Adam Pickens
By examining closely the migratory nature of these movements, in conjunction with the migration narrative formed from Lila Mae’s background and as how the novel uses tropes from detective fiction in order to scrutinize the very empirical methods that Lila Mae employs in her investigation, it becomes clear that The Intuitionist is using its alternative history version of 1960s New York to push towards a radical new epistemology as it relates to African-American relationships to urban centers and the larger problems of race relations in America both in the past and today. The project of Lila Mae becomes one of finding ways to create this new epistemology, of learning to read back against traditional notions of progress and of breaking out of the traps of language and modes of thinking that are the born of the condition in which she has found herself. These traps, that are baked into the vertical-progress oriented narratives that a reader expects when encountering a work of speculative fiction, are so rooted in the image of the skyscraper and the technology of the elevator that Lila’s Mae’s ability to move towards a more true form of intuition becomes itself heroic and suggests that break the holds that existing society has on us we must first find new ways of thinking instead of thinking new things in old ways.
Critical work on The Intuitionist seems, in many ways, to be as obsessed with the novel’s elevators as the inspectors of Whitehead’s world are, though there seems to be 3 major through lines that all their readings come out of: the novel as a work of genre fiction, the novel as African-American literature, and the novel as invested in the work of thinking towards utopia. Critics such as Ramón Saldívar, Linda Selzer, and Spenser Morrison all present radically differing views on the novel but what is present in all of them is a reliance on the novel’s elevators as part of some kind of larger metaphor that Whitehead is playing with. For Saldívar, the novel is using the elevators, and their presence as a central part of Whitehead’s world to build a reading the work as postrace. He says that, “The Intuitionist is part urban thriller, part alternate history, part fantasy meditation on race, technology, and the imagination all filtered through the visionary metaphor of “elevation”” which “drives the narrative up and down between the narrative levels of the naturalistic protest novel of race and the metafictional postmodern imaginative novel of ideas” (Saldívar 8). But no matter how far he gets from the novel’s elevators, his larger goal is rooted in their presence. He attempts to determine “to what extent is this technology at the heart of the narrative also a determinant of the representational aesthetic it offers?” (9). Focused less on this concept of technology, in Instruments More Perfect than Bodies: Romancing Uplift in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist,Linda Selzer presents a reading of the presence of “uplift ideology” in the novel and the ways that “Lila Mae’s position at the end of the text…raises pointed questions about the reader’s own participation in what has increasingly come to be recognized as a problematic social philosophy” and how “while working to subvert racist signifiers, uplift ideology sometimes ironically embraced them” (Selzer 681). While her criticism are highly insightful in the context of uplift ideology, the term itself is clearly intended to link to the novels elevators and the metaphor that they form. Morrison’s work reads the novel in what seems like the most straightforward manner; he says that “This novel of elevator maintenance, regulation, and care clearly positions elevators as potential vehicles for racial justice” and considers the technology as a means for the novel to talk about political action as it relates to infrastructural access (Morrison 110).
This is not to say that the entire body of critical work as been attached to the elevator like a ball and chain. Lauren Berlant’s Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event and Sean Gratten’s I think We’re Alone Now: Solitude and the Utopian Subject in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist both provide readings which depart from a focus on the vertical movement as metaphor. However, while they abandon a focus on the elevators, in favor of affect and utopia respectively, neither fully addresses the subject of horizontal movement, despite both of their (as well as Jeffery Allen-Tucker’s work) willingness to briefly touch on the novel’s migration narratives that form from the backstories to Lila Mae and Fulton. Of the two, Gratten comes the closes as he argues for the novel as investigating the role that an individual can play in the development of utopia as opposed to more traditional concepts of utopia through community. He says that “Through The Intuitionist might seems obsessed with elevation, the productive relationships throughout the text all develop within a logic of beside” because it presents us with a heroine who is excluded (either by social norms or by choice) from the communities that she will rebuild when she finally delivers the second elevation (Gratten 145).
I would like to build from this theory of the beside (which Gratten is borrowing from Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet) and suggest a reading of the novel that more thoroughly grapples with the migratory aspects of Whitehead’s story than those before me while also addressing the horizontal movement that is present in the aspects of the novel that are widely considered to be borrowed from genre fiction.
