Teju Cole's "Flat" Description

I’m still trying to figure out what James Wood meant by “‘flat’ description” in his review of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (“The Arrival of Enigmas,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011). In his piece, Wood talks about a particularly vivid image that occurs near the end of Open City: Julius, the novel’s narrator, is attending a Carnegie Hall performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; he sees an elderly lady walking up the aisle. Cole describes her as follows:

She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music.

Wood says,

Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.

“Flat” in the sense that Cole’s description is dull and lifeless? I don’t think that’s what Wood means. The fact that he sets “flat” in quotation marks indicates that he’s using the word in a particular way – to denote a particular style of description. There’s a hint as to what he means when he says the image of the old woman “seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.” We know that Wood dislikes overly rich description. In his essay “John Updike’s Complacent God” (included in his 1999 collection The Broken Estate), he disdainfully refers to Updike’s “puffy lyricism” and “slathered detail.” He’s an anti-inflationist. When it comes to verbal representation of reality, he seems to prefer an almost literal transcription – the thing itself. It’s the kind of description that Teju Cole abundantly provides in Open City. For example, here’s Cole’s depiction of a section of Wall Street:

I walked toward the west. People bought food from a falafel vendor whose van was parked on the corner, or walked alone, in pairs, in threes. I saw black women in charcoal grey skirt suits, and young, clean-shaven Indian-American men. Just past Federal Hall, I walked past the glass frontage of the New York Sports Club. Right up against the glass in its brightly lit interior was a single row of exercise bicycles, all of them occupied by men and women in Lycra who pedaled in the silence and looked out at the commuters in the dusk. Near the corner of Nassau, a man in a scarf and fedora hat stood with an easel before him and painted the Stock Exchange in grisaille on a large canvas. A stack of completed paintings, also grisaille, of the same building seen from different angles, lay at his feet. I watched him work for a moment, as he loaded his brush, and with careful gestures applied white highlights to the acanthus of the six massive Corinthian columns of the Stock Exchange.

“I saw,” I watched,” “I noticed,” “I scrutinized” – these words occur frequently in Cole’s writing. His descriptions are built on data received through the eye. He rarely constructs a metaphor or simile, and when he does, it’s usually a fairly plain one (e.g., “The just risen sun came at the Hudson at such an acute angle that the river gleamed like aluminum roofing”).

There’s a Hopperesque quality to many of Cole’s descriptions that I really like. That image of the men and women on their exercise bicycles pedaling “in the silence,” looking out “at the commuters in the dusk,” in the above-quoted passage, for example, seems to me a scene that might’ve caught Hopper’s eye.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Cole’s “flat” description – what I understand “flat” to mean, at any rate – is his use of catalog. For example, here’s a passage from Open City in which he catalogs the details of the interior of a Chinese shop:

The shop, of which I was the sole customer, was a microcosm of Chinatown itself, with an endless array of curious objects: a profusion of bamboo cages as well as finely worked metal ones, hanging like lampshades from the ceiling; hand-carved chess sets on the ancient-looking bar between the customer and the shopkeeper’s bay; imitation Ming Dynasty lacquerware, which ranged in size from tiny decorative pots to round-bellied vases large enough to conceal a man; humorous pamphlets of the “Confucius say” variety, which had been printed in English in Hong Kong and which gave advice to those gentlemen who wished to find success with women; fine wooden chopsticks set on porcelain chopstick stands; glass bowls of every hue, thickness, and design; and, in a seemingly endless glass-fronted gallery high above the regular shelves, a series of brightly painted masks that run through every facial expression possible in the dramatist’s art.

I’m a sucker for compendiums of detail like the one above. They seem to me to be one of the most effective ways for a writer to reproduce reality. The trick is in knowing how to make something good, something artful, out of them. There’s an intriguing scrap of catalog writing under the title “Descriptions of Things and Atmosphere” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nonfiction collection The Crack Up that reads as follows:

Seen in a Junk Yard: Dogs, chickens with few claws, brass fittings, T’s elbow, rust everywhere, bales of metal 1800 lbs, plumbing fixtures, bathtubs, sinks, water, pumps, wheels, Fordson tractor, acetylene lamps for tractors, sewing machine, bell on dinghy, box of bolts, (No.1), van, stove, auto stuff (No.2), army trucks, cast iron body, hot dog stand, dinky engines, sprockets like watch parts, hinge all taken apart on building side, motorcycle radiators, George on the high army truck.

Fitzgerald must’ve made this entry in his notebook with the intention of someday turning it into something – a scene in a novel or short story, maybe. But, unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to do so. In Open City, Teju Cole integrates his catalogs of urban details into a larger narrative about a young man for whom walking in the city is “a release,” “a reminder of freedom.” He’s successfully done what all artists strive to do - shape reality’s welter into something meaningful.