with his eyesight, he quotes a passage in Open City and it is as if you are reading Sebald
in Austerlitz because there is a similar experience
that the narrator undergoes. It is eerie. Here is my favorite passage that
reminds me of Cole’s Granta essay because it is uncannily similar to Cole’s
narrative about his eyesight:
I was in some anxiety at the time because I had
noticed, looking up an address in the telephone book, that the sight in my
right eye had almost entirely disappeared overnight, so to speak. Even when I
glanced up from the page open in front of me and turned my gaze on the framed
photographs on the wall, all my right eye could see was a row of dark shapes curiously
distorted above and below— the figures and landscapes familiar to me in every
detail having resolved indiscriminately into a black and menacing
cross-hatching. At the same time I kept feeling as if I could see as clearly as
ever on the edge of my field of vision, and had only to look sideways to rid
myself of what I took at first for a merely hysterical weakness in my eyesight.
Although I tried several times, I did not succeed. Instead, the gray areas
seemed to be spreading, and now and then, opening and closing my eyes
alternately to compare their degrees of clarity, I thought that I had suffered
some impairment on the left as well. Considerably alarmed by what I feared was
the progressive decline of my eyesight, I remembered reading once that until well
into the nineteenth century a few drops of liquid distilled from belladonna, a
plant of the nightshade family, used to be applied to the pupils of operatic
divas before they went on stage, and those of young women about to be
introduced to a suitor, with the result that their eyes shone with a rapt and
almost supernatural radiance, but they themselves could see almost nothing. I
no longer know how I connected this memory with my own condition that dark
December morning, except that in my mind it had something to do with the
deceptiveness of that star-like, beautiful gleam and the danger of its
premature extinction, an idea which filled me with concern for my ability to
continue working and at the same time, if I may so put it, with a vision of
release in which I saw myself, free of the constant compulsion to read and
write, sitting in a wicker chair in a garden, surrounded by a world of
indistinct shapes recognizable only by their faint colors. Since there was no
improvement in my condition over the next few days, I went to London just
before Christmas to see a Czech ophthalmologist who had been recommended to me.
[Sebald, W.G. (2011-12-06). Austerlitz (Modern Library Paperbacks) (Kindle
Locations 579-594). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.]
Cole
is his own best enemy. Cole is an accomplished and important writer and it
bears restating that Open City is a
unique, original novel, albeit one borne on Sebald’s powerful literary
shoulders. I do not believe that Open City would
have been birthed without the benefit of Sebald’s prodigy. On the other hand,
you have to be a really good writer and thinker to do what Cole did with Open City. I do fault Cole on one point: Cole should
have given Sebald credit in the book and not look like he waited to be prompted
by alert readers before showering him with encomiums. What Cole did is perhaps
a more intense version of Ola Rotimi’s adaptation of Oedipus Rex in The Gods are not to Blame. Rotimi is careful to give
due credit in his play. This essay would have been unnecessary if Cole had
given Sebald credit in his book.
Again,
in virtually all of Cole’s works, the Sebald influence is everywhere, it is
hard to miss, and it is obvious that Cole has been studying Sebald for a long
time. There are little things; the grainy black and white photos in Every Day is for the Thief now remind me of those
in Sebald’s books. And all of Cole’s writing today have been travelogues, what
James Wood refers to as flâneur.
Cole
does not like the reference to the Sebald “influences” and the negative
connotation. In this interview he bristles at this question:
It strikes me that if there is a resonance between
Sebald’s work and your own it’s what you’ve just described. A lot of reviewers
have latched onto stylistic similarities. But it seems to me it’s far more the
legacy of traumatic events connecting you than questions of style.
