I think books like The Intuitionist please bell hooks, as it seems to incorporate much of what she finds to be lacking in postmodernist representations of black Americans. Colson Whitehead does not revert to simplification in portraying the black community of New York (is it?), but shows how, despite similar background and class belonging, black American experience is always unique and will create differences, and sometimes even antagonisms, within the group.
Even though Lila Mae and Pompey are two of the very few black elevator inspectors who are actually allowed to work as such, there seems to be no common bond between them, only mutual animosity. Lila Mae looks down upon Pompey because of his apparent adaptation of a ‘white’ outlook on the world (and a racist sense of humor), while he sees her as a presumptuous black chick whose rise in the firm is alleviated by all the hardships he went to go through in the attempt to be accepted as a black professional. In fact, their attitude towards each other seem to the white people around them to confirm the view that one colored person means integration, whereas two colored means “you got a race war as they try to kiss up the whitey” (249).
Of course, their attitude towards one another has nothing to do with ‘kissing up the whitey’; they are merely results of attempting to display the ‘caricature of strength’ needed to get by in an antagonistic world. For whereas the world they live in – and the trade they live by – is the very emblem of social mobility, the color of their skin makes it impossible for them to ascend like white men. The comparison with the white black man, Fulton, emphasizes this. Towards the end of the novel Lila Mae admits that her hatred towards Pompey is based on her hatred towards herself: what hostilities she has ignored and what ‘white’ or Empirisist vision (i.e. judging things based on surface appearance) she has adapted in adjusting to the white world that surrounds her in her upward ascent. Lila Mae and Pompey can thus be seen as representatives of what Cornel West called the “anxiety-ridden” black middle-class, which is “insecure” yet “willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be” (in hooks, 8).
The other group West describes as those sharing the collective plight of the black Americans is the hopeless members of the “vast and growing underclass” (Hooks, 8 ). In the novel these are the dwellers of the colored parts of the city. These people whose skin color force them to live their lives trapped in what seems to Lila Mae a distasteful and atavistic “horizontal maundering about” (171) the city’s dirt, water and ‘dark murk’ beyond the dream of social ascent. They are invisible to white men, and the closer they get to the power network that runs the city, the worse their predicament. At the financial district their very bodies dissolve, and their voices are silenced to such an extent that even organizing sentences becomes an “impossible prospect” (223). The reason for Lila Mae’s slight contempt for these people is that she (like most black kids?) was taught to believe in the possibility of social ascent, and early taught the mechanics of this ascent by her father, a man himself trapped at the lower level of society.
Fulton’s first dream of ascent was of high buildings in which people were stacked on top of one another and no-one knew anything about his neighbor: where he came from or what he did. In this dream-world, successful integration depended upon not being recognized or having contact with people of the same background as yourself. It is the white man’s idea of integration: each black individual separate in a white world, – and it is very similar to modern city anonymity. Yet it is a state that cannot protect the black man from free fall. The shafts of each elevator are separate, and there is always the threatening black void beneath you. Fully integrated into this kind of community, Fulton realized he could not make his satire bite because no-one was there to share his vision. This is why he came up with his vision of the second elevation: a different approach to black ascent.
Fulton’s final dream is of a world based on interconnectedness: of shafts in which you rise from the original black nothingness and into something that transcends it and diminishes the probability of falling. In this ride, there is only ascent, no fear of free fall. You leave the world below you behind – that black coffin that diminished you and kept you grounded in the mud – and rely on new “dependable allies” (222). This mutual lift must be based on Intuitionism: it is a black thing, associated with an awareness (black, and hence stereotyped as witchcraft and voodoo by white men) that can only be partially understood even by sympathizing whites (like Chuck). This means that the ‘second ascension’ is all about communication: Intuitionism is communication: communication which what is not-you. Only when black Americans have been able to communicate in a way that unites their common experience and prevents them from falling back into separate states of black dispair (i.e. when they have formed new allies), can the subject be dissolved without becoming nothingness.
In this way, I believe, The Intuitionist asserts bell hooks’s point that issues of identity are still important to black Americans, and must be allowed in postmodernist writings in order for it to maintain its function as a discourse of difference and resistance. Insisting on dissolving the subject before individuals belonging to marginalized groups have been able to negotiate some kind of subjectivity only serves postmodernism to become exclusive instead of inclusive, and favor the voice of the (white intellectual) critic over the real (and colored) other.