Teju Cole’s Photographic Afterimages
Karen Jacobs
Abstract
Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) directly engages W.G. Sebald’s concerns about the traumatic displacements that arose from the Second World War and its aftermath through his employment of photographic afterimages. Afterimages describe the belated, psychically regulated optic that encapsulates Cole’s vision of contemporary African migrations, an optic that expands upon the phenomenon in which a secondary visual sensation occurs after its primary source of visual stimulation has ended. The belated visibility of Cole’s afterimages is a matter not merely of the mechanics of vision but also of historical and literary precedent. Indeed, Cole’s capacity to imagine and to image the African diaspora is complicated specifically by the historical and literary precedent of the Holocaust and Jewish diaspora and the crises of witness they instigate—a template whose broadly global inscription arguably has shaped what can be known of these latter events and experiences, and constrains how and to what extent they can be represented. As icons of largely unwritten histories and lost or attenuated pasts, Sebald’s photographic images and discourses become the pictorial and imaginative fulcrums against which Cole fashions what might be called, in both a photographic and epistemological sense, a ‘negative’ pictography. Cole’s distantiating homage to Sebald’s strictly measured but still constant faith in the representability of marginal lives reflects the scope of Cole’s challenge to what can be securely known and represented of the African diaspora. In the very moments when we avert our gaze from these photographs’ constitutive grains, dots, and lines, we find Judaic history texturing our vision of Africa and vice versa.
Résumé
Open City, de Teju Cole (2011) rejoint totalement les préoccupations de W.G. Sebald concernant les déplacements traumatiques qui ont eu lieu après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, par l’utilisation qu’il fait d’images photographiques rémanentes. Par images rémanentes, on entend le processus optique tardif et psychiquement régulé qui reflète la vision qu’a Teju Cole des migrations africaines contemporaines, processus basé sur le phénomène selon lequel une seconde sensation visuelle se produit après que la première source de stimulation visuelle a pris fin. La visibilité tardive des images rémanentes de Cole a à voir non seulement avec la dimension mécanique de la vision mais aussi avec tout un passé historique et littéraire. En effet, la facilité avec laquelle Teju Cole imagine et met en images la diaspora africaine se heurte spécifiquement à l’héritage historique et littéraire de la Shoah et de la diaspora juive et aux crises de témoignage que celles-ci ont engendré, un modèle dont l’ancrage quasi planétaire a sans doute façonné ce que l’on sait de ces événements et de ces expériences, et, ce faisant, imposé des contraintes à
leur représentation et à la portée que peut avoir celle-ci. En tant qu’icônes d’histoires individuelles pour la plupart jamais écrites et de passés perdus ou atténués, les images photographiques de Sebald et les discours sur ces images deviennent les pivots picturaux et imaginaires contre lesquels Teju Cole bâtit ce que l’on peut appeler sa pictographie « négative », au sens à la fois photographique et épistémologique du terme. L’hommage distancié qu’il rend à Sebald et à sa foi toujours mesurée mais néanmoins constante dans la possibilité de représenter les vies marginales reflète l’étendue du défi que relève Cole quant à ce que l’on peut réellement savoir et représenter de la diaspora africaine. Au moment même où notre regard évite les grains et les points constitutifs de ces photographies, nous nous trouvons confrontés à une histoire judaïque qui imprègne notre vision de l’Afrique et vice versa.
Keywords
Teju Cole; Open City; W.G. Sebald; afterimage; photography; Jewish diaspora; African diaspora; Holocaust; Martin Munkácsi; memorial poetics.
“To be alive […] was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone” (192).—Teju Cole
“Cole Inverted”, Karen Jacobs, 2014
The historical meaning of “open city,” the title of Teju Cole’s 2011 novel, remains unglossed for nearly a hundred pages until our Nigerian narrator Julius, during an extended visit to Brussels, explains that “[h] ad Brussels’s rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden” (97)— Dresden being the German city that became synonymous with total obliteration after the Allied bombing
campaign undertaken on February 22, 1945. The term “open city” has at least two recognized meanings, the first of which signals that during war time a given city has abandoned all defensive efforts and has opened itself to occupation, with the expectation that its enemies will spare it from further destruction of persons and property; the second meaning is colloquial, evoking a space defined by absent, ambiguous, or fluid borders that remain receptive to exploration, change, and re-interpretation.1 In 1940, Oslo and
Paris joined Brussels in declaring themselves to be open cities of the first kind and materially preserved themselves. To appreciate adequately the scale of the obliteration wrought by the Allied bombing campaign of Dresden on that day in 1945 remains, of course, an impossible task, although W.G. Sebald attempts it when he recounts that “there were 42.8 cubic meters [of rubble] for every inhabitant of Dresden” after the bombing (On the Natural History of Destruction 4). And yet such numbers numb the mind. Susceptible to capture neither by statistics nor by the clichés, as Sebald names them, to which eyewitnesses resorted in the face of their complete incomprehension, he observes:
The apparently unimpaired ability—shown in most of the eyewitness reports—of everyday language to go on functioning as usual raises doubts of the authenticity of the experiences they record. The death by fire within a few hours of an entire city, with all its buildings and its trees, its inhabitants, its domestic pets, its fixtures and fittings of every kind, must inevitably have led to overload, to paralysis of the capacity to think and feel in those who succeeded in escaping. The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals. (On the Natural History of Destruction, [25-6])
My turn to Sebald to understand a passage in Cole might seem capricious were it not for my contention that Cole’s novel itself initiates an extended, highly detailed, and philosophically dense conversation with a writer now acknowledged as one of our most influential interpreters of the traumatic displacements that arose from the Second World War. As the above quotation, and indeed, Sebald’s entire oeuvre make clear, those displacements are his particular subject, along with the “paralysis of the capacity to think and feel” those displacements widely occasioned.2 The photographic documentation and biographical accounts
of these displacements as well their re-imagination through a “synoptic and artificial view”—Sebald’s optic code, I suggest, for the distinctive imaginative province of the literary—are arguably as integral to Cole’s project as they are to Sebald’s. Sebald’s assertion that the “everyday language” produced in the aftermath of siege necessarily impugns the authenticity of that language and its speakers, clearly is a response to Dresden’s historical extremity. But in his novels, Sebald more widely demonstrates his reservations about the limited expressibility of traumatic dislocation through his attention to the World Wars’ larger cast of surviving casualties—those émigrés, migrants, nomads, and exiles who in so many ways prefigure Cole’s.
