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.