The urban gothic vision of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999).

But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

--Richard Wright, Native Son xxxiv

By listing Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe as cultural references in his essay "How Bigger Was Born" Richard Wright does not merely address the similarities between the richness and depth of African American literature and the historical and cultural focus of these authors. As implicit in his use of the word "horror" to describe the racial history of the United States, Wright was also drawing an important connection between black America and the literary tradition known as the gothic. On its surface gothic literature seems an unlikely context in which to find a discussion of the African American experience. Originating as a formal literary tradition first in Europe with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, and consisting of such figures as castles and abbeys, tyrannical aristocrats, and damsels in distress, the genre's main purpose is to terrify, to reflect the threats and anxiety that individuals and societies often confront. With Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or the Transformation (1798), the American gothic literary tradition began, thus transplanting the genre onto US soil and transforming many of the earlier conventions. Rural towns and plantations replaced castles and abbeys, and landed gentry and slave owners stood in for European aristocracy. The gothic literature that would arise out of each of these contexts, even with their differences, took its inspiration from the social and political climates of the late eighteenth century.

Despite the temporal and contextual distance from its European and American gothic counterparts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contemporary African American literature resonates with many characteristics of the gothic aesthetic. The past still influences the present and future, and issues of identity still create conflicts within the individual. What contemporary African American gothic literature offers is a new set of questions: What does it mean to be a modern black American? Have class and gender differences replaced racial distinctions as the main threats to societal stability, for blacks and whites? How is future racial uplift to be achieved? In diverse ways, Wright and other novelists--Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Ralph Ellison, in particular--have widened the perception of the gothic genre. (1) Like these black authors before him, Colson Whitehead demonstrates a gothic sensibility in his 1999 novel The Intuitionist. Set against the unusual backdrop of an investigation into elevator operations, The Intuitionist is an allegorical tale of blacks' struggle for upward mobility. Whitehead uses an urban gothic landscape and traditional gothic conventions to portray the alienation of the modern black American due to the progress in urban cities and to speculate on the future of US race relations.

In The Intuitionist Lila Mae Watson is an elevator inspector who becomes embroiled in big-city politics when an elevator that she has passed free-falls, fortunately without any passenger injuries. Lila Mae's occupation as an elevator inspector, and her subsequent investigation into the accident, is a clever variance of the detective figure and the detective genre, seen throughout African American literature, but also closely tied to the gothic narrative. (2) As Lila Mae s inquiry deepens, she dashes with dangerous characters and learns of plans for a new elevator design called "the black box." These plans lie at the heart of a power struggle within the elevator industry, and underscore a much larger social battle. In this singular novel Whitehead offers a tale that is part detective novel part racial protest novel. (3)

For early American gothic writers the New World was a wild frontier. Novels such as Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) have depicted what Donald Ringe calls "the darker aspects of the American landscape--the terrible insecurity felt by the whites who find themselves alone in the threatening wilderness, the terror inspired in them by the hostile Indians" (109). Although rural environments have perhaps more often been the setting of American gothic literature, best exemplified in southern gothic novels by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, as urban cities developed, their concrete and steel terrains and turbulent social conditions provided a rich backdrop for the American gothic. Particularly during the 1930s and 1940s, the Los Angeles novel represented by such texts as Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and its cinematic counterpart, film noir, reflected an urban gothic sentiment. The US metropolis was brooding and pessimistic, rife with scandal deception and treachery. In keeping with this novelistic tradition, Whitehead displays his own vision of America's dismal landscape in The Intuitionist.

The northern city in particular has been the source of much inspiration in African American literature, codifying ideas of both hope and frustration. In the nineteenth century, slave narratives depicted the North as a refuge, a Heaven to which slaves escaped, if they could. In his 1845 narrative, Frederick Douglass describes his reaction to seeing New Bedford, Connecticut, for the first time: "From the wharves I strolled around and over the town, gazing with wonder and amazement.... Everything looked clean, new, and beautiful" (111). Into the twentieth century, the North was a land of disappointment and bitterness, as African Americans realized that the region was not completely free of racism or other forms of oppression. In his autobiographical Black Boy (1945), Wright describes his arrival in Chicago in 1927: "My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed me and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie.... The din of the city entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years to come" (261). In The Intuitionist, Lila Mae's father, Marvin, likewise cautions his daughter about leaving their southern home for the North after she has been accepted into the Institute of Vertical Transport, a college for the study of elevators. "It's not so different up there, Lila Mae," he warns. "They have the same white people up there that they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it's the same" (234). Despite this admonition, she sees the North as her opportunity to progress. She explains, "I moved up here because here is where the elevators are. The real elevators" (168).