I argue that Cole directly engages Sebald’s concerns about such deformations of language, memory, and 1. While the term dates from World War I, it only comes into regular usage during World War II. See the Oxford
English Dictionary entry for “open city.”
2. While Open City references all of Sebald’s texts, I confine myself here to Sebald’s two Holocaust-related novels, The Emigrants and Austerlitz.
representation through his employment of what I call afterimages. By afterimages, I refer to the belated, psychically regulated optic that encapsulates Cole’s vision of contemporary African migrations—a belatedness the cultural and collective character of which exceeds such models as hauntology that fundamentally reference individual psychology.3 By afterimage, I refer not only to the optical phenomenon
in which a secondary visual sensation occurs after its primary source of visual stimulation has ended.4
By afterimage, I also refer to an expanded, textually mediated, imaginative optics in which a secondary image (and concomitant understanding) emerges after its primary stimulus has been withdrawn. We find something quite like this when Julius views enlarged photographs of the lynchings of African-Americans early in the novel and, some fifty pages later, startles at the sight of the body of a lynched man that resolves merely into a canvas fluttering on a scaffold (18, 74-5). But the variety of afterimages in Open City can’t be confined to this template. The belatedness of Cole’s afterimages, as the lynching segments illustrate, is a matter not merely of the mechanics of vision but also of historical and literary precedent; indeed, in Cole’s afterimages the three (the optical, literary, and historical) are condensed and metaphorized visually. Cole’s capacity to imagine and to image the African diaspora is complicated specifically by the historical and literary precedent of the Holocaust and Jewish diaspora and the crisis of witness they instigate—a fraught and over-determined template whose broadly global inscription arguably has shaped what can be known of these latter events and experiences, and constrains how and to what extent they can be represented. Under such conditions of crisis, as Cathy Caruth among others has taught us, “experience” categorically ruptures into complexly estranged forms of epistemology, temporality, and subjectivity, a process to which we ourselves are invited to bear witness in the text.5
Just as in optics, wherein the afterimage may visually invert or distort the palette and shape of its source, Cole’s afterimages consist in the shape-shifting echoes of the iconography and narratives of the Holocaust and its aftermath, which collectively form his afterimages’ chief generative source.6 In the
very moments when we avert our gaze from these afterimages’ constitutive grains, dots, and lines, we find Judaic history texturing our vision of Africa and vice versa.
Cole, I suggest, is hardly alone in negotiating the weight of the legacy of the Holocaust and Jewish diaspora; I follow Aamir Mufti’s contention that this legacy has been distilled into “a set of paradigmatic narratives, conceptual frameworks, motifs, and formal relationships concerned with the very question of minority existence, which are then disseminated globally in the emergence, under 3. The psychic generation of the afterimage from a vestigial past against which it differentiates itself must arouse associations with what has come to be known as hauntology. In hauntology, the phantom dead mislead their haunted subjects about the past in order to ensure that their secrets remain hidden; because their influence is psychically compartmentalized, it remains resistant to integration by the subject. Hauntology, I suggest however, remains too anchored in individual psychology to account for the collective and historical belatedness intrinsic to Cole’s afterimages. See Abraham and Torok; Colin Davis; Jacques Derrida; and Gabriele Schwab.
4. In the after image, “retinal impressions persist after the removal of a stimulus, believed to be caused by the continued activation of the visual system. The afterimage may be positive, corresponding in colour or brightness to the original image, or negative, being less bright or of colours complementary to the original.” Encyclopedia
Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/8548/afterimage.
5. For a detailed account of these forms of estrangement see Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative and History. See also Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History; and Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma.
6. The novel’s recurrent black and white palette itself (as ubiquitous as Sebald’s reliable grey) offers a dramatic example of such inversion—one that is inescapably racialized while linking racial stratification itself back to photography.
colonial and semicolonial conditions, of the forms of modern social, political, and cultural life” (2).7
From Mufti’s postcolonial perspective, Jewish minoritization and exile became exemplary processes that evolved into discursive and experiential templates for comparable future non-Jewish groups. Cole’s project must be understood as a sustained engagement with these narratives, frameworks, motifs, and relationships within and against which he struggles to portray migrant African lives. Cole’s afterimages, then, present themselves as the what-can-be-seenness of the African diaspora after the West’s long, collective contemplation of the Holocaust and its legacies. Because Sebald’s work considers these subjects so intimately within the space of its own photographic and epistemological practices, it should not surprise that Cole’s takes Sebald’s mnemonic evocation and displacement to be a central task.