The Failures of Noir Empiricism
It seems quite impossible to properly address the aspects of The Intuitionist which are rooted in noir and detective fiction without addressing directly the title of the novel. The Intuitionist suggests up front a particular way of knowing and relating to objects and people in the world around us – via intuition. However, while it may be easy to assume that the intuitionist in that the title refers to is the novel’s main character, Lila Mae, she is far from the only intuitionist that we meet. Indeed, Whitehead has populated his novel with two distinct political factions within his fictional guild of elevator inspectors (the intuitionists and the empiricists) and it is the political duel going on between the two groups which serves as a backdrop for Lila Mae’s mad horizontal dash across the city as she looks for evidence for to who caused the Fanny Briggs elevator to crash after Lila Mae gave it a passing inspection. While it seems clear that Lila Mae’s allegiance is less to either party than to the writings of John Fulton, (the founder of the intuitionists) it is his “black box” elevator that the two groups are racing to find the plans for. In order to discover who sabotaged the elevator, and find Fulton’s missing work, Lila Mae is pulled into a full-on detective story that has her tailing leads, breaking and entering corporate buildings, and running from the mob. Critics such as Christopher Wixon and Derek Maus have addressed this aspect of the story specifically, though while Wixon is interested in the debt that Whitehead owes to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Maus with a more general understanding of how the false leads and twisting plots of these types of fiction can affect a reader so that the work “becomes an examination of both the benefits and limitations of “reading” one’s world in unchallenging ways”, my own reading is much more interested in how the physical movement and types of thinking that are inherently linked to mental detective work that undermines Lila Mae’s own epistemology until the failure of those empirical techniques causes her to revisit a more pure form of intuition as the solution (Maus 20).
By addressing this contradiction of action and philosophy seen in Lila Mae through Henri Bergson’s discussions of intuition and empiricism in his An Introduction to Metaphysics it becomes clear that Lila Mae spends much of the novel working in empirical ways, even when she is claiming to be intuitive and it is only the complete failure of her investigation to correctly assess the reality of the situation that eventually causes her to break out of a faux-intuition and actually start to intuit in a meaningful way at the end of the novel.
In his discussion of the precise nature of intuition and empiricism, Bergson views intuition as a kind of knowing that is based on sympathy and imagination which can only be properly accessed when translation and symbolic representation of the original object have been abandoned. This is because “a representation taken from a certain point of view, a translation made with certain symbols, will always remain imperfect in comparison with the object of which a view has been taken, or which the symbols seek to express” (Bergson 4). Put simply, empiricism inherently views a thing from the outside (as opposed to intuition) and cannot access the perfect version of such an object because of that position. It is forced to rely on many small pieces in order to suggest a semi-accurate translation of the whole. Bergson further says that,
By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with that is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects. To analyze, therefore, is to express a thing as a function of some thing other than itself. (4)
In other words, to analyze is to understand something only in the context of things which you already know, and thus open yourself up to the effects of assumed ideas.
That is exactly Lila Mae’s problem as she conducts her investigation. She is constantly trying to piece together clues in a way that already fits her assumptions about the situation. She eventually decides to investigate her failure in order to properly intuit a single elevator and it is only when she comes back to the site of the crash without bringing those assumptions of foul play with her that she is able to confront reality and break out of the empiricism which causes her to assume that the crash is a set up related to the political election.
In the course of this investigation Lila Mae constantly moves horizontally in order to discover more evidence or escape capture. Early in the novel when her investigation is still at the urging of the head Intuitionists, she is taken by car to see John Fulton’s former housekeeper, who is suspected of hiding his final notes. As she starts to take on this role of detective, she begins her constant movements across the landscape that will only be upended by her trip into the Lift building where the degree to which her investigation has been misguided is revealed. This first interaction with Mrs. Rogers is clearly one in which she is attempting to take the role of detective, asking a series of prepared questions, she starts the process by saying, in the impersonal tone of a police investigator, “I just wanted to ask you a question or two. If you have the time” and quickly is overpowered by the unassuming woman (89). She approaches the interview as though it is all about her attempting to gather evidence, as opposed to better understand the larger complexities of Fulton’s life and his work. She is worried that “she’s losing control of the situation, letting this bitter old bird get the best of her” and totally misses Mrs. Rogers hint at Fulton’s racial identity as a white passing black man (91).
