Like Jack Gladney, Lila Mae Watson, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The
Intuitionist, sees conspiracy where there is only accident. Her desire to reside at the center of a
conspiracy compensates for her lack of control: Lila Mae is the first African American female elevator inspector, and an elevator accident will allow her to better understand history, rather than alienate her from it. Yet unlike Gladney or the characters of Crash, Lila Mae will author control from accident; she does not want to believe, she wants to create.
Early in The Intuitionist, the mayor of the large northern city in which the novel is set— New York City in all but name—addresses the press regarding an elevator accident that took place at the Fanny Briggs building.25 A reporter asks, “Do you think that a party or parties resistant to colored progress may be responsible?” and, before the mayor can answer, we are told that “Everyone thinks, as they must, of last summer’s riots, of how strange it was to live in a metropolis such as this (magnificent elevated trains, five daily newspapers, two baseball stadiums) and yet be too afraid to leave the house. How quickly things can fall into medieval
disorder” (23). The race riots referred to are those of 1964, which raged in cities such as
Rochester, New York City, Philadelphia, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, and Chicago from July to August. The last race riots that took place in New York City prior to 1964 were those of 1943, a decade too early for the setting of this novel since both the film Guys and Dolls (1955) and the music of Buddy Holly (who died in 1959) are referenced (150, 145).26 As well, towards the end of the novel Lila Mae Watson notices, hanging on a wall, “a head shot of the famous reverend. The man so loud down south” (Whitehead 248). Martin Luther King Jr. goes unnamed, the headshot hanging on the wall a stark reminder of the assassin’s bullet that will kill him early in April 1968.
The Intuitionist obfuscates its chronological setting in order to emphasize the ways in
which African American history and other struggles for equality are covered up, ignored, or forgotten but nevertheless shape our present. While the writings of Ballard and DeLillo, and Cronenberg’s film Crash, attempted to historicize their present through depicting it, The
Intuitionist shows how the past must always be unearthed—especially in the face of historical
revisions such as those constructed during Reagan’s presidency. History veiled nevertheless touches us. The novel depicts such events’ absence in the historical record: inside of the Fanny Briggs building, where the elevator accident transpired—an elevator that Lila Mae was the last to inspect—we see the interior of the building, everything in its place except, “the mural, however, [which] was not complete:”
It started out jauntily enough to Lila Mae’s left. Cheerless Indians holding up a deerskin in front of a fire. The original tenants, sure. A galleon negotiating the tricky channels around the island. Two beaming Indians trading beads to a gang of white men—the infamous sale of the Island. Big moment, have to include that, the first of many dubious
transactions in the city’s history. [. . .] The mural jumped to the Revolution then, she noticed, skipped over a lot of stuff. The painter seemed to be making it up as he went along, like the men who shaped the city. The Revolution scene was a nice setpiece—the colonist pulling down the statue of King George III. They melted it down for ammunition, if she remembers correctly. It’s always nice when a good mob comes together. The painting ended there. [. . .] Judging from the amount of wall space that remained to Lila Mae’s right, the mural would have to get even more brief in its chronicle of the city’s greatest hits. Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the intervening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please. (47-48) Among the ironies of this scene is the fact that this unfinished mural resides in the lobby of the Fanny Briggs building, which is named for “a slave who taught herself how to read” (12). Watson can see, painted on the wall, the exclusion of other struggles for rights (women’s rights, African American rights, etc.) in the mural. The mural excludes such history in order to deflect from events of the present. It shows founding struggles, condensing history until the recent past and present are invisible—in the mural, literally unfinished. In fact, the building itself is meant to serve the same suppressive purpose. Earlier, we are told how this building came to be named after Fanny Briggs. The mayor—yes, that same mayor—named the building for Briggs due to “an increasingly vocal colored population—who are not above staging tiresome demonstrations [. . .] or throwing tomatoes” (12). The mayor did this because he “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. The new municipal building has been named the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building, and there have been fewer complaints, and fewer tomatoes” (12). The building was not named as a remembrance of the historical figure Fanny
Briggs, but as a means to appease the city’s present African American population—in order to keep them from acting upon the injustices of both their past and their present. The mural does not so much overwrite African American history as it simply excludes it. Lila Mae’s reading of the mural, within the building named for a slave who taught herself how to read, performs a method of interpretation that, when applied to Whitehead’s novel, leads to an understanding of its historical palimpsests. However, this form of reading only begins at the incomplete mural; it ends deeper in the Fanny Briggs building, in elevator Number Eleven (65).