Cole’s optically and historically belated afterimages, then, are the legitimate heirs of Sebald’s seeing yet unseeing eyewitnesses of Dresden’s destruction and their bifurcated vision; but they are heirs that carry the distinctive and added burdens of bearing their own and others’ histories. Indeed, those others’ histories make up the prism through which they may dominantly view or comprehend their own histories. The afterimage remains Cole’s singular response to these conditions, a response that brings African lives into momentary, refracted visibility. Teju Cole is a practicing photographer as well as a writer who included numerous photographs in his first novel, Every Day is for the Thief (2007). Because Open City follows Sebald so closely in every other possible respect, the absence of photographs in his second novel must be taken as an active assertion about the ways photography’s particular representational authority jeopardizes the subject matter under discussion in the later text.8
Afterimages may be regarded as a tentative imaginative resolution to this implicit representational challenge—the visual correlative to Open City’s evacuated sense of home, and the iconic vestiges of the novel’s absent psychic and geographical center.
Similar to Sebald’s eyewitnesses, Cole’s afterimages render mimetic representation at once suspect and in presumptive need of (literary) supplementation. But like the African diaspora they reference, Cole’s afterimages are geographically exploded across several continents, while the epistemological questions they pose recast the need for supplementarity in a new register. The partial or traumatically inaccessible truths embedded in Cole’s afterimages arguably transform Sebald’s affective stance of abiding ambiguity into Cole’s full-blown sense of representational crisis. In response to that crisis, Cole abjures the temptation to make the African diaspora photographically or mimetically present (as 7. Mufti further notes the contradictory set of representational demands that initially were confined to Jewishness but subsequently were expanded to include other minoritized and exiled populations: on the one hand, “anxieties about the undermining of the universalizing claims and ambitions embedded in the constitutive narratives of modern culture, with the Jews coming to be seen as slavishly bound to external Law and tradition, ritualistic and irrational, and incapable of the maturity and autonomy called for in the development of enlightened, modern subjectivity; on the other, as a figure of transnational range and abilities, it raises questions about deracination, homelessness, abstraction, supra-national idenitifications, and divided loyalties” (38).
8. Cole’s recent Twitter Feed that accompanies his account of photographing the conflict in the Ukraine demonstrates his ongoing skepticism about the medium and how closely he associates it with violence and death. His three most recent quotes about photography include: “For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image...”––Barthes; “It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”––Berger; “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”––Sontag. https://twitter.com/tejucole/timelines/429083329502007298
Sebald does in his depictions of the Jewish diaspora). Instead, Cole confines his imaginative resolution of the African diaspora’s representational impossibility to photographic discourse alone. Comparably, but in a narrative register, he turns repeatedly to the aporia—narrative elisions at critical junctures wherein Julius’s motives and self-understanding are conspicuously withheld, often along with key bits of narrative information. This representational gesture reiterates of the scope of the African diaspora’s representational impossibility.
Open City’s recurrent losses and silences are of a piece with those aporias and have a similar foundational stature: from the most public and collective of losses (beginning with the negative space of Ground Zero, to Native Americans’ loss of their collective past), to the most private (from the silence of Julius’s oma about her rape in Russian-occupied Berlin through which his mother was conceived, to his own silence about his role in the rape alleged by Moji Kasali, the sister of his boyhood friend). The novel’s immigrant characters—Julius included—furthermore remain psychically lost in America and abroad, a phenomenon that may have commenced with their serial spatial dislocations but which ends with the loss of “home” as a viable imaginable space of habitation, even (or especially) when longed-for returns are actually accomplished. Consequently, we witness the transformation of their sense of being lost from a spatial into an ontological category. (Symptomatically, the Brussels internet café worker Farouq who wrote a Master’s thesis on Gaston Bachelard—the great phenomenologist of space and home—has suffered his work to be rejected without reason.)
Whereas Sebald’s first person narrators typically function as semi-transparent amanuenses for the stories of others, Cole’s first person narrator Julius more openly foregrounds the psychological investments, defenses, and biases that color his accounts of others, such that they, too, never appear unproblematically present. True, Julius has “learned the art of listening” from his mentor Dr. Saito, but more crucially, he has mastered “the ability to trace out a story from what was omitted” (9). The ability to read silences, omissions, erasures, and absences should be regarded as a pedagogical model for Cole’s readers. These aporias collectively point to the incongruities that a Jewish template imposes on African lives that necessarily must fail seamlessly to reproduce its terms. Such incongruities mount up into an abyss. Afterimages imaginatively fill some of the holes such importunate parallels rend in Open City’s narrative fabric, but perhaps only to a degree sufficient to indicate the ephemerality of their restorative prospects.
And yet Cole can only have been drawn to such a densely woven engagement with Sebald’s subject matter and representational methods by virtue of their still common projects and shared historiographic assumptions and practices. Where Sebald explores traumatic dislocation at mid-century, Cole picks up that subject at the millennium, in the aftermath of 9/11; and, where Sebald concentrates on the Jewish diaspora and the wide spectrum of those it touched across Europe and America, Cole devotes his novel to a range of African migrations chiefly to American shores. Because those African migrations derive from such myriad, distinctive, and dispersed national contexts and crises, they lack the ready organizing framework and exhaustive documentation that rank among the equivocal legacies of the Second World War. Cole’s novel arguably steps in to provide such a framework, in which America and its promises of freedom and social mobility serve as a key imaginative fulcrum.
since Sebald’s work is preoccupied precisely with those lives that resist capture through conventional documentary tools and perspectives. The belated optics of Cole’s afterimages don’t arise through the intertwining of these two historically distinctive sources or stimuli—namely, the tangled, loosely affiliated stories of Sebald’s post-Holocaust diaspora and the equally tangled, loosely affiliated stories of Cole’s contemporary African diaspora—but through their fruitful collisions. Because both Sebald’s and Cole’s projects are consecrated to imagining dimensions of lives that have eluded public record, the distinctions between the post-war and millennial contexts as much as the distinctions between the historical and the literary instead refract into the irreducibly complex medium of story. The traces of Sebald’s oeuvre thus reverberate through and texture Open City’s itinerant strands in an unpredictable but fundamentally literary spectrum of ways.