The Intuitionist operates within two time periods. Its 1999 publication date, at the conclusion of arguably one of the most prosperous decades in American history, allows it to speak to the continuing alienation of the classes of people who were not the beneficiaries of social and economic gains. Whitehead portrays a northern city that was perhaps once a promising urban center but in the novel's present is a metropolis hit hard by economic downturns. Employment is scarce and influenced by racial and gender discrimination and the policies established at mid-century to counter this prejudice. Cronyism and patronage are rampant in business and politics. Minority groups and the poor struggle against social and economic repression that leaves them isolated and vulnerable to abuse. The contrast between economic prosperity and inner-city despair that the author depicts contributes to a gothic landscape infused with mystery, fear, and apprehension.

Without specifying the year in which this novel's story takes place, Whitehead uses subtle details of diction, automobile make, and dress styles, and so on, to depict a 1950's or 60's urban environment. In addition, the city setting is never named, although Whitehead coyly refers to it as "the most famous city in the world, with magnificent elevated trains, five daily newspapers, two baseball stadiums," and "the most famous street in the world" (12, 23, 163). The time of year, too, is ambiguous, the narrator revealing only that "everything in the garden is dying, that's what time of year it is" (58). One of the few references to the popular culture of the era comes from the appearance of a singing group called "Rick Raymond and the Moon-Rays," who performs "a song from a movie musical that was popular a few years back" at an elevator industry party (150). The history of the city and the larger surrounding area are referred to only by referring to "the infamous sale of the island" (47).

Whitehead delivers characters who are estranged from the majority of society. Reminiscent of Ellison's Invisible Man, another novel with (black) gothic overtones, the individuals who inhabit the fictional world of The Intuitionist only exist in surroundings that are hidden, underground, and peripheral. The hierarchy of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, for example, positions white employees above ground while black men are relegated to the motor pool in the "rank gloom of the garage" located at the bottom of the building: "This space in the garage is what the Department has allowed the colored men--it is underground, there are no windows permitting sky, and the sick light is all the more enervating for it--but the mechanics have done their best to make it their own" (18).

This description highlights the black American's relationship to the larger society. The dominant society is determined to keep African Americans, and perhaps all minorities--although no others are discussed in the text--at the bottom, in the dark, and out of sight. By making the most of their situation, "mak[ing] it their own," the black men take ownership of their work conditions, of their very existence, out of the hands of the white heads of the Department. They periodically revolt against their imposed subordination by defacing a poster depicting their boss, the chair of the Elevator Inspectors Guild. Whitehead writes:

   A close inspection of Chancre's campaign
   posters, which are taped to
   every other cement column despite
   regulations against campaign literature
   within a hundred yards of
   Headquarters, reveals myriad tiny
   insurrections, such as counterclockwise
   swirls in the middle of Chancre's
   pupils, an allusion to his famous nocturnal
   dipsomania.... Horns, boiling
   cysts, the occasional cussword inked in
   across Chancre's slat teeth--they add
   up after awhile.... No one notices
   them but they're there, near-invisible,
   and count for something. (18)

Whitehead presents a picture of subtle determination and resilience sustained by various characters throughout the text. This conflict between those who work underground in the garage and those who work in the building itself is symbolic of the larger struggle that gothic literature depicts. What Juliann Fleenor has written about the nightmare that the female gothic exhibits can equally be ascribed to Whitehead's presentation: the discord depicted in the literature is "created by the individual in conflict with the values of her society and her prescribed role" (10). The black workers at the Department of Elevator Inspectors are struggling within the confines of their position to find and reaffirm their voices and very identity.