Contrasting this moment with her second conversation with Mrs. Rogers and it becomes clear that, once she has revisited the elevator and realized that she was wrong about both Pompy’s duplicity and Natchez identity and intensions (he turns out to be working for Arbo elevator manufacturing and looking for the black box as well and not being Fulton’s nephew) ,we find a Lila Mae who is as interested in Fulton’s story as she is finding his notes. She does not interrogate but helps Mrs. Rogers to pick up the pieces of her ransacked home and is rewarded with Fulton’s notes – which are not hidden vertically in the bottom of the dumbwaiter but horizontally in the back wall of the shaft. She has begun to trust her intuition and not rely on detective style empiricism. Her reward is to see that an obsession with elevators literally hides the location of the notes instead of being the location itself.
In the moment that starts to tear down the fiction she has constructed for herself, Lila Mae conducts a classic “stakeout outside Pompey’s tenement” which is “only two blocks from her apartment” (190). This moment of horizontal surprise for her is coupled with yet another failure of an interrogation. She goes there expecting to finally get Pompy to admit that he sabotaged the Fanny Briggs’ elevator but is only convinced that he is not lying when he denies it. The shock of this moment leads her to the Lift building where she meets another investigator, Ben Urich. This is the first moment since the beginning of the novel that we have watched Lila Mae take an elevator up, and it leads her to the realization of how wrongly her empirical methods have led her. Urich has a photograph of the men working for Arbo and Natchez is among them. He is not the alley which she assumed and has developed feelings for but another person looking to use her in their quest for the black box. When the two are interrupted by John and Jim, Lila Mae does not take the elevator down, but the stairs and finds refuge from the Arbo enforces, horizontally, across the street in the Happy-Land Dime-a-Dance. She loses her pursuers by dancing (another horizontal movement) and then loses herself in a moment of pure intuition with her second partner. She intuits his mind:
Her partner likes this slower tempo. His step is more confident, his grip a pinch. It reminds him of another our song. It’s our song, calcified by indecent into pure memory. It’s a powerful substance, pure memory, it irradiates. (She does not hear the commotion at the door. The bouncers have beaten an interloper, someone who did not understand what this place is.) Who is she now to him: his wife, his daughter, that old sweetheart, all lost now. What remains of them is this, this song…Who is he to her? A ghost. She asks her partner, who is not her partner now but someone who is dead and will not answer except in what remains of him, his words, “Why did you do it?” “You’ll understand.” “I’ll never understand.” “You already do.” (216-217)
In this moment she is reminded of what real intuition is, not the kind that jumps to conclusions based off external information but the kind which does, as Bergson suggests, and is able to view the whole while being part of it[1]. From here, she goes back to visit Fanny Briggs for the first time in the novel. She intuits the elevator from a pure moment of Bergsonian imagination (never actually stepping inside it) and concluds the truth: that the crash “was a catastrophic accident” (227). As she grapples with this reality she starts to doubt everything that her investigation took for granted. Her thoughts are “all jumbled now” with the reality of “machinations eclipsing machinations” causes her to doubt “for a second…that Fulton was colored” (229).
From this moment forward, the novel is no longer borrowing from detective fiction. Instead, Lila Mae is searching for the whole truth and considering what to do if she finds it. When she does find it (in the same place that turned up as a dead end before) her actions are no longer that of an investigator. She takes the novel’s McGuffin (Fulton’s notes) and provides copies to all interested parties. She retreats from the politics and debate between the two ideological factions and ends the novel working on finish Fulton’s elevator with the use of her own more true form of intuition. She is attempting to access Fulton via imagining (to use Bergson’s word) herself to be him and “sometimes she almost gets his voice down but then it flutters away” (254). As the novel closes “its her intuition” which she uses to try and make her own identity and Fulton’s “hang together. Seamlessly” in the new book that she is writing which will fully deliver a finished version of Fulton’s black box (254-255).
But Lila Mae is not only horizontally motivated as she pounds the pavement looking for clues in all the wrong places. Her story is one of long-distance moment in the form of south to north migration that Fulton experienced as well.
Migration Narratives
Rooted in this idea of horizontal movement in The Intuitionist is the underlying migration narrative of Lila Mae. She is not a woman who is from the city. She moved there, and we are provided with vignettes of her past at home and in school as the novel progresses. Her experience in the city seems to be one of constant challenges, and disruptions to the ways that she thinks, and the assumptions that she makes. In short, as a migrant her interaction with the city is not one of bodily harms but one that can be characterized by what Farah Griffin describes as a shift to the psyche.