Cole’s Open City is an elliptical, partial, first person retrospective of Julius’ upbringing in Lagos, Nigeria, by a German mother (born of rape in Russian-occupied Berlin in May 1945) and a Nigerian father. It selectively toggles between Julius’ childhood in Lagos and his attendance of a Nigerian Military School in the Zaria of the 1980s, and his present-tense completion of a psychiatry fellowship in post-9/11 New York City. The novel juxtaposes contemporary stories of displacement, loss, and also unanticipated accomplishment with histories documenting the reliable brutality and ignorance of the powerful; collectively, the stories narrate a grim continuity of human cruelty, suffering, and injustice across centuries and national frames, as well as the limited ideological and aesthetic strategies through which survivors wrest what victories or consolations they may. Throughout, the legacy of the Holocaust—a seemingly inevitable benchmark of catastrophe and displacement—remains a complex historical touchstone for many of the novel’s characters. Open City moves simultaneously across three broad structural planes: Julius’ wandering itineraries, both local and global, although they are mainly confined to New York City; the spectrum of historical, psychological, and sensory associations these wanderings evoke, along with their densely chronotopic layers; and Julius’ chance encounters with a large cast of mostly African immigrants whose brief but densely interweaved biographies are inextricable from the spectrum of national catastrophes that have shaped them.
Cole’s engagement with Sebald takes the form of an elaborate, sometimes point-by-point conversation undertaken at the levels of narrative organization, themes, and style; historiographic methods and sites; psychological and epistemological understandings; perspectival stances and imagery. Both Sebald’s and Cole’s narrators are erudite, cosmopolitan men possessed of a seemingly endless, sometimes pedantic knowledge of historical and architectural sites that their shared habit of wandering readily provides occasions for articulating; few places in America besides New York City could afford a spectrum of sites historically saturated enough to bear comparison with Sebald’s Europe. The two writers’ shared historical elaboration of those palimpsestic sites further affiliates them, as does their joint inclusion of “found” object—diaries, memorandum books, field reports, government records—that provide their respective narratives with seeming access to restricted materials that collectively buttress their documentary aesthetics. Cole also echoes Sebald’s imagery and memorable details expressed through photography, optics, creatures of flight, memory, cosmology, and architecture (to name the most prominent). The narrator of Sebald’s Austerlitz speaks of “a picture painted […] towards the end of the
sixteenth century during what is now called the Little Ice Age” (13); Cole’s Julius observes that “[t]here had been a natural little ice age in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, and so, why not a little warm age in our own time?” (28). The narrator of Sebald’s The Emigrants visits a German graveyard full of uncommemorated Jews (222-25); Cole’s Julius visits the Negro Burial Ground of uncommemorated slaves now interred under the pavement of lower Manhattan (220-221); and so on.
With Sebald as his primary interlocutor,9 Cole’s afterimages might best be understood as visual
conversations—conversations that depend however so much upon translation that they must be grasped, following David Simpson, “not as the fantasy of dialogism but as the impasse of blocked communication” (151). To be sure, Open City can be read without any knowledge of Sebald’s texts, but such a reading would miss a world. It is surely telling that so many reviewers of the novel have commented on Sebald’s extensive presence in the text, and Cole himself has written several essays on the importance of Sebald to his work.10 Granted, Cole’s afterimages are not only informed by his complex debt to Sebald, although
Sebald’s absent but implicitly referenced photographs linger with afterimages’ evanescent force. In Sebald, the referents of individual photographs may or may not be verifiable, but the atmosphere and iconography of historicity they create form a collaborative basis for readerly identifications that I suggest ideally conscript the reader into a momentary, ethical “face to face” encounter with the past. As icons of largely unwritten histories and lost or attenuated pasts, Sebald’s photographic images and discourses become the pictorial and imaginative fulcrums against which Cole fashions what might be called, in both a photographic and epistemological sense, a ‘negative’ pictography registered through afterimages—a pictography that evinces an inverse faith in the ethical outcomes of such encounters. The past in Cole, that is to say, remains an intractably traumatic and inaccessible arena, the very space of knowledge’s failure. Cole’s distantiating homage to Sebald’s strictly measured but still constant faith in the representability of marginal lives reflects the scope of Cole’s challenge to what can be securely known and represented of the African diaspora. He extends that challenge not in the (widely mischaracterized) sense attributed to Adorno that to such calamity no representation can be equal,11 but rather in the sense
that we are destined to see in any photographic record of the African diaspora (a photographic record 9. Cole’s range of reference and affiliated conversation partners rival Sebald’s. His textual references include Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Altenberg’s Telegrams of the Soul, Jelloun’s The Last Friend, Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Nabokov’s Pnin, Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, Langland’s
Piers Plowman, Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, and Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, and The Ego of the Id;
also mentioned are Badiou and Serres, Mohamed Choukri, Gilles Deleuze, Averroës, Benedict Anderson, Paul de Man, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, Borges, and Jane Austen. Open City furthermore references films, including The Last King of Scotland, and El Espíritu de la Colmena; music, including Mahler, ehru players, jazz, Anglican Songs of Praise, and Michael Jackson; artists, including the paintings of John Brewster, Cézanne, El Greco and Courbet; and photographer Martin Munkácsi.
