Music and Latency in Teju Cole’s Open City: Presences of the Past

This article sets out to explore configurations of literary musicality in Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), showing how intermedial relations between literature and music are linked to the novel’s exploration of transcultural histories of violence. Supporting but also displacing the larger verbal narrative, intermedial references in Open City produce a surplus of meaning, an unruly remainder. They do so by introducing musical frictions that resist and undermine the structural coherence of the text and gesture toward something nonlinear and latent. Modelled on the form of the fugue, the novel’s contrapuntal structure reveals the disjunctions, latencies, and elisions within hegemonic orders of knowledge and destabilize established notions of community, memory, and cosmopolitanism. To afford a fuller understanding of what we call the novel’s “intermedial poetics,” our essay will first provide a brief definition of the concept of intermediality, showing how references to music in the novel are connected to concepts of latency and atmosphere. Following this, we will investigate configurations of literary musicality in Open City. We argue that the contrapuntal structure of the novel clashes with the protagonist-narrator’s contrapuntal reading of urban spaces and histories, asking readers to rethink conventionalized notions of black diasporic subjects.