My thoughts on The Intuitionist were touched off by bell hook’s discussions of "difference" and "otherness". These terms reminded me of the modernist tenet of the individual as alienated (or the theme of distance vs. participation in Hassan’s chart from last week’s reading). This is certainly true for Lila Mae in The Intuitionist. However, in bell hooks’ discussion, difference and otherness seemed to have a presence or a form (this in turn reminds of absence as a presence – another of Hassan’s dichotomies), whereas in The Intuitionist difference and otherness become qualities that make a person most invisible.
Lila Mae, as the Department of Elevator Inspectors first black female inspector is in a position to stand out against the ranks of white men who populate the department. It seems that her uniqueness, or otherness, would make her most visible, but that is not the case. She is shunned during after-work outings to O’Connor’s. She has only to don a maid’s uniform at the Department’s annual Follies to vanish completely from the radar of her white colleagues: "Lila Mae picks up empty plates from the tables of her coworkers. No one recognizes her" (148).
Yet Lila Mae sometimes perceives other characters as invisible. One passage describes Jim and John, the ransackers of Lila Mae’s apartment: "The invisible everymen. The true citizens. Lila Mae counts few people as friends in this world. Jim and John are the rest" (29). In fact, Lila Mae is described as being "a practicing solipsist" (I can’t find the page). Lila Mae points out that the Empiricists "…looked at the skin of things" (239), and is sure that it is Pompey who sabotaged the Number Eleven elevator in the Fanny Briggs building. However, she eventually realizes that she was wrong about Pompey, and that she only "looked at the skin" of him: "She could not see him anymore than anyone else in the office saw him" (239). This leads me to wonder, who is really invisible in The Intuitionist? How visible is anyone to anyone else?
It seems that Fulton himself, grounded by the perpetual lie about his race, had to get past looking "at the skin of things", as well. "He created a life of transcendence that was as much a lie as his life…" (241). Posing as a white man, he blended seamlessly into a white man’s world – becoming invisible as part of "the rest" (29). At the end of the novel, Lila Mae wonders about Fulton’s intentions in his late-in-life conversion to his own theories: "That there could be, in the world he invented to parody his enslavers, a field where he could be whole?" (241). These musings lead her to revelations about "otherness": "Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you" (241). With these words, I saw the pervasive modernist tenet of distance (the individual as alien) evaporate into the postmodernist participation (where characters interact, or communicate, with each other, as part of the larger world).