Open City’s “Abschied”: Teju Cole, Gustav Mahler, and Elliptical Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

The dear earth everywhere Blossoms in spring and grows green again! Everywhere and forever the distance shines bright and blue! Forever...forever... [Ewig...Ewig...]-Gustav Mahler, ending of "Der Abschied" [Farewell], from Das Lied von der Erde (1909), trans. Deryck Cooke. 1 When we sit down to make work, we are made of all the things we have consumed.-Teju Cole, interview with Khalid Warsame Teju Cole's Open City (2011)-a novel determined to unravel its protagonist-is bookended by the late music of Gustav Mahler, a composer equally determined to disintegrate. A roundabout bildungsroman that counterpoints the memories of a Nigerian psychiatrist, Julius, with his present-day movement through Manhattan, Open City is haunted by Mahler's presence as an infirm Bohemian-Austrian composer in New York, who sought solace both in long walks and in the philosophical Weltschmerz of Goethe and Schopenhauer. If Cole's elusive narrator finds an intellectual mirrorimage in Mahler, that alienated image reflects a gaping ellipsis at Julius's core. Julius's narrative is initiated by a recording of Mahler's song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) (1909), which he hears playing in a Tower Records store, before spiraling back, at the end of the novel, to a live performance of Mahler's last finished work, the Ninth Symphony (1909). Having been alerted to a series of Mahler concerts under the baton of Simon Rattle, the cosmopolitan British conductor, Julius is disappointed to find that Das Lied von der Erde is sold out, but attends a performance of the Ninth instead. Before narrating his experience of the piece, Julius slips into a 412