In her book Who Set you Flowin’: The African-American Migration Narrative[2] Griffin investigates the ways that migration narratives are inherently linked to the development of African-American cultural identity and often serve as a place for African-American artists to express their views on the effects that migration had on the African-American population as it shifted from a distinctly southern-rural culture to a predominantly northern-urban one[3]. She argues that “the effect on the psyche is an indication of the complexity of Northern power” and that “The psyche is the realm where power is enforced and is the ground on which the migrants seek first to resist objectification” (Griffin 52). As she discusses the work of Richard Wright, (author of Native Son) in the context of his work with African-American migrant narratives, she notes that his work suggests the migrant’s interaction with the city is one in which “migrants arrive confused, afraid, and uncertain of which masks to wear in the city” (69). She references Wright’s autobiography and describes his confrontation with Chicago as one in which the migrant is confronted with a new, unreadable, language. Griffin’s reading of Wright’s migration is one in which the migrant is confronted by the city and “his cultural illiteracy is apparent in his inability to read and negotiate the signs of the urban landscape” (70). But Griffin does not read Wright’s work as the hopeless story that all this makes it sound like. Instead, she suggests that he, like other African-American authors, are looking in their creative work for solutions to exactly the kinds of alienation that migrants feel when coming into contact with the city for the first time. She locates many different solutions to this problem in migration narratives, but I would like to note one that she sees in Wrights work specifically – dance. She says, “For Wright, the intricacies and complexities of black dance are indicative of the possibilities for black creativity. With no access to art, industry, finance, education, or aviation, black migrants fill their “hunger for expression” with dance, music, slang, and colorful dress.” (81). All of these aspects of the migration narrative are present in The Intuitionist, and particularly situate the novel as one in which the central project of the protagonist is coming to terms with the urban center, and how when she is constantly met with her failure to read the signs in front of her (much like her failure to use detective work to find the truth), she chooses to remake her world via a moment of true intuition.
While this type of narrative is seen predominantly in the flashbacks where we see Lila Mae’s early life, The Intuitionist is rife with examples of Lila Mae’s difficulty reading her surroundings even in the novel’s present. As the novel opens and Lila Mae leaves the routine inspection of an elevator (complete with derogatory comments related to her sex and her position as an intuitionist) she is thrust back into the city and the reader is given a first impression of her reactions to it as she drives her sedan back to the office. For her, the city seems to be a space where the ability to read details is made difficult because it communicates in signs that she does not understand. She “is never able to differentiate” unemployed men from traffic spotters; “All of them make obscure, furtive gestures, all share a certain stooped posture that say they lack substantive reasons for being where they are, at the side of the road” making it “Impossible to distinguish a walkie-talkie from a bottle of cheap wine” (Whitehead 10). Lila Mae is, like Griffin says about the migrants of Richard Wright’s novels, engulfed by the sounds of the city and confronted by a language of social queues and visual images that she cannot seem to parse properly. The city functions via a language that is “not a means of communication but another aspect of the urban landscape that baffles” those not born to its logic (Griffin 70). To further drive home the migratory nature of the novel’s setting, only eleven pages in Lila Mae dwells on the naming of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building (where the elevator of the first novel’s first sentence falls and sets the plot in motion) and notes that “The mayor is shrewd and understands that this city is not a Southern city it is not an old money city or a new money city but the most famous city in the world, and the rules are different here.” (Whitehead 11). Lila Mae cannot help but contrast the city with the part of the country where she is from, and the city cannot help but be a place with rules that are unique to it – and as such it is a difficult place for the migrant to properly parse.
Even the ways that different neighborhoods of the city are sectioned off reflects the migratory focus of the novel as well as invokes the horizontal movements that seem to offer solutions in place of the vertical ones. The part of the city Lila Mae lives in as a transitory place of migration and shifting immigrant populations that was constructed to house eastern European immigrants but has given way to the rising African-American population. In contrast to the Arbo enforces John and Jim, who “wouldn’t live in this neighborhood if you paid
[them]
”, Lila Mae notices these differences because of her place as a migrant[4]. She understands that, “The neighborhood is tidal, receding and dilating according to the exigences of the city” and in invoking this gradual change the novel makes it sound as though the city itself is shifting back and forth (Whitehead 29). But it is exactly this shifting that makes it hard for Lila Mae navigate the social ques of the people within it. Even when first renting the apartment she cannot seem to make herself properly understood. She says, “excuse me, sir, I’m looking for the building manager.” And is met with confusion by the man who says, “you want a room?” only to have him interrupt her when she doesn’t respond with only “yes” but also, “The sign says-” (244). She may have been able to properly read the physical sign but is unable to communicate her interest in a way that is comfortable to the white building manager.
