The Intuitionist

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

The Intuitionist actually made me doubt what I even knew about the world at points. Set in the (unnamed but no less distinct) New York City of a vague past—perhaps the 50s or early 60s—the work of speculative fiction chronicles Lila Mae Watson’s work in the city’s Department of Elevator Inspectors and how a mysterious, power-laden conflict between philosophical branches of Elevator theory intersects with race and racism in the U.S.A.

Ibram X. Kendi’s crystallization of the ideology of “uplift suasion” came to mind a lot as I read The Intuitionist. Uplift suasion is “the idea that blacks can overcome inherent prejudice in whites only by competing as their intellectual and business equals” (Cain). Whitehead’s novel is not only about the first black woman to work in New York’s Department of Elevator Inspectors (referred to self-importantly by its workers as “The Department”), it’s about elevators themselves: their function, their promises of modernity, verticality, and convenience, and what they make possible—literal uplift right alongside the potential for injury, tragedy. All of this, in the US, always indivisible from racism, disparities, exclusions, limitations upon the imagination of what is possible.

Whitehead breaks it down and shakes it up in a way that is hysterical, painful, and sharp. At times the novel is a mystery, sometimes shading into a New York mob-story vibe; at times it is an explicit meditation on race and racism in the US, the relative advantages and disadvantages of passing, assimilation, pursuing uplift suasion, or pursuing rebellion. Unabashedly clever and witty, Whitehead savors choice words and poetic turns of phrase and doesn’t shy away from unconcluded/inconclusive philosophical mind-spinners: his invention of the ideological debate in Elevator-interested people between Empiricism and Intuitionism is at once a plot device and almost bigger than the book itself, asking us to consider the relative importance (or perhaps even “realness”) of what we can see versus what we can imagine to be true. It asks us to confront the very real power that a made up idea can come to have in the world, and what options there are for contending with such an idea once it’s taken hold, grown roots, transformed into something with physical, emotional, financial, global repercussions.

Lila Mae’s responses range from going rogue in a city van; reveling in flirtatious solidarity; sucking the bitter fruit of being double crossed, underestimated, used, and considered less than human; and questioning everything she believed to be true. Published a little more than twenty years ago, Whitehead asks where the elevator—city—country is going next, and how we will respond. I wish I knew what Lila Mae was doing and thinking now.