"We have too long had imposed upon us, both from inside and outside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness." (hooks, par 10)
At the risk of sounding cantankerous, I feel as though I should re-clarify my argument. I stated in both the blog and in class, that The Intuitionist is not entirely an essentialist novel. I also agree fully that it is possible to have a novel populated with black characters that is entirely nominalistic, as described in the hooks quote cited in Dr. Sample’s previous blog entry. However, it is still my contention that Whitehead has done little to progress the "black novel" towards the nominalistic ideal presented in hook’s essay.
Dr. Sample wrote, "To use a word that came up in class, it doesn’t necessarily equal a cliche to present a black man whose aspirations have been foreclosed because of the color of his skin. What looks like a cliche, others would call the truth, steeped in lived history." I agree that cliche may have been an unfortunate choice of words (not because it is inaccurate, but rather due to its critical connotation); perhaps "trope" would be more appropriate. However, Lila Mae’s father is a trope not because he is a "a black man whose aspirations have been foreclosed because of the color of his skin," but rather due to the fact that this is all we know of him. If we look at the second definition of cliche (the one that does not concentrate on the triteness of a subject), we get, "A person or character whose behavior is predictable or superficial." ((dictionary.com) I know that the OED would have been more impressive, but I’m just lazy). It seems to me that each of the black characters in the novel, with the exception of Lila Mae, are structured in the same manner as a host of characters that came before them. For evidence of this, I need go no further than our class discussion. A number of students spoke of Lila Mae’s father as a complex, developed character, even though Whitehead dedicated only a few paragraphs to his description. The connection was made, not through the text, but rather through the history of this trope, one that has been reinforced through countless descriptions from slave narratives through contemporary rap lyrics.
I do not feel as though this is a trite novel, in fact I think it was excellent. Nevertheless, I would argue that it falls short of the hooks quote mentioned in Dr. Sample’s blog entry. For the sake of summation, I ask the following question: What has The Intuitionist done for the black novel? Will future "nominalistic-black" writers cite it as a genre changing text? I realize that I may be asking too much of Whitehead, but at this point, I am responding to the claims made in class as well as online.
Anyhoo, I’m glad for this opportunity to restart the debate via blog, as I’m still working to wrap my head around this text.
Some very good points to consider. I’m not entirely entrenched in my own point-of-view, so I could be swayed. But not quite yet.
I agree that The Intuitionist doesn’t completely answer bell hooks’ call for a radical departure from the essentialized versions of African-American life that crop up in novels written by both black and white writers (the kind of novels, I should add, which have proliferated in the fifteen years since hooks wrote her essay).
I do, however, believe that The Intuitionist achieved success with a smaller component of hooks’ larger call: a “recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle” (par 11).
For example, exile is a theme we didn’t address in class, but which is clearly present in the novel. In many ways, The Intuitionist is about the Great Migration of rural black Americans to the urban north in the first half of the twentieth century. Whitehead even maps this migration–caused by both push and pull factors–onto his elevator metaphor, having Lila Mae’s father talk about the North as “up” and the South as “down.” So, I see Whitehead recognizing the African-American experience (here and in many other places in the novel) but then providing a metaphorical turn of the screw which allows us to see these experiences in a new light, and avoids essentializing them.
I like replacing our use of “cliche” with “trope.” I do think they’re different terms, with different connotations. Cliches are repeated, unthinkingly, uncritically (unless they’re used ironically). Trope implies more critical insight on the part of the author, who is strategically employing the trope for a larger purpose.
And in the case of The Intuitionist I wonder if the novel is not only about Lila Mae’s learning to read, but about us, the readers, learning to read as well (or re-read, as the case may be). Think about Pompey, who for most of the novel seems a cliche, the shuffling, acquiescent Uncle Tom. This is certainly how Lila Mae “reads” him, and it’s how we are encouraged to read him too. Toward the end of the novel, however, Lila Mae (and we) discover he’s a much more complicated person. We’d been misreading a cliche.
And this brings me to my final comment, which is simply an open-ended question: is it possible to have a novel which seems to be made of a dozen different cliches (or tropes) be, in its totality, not a cliche or essentialized text at all? That is, can the whole be greater than the sum of its cliched parts?
CANTANKEROUS: Showing an ill-natured disposition; ill-conditioned and quarrelsome, perverse, cross-grained. (OED)
Your points are well taken. I can see how the elevator metaphor brings a new dimension to a long-standing discussion.
However, the linchpin of your argument seems to involve Lila Mae’s misreading of Pompey. You claim that we have been misreading him as an “Uncle Tom” when we discover that he was not responsible for the sabotage. I would argue that you are placing entirely too much weight on this discovery. Pompey was a red herring in a detective novel, not a complication of the “Uncle Tom” trope. In fact, if we revisit Beecher Stowe’s novel, the original Uncle Tom was infinitely more redeemable and complicated than Pompey’s character, as Uncle Tom was an attempt to demonstrate the power of Christian love, and was a lot less tolerant of his status as a slave than history remembers. I point this out not to reveal a misreading of a common phrase, but rather to demonstrate that Pompey, in no way, has left the familiar trope. He is still the shuffling, obsequious character that the reader knows he is; he’s just not a criminal.
To address you question: yes, I believe a text filled with clichés can produce an entirely new idea (the films of Luis Bunuel come to mind), yet I didn’t see that in this text. I don’t know that Whitehead was critical enough of his own tropes to have accomplished this. However, once again, I agree that the re-contextualization of these themes through the metaphor of the elevator has brought a new approach to these tropes.
Dictionary.com – by far the most scholarly (not to mention ass-kick’n) approach to linguistic navigation. (OED)
You’re absolutely right that Uncle Tom was “a lot less tolerant of his status as a slave than history remembers.” The modern stereotype of the “Uncle Tom” came not from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel but from the immensely popular stage plays loosely based on the novel. Colson Whitehead is most surely aware of the history of the “Uncle Tom” figure — but Lila Mae appears not to be. Which again, proves the point that she fundamentally misreads situations again and again, and that her path to “literacy” is one of the most important trajectories of the novel.
I disagree that Pompey is simply a red herring. To paraphrase Hitchcock’s story about the MacGuffin, sometimes a MacGuffin really does exist, and it’s not a MacGuffin at all — but a real integral part of the plot. Lila Mae sees Pompey as a race traitor, laughing at caricatures of black people, but this doesn’t mean we have to, especially after we hear more of his story on his front porch stoop. What it comes down to is that Pompey wears a “mask” of the shuffling servant, but that is not his real self. According to your terms, maybe this only makes him a two-dimensional character rather than a one-dimensional one. But it certainly complicates him.
This leads to one final thing I have to say about The Intuitionist and that is about the idea of masks. The word “mask” appears multiple times in the novel, and it’s easy to overlook. But the theme of masks is fundamental to African-American literature and postcolonial criticism, from D.E.B. DuBois to Frantz Fanon. Every mask is part betrayal of self, part survival tactic. Remember that Lila Mae has a mask — one that contorts her face in painful ways — and here I see Whitehead literalizing the metaphorical masks that blacks (and many minorities) have to put on in order to survive. Pompey’s mask is more traditional version of the mask, but a mask nonetheless.