Looking Back on The Intuitionist

Well, I definitely finished this book with overwhelmingly positive feelings. What surprised me, as I neared the end, was that it ended up really being a book about race; however, Whitehead did a skillful job navigating the dimensions of racial conflict without screaming at the reader "I AM WRITING A BOOK ABOUT RACE!" That seems, unfortunately, to be my experience with many books revolving around racial conflict (and is one reason why I'm still resisting Edward P. Jones, because I fear that I might feel like his stuff is the same way). By plunging his characters into a world that revolves around a dichotomy between those who judge based on looks (Empiricists) and those who judge based on feeling/emotion (Intuitionists), Whitehead has set the stage for a discussion about that most simple of concepts in the field of racial conflict. However, the way he writes about this concept is anything but simple. By adding in the dimension of verticality - can one rise in society, or does one find oneself standing always on the ground floor, waiting for the elevator to arrive? - Whitehead increases the metaphorical conceits he has at hand to disguise his subject, to speak about it in as many subtle ways as possible.

I loved the passage where Lila Mae realizes (spoiler alert!) that the Fanny Briggs accident was just that: an ACCIDENT. Whitehead writes:

The elevator pretended to be what it was not. Number Eleven passed for longevous. Passed for healthy so well that Arbo Elevator Co.'s quality control could not see its duplicity, so well that the building contractors could not see for the routine ease of its assembly coeval doom. So well that Lila Mae Watson of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, who is never wrong, did not see it. Did it know? After all of Fulton's anthropomorphism: did the machine know itself. Possessed the usual spectrum of elevator emotion, yes, but did it have articulate self-awareness. ... Did it decide to pass? To lie and betray itself? Even Fulton stayed away from the horror of the catastrophic accident: even in explicating the unbelievable he never dared broach the unknowable. Lila Mae thinks: out of fear.

The dialogue of "passing" is, of course, a direct reference to the dilemma of many lighter-skinned African Americans. Lila Mae herself experiences "passing" in the opposite context, when she puts on the maid's uniform at the Funicular Follies and goes unrecognized by everyone she works with, as they suddenly see nothing but the uniform and the color of her skin. This passage's wonder about whether one chooses such a life or whether it occurs by accident is interesting. When Lila Mae went to the Follies, she did choose to put a maid's uniform on, but she did not choose to make her co-workers blind to the person in the maid's uniform. That happened on accident. If "on accident" means "because of society," I suppose.

I also like how Whitehead presents the idea of Intuitionism as a "postrational" idea. Are we in an age that has passed reason & rationality? Must all literature now be postrational? It certainly seems that in order to be taken seriously as an artist your work must have a flare of the absurd, the nonsensical, the "I-am-so-brilliant-that-my-mind-makes-connections-no-one-else-could-have-dreamed-of." That bothers me.

So, anyway, in the end, thumbs up to Colson Whitehead. I'm looking forward to seeing him at Tin House. Perhaps I'll read Apex Hides the Hurt, too, although that one seems to have gotten much more mixed praise than The Intuitionist.

Towards a Definition of this Blog

I realized recently that I really ought to be gearing this blog more towards a potential readership. I mean, right now, I don't think anyone really reads the blog besides me. And sometimes my boyfriend, if I say something like "Hey, I just posted on my blog. Do you want to read it?" And really, that's not very effective blogging.

Also, so far, the posts have been rather inward things - just a way for me to keep my literary analysis skills ticking while looking forward to a time when I can do that in a more professional sense. But I'm not just a reader - I'm a writer, too. So shouldn't that come into some play on my blog?

Right now I'm mostly writing poetry - I have a few poems up in accessible places online. Ghoti Magazine and PoetryX.com have poems of mine, and HazMat Literary Review sent me a notice saying they'd like to publish one of my poems, but they've got a backlog of about three years. So check back in three years or so for that one. Actually, I think I got that letter in December, so the wait might be down to 2 1/2 years. Hopefully I can get a chapbook published in the next year or so.

I've been tentatively trying my hand at fiction, as well, but I'm not quite ready to submit that anywhere. I'm hoping to be able to devote more time to writing fiction starting in about a month, after I have definitively finished my teaching and successfully relocated to Los Angeles. I'll be spending the week of July 8th up at the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop, which I'm very excited about, as I've never participated in a writing workshop before. Although I do always THINK I'm going to love feedback on things until I actually get the feedback, and then I feel hurt and annoyed. We'll see if I'm able to break that pattern this summer.

Finally, I want to get into writing book reviews, although with the current "crisis" in book reviewing, I'm not sure if that's going to happen any time soon. Freelancing scares me a bit. But I definitely won't end up writing any book reviews if I sit around waiting for someone to come ask me to write one, so I suppose I'll have to start sending out queries soon.

All right. That was a lot of information. But if I'm going to use this blog the way a "real" blogger should, I think it was necessary.

Intuitioning

Still working my way through The Intuitionist, although now that I have taught my last high school class forever (knock on wood), it's looking like I'll have a lot more time to devote to reading. And thinking. Both of which I have been neglecting over the past two years.

I think the best way to describe the book is "fascinating." I'm fascinated by it. I wouldn't say I love it, necessarily, but I find it difficult to stop reading. And each time some new development that I hadn't anticipated occurs, I find myself thinking "Huh. Fascinating."

I am about 60 pages from the end, and I still haven't made up my mind whether the book is set in a futuristic alternative universe or a past alternative universe. Or, for that matter, in a concurrent alternative universe. Sometimes it seems to me that it must be unraveling in a futuristic world, and even though the racial issues in the book seem more strident and legally unacceptable than our current subtly crippling racial issues, it's possible to perceive our world moving backwards in the arena of race relations even as it moves forwards in other areas. But now that I'm actually writing about it, I think the book is actually the most effective when envisioned as happening right alongside our current world, in a New York City parallel to our own.

I think one could easily get swept up in divining metaphorical meanings for the fact that it is elevators that make this world go round, so I'll try not to do that. The only thing I'll say on the subject of Colson Whitehead's obsession with verticality is that it seems either oddly prescient or simply stirringly coincidental to have created a world that keeps its self-worth shored up in the height of buildings - of towers, if you will. Reading the book in a post-9/11 context gives it a new reverberation.

The only trouble I'm having with the book is a lack of a very clear portrait of anyone besides Lila Mae. Then again, that may be purposeful. After all, Lila Mae has just discovered that fuzziness and mystery were the keys to understanding the great Fulton, so keeping many of the supporting characters dimmed by the shadow of the buildings and machines they work with may have been a conscious move.

In any case, I'm looking forward to what the ending has to offer.