The Intuitionist takes as its subject the suppression of history, and, form matching
content, its narrative limits direct reference to the time and place in which it is set. The secrets of the past, in this novel, are reached only by accident. Like White Noise, and the Reagan era politics it depicts, the past becomes a refuge that covers up the problems of the present. The mural, like the building that houses it, whitewashes the past in order to appease political discontent in the present. Lila Mae Watson would not reflect on the mural, the Fanny Briggs Building, or discover the secret of James Fulton were it not for the elevator’s crash. Yet another nuance—the form the novel takes—depicts history as that which one must always be
scrutinizing, studying, detecting. In its limiting information for the reader, The Intuitionist appropriately assumes characteristics of the genre of hardboiled detective fiction. The
Intuitionist, like the detective story, as Sean McCann writes “articulates a tension basic to the
classical liberal vision of society. It depicts a world in which the freedom of the individual creates an anarchic or a soulless society” (8). Lila Mae’s choice to act in the face of conspiracy leads her to be seen as an anarchic presence among Elevator Inspectors and leads her to discover many horrors of her historical moment. Setting the opening of Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind” (1938) alongside that of The Intuitionist draws out these texts’ shared features:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. (368)
Now the sentences that open The Intuitionist:
It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast. ***
She doesn’t know what to do with her eyes. The front door of the building is too scarred and gouged to look at, and the street behind her is improbably empty, as if the city had been evacuated and she’s the only one who didn’t hear about it. There is always the game at moments like this to distract her. She opens her leather filed binder and props it on her chest. The game gets harder the further back she goes. (Whitehead 1)
The rhythm, the deliberate denial of causation—why do the Santa Ana winds lead to violence, what does the falling elevator have to do with this woman?—obscures the relationship between the narrative’s withholding of information and its depiction of contingency. Both open with the statement of an event—the desert wind blowing, the elevator falling—followed by a description of actions that are only implicitly connected to the first event. A short declarative sentence is followed by a longer sentence that complicates the setting, providing information that informs one of little. The tone and mood are quite similar. The Intuitionist evokes the style of hard boiled detective fiction in order to translate to the page the “cynicism, pessimism, and darkness” of film noir which itself emerged, in large part, from adaptations of American hard boiled detective fiction (Schrader 53). The opening can also be read as a literary depiction of parallel editing, the
asterisks signifying a parallel edit, showing the reader that the elevator falls as Lila Mae stands at the building’s front door. The Intuitionist borrows from the genre of hardboiled detective fiction so as to adapt film noir to the page. Noir, according to Paul Schrader, “is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood” (53). Lila Mae fits the type of noir protagonist as
adapted from hardboiled detective fiction, which Schrader describes as possessing the “‘tough,’ cynical way of acting and thinking which separated one from the world of everyday emotions— romanticism with a protective shell [. . .] [these] protagonists lived out a narcissistic, defeatist code” (56). Moreover, the folding of form into content—the content of the form—comes to the fore with a reading of The Intuitionist as a literary adaptation of film noir in its use of setting: “A complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and lost time. [. . .] a convoluted time sequence [immerses] the viewer in a time-disoriented but highly stylized world. The manipulation of time, whether slight or complex, is often used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what” (Schrader 58). The how,
intuition, a hunch, often leads the hardboiled detective to the what, the who of the who-dunnit. In this way, The Intuitionist provides simulation as a means of understanding one’s historical situation. Lila Mae Watson resembles a character from film noir once she perceives a mystery, a conspiracy, for which she must discover the solution. As Robert Pippin writes of characters in noir, Lila Mae knows that “what [she] is undertaking is profoundly ill-advised, and [she] can admit to [herself] and others that there are no good reasons to do what [she is] doing and many very good reasons not to act as [she] propose[s]” (15). Believing that the Empiricist camp of the Elevator Inspectors Guild has sabotaged the elevator in order to defame both her and the Intuitionists—both camps are embroiled in a race for the presidency of the Guild—Lila Mae
believes that she lives at the center of a conspiracy that only she can solve. Like Oedipa Maas, Lila Mae believes that she lives “a form of life shadowed, as a matter of historical fact, by a growing, shared, heightened sense of fatalism and alienation” (Pippin 12). That a character must act despite believing that they lack agency, that there are greater forces conspiring against them, authoring their lives, Pippin claims, “is the most interesting aspect of noirs” (12). Lila Mae chooses to act, despite the historical moment—and more specifically American culture—placing restriction upon both her race and gender. She sees her task as hopeless, but nevertheless acts to unveil the conspiracy.
Yet there is no conspiracy, only a “catastrophic accident” (Whitehead 227). The catastrophic accident reveals more about those who are or would be affected by it than it does about the nature of the world. In The Intuitionist the catastrophic accident always reveals the substance of the characters that confront it with both narcissism and cynicism. First deployed as a description of the elevator accident that opens the novel, the catastrophic accident provides the reader with insight into Watson’s character. Throughout the novel Lila Mae has tried to prove that the elevator accident was not an oversight of her intuition, a failure on her part as elevator inspector, but an act of sabotage. Within the Fanny Briggs building, Lila Mae reads the elevator from within the shaft, beyond the mural with its incomplete history. Thus, beneath the surface of history, Lila Mae experiences the darkness of the shaft, a darkness that evokes film noir and its fatalism. She has made the mistake of imagining conspiracy when actually there is only the darkness of accident. This act of intuitionist reading manifests as darkness that veils the shapes and colors that we first see as manifestations of Lila Mae’s trade (6).