10. To be sure, Cole’s work is compared to other writers in addition to Sebald, but the recurrence of comparison of his work with Sebald’s is telling. Syjuco writes, “In places Cole’s prose recalls W.G. Sebald’s.” Foden contends that Julius recalls “the roving ‘“I’” of European romantic modernism, which has found its most eloquent recent exponent in the work of W.G. Sebald,” Kakutani laments that Julius’ “glimpses of the city turn out to be fragments in a meandering stream-of-consciousness narrative that often reads like an ungainly mash-up of W. G. Sebald’s work and the Camus novel ‘L’Etranger.’” Wood maintains that Open City is written in a prose that “will remind you” of “W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee,” and the novel “move[s] in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work” although “it becomes apparent that Cole is attempting something different from Sebald’s.”
11. See Michael Rothberg’s argument about this mischaracterization in his chapter “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe”, 27ff.
that in any case scarcely exists) a projection of Jewish frames of reference and understanding. * * *
To speak of afterimages broadly in this way is not only to acknowledge the poverty of the term “influence” for capturing the degree and character of Cole’s engagement with Sebald, but also to understand the visual genealogy of that engagement—a genealogy that culminates, however paradoxically, in visual and specifically photographic absence. It’s significant that Julius’ first non-metaphorical reference to photography occurs late, in Chapter Nine, when he concludes a brief sexual encounter in Brussels by going home to read Camera Lucida (110-11), Barthes’ well-known phenomenological exploration of photography in which a picture of Barthes’ by-then-deceased mother, the text’s avowed emotional center, is famously withheld. The absence of the Winter Garden photograph (as it’s widely known) which Barthes shares only ekphrastically with readers introduces us to questions of visual discretion and the sacred, as well as to the natively haunting quality of photographs, in ways that clearly inform Cole’s own visual commitments.12 Later in the novel Julius belatedly notes the absence of photographs in his
mentor Dr. Saito’s apartment, an absence he partly fills with his distant knowledge of Dr. Saito’s long-term male partner, now dead, a partner whom Dr. Saito never discussed but for two oblique references (171-2). Photographic representation, we can infer from these quite different examples, is dangerous: just so easily may its evidentiary character slip the grasp of intimate and sentimental bonds and be overtaken by the assault of official meanings, cultural taboos, and public incomprehensions. Photographic absence and erasure thus acquire a paradigmatic status for the novel’s weave of geographic sites and micronarratives, eliding documentary trails of evidence, history, and memory as they go. To bring some of these images into the text (as I do below) is therefore to risk each of these dangers, not only in the name of documentary truths, but also in the name of what Sebald (to recall) named “a synoptic and artificial view”—his appropriately optic construction of what I call his memorial poetics.
Cole’s afterimages should be distinguished from those of Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003), the photographer (and childhood member of Hitler Youth) who dedicated his adult life to documenting the remnants of Nazism and the Holocaust. To the extent that Bäcker’s photographs focus on the minute and incidental traces of concentration camps, forced labor, and other remnants of Nazi presence left behind in the Austrian landscape, they are very much literal afterimages in the sense that they document the aftermath or afterlife of significant historical sites.
12. For a reading that explores the role of absence in Barthes’ Camera Lucida further, see Rabaté’s chapter “Roland Barthes: Ghostwriter of Modernity.”
Heimrad Bäcker, two details from Mauthausen, the largest concentration camp in Austria, 1970-75. Afterimages in Cole by contrast are of a psychological order that resist straightforward paths to visualization; they emerge in the aftermath of a crisis of witness. This psychological dimension flows from Open City’s diminished faith not only in what we can know of another, but more tellingly, in what we can know of the self; and this level of epistemological doubt opens a hole, as it were, in numerous places in the visualizable narrative fabric. I use afterimage in preference to aporia as a governing term, however, precisely because such holes are “filled”—not in kind but in substance—with the vestiges afterimages reliably conjure. Because these vestiges categorically differ from their visual sources, they are therefore more difficult to track or tie seamlessly to a narrative of origins. Like the movements of Cole’s narrator, Julius, they trace idiosyncratic, nonlinear paths. The afterimage thus undergoes a transformation of kind, and yet it retains within it a trace (or several distinct and independent traces) of its origins. To the extent that it persists independently of those origins, the afterimage should be understood as a temporal as well as visual event, one defined—much like the traumatic incidents upon which the afterimage is often predicated—by an incremental delay or belatedness. Meanwhile, its lack of concrete materiality throws it back on the resources of the psyche either to shepherd it into the realm of sense and knowability or else to abandon it as an (potentially insoluble) enigma. Subjectivity itself, furthermore, appears to coincide with the psychologized, circumambulatory, and eventmental afterimage, one that fuses the self with a visual corollary or twin: Julius muses that “to be alive […] was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone” (192). In opposition to Western literary convention, I propose, Julius’s engagement with afterimages leads him to contend not with a dark but a light double who is inscribed within this mirrored yet indivisible model of subjectivity.
Open City leads up to its most photographically resonant articulation of subjectivity toward the end of the novel when Julius arrives at New York’s Cloisters, where he connects Paracelsus’ view, that beings’ inner realities must be expressed in their outer forms, to the vocation of psychiatry and its dependence upon “external Signs as clues to inner realities (238).13 Julius tells a friend about his
experiences as a psychological resident who regularly treats migrant and diasporic patients:
13. Julius notes that these sorts of readings of the body or bearing led to phrenology, eugenics, racism, and yet they also mirror the diagnostic struggle of doctors.