Also linking The Intuitionist with the gothic tradition is the manner in which Whitehead molds the notion of evil into the shape of a modern patriarchy, producing a climate of terror and seclusion that devalues not only women but blacks as well. In becoming an elevator inspector--the first female and only the second black--Lila Mae has escaped the plight of those in the motor pool, only to face her own isolation. She experiences no camaraderie or even a professional rapport with her fellow inspectors. This separateness began even before Lila Mae joined the ranks of the elevator inspectors, however. As a student at the Institute for Vertical Transport, Lila Mae had to live in a converted janitor's closet above the gymnasium because there were no living quarters for "colored" students. She was a specter on campus, seen by other students and yet not acknowledged. Race relations at the school were characterized not only by whites' disregard for blacks, but by a blatant fear and hostility towards blacks. Using language that recalls the discourse of 19th-century slavery, the narrator tells us that "the admission of colored students to the Institute for Vertical Transport was staggered to prevent overlap and any possible fulminations or insurrections that might arise from that overlap" (44). Despite this staggered admission, the white faculty is unable to tell the black students apart, and they frequently call Lila Mae by the name of the previous black student, a male.

Lila Mae is able to use this invisibility to her advantage as she embarks on her own investigation into the crash of the elevator. At the Funicular Follies, the Department's annual banquet/variety show, she is mistaken for a maid and is therefore able to operate behind the scenes and witness the outlandish actions of her colleagues. Examining herself in the mirror after donning the maid's uniform that has been mistakenly thrust into her hands, and noting that she is not wearing shoes appropriate for such work, she shrugs off the contradiction, reminding herself that those in attendance "won't be looking at [my] shoes. They won't be looking at me at all." Throughout the night she repeats this observation, deciding not to put her hair back in a bun, more appropriate for her position as a waitress or maid, because "[t]hey do not see her." Even though these are the same men with whom she works side-by-side during the day, "[i]n here they do not see her. She is the colored help" (Whitehead 153).

Lila Mae's misidentification as a maid signifies what Hana Wirth-Nesher describes as "the paradox of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of the black to the white in public space." In discussing the examination of double consciousness in Ellison's Invisible Man, Wirth-Nesher writes, "Although visible due to race, the black figure in the landscape is rendered invisible by being "naturalized" into a familiar icon--the shoeshine boy, the 'Jolly Nigger,' or variations of Sambo" (96). Whitehead thus depicts the black female figure in white society rendered invisible and "naturalized" as a maid; thus, he illustrates the narrow-mindedness and racism within the Department and indeed within the larger US society. (4)

If race and gender erase Lila Mae, race distinguishes as hypervisible a blackface duo, "Mr. Gizzard and Hambone," actually two white elevator inspectors, who perform at the banquet. Their performance accentuates the dividing line between the predominantly white audience of elevator inspectors and the black waiters, waitresses, and busboys. The duo entertains the crowd in the traditional minstrel fashion: "The skinny man wears a white T-shirt and gray trousers. Clothespins hold his suspenders to his pants. The fat man wants to be a dandy, but his green and purple suit is too small for him, exposing his thick ankles and wrists. Their elbows row back and forth in unison and their feet skip 'cross the stage to the music. Their faces are smeared black with burnt cork, and white greasepaint circles their mouths in ridiculous lips" (154). To raucous applause, they perform a routine that includes dances and jokes, complete with requisite "Negro dialect" and pejorative stereotypes. One such joke: "Hambone, you ole niggah, where you git dat nice hat you got on yo head?" His partner answers, "I got it at dat new hat stoe on Elm Street." "Tell me, Hambone, did it cost much?" "I don know, Mr. Gizzard--de shopkeeper wasn't dar!" (154).

The response to this performance signals Whitehead's sense of the contrast between white and black. The world that Lila Mae and her fellow African Americans live in is one in which whites still accept such racial exhibitions as "Mr. Gizzard and Hambone" as accepted sources of entertainment, and as such, the white audience enthusiastically receives the minstrel performance. In appreciation, the elevator inspectors "[go] mad" and give the pair a standing ovation. In contrast, "the [...] colored workers do not speak on what they have just seen" (156). Lila Mae's reaction is similar to that of her fellow colored workers, reflecting their mutual disbelief, shame, and anger. Despite her seemingly outspoken personality and her more advanced position as an elevator inspector, she "does not mention it either, telling herself it is because she does not know the silent women she has been working with, whom she has not talked to all evening for her concentration on the Follies" (156). She rationalizes her silence, thinking to herself that her reticence "is because she is undercover and speaking to them might trip her up, a dozen other reasons." Initially believing that "the other women are so beaten that they cannot speak of the incident," she finally realizes that "all of them, Lila Mae included, are silent for the same reason: because this is the world they have been born into, and there is no changing that" (157). Although she is verbally silent, like the men who work in the garage, Lila Mae also ultimately performs her own act of resistance. Before giving a new fork to one of the attendees of the dinner, she drags it through grease and the contents of the garbage can.

