I think what’s most interesting about this book, and Whitehead’s approach to it, comes from both his deep knowledge of form and media-laden familiarity with critical approaches (before completing this book, he was a television critic for the Villiage Voice, as well as an accomplished freelance journalist). The somewhat optimistic ending to this book (aside from the elevator allusion) proves an evolution in postmodernist literature that may have been one of his driving intentions behind writing it. The Intuitionist is clearly an African-American-themed take on Lot 49, but more interestingly it’s an extension of the postmodern literary style that benefits from Pynchon’s foundation, yet takes it a different direction almost entirely. NY Times critic Gary Krist wrote in his review of The Intuitionist:
"The idea of physical elevation, of course, has obvious metaphorical significance in this context, and Whitehead makes much of it, framing his subject as a contest between warring conceptions of how best to lift people from one level of being to the next. And since any attempt to replace ‘the robust edifices of the old order’ is likely to spawn a thicket of deceptions and betrayals, his use of the film noir idiom proves cunningly apt."
Whitehead’s framework and stylistic influences for the book are steeped in film noir, and he uses the construct to build his story, and I think this approach adopts post-modernity in a completely different way than we’ve been studying that allows for more positive resolution, but still stays within the rubric of post-modernity. The reliance on a film construct to greatly inform a literary novel such as this was a tremendously interesting choice (a nice way to approach using the simulacrum), and one I hope we will discuss tomorrow.
Further, I’m hoping to discuss issues of subculture with regards to this book and how its similar and different to that approach taken in Lot 49. While Pynchon used the possibility of the Trystero mail culture as ultimately a red herring, something that may have been constructed only for the torture of Oedipa, it’s interesting to see what Whitehead does with the same idea. Fulton’s works, while misinterpreted on a mass scale, gave way to a fully functioning underculture of Intuitionists, which has a ring of authorial conviction to it that we didn’t get to really see in Lot 49. Given the books’ undeniable similarities, why do you think Whitehead made this choice?