Reading: The Intuitionist
Jan. 25th, 2022 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI should mention that I recently finished Colson Whitehead's debut novel "The Intuitionist," and found it delightful. The book follows the first Black female elevator inspector in the Guild, who belongs to a school of praxis known as Intuitionism. Deliciously, it's never quite clear if Lila Mae et al come from an alternate universe where elevator inspecting is extremely Serious Business socially and politically, or if it merely looms large in the psyches of all of our characters who are deeply involved in the business and its philosophical and historical minutiae.
The book's final twist left me thinking about the "number" of times a story "should" twist and turn, as based on genre categories. Whitehead uses a number of twists that I find very lit-ficcy -- it becomes clear to Lila Mae at the end that Intuitionism was initially a joking-on-the-sly parody/confession/getting-away-with-it concept from a field pioneer who was passing as white. But then, both the pioneer and Lila Mae seem to recognize something transcendent in her position, an openly Black woman in their field, that makes Intuitionism the real path to the future.
In more traditional SFF, I would expect the twist to be more to do with the proven power of Intuitionism, or something like that -- the "it was only a fiction initially that grew into more" turn seemed out of rhythm for SFF, but needed for literary fiction genreness to come through. IDK how that squares with other magical realism traditions of the subaltern, tho.
The book's final twist left me thinking about the "number" of times a story "should" twist and turn, as based on genre categories. Whitehead uses a number of twists that I find very lit-ficcy -- it becomes clear to Lila Mae at the end that Intuitionism was initially a joking-on-the-sly parody/confession/getting-away-with-it concept from a field pioneer who was passing as white. But then, both the pioneer and Lila Mae seem to recognize something transcendent in her position, an openly Black woman in their field, that makes Intuitionism the real path to the future.
In more traditional SFF, I would expect the twist to be more to do with the proven power of Intuitionism, or something like that -- the "it was only a fiction initially that grew into more" turn seemed out of rhythm for SFF, but needed for literary fiction genreness to come through. IDK how that squares with other magical realism traditions of the subaltern, tho.