More so than moments such as these, Lila Mae’s personal history, which is doled out in a series of out of order flashbacks, tells the literal migration narrative of the novel and shows the process of Lila Mae growing up and moving to the city. We see her as a child who has her relationship to elevators firmly established through a moment with her father, her first northern migration when she goes to college and first confronts this difficulty of a new spaces’ language, and we even see her first days in the city where she gets lost trying to navigate the subway and a liaison with a northern salesman, Freeport Jackson. In each instance where we find Lila Mae in a space that is distinct from her southern home she is experiencing the same kind of psychic stress that Griffin describes in her analysis of Wright’s work.
When we see her first dropped off at college, Lila Mae is immediately a stranger in a strange land, both to the physical spaces of the northeast and to the world of elevator studies. As her first semester commences indications that she has yet to grasp how to interact with the new space around her are everywhere. In her classes “she was learning about Empiricism but did not know it yet”, and she “had discovered she was often ignorant of much routine information her fellow students possessed” (45). This lack of understanding however, is tempered beyond this first semester as she learns to partially navigate her place in this space that is between the rural-south of her home and the urban-north where she will end up. She understands in her exam that she is expected to not know the answer to the final question, “how many [African-American elevator inspectors] are employed as such” but provides the answer that is expected anyway “I don’t know. Less than twelve?” (53). When we get a glimpse of her in a class on intuitionism the novel tells us that “she did not feel she understood enough about Intuitionism to talk about it, no matter the extent of her sincerity” (99).
These flashbacks establish how her time at college is where Lila Mae did not learn which appropriate “mask to wear” was for what occasion, but just that a mask was required (Griffin 69). This inability to understand that the mask is expected to change based off the environment, company, and social setting, are what lead Lila Mae to the face she has practiced so much by the time she is starting her investigation. When she puts on this mask in the morning before heading out after her first night at the intuitionist house we are told:
Dressed, she’s in front of the mirror. Armed. She puts her face on. In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard? It took practice. Not in front of a mirror or in front of strangers, gauging her success by their expressions of horror, disgust, etc. She did it by lying in her bed, feeling and testing which muscles in her face pained under application of concerted tension. To choose the most extreme pain would be to make a fright mask. A caricature of strength. (Whitehead 57)
This battle face, together with her suit, become a standard which Lila Mae relies on in order to navigate the social pressures of the city. She takes this highly controlled and regular form because she does not fully understand how what masks are appropriate. So instead, she choses thing single face that may have given characters such as Pompy the impression of pretentiousness that they associate with her.
Later in the novel, when we are shown Lila Mae in the city during her first week on the job. She is the picture of the lost immigrant who is unable to parse the signs that are plastered all around her – both geographic and social. Instead of following the street signs she navigates by “a trail of cigarette butts” and quickly “she [is] lost” and can’t “remember where the subway” is (171). Her geographic ineptitude is compounded by the fact that “she’d spent the previous Sunday on her couch decoding the subway map, superimposing its feeble order over the few scattered sections of the city she was already acquainted with” (171). Like the baffled migrants that Griffin references, Lila Mae is attempting to “decode” and impose “order” on a space that she cannot make sense of to the point that even her attempts leave her literally lost (171). When Freeport Jackson offers to help her, she becomes stressed (fearing that he is attempting to take advantage of her) and she literally doesn’t “know how to act in situations like this” (173). While they eventually make their way to a bar and Jackson’s hotel room, when they sleep together Lila Mae is still struggling to find the right language for the situation. She relies on word choice that would be more appropriate for her job than for such a social interaction, such as “recorded the details of the investigation” and “Lila Mae made a file for her first investigation and recorded the pertinent details” (180).