I viewed each patient as a dark room [….] For the troubles of the mind, diagnosis is a trickier art, because even the strongest symptoms are sometimes not visible. It is especially elusive because the source of our information about the mind is itself the mind, and the mind is able to deceive itself. […] But what are we to do when the lens through which the symptoms are viewed is often, itself, symptomatic: The mind is opaque to itself, and it’s hard to tell where, precisely, these areas of opacity are. Ophthalmic science describes an area at the back of the bulb of the eye, the optic disk, where the million or so ganglia of the optic nerve exit the eye. It is precisely there, where too many of the neurons are clustered, that the vision goes dead. […T]he work of psychiatrists […] was a blind spot so broad that it had taken over most of the eye. (238-39)
Julius’ view of psychiatric encounters with these “dark room[s]” reads like the progress of photographic development gone wrong, in which the task of midwifing recondite symptoms into visibility is already a “trickier art” than reading the symptoms of physical illness on the body’s surfaces. To subsequently translate those visible symptom into legibility, however, ambiguously extends this virtual darkroom of “the mind”—whose mind?—from the psyche of the patient to the interpreter, where the millions of ganglia that converge upon “the bulb of the eye” overload it with so much information that it yields only an outsized “blind spot.” Meanwhile, this indeterminate mind’s capacity for deception and self-reference (pictured as the symptomatic and photographic “lens through which the symptoms are viewed”) seems destined to transform all that eludes its blind spot into a visual constellation that intermingles (but fails to focalize) self and other. This post- or anti-photographic visual process with its implicit failure of mimesis arguably defines Cole’s view of what may be known of self and other—be it psychiatrist and patient, Cole and Sebald, or African and Jewish migrant. In Julius’s formulation, blindness emerges as the larger field from which sight (such as it is) constructs itself. Because such a vision is produced rather than received by the subject’s eye, we may recognize it as the space in which the afterimage emerges.
A genealogical sequence of afterimages occurs in Chapter Twelve, when Julius visits a photography show featuring the work of Martin Munkácsi, the Hungarian journalist and photographer who worked in Germany from 1928-1934 until he immigrated to the United States. Although Munkácsi’s Jewish identity (and, thus, his reason for emigrating) isn’t revealed until the end of the segment, the whole of it is shot through with references to the Holocaust and its aftermath. Julius converses with a man whose account of his boyhood departure from Berlin in 1937 silently indicates his Jewish ancestry; and Julius shares the exhibition space with several Hasidic Jews, whose presence leads him to speculate about their response—“stronger than hate?”—to Munkácsi’s German photographic subjects from the 1930s. Yet more important than the speculation they elicit are the powerful aversion and withdrawal the Hasids also prompt. Julius reports: “I couldn’t bear to look at them, or at what they were looking at, any longer” (154). In addition to triangulating the putative gazes of Munkácsi, Julius, and the Hasids (the visual convergence of which instigates the afterimage that follows), Julius’ response also suggests his ambivalent over-identification with those who were the direct and collateral victims of the Holocaust. And, despite his conscious intention to push these images and identifications away, they return in the visual forms of the old Berliner and his wife whom Julius glimpses in the museum shop on his way out. The couple thus personifies Cole’s afterimages, born of the crisis of witness the exhibit has instigated.
Together with the concluding disclosure of Munkácsi’s Jewishness, the segment I suggest re-focalizes Jewish identity tout court into the novel’s defining afterimage, ubiquitously if variably personified, and projected through Julius’ triangulated lens. Julius responds to the visual record of the rise of the German military state that forms the centerpiece of the Munkácsi exhibit by articulating the view better known as Holocaust’s exceptionalism: the assertion that the tragedy of the Holocaust and its diasporic aftermath have no historical precedents and should therefore be considered as sui generis events that remain ethically beyond the comparative reach of other genocides, and perhaps even of other diasporas. “The story, told countless times,” Julius observes about the Nazis’ extermination of European Jewry, “retains its power to quicken the heart; always, one holds out the secret hope […] that the record of those years will show wrongs on a scale closer to the rest of human history” (my emphasis, 154).14
How, the reader must wonder at this point, can Julius’ own or other Africans’ experience of displacement and suffering compete with a history so conceived?15
That the implicit comparison between the Jewish and African diasporas is the defining subtext of the episode is made clear by the order in which Julius encounters Munkácsi’s photographs in the exhibit (all of which, significantly, are reproduced only in ekphrastic form): the first image of three African boys is quickly overtaken by the preponderance of images that narrate the rise of Nazi Germany (the historical weight of which also overshadows those American photos that come after them); Cole drives home the ways African lives are thus eclipsed by employing the narrative and pictorial language of absence to depict African subjects. The episode begins with the studied cancellation of Julius own identity, whose use of an expired student ID to gain entry to the exhibit resonates with the identificatory evacuation he immediately observes pictorially in Munkácsi’s first photograph. Julius describes the image, which dates from 1930, as “three African boys running into the surf in Liberia”—and it is the very picture, he notes, that inspired Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the decisive moment (152). If we flush the absent image into visibility we find that it is decisive, too, for our reading of the segment.