Lila Mae reaches out into the darkness and presses the glass convexity of a button. [. . .] This is the wrong darkness. It is the darkness of this day and this time and this elevator
and Lila Mae needs that further-back darkness, the one she encountered on her first visit to Fanny Briggs. [. . .] She’s, she’s almost at that darkness now. It is a slow curtain dropping before this day’s darkness. (226)
Beyond this darkness Lila Mae reads the colors:
There. This new darkness is the old darkness of Number Eleven. She watches the sure and untroubled ascent of Number Eleven. The genies appear on cue, dragging themselves from the wings. The genie of velocity, the genie of the hoisting motor’s brute exertions, the red cone genie of the selector as it ticks off the entity’s progress through the shaft, the amber nonagon genie of the grip shoes as they skip frictionless up T-rails. All of them energetic and fastidious, describing seamless verticality to Lila Mae in her own mind’s tongue. (226)
In the darkness of Fanny Briggs, named for a blind slave who taught herself how to read, beyond the incomplete history of the city, Lila Mae, blind, sees the colored shapes of her intuition, but ultimately sees “nothing” (227). She does not see the cause of the accident. Yet when she reads that which cannot be seen, she is touched. The accident reaches out, she feels the elevator move, she begins her inspection with the touch of a button, and everything she experiences feels wrong—even though the elevator operates correctly. In trying to feel the accident, its cause, she feels everything working correctly. She realizes that “this was a catastrophic accident [. . .] the things that emerge from the black, nether reaches of space and collide here, comets that connect with this frail world after countless unavailing ellipses. Emissaries from the unknowable. [. . .] What her discipline and Empiricism have in common: they cannot account for the catastrophic accident” (227). Lila Mae Watson discovers that the catastrophic accident has no meaning. The catastrophic accident constitutes the “what” of the novel, but its meaning remains elusive,
covered in the darkness of an elevator shaft and in the darkness that marks one as African American.
James Fulton, author of Theoretical Elevators, the founder of Intuitionism, embodies the darkness of the catastrophic accident. Lila Mae, having discovered that James Fulton passed for white from a very young age throughout his entire adult life, realizes that “He was the perfect liar the world made him, mouthing a supreme fiction the world accepted as truth. [. . .] In constant fear of the shadow, the shadow of the catastrophic accident that would reveal him for what he was. The shadow that envelopes [sic] and makes him dark” (232). Lila Mae reads his fear of being discovered as African American as a fear of the catastrophic accident. She interprets the consequences of Fulton’s sister visiting him after many years apart as the moment of recognition: “He sits in the chair Lila Mae sat in, hands kneading the armrests. It is the moment he has feared since he left his town. When he will be revealed for who he is, the catastrophic accident. But his sister does not expose him. She did not make him crash. He was saved” (237). Passive, we do not know what saved James Fulton other than the fact that the catastrophic accident never happened: no one ever discovered his race. The secret identity of James Fulton shapes the form of The
Intuitionist, justifies and catalyzes the secret history that the novel’s narrative withholds, and
justifies its adaptation of film noir to the page. What Fulton is—an African American passing for white—causes us to comprehend his invention of Intuitionism: the realization that what is veiled in darkness can be seen, but such a glimpse happens only by accident—not through sight, but through touch, the authentic experience of history that can only be understood by living a fiction. The revelation of his substance as being African American could only be inscribed with the catastrophic meaning of those carrying the worst prejudices of the time.
Using her intuition within the darkness of an elevator shaft, behind a wall covered in an abbreviated history, within a building named for a slave who taught herself how to read, Lila Mae Watson reads for the cause of an accident, and in doing so reads nothing; yet in this nothing she sees that James Fulton invented Intuitionism as a joke no one but her has understood: “A joke has no purpose if you cannot share it with anyone. [. . .] Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you” (241). There is nothing more serious than a joke. Lila Mae, at the end of the punch line, sees history as others see it, life as those who wish to view the world empirically, for what they can see, and those who see a world beyond this one, intuit it, write it, and make it come to be: a catastrophic accident, existing for itself, a joke no one gets.
“How quickly things can fall into medieval disorder” we are told earlier in the novel (23). As the novel ends, Lila Mae prepares to thrust the profession of elevator inspection further into medieval disorder. She will write the third volume of Theoretical Elevators, assuming Fulton’s name. She will provide an apocryphal manuscript, a forgery that she believes will become