Lila Mae’s story is made of examples such as there, where she cannot seem to fully read the context of the city that she has made to central to her existence. But this is not to say that the novel does not present her as finding ways outside of these blocks. As noted earlier, Griffin suggests that it is in creative pursuits that African-American migrants found way to interact meaningfully in urban spaces that denied them access through traditional means. Where specifically Griffin references dance as a gateway to this access, it is no mistake that the location which rescues Lila Mae from the pursuit of John and Jim is (as I have previously stated) the dance hall. Griffin quotes Wright specifically on the relationship between African-Americans in urban spaces and music, saying “Our blues, jazz, swing, and boogie woogie are “spirituals” of the city pavement, our longing for freedom and opportunity, and expression of our bewilderment and despair in a world whose meaning eludes us” (Griffin qtd Wright 82). Wright, and Griffin by extension see direct connection between the importance of dance and music and the confusion that migrants experienced. Lila Mae is no different. Where in my discussion of intuition and empiricism this space served to help Lila Mae reach out of empirical though and into true intuition, from the perspective of migration narratives it has a double meaning. As she dances she “does not hear the commotion at he door” and is so wrapped up in the dance that she fails to notice that “the bouncers have beaten an interloper, someone who did not understand what this place is” (Whitehead 216). It serves to physically separate her from those who literally seek to take her freedom and it is in this space that she is provided with access to the new type of thinking which is required for her to forge on to the novel’s conclusion.
Conclusion
It is impossible to fully disentangle either of these narrative strands from each other in my reading of The Intuitionist. However, it is worth noting that what both of these threads have in common is that Lila Mae is presented with a problem (solve the mystery or adapt to the city) and she initially fails to address them with the tools that are available to her. Instead, the story that Colson Whitehead tells is one in which a uniquely African-American migration story presents Lila Mae with a situation in which she must think differently in order to solve. She must think horizontally in a world that is focused on the vertical. Sean Gratten’s argument that “Writing in her room, Lila Mae is one of what Jameson calls the “party of Utopia”; a group of people of an undisclosed number with an unclear agenda who “recognize one another by means of secret Masonic signals” is ultimately one that I agree with (Gratten, Gratten qtd Jameson 148). However, where he sees Lila Mae’s signals as textual, they are for me epistemological. Her utopia will not be written, it will be through.
Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. Selections from Bergson. Translated by T.E. Hulme, Edited by Harold A. Larrabee. New York, NY. Appleton-Century-Crofts, inc. 1949.
Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event”. American Literary History, Vol 20, no 4, Winter 2008.
Gratten, Sean. “I think We’re All Along Now: Solitude and the Utopian Subject in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist”. Cultural Critique, Vol 96, Spring 2017, pp 126-153.
Griffin, Farah Jasime. Who Set you Flowin’?: the African-American migration narrative. New York, NY. Oxford University Press. 1995.
Jeffery, Allen-Tucker. “Verticality is a Risky Enterprise”: The Literary and Paraliterary Antecedents of Colin Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Vol 43, no 1, 2010.
Maus, Derek C., Understanding Colson Whitehead. Columbia, SC. University of South Carolina Press. 2014
Morrison, Spenser. “Elevator Fiction: Robert Coover, Colson Whitehead, and the Sense of Infrastructure”. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Vol 73, no 3, Autumn 2017
Ramón Saldívar. “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative”. Narrative, Vol 21, no 1, Jan 2013.
Selzer, Linda. “Instruments More Perfect than Bodies: Romancing Uplift in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist”. African American Review, Dec 2009. pp 681-698.
Wixon,
Christopher. “Vertical bearings: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and
Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.” Notes on Contemporary
Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, 2012. Student Edition
[1] Which is further enforced by how she is part of Fulton’s story throughout the novel as the only black student at the college, the student who caught his attention, and the student whose name he writes in his notebook and thus causes everyone who reads them to assume her importance.
[2] I am in debt to Jeffery Allen-Tucker’s work on The Intuitionist for pointing me to Griffin’s book. While for him, Whitehead’s work serves as an example to support Griffin’s arguments, I am using Griffin’s work to more fully read aspects of migration narrative in the novel. It might be appropriate to characterize this paper as an outgrowth from a sentence or two from Allen-Tucker’s work.
[3] It is worth noting here that my interpretation of the Great Migration is of a distinctly horizontal kind. It might be tempting to think of it as vertical (in that it was a movement from the geographic south to a geographic north on a map), but such readings connect ideas of northern cities as more culturally elevated than their southern counterparts (due to their position in the Civil War) with the migrations to cities. While this perception (as well as less outward experiences of racism) would support such reading, Griffin’s work suggests that what African-American Migrants found was just a different form of socially unjust American society – not a more culturally enlightened one.
[4] Though she is clearly not paying complete attention, or she would have noticed that Pompy lives only two blocks away.
Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms 