Without a doubt, we didn’t come even close tonight to saying everything that could be said about the bell hooks article and its relationship to The Intuitionist. Keeping in mind that I didn’t pair these two texts to be read as a call and response, I still think they speak volumes to each other, even if only implicitly.
One of hooks’ most salient observations is that "there is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black ‘essence’ and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle" (par 11).
In other words, recognizing the common lived experience and shared history of a group of people (in this case, a shared history of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination, profiling) does not necessarily equal "essentializing" these people or their experiences. 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.
The more I think about it, the more I think that The Intuitionist does honor the widely varied experiences of blacks without resorting to essentialism. (This is not to say that I don’t think the novel doesn’t fail in other regards.) Part of my thinking here has been influenced by another book I’m reading, An Education in Georgia, by Calvin Trillin. This book is a firsthand account, published in 1963, of the integration of the University of Georgia in 1961. In Trillin’s book the first two black women to attend the University of Georgia recall instances of isolation, rejection, and invisibility that sound eerily like Lila Mae’s experiences at the Institute.
Of course, we have to recognize that even if Lila Mae undergoes struggles that mirror the real world, she is ultimately only a character in a heavily allegorical novel and not a real person. She is a literary representation. This recognition calls for nuance and perhaps a slight tweaking of our vocabulary. To this end I want to draw your attention to the two different meanings of the word "representation." The postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak points out in "Can the Subaltern Speak" that representation can mean both speaking for someone (as in politics) and re-presenting something (as in art or literature). Spivak uses two German terms (because the meanings have separate words in German) to distinguish between the two: vertreten (speaking for someone) and darstellen (re-presenting something). It’s the difference between proxy versus portrait, between presuming to speak for someone and presuming to depict something artistically.
As we consider The Intuitionist (and any text in which voice, identity, and authenticity are at stake), we should keep in mind this critical difference between the two types of representation, examining how literarily rendered (or cinematically rendered) "voices" both do and do not "speak" for the experiences behind the voices.
“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 chara
cters 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.