is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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The Intuitionist: Your Summer Reading?
The Intuitionist: Your Summer Reading?
I finished reading The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead a week or so ago, and at the time, not to mention while I was deep into reading it, I was recommending it to people. But it�s difficult to recommend it to people successfully because they of course want to know �what�s it about� and then the moment you start telling them, �well, it�s about the art of elevator inspection, and a fictional quarrel between two different schools of elevator inspection, and in the end it turns out to be a huge allegory for racism, racial politics, and passing for what you aren�t.� The look on the faces of many of the people to whom I tried to communicate my enthusiasm was similar to the look on the face of someone who is about to hit the snooze button for ten more minutes of peace before fully waking!
Another thing about the novel is that none of the characters are likeable, really. You don�t end up caring very deeply about anyone�s life, or trying to imagine what will happen to them after the movement of the plot ends, etc. It is intentional, I think, because it�s the story itself that is engrossing, the world it build for you that both is and is not recognizable as your own. The book takes patience, but not because it�s boring (I do know the difference. There are many books I wouldn�t bother to recommend to you because the patience they take has to do with boringness.). The writing is beautiful, and the use of the elevator inspection metaphor strangely fascinating. There are even these whole passages from made-up textbooks of intuitionist elevator inspection.
Hey, if you�re going to read the book, what follows may or may not spoil certain elements of it.
The conflict within the book is about race but it�s also about the difference between the empiricist school of elevator inspection and the intuitionist school of elevator inspection. The empiricist school relies on things as they appear to the eye: the condition of cables, machinery, shafts, elevator cars. The intuitionist school relies on the feeling of an elevator working as it should, and so an intuitionist elevator inspector doesn�t need to go to the machine room, but rather can take a ride in an elevator, feel its vibrations, listen to its components working together, and sense what is right and wrong with the elevator system. The point: sometimes what is wrong with a system can�t be seen by looking at its machinery. The thing that is puzzling to the empiricists is that the intuitionists have such stellar records of catching faulty mechanisms and diagnosing problems. So, though in the world of �the way things are and appear to be��empiricism, and common ideas of how to know what truth is�it is very difficult to explain how one could intuit something like a badly maintained lifting mechanism, it remains the case that intuitionists do so fairly consistently.
A lot of other stuff happens, having to do with petty city politics and human smallmindedness and racial prejudice.
Here�s the thing. We do live in the world of the empiricists. We think what appears to us is what the truth is. �How things are� is fact. How things work is simply how they work. So, you may or may not like the poetic flights of fancy contained in the manuals of the intuitionists, and their ideas about transcendence of �what is,� etc.�the poetry is a matter of taste, you might tell yourself�but you�re probably inclined to want your elevator inspector to be an empiricist, leaving his poetry to his private life, success-ratings notwithstanding.
But what if the truth created by the how things work is a truth produced by a racist classist system whose truths are hatched from presuppositions no more scientifically tenable than the intuition of some minority of elevator inspectors? What if how things appear to us is biased to such an extent that it can never be true, if truth has something to do with humanity, and humanity has something to do with justice? What if you can�t see the injustice by looking with the bare eye at the systems whose main aim is to keep being systems that work just as they work right now?
What is so great about Whitehead�s book is that it doesn�t hit anyone over the head with any of its truths. It just works them into its narrative in the subtlest of ways, and then parts of it stick with you well after you�re done reading. And maybe, it makes your shift your presuppositions in some subtle way that, in the end, makes what appears to be true not so true: Empiricism modified by intuitionism without anyone even noticing that anything has happened! Because actions aren�t only what we can see.
Man, what a beautiful book.
I just started reading Cloud Atlas, which already has me enthralled. That�s right, enthralled.
When we next meet I'll reveal how I was insinuated into a plot that found Evany Thomas sitting on a gorilla's knee late, late at night.
5:09 p.m. - June 28, 2005
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