And he responds dismissively with an
air of annoyance and tries to put some distance between him and Sebald:
Absolutely. I’m very grateful for that, and I
completely agree. Stylistically speaking, I take a lot more from poets like
Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, and prose writers like VS Naipaul, JM Coetzee,
Michael Ondaatje and James Salter. It’s fair to say a lot of the cadences in my
sentences are inspired by Naipaul. But few critics pick that up, and somehow
end up latching onto the Sebald thing instead. His sentences are completely
different from mine. His are long, looping and sort of intoxicated, whereas my
stuff reads like court testimony; it’s very laconic. To me, that’s an important
difference. I know I shouldn’t read reviews, but I do, and somebody recently
wrote that it was absolutely disgraceful how I was picking Sebald’s pocket. And
I just think, “Well, I have no response to that…
Well,
Cole owes Sebald a huge debt of gratitude, no ifs, no buts. Since Open City, as if stung by the criticisms, Cole has been
on a charm offensive writing effusive and really good essays on Sebald’s works,
like this one here on his poetry. Writing in the UK Guardian,
Cole lists Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as
his number one novel of solitude (August 24, 2011). He fairly gushes and
breathlessly describes it as a “novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing
but ideas. Framed around the narrator’s long walks in East Anglia, Sebald shows
how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. Formally dexterous, fearlessly
written (why shouldn’t an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the
end I was in tears.”
In
any case, scholars are going to spend an awful amount of time analyzing the
relationship between Cole and Sebald and judging whether it was wholesome, that
is beyond my pay grade. Judging from this scholarly blog piece from the English department of St.
Columbia’s College, history will be kind and just to Cole:
W.G. Sebald’s death in a car crash in 2001 was a
great loss to literature; he was in rich form, and we could have expected
several really fine books in the years to come. We could hardly, however,
expected that a literary descendant would have appeared in 2011 in the form of
a part-Nigerian ‘professional historian of Netherlandish art’ writing about the
perambulations of a part-Nigerian psychiatric doctor as he is wandering around
the island of Manhattan.
But Sebald is the influence that Teju Cole’s first
novel Open City inevitably evokes. It’s not that Cole doesn’t have his own
voice (through his narrator Julius) or that his book isn’t an achieved work of
art in its own right. It’s just that some elements are inescapably ‘Sebaldian’:
the melchancholy shimmer of its beautiful prose, the apparently freewheeling
associations in the mind of the narrator, the fascination with loss and the
layerings of personal, cultural and architectural history. ‘Novel’ also seems a
crude label, as it does for The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. And the
narrator himself is a tricky figure – in Sebald, often slipping behind veils of
irony, in Open City an altogether more ambiguous character than his
highly-educated surface at first suggests.
This testimonial in itself is a major
achievement for Cole, not many writers will ever have that honor. Ironically,
he has done more for Sebald’s works than Sebald could have hoped to do in his
lifetime. Cole has established himself as a great voice and an important gifted
writer; on balance, given his creative adaptation of Sebald’s works as a
vehicle for his own unique ideas, it is a testimony to the force of his voice
that he has come away largely unscathed from the grumblings about his
relationship with Sebald. Lesser thinkers would be doomed today.
I
am a personal admirer of Teju Cole, a groupie even, he has been a great griot
and enriched literature as we know it, for that we must appreciate and honor
him. Cole will be with us for a long time stoking the embers of burning
boundaries, cunningly testing the limits of what is acceptable in literary
discourse. I don’t know of any writer in recent times that has garnered as much
critical attention as Cole. He has done incredibly well and he deserves the
accolades. He does need to come out from under Sebald’s brooding voice. For
now, judging by his recent essays, it will take hours of therapy to wean him from
Sebald’s shadows. Cole has a flair for mild drama. Reminiscent of the
mysterious nocturnal visitor to Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, he
recently wrote a movingessay on his visit to Sebald’s grave. No word on
whether he left flowers and a half-empty bottle of cognac. And oh, did you know
that Teju Cole is the nom de guerre for Yemi Onafuwa? Find out from Margaret
DeRitter in this awesome essay about the writer also known as Teju Cole.
Ikhide R. Ikheloa is a literary critic, writer and columnist, and can be reached at xokigbo@yahoo.com. He blogs at http://xokigbo.wordpress.com/ . You can follow him on Twitter at @Ikhide .