Included in the audience is Pompey, the city's first black elevator inspector, who "rub[s] laughter-tears from his eyes, [and] lean[s] against [another audience member] to steady himself" (157). Pompey's seemingly traitorous behavior, appearing to enjoy the blackface performance as much as his white co-workers, rather than being stunned into silence like the other African Americans, is understood when a clearer picture of Pompey develops. Called "little Pompey" (25) by the white inspectors, he has incurred the disdain of Lila Mae due to his "appalling obsequious nature, cultivated to exceptional degree" and a persistent rumor (or truth) that he, upon being invited to the office of the head of the inspectors, allowed himself to be kicked in the behind. "The next day," the story goes, "a small memo appeared on Pompey's desk informing him of his promotion to Inspector Second Grade." (5) Significantly, Pompey equally dislikes Lila Mae, declaring about the elevator accident and the impending investigation that threatens Lila Mae's career, "She's finally getting what's been coming to her for a long time" (26).

The smothered, growing conflict between Lila Mae and Pompey explodes when she visits his home to confront him regarding her suspicions that he is involved in inspecting the elevators of a mob-owned building and that he might have been responsible for sabotaging the elevator that she had inspected. She is surprised that he lives only two blocks from her, although his pleasant neighborhood is very different from her own desolate community; there are children playing in the street and people greet each other amiably. Unbeknownst to Lila Mae, Pompey has a wife and children, who are the motivation for his sycophantic actions. Confronting her accusations, he tells Lila Mae that he took the extra job because he needs the money to take his family out of the neighborhood that, while looking nice, is undergoing a change. "You see them kids play ball?" he asks Lila Mae. "Ten years from now half of them be in jail or dead, and the other half working as slaves just to keep a roof over they heads. Ten years from now they won't even be kids playing ball on the street. Won't be safe enough even to do that" (194). He continues, defending his on-the-job demeanor, "how am I supposed to act, the way you carry yourself. Like you some queen. Your nose up in the air? I got two kids." And after Lila Mae criticizes Pompey for "shuffl[ing] for those white people like a slave," Pompey responds with his own critique. "What I done," he explains, "I done because I had no other choice. This is a white man's world. They make the rules. You come along, strutting like you own the place. Like they don't own you. But they do." He persists, frustrated by Lila Mae's unwillingness to appreciate his struggles with race and class as the first black inspector. "You had it easy, snot nosed kid that you are," he states, "because of me. Because of what I did for you" (195).

This clash between Lila Mae and Pompey obviously echoes arguments between the early and later generations of African Americans who struggled for equal rights. Lila Mae feels embarrassed by Pompey's seemingly subservient behavior, behavior that she ultimately sees as part of very real sacrifices he has made. Pompey, on the other hand, is resentful of the ease with which Lila Mae has incorporated herself into the elevator industry, a progression perhaps made easier because she is female, and her appearance of having no regard for the path that was paved before her. Both characters are so concerned with their own agendas that neither of them can see their ultimate reliance on one another, or their place within a larger scheme set in motion by those looking for the missing elevator plans. As the novel draws to a close, one of the men who wants to find the plans to the black box tells Lila Mae how beneficial and utterly predictable it was for her to suspect Pompey, thereby steering her away from the real potential culprits. "Let one colored in and you're integrated," he says. "Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey" (249). (6)

Whitehead offers no easy resolutions to this intergenerational conflict. Later in the novel, an unacknowledged, if one-sided, truce has been called. Lila Mae admits her misreading of Pompey, acknowledging that she was no better than her white co-workers. Whitehead describes the role that Pompey played in society:

   The Uncle Tom, the grinning nigger,
   the house nigger who is to blame for
   her debased place in this world.
   Pompey gave [whites] a blueprint for
   colored folk. How they acted. How
   they pleased white folks. How eager
   they would be for a piece of the dream
   that they would do anything for
   massa. She hated her place in the
   world, where she fell in the order of
   things, and blamed Pompey, her
   shucking shadow in the office. She
   could not see him any more than anyone
   else in the office saw him. (239)

Whitehead later adds that Lila Mae "hated something in herself and she took it out on Pompey" (240).

