“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead (post 1): Protagonist’s most remarkable attribute—synesthesia—is rarely, if ever, mentioned in reviews

I have just started Colson Whitehead’s first novel. It’s story takes place at a time when elevators were a cutting-edge technology. The protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, the city’s first black, female, elevator inspector, is a leading exponent of one of the two approaches to elevator inspection. She is an Intuitionist, as opposed to the Empiricists, who look at the hardware.

“ ‘Press twelve,’ Lila Mae orders the super. Even with her eyes closed she could have done it herself, but she’s trying to concentrate on the vibrations massaging her back. She can almost see them now. This elevator’s vibrations are resolving themselves in her mind as an aqua-blue cone…The elevator moves upward in the well, toward the grunting in the machine