14. Despite the central place the Holocaust and its aftermath occupy in Sebald’s oeuvre there is evidence that he also departed from the exceptionalist orthodoxy. We know this precisely because of the kind of attention he pays to the suffering wrought by such events as the Allied bombing of Dresden and other German cities. Sebald’s essay on the allied firebombing of Dresden in “A Natural History of Destruction,” first delivered as a series of lectures in Zurich in 1997 and later published in America as a book of that title in 2003, might be read as consistent with the views held by some Germans that there was no moral difference between Auschwitz and the allied firebombing, but I believe that culturally charged view fundamentally mistakes his purpose. Instead, the essay seems consistent with Sebald’s broader effort to bring to public consciousness a heretofore unspoken, invisible history outside the official, Manichean frameworks that have previously defined it. See On the Natural History of Destruction. 15 From Mufti’s perspective, it no longer seems disproportionate that the longest conversation in the novel is devoted to a discussion between Julius and two Arab immigrants to Brussels—Farouq and Khalil—about the political contradictions stemming from Holocaust exceptionalism--contradictions that inform largely Western understandings of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
It’s true, Khalil said. Europe is not free. […] If you say anything about Israel, you have your mouth plugged with the six million. […] Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? And what about the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews? […] But I reject this idea [of unique suffering]. It is not a unique suffering. What about the twenty million under Stalin? It isn’t better if you are killed for ideological reasons. Death is death, so, I’m sorry, the six million are not special. (122-123)
Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, circa 1930s
In Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika (the photograph’s full title), the picture’s subjects appear like inverse chiaroscuros—akin to photonegatives of light-skinned bodies, or tangible absences. The boys’ overlapping silhouettes, nearly unblemished by detail, seem to cut a collective hole into the picture. The lack of bodily detail also renders the direction of the boys’ movements hard to read, introducing a kind of visual stutter that renders the image temporally reversible. Julius himself substantially contributes to the photograph’s fusion of spatial and temporal reversibility through his error about the boys’ location: Lake Tanganyika is more than two thousand miles from Liberia, and has a significantly different history. Whereas Liberia (the only African nation to be colonized by the United States) began to be populated by freed American and other former slaves beginning in 1820 and became the Republic of Liberia in 1847, Tanganyika only gained independence from the United Kingdom as a commonwealth in December of 1961—almost three decades after Munkácsi’s picture was taken.16 In addition to displacing these
photographic and colonial subjects across half a continent, Julius’s error prematurely grants them political independence, and provides them with ties to America they manifestly lack. Julius refashions the boys, to say it directly, into a proximate image of himself.
As our openly psychologized introduction to the exhibit’s consideration of Munkácsi’s 1930s Germany, Julius’ projections concerning Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika thus momentarily suppress the ways that African lives have been eclipsed by European colonialism. The exhibit’s subsequent group of photographs depicting the gradual rise of Nazi Germany also stages the ways such lives as we find in Three Boys have been more pointedly overtaken—both affectively and spatially, as the exhibit unfolds— 16. Munkácsi is reputed to have photographed the scene at Lake Tanganyika in 1930, while on assignment in Africa for BIZ. The job involved documenting how traditional life in Liberia was changing in the twentieth century. However, Lake Tanganyika is located between Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania and Zambia, and is more than two thousand miles from Liberia. See “Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika by Martin Munkácsi - Iconic Photography.”
by the catastrophic history of European Jewry. Julius describes the second Munkácsi photograph (again, not shown) as “a field of young Germans lying in the sun, which must have been taken from a zeppelin. The bodies, filling every available space, made a flat, abstract pattern against the field” (153).
Summer Camp, near Bad Kissingen, Germany, 1929
Despite Julius’ neutral tone and formalist description, as well as the fact that this 1929 photograph was taken long before the Second World War began, I propose that our visual knowledge of the events of the coming decade necessarily reconstitutes the photograph into an eerily retrospective war-time afterimage. The force of those events impels us to swap the linguistic and affective priority of “bodies filling every available space” with the “flat, abstract pattern” such that the earlier image—the surfeit of bodies— leaps to the spatio-temporal foreground where it uncannily lingers. The god’s-eye-view afforded by the zeppelin that allowed Munkácsi to carry off the shot reinforces an atmosphere of military menace and panoptic exposure, given the extensive use the German army made of zeppelins as bombers and scouts during WWI.17 The ‘bulb of our mind’s eye’ thus creates an image born of the one ekphrastically
before us; however, our knowledge of the historical gravity of subsequent events and our psychological reaction to them transforms it into an afterimage.
Julius’ gaze is once again triangulated (here with Munkácsi’s and the old Berliner’s with whom he hovers above the exhibition case), reiterating the spatio-temporal convergences that underpin the afterimage. As Julius leaves the exhibit early, unable casually to peruse Munkácsi’s later American fashion photography in the wake of these haunting European images, he identifies Munkácsi not only as Jewish, but importantly as “the photographer of the so-called Day of Potsdam, into whose camera 17. By World War II, zeppelins no longer were considered militarily viable.
one seemingly ordinary moment in Berlin in 1933 was secreted away for future viewers” (155). (Day of Potsdam commemorates the day when President Paul von Hindenburg handed Germany over to Adolf Hitler.)
Day of Potsdam, Opening of the Reichstag, 1933
To be sure, Julius’ understanding of the photograph as a conversation with futurity defines the ontology of all photographs, but Cole’s afterimages interpolate futurity’s conversation with the past specifically as a crisis of witness. In this context, Julius’ projection of a Jewish Munkácsi having “secreted away” in his camera this “seemingly ordinary” but in fact watershed historical moment unmistakably connotes the risk, foresight, and transformative power of witness Julius has discovered in it. We know, too, along with Julius, that the “future viewers” for whom Munkácsi safeguarded the moment must include the migrant remnants of a decimated European Jewry, one of whom (the old Berliner) has joined him thus to see. As important as is Julius’ belated re-visioning of Munkácsi’s Day of Potsdam, furthermore, is the way this afterimage dwarfs his experience of and identification with the first Munkácsi image of the African boys. The segment ends, however, not on a note of disclosure but instead of omission: Julius makes a long-deferred call to his estranged girlfriend Nadège but the conversation is withheld. The aporias in Open City that recur following such moments of crisis (including when Moji accuses Julius of rape while they were teenagers in Nigeria) return us to the problem of epistemology in Cole. These moments of narrative suspension and deflection, of turning aside from emotionally charged encounters, suggest the ways in which the (always delimited) knowledge of the other is further complicated and mitigated by the subject’s traumatically limited self-knowledge. Such limits arguably figure among the preconditions
for the formation of afterimages in Cole, which emerge also as methods of expressing experiences and forms of knowledge that otherwise would never achieve visual representability or comprehension.
* * *
Cole opens the novel’s final chapter with the news that Julius has opened an office for his private psychiatric practice; there he keeps a postcard that occasions the most extended photographic ekphrasis in Open City. After a detailed description (including a street, a building, a bell tower, three robed figures, overhead tram wires, an onion dome), Julius observes: “It is not a picturesque card. The sky is washed out, the shadows are dark, the composition is of no great interest. It looks like something someone has forgotten”; yet Julius “cannot shake the feeling that the small man in the black jacket and white robe, whose face is invisible because of the shadow of the street, plays the role of witness, and watches me while I work, and, indeed, it was this little figure who had first compelled me to pick up the card. Only later had I noticed that it depicted Baron Empain’s Heliopolis” (248-9). The whole of Open City could be regarded as an extended practice of bearing witness to the two historical strands of the Jewish and African diaporas it brings into conversation. But notably, the object of witness here is Julius himself, watched by “the small man in the black jacket and white robe, whose face is invisible.” The identity of the small man invites our speculation, and his location in the city of Heliopolis offers us, if not Julius himself, some guidance (Julius’ belated recognition of the site of the card is yet another index of his limited self-knowledge).
The Egyptian city of Heliopolis has been the subject of some discussion in the novel, when Julius’s new acquaintance Dr. Maillotte tells the story of her friend’s brother Jean—the contemporary Baron Empain and grandson of Édouard, the first Baron Empain; Baron Édouard Empain was the engineer who designed and built Heliopolis in 1907 to be a “luxury capital.” Jean’s life, she tells him, was derailed by a haunting catastrophe (91), the story of which reads like a miniature of the novel’s larger themes. Heliopolis, she parses for him furthermore, “means city of the sun, sun city,” thus recasting it as a source of light connected with other forms of illumination—bulbs and blind spots—that have informed the text’s optical commitment to afterimages. To these associations Julius adds a reference to “the ancient city in Egypt that had also been known as Heliopolis, before Baron Empain built his version,” exposing Heliopolis as a transgenerational, sedimented site, one of the novel’s many spaces haunted by the “numberless dead, in forgotten cities, necropoli, catacombs” (93-4). In this spectrum of ways, Heliopolis reveals itself to be a locus of multidirectional memory that brings the novel’s many sites, subjectivities, and temporalities together in a collectivist vision that transcends individual memory.18
18. Michael Rothberg defines “multidirectional memory” as a model of collective rather than privative memory intended to replace competing claims about victimization with dialogical interactions. “The model of multidirectional memory,” Rothberg explains, “posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal and cultural sites” (11).
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, 96.
The undated postcard I include here is not Julius’ ekphrastic image but Sebald’s from The Emigrants, in which one can just make out the words “Oasis D’ Heliopolis, Casino.” The image ‘illustrates,’ in Sebald’s notoriously ambiguous way, the 1923 trip taken to Heliopolis by the Jewish emigrants Ambros Adelwarth and his wealthy but anguished charge, Cosmo Solomon, a young man who gradually is destroyed by the melancholy induced by news of the devastations of World War I. Sebald’s narrator describes the trip as “an attempt to regain the past, an attempt that appears to have failed in every respect” (96-97). For those of Cole’s readers who know Sebald’s text, the feeling of reading both with and against the grain of this antecedent must overwhelmingly texture our reading. With this link to the failed journey of Sebald’s Jewish emigrés— emigrés who escaped to America before the Second World War but still fled European anti-Semitism—the image of Heliopolis metamorphoses into the historical and literary condensations of the afterimage, while proposing Sebald, himself, (his face lost in shadow) in the role of witness. And yet this identification seems not only too pat, but also too historically narrow and particular—a narrowness and particularity upon which the belated optic of the afterimage invariably expands. Sebald’s photograph of Heliopolis facilitates that expansion precisely because the place of witness in his image stands empty; and we have learned to see in such emptiness places waiting to be filled. In preference to Sebald, I want to fill the place in Open City discursively occupied by the small man with the invisible face, in the black jacket and white robe, as Prosopopoeia, that figure of speech (and here also of image) who stands for imaginary or absent persons who aspire to speak, to act, and to bear witness to a past that must somehow be integrated into our complex global present. Maurice Blanchot’s invocation of a “word still to be spoken beyond the living and the dead, bearing witness for the absence of attestation” has relevance to such a figure here (205).19 That figure would honor the ways absence
and collectivity, the weight of the irrecoverable but ubiquitous past and the demands of the present, each have informed Cole’s afterimages and conspired to make up his (as much as Sebald’s) memorial poetics. As we turn away from Cole’s Open City, we may ask which of the vestigial grains and textures of its 19. Le pas au-delà, quoted in Jacques Derrida, “‘A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text’: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing.”
stories of African diasporic lives we can bring to visibility by its strangely reversible lights. If we may only just see them when we look away, are we then left with the space of an evanescence?
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---. Summer Camp, near Bad Kissingen, Germany. Photograph. 1929. Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.
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Karen Jacobs is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. The author of The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Cornell 2001), she is also the editor of ELN’s “Photography and Literature” (2006), French critic Liliane Louvel’s Poetics of the Iconotext (Ashgate 2011), and ELN’s “Imaginary Cartographies” (2014). She is currently completing two monographs: Afterimages: Nabokov • Sebald • Cole; and Trace Atlas: Itineraries of Postmodern Literary Space. Email: Karen.Jacobs@Colorado.EDU