The divisiveness between Lila Mae and Pompey is a product of one of Whitehead's main tenets in The Intuitionist, what he calls "the lie of whiteness" (239). All of the characters, white and black, are afflicted by a blindness that prohibits them from realizing their position in society and from determining their own fate. All of them are searching for a means of escape, of rising above their present individual and social circumstances. The potential for this transformation might be found in the mysterious plans of the black box.

The very possibility of change informs Lila Mae's quest for the elusive black box. The search for the cause of the elevator's fall, and the resultant discovery of the plans for a potentially revolutionary elevator model--the black box--in the missing notebooks of a deceased inventor, could create a shift not only in the local politics of the city, but also in the city's and the nation's race relations. With this black box, Whitehead has created an ingenious metaphor for racial uplift. The investigation into the validity and location of the plans for the black box functions effectively as an exploration into the past, present, and future of racial progress, outlining the compromises, losses, and gains inherent in such an evolution.

Whitehead has created, then, an intricate postmodern tale, at the center of which is the symbol of the elevator. The structure of the elevator is an elaborate, mechanical, and philosophical fantasy, the design of which suggests the very opposite of the elevator's actual function. Of the form of the traditional elevator, the Arbo Smooth-Glide, Lila Mae notes: it was "equipped [...] with an oversized door to foster the illusion of space, to distract the passenger from what every passenger feels acutely about elevators. That they ride in a box on a rope in a pit. That they are in the void" (6). The elevator that Lila Mae describes is similar to the garage where the maintenance people work in the Department of Elevator Inspectors building: each is designed to give the appearance of openness--the elevator by its large doors, and the garage by its florescent lights--while masking the true intent and design of the space. On the one hand, the elevator is constructed to give the impression that it is not moving at all, all the while hurtling passengers through the heights and depths of a building. The Department's garage, on the other hand, while seemingly a blacks-only space where the workers experience freedom and autonomy, serves the white power structure as a perfect holding cell to the keep blacks in their place. Lila Mae and the other blacks in the city hope to find in the elusive black box an escape from the void of the garage.

The Arbo Smooth-Glide and the mechanics' garage further symbolize Whitehead's critique of late 20th-century US social and political programs that promise more than they actually deliver. The progress made by the 1960's civil rights movement and the subsequent passing of legislations beneficial to racial and ethnic minority groups was tempered by economic policies that kept any real progress to a minimum. Like dysfunctional social, political, and economic policies, the elevator and the garage offer the illusionary appeal of movement and progress, while simultaneously keeping things stagnant, or even moving them backwards.

Whitehead presents as an antidote to this conservative condition the mythological black box. To the novel's students of elevator science, the black box is more than another means of conveyance. It is "the perfect elevator," "one that will deliver [people] from the cities [they] suffer now, these stunted shacks" (61). The dueling national elevator companies, Arbo and American, are both in search of the plans for this project that holds such hope, not just for their respective companies and the industry as a whole, but for all people. Compared to the first elevator, invented by Elisha Otis in the early nineteenth century, which "delivered [people] from medieval five- and six-story constructions," this (post)modern invention, developed by James Fulton, "will grant [people] the sky, unreckoned towers: the second elevation.... [I]t's the future" (61). The second elevation represents unlimited potential and possibility for Lila Mae and the other residents of the city, if not the world. It suggests a lifting of the restrictions and constraints placed on black Americans in contemporary society. (7)

The inventor of the black box, James Fulton, was a black man who had passed for white, holding the position of outsider in the industry of elevator invention, as well as in the larger society. His is a dual presence throughout the novel, not only representing the evolution of the elevator industry, but also personifying the early days of race relations. When Lila Mae learns that Fulton was black, she perceives him as "a spy. in white spaces, just like she is" (139). (8) Not only is Fulton a spy, but he also signifies the spectral presence so often present in the gothic. As such, throughout the text both he and his invention haunt the characters, especially Lila Mae. A unique bond develops between them, although they never meet in person. For several months, from the vantage point of her room at the Institute, Lila Mae would see a mysterious figure moving through the stacks of the library. On the last night that she was to see him, Fulton waved back to her, "communicat[ing] all he knew and what she already understood about the darkness" (46); the next day Fulton was found dead on the library floor. Fulton, in turn, had inquired about the girl he had seen through the window. When the Dean of the Institute identifies Lila Mae, Fulton senses an affinity as well in part perhaps because of her race. He absentmindedly writes in the margin of his notebook, "Lila Mae Watson is the one" (253).

Fulton's imaginative theories on elevator construction and operation speak to the status of the black American in US society; they reflect the race's movement up--and down--the social order. In his seminal multi-volume text, Theoretical Elevators, he writes that "horizontal thinking in a vertical world is the race's curse," thereby positing that what plagues the black race is a lack of upward vision, an inability to seek heights previously unreached (151). He further addresses this deficiency in Volume Two of his text: "The race sleeps in this hectic and disordered century. Grim lids that will not open. Anxious retinas flit to and fro beneath them. They are stirred by dreaming. In this dream of uplift, they understand that they are dreaming the contract of the hallowed verticality, and hope to remember the terms on waking. The race never does, and that is our curse" (186). With his innovative creation he proposes to lift this curse, thus realizing the dream of uplift, "the promise of verticality" (176). In truth, he writes of, in sociological non-elevator, terms, racial uplift. One character says, in speaking of his search for the black box and its importance to the black community, "they always saying it's the future. It's the future of the cities. But it's our future, not theirs. It's ours. And we need to take it back. What he made, this elevator, colored people made that. It's ours. And I'm going to show that we ain't nothing. Show them ... that we are alive" (140).

This second elevation, or black box, mirrors the gothic's function in philosophy in that it responds to traditional modes of thought. Just as the Fulton-designed elevator served as an improvement over the early Otis conception, so, too, did the gothic emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an improvement, or at least a change, over earlier philosophies. Gothic fiction, as J. Gerald Kennedy writes in his essay about Edgar Allan Poe, "enacts the radical uncertainty of an epoch of revolution in which nearly all forms of authority ... came to be seen as constricting systems" (40). Fulton's design challenges not only the authority of the leaders of the elevator industry and their present theories of elevator inspection, but the dominance of traditional notions of race as well. Despite the vagueness of the novel's temporal setting, The Intuitionist clearly reflects a racial revolution. Like the gothic, the elevator responds to the fears of an industrial, urban, multiracial western society. Fulton has found a better way, and that way is the black box.

What makes Fulton's invention even more intriguing than its potential is that it is based on a joke, an attempt by Fulton to challenge traditional notions of elevator philosophy. Prior to Fulton's theories, elevator inspection was based on Empiricism, physical examinations of elevator machinery, its material components, to determine how the apparatus is working. As a means of revealing the deficiencies of this approach, Fulton writes a volume promoting an opposing ideology--one that he did not fully believe himself--based on sensing the elevator's movements and interior design. When investigating the elevator that eventually falls, Lila Mae "listens" and "concentrate[s] on the vibrations massaging her back." In her mind, the vibrations take the shape of an "aqua-blue cone," and she visualizes the upward movement of the elevator as "a red spike." Other shapes form as the elevator ascends. Lila Mae's intuition is innate and magical, for, the narrator tells us, "You don't pick the shapes and their behavior. Everyone has their own set of genies" (6). One critic would come to deem the practice "Intuitionist" and define it as "postrational, innate. Human" (238).

It is not accidental that the language that Whitehead uses to describe these differing philosophies evokes the dichotomy that exists between East and West, black and white. What Whitehead presents is not solely a potential technological shift, but ultimately an entire paradigm shift. Lila Mae's own description of the position of the early inspectors reveals the larger implications of the development of such a revolutionary approach as Intuitionism. "They looked at the skin of things," she says, further delineating the two methods not just along philosophical lines, but racial ones as well. "White people's reality is built on what things appear to be--that's the business of Empiricism" (239). The men at the Funicular Follies just "looked at the skin of things" when they failed to recognize Lila Mae in a maid's uniform, seeing her merely as a black servant, and not as their co-worker. Lila Mae shares their myopia when she initially suspects Pompey. The failure of Empiricism is that individuals don't see the subtle shadings, either of elevators or people. "Their sacred Empiricism has no meaning," Lila Mae concludes, "when they can't even see that this man [Fulton] is colored because he says he is not. Or doesn't even say it. They see his skin and see a white man." (9) Fulton's design suggests that Intuitionism, conversely, offers a new opportunity, a new vision, for both this city and for all of US society.

There are no clear conclusions at the end of Whitehead's novel. Lila Mae finds Fulton's notebooks that contain the plans for the black box, and she delivers them, incomplete, to both of the elevator companies. What is missing is the key that will break the code that Fulton used to design his elevator; only Lila Mae possesses the code. After she has completed Fulton's manuscripts, when she feels that the time is right, when society is ready to receive what the black box represents, Lila Mae will reveal the code to the rest of the world. It is then that Fulton's vision of the world will be transformed from a joke into a reality.

Works Cited

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stones as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. Ed. David W. Blight. Boston: Bedford, 1993.

Fleenor, Juliann, ed. "The Female Gothic." The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden P, 1983. 3-28.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. "Phantoms of Death in Poe's Fiction." The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920. Eds. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crew. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983. 37-65.

Miller, Laura. "Colson Whitehead's Alternate New York." 12 Jan. 1999. Salon.com. 1 July 2006. <http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/01/cov_12featureb.html>.

--. The Salon Interview: Colson Whitehead." 12 Jan. 1999. Salon.com. 1 July 2006. <http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/01/ cov_is_12int.html>.

Ridenour, Shelley. Rev. of The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead. 4 Oct. 1999. Chicago Words Hub. 1 July 2006. <http://newcitychicago.com/home/daily/book_reviews/ intuitionist10499.html>.

Ringe, Donald. American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth Century Fiction. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1982.

Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. New York: Anchor, 1999.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. 1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

--. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper & Row, 2001.

Notes

(1.) See Native Son, Beloved and Song of Solomon, Mama Day and Linden Hills, and Invisible Man, respectively.

(2.) For a discussion of the relationship between the detective and gothic novels, see, for example, Cawelti (27) and Day (passim).

(3.) Laura Miller cites Whiteheed's influences as being Don DeLillo and "Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon by way of Walter Mosley." Reviewer Shelley Ridenour sees traces of Ralph Ellison as well, but also includes George Orwell as an obvious inspiration. In an interview with Miller, Whitehead himself cites Stephen King, Ishmael Reed, and Jean Toomer as authors who have directly or indirectly inspired him.

(4.) As a courier, Lila Mae's father represents yet another familiar icon for whites. When he appears at an office building seeking a job interview for the position of elevator inspector, "[t]he secretary handed him a package when he walked in the door. He returned it to her thin white hands and informed her he was here for an interview. Wasn't a messenger boy" (161).

(5.) This scene replicates a scene in Wright's Black Boy, where Shorty lets a white man kick him in the behind for a quarter (227-29). Just as it is probably no coincidence that Wright's Shorty is also an elevator operator, Pompey is the name given, ironically or contemptuously, to an officious slave type in various antebellum slave narratives.

(6.) Racial politics had infused Lila Mae's career from the beginning. Lila Mae's assignment to the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building, named for a slave woman who had escaped to the North and taught herself how to read, was politically motivated. It was an election year, Lila Mae observes, and Chancre, the current Inspector Guild chair, "was so naked in his attempt to score points with the electorate," particularly the minority population, that he assigned her to that building (13).

(7.) So much is the elevator a symbol of (racial) progress, and therefore a threat to the white majority, that at the press conference following the accident, a reporter asks the city's mayor, "Do you think that a party or parties resistant to colored progress may be responsible?" (22)

(8.) When she discovers that Fulton was passing for white, she asks herself, perhaps reflecting upon her own experiences with her co-workers, "What did Fulton do when [other colored people] acted white? Talk about 'the colored problem' and how it is our duty to help the primitive race get in step with white civilization. Out of darkest Africa. Or did he remain silent, smile politely at their darkie jokes. Tell a few of his own" (139).

(9.) In discussing the potential impact of the discovery of Fulton's racial identity, one character remarks, "'I don't know if [the upper ranks of the Inspectors Guild] know he was colored, but if they do you know they ain't going to tell the truth. They would never admit that.... They'd die before they say that" (138).

Saundra Liggins is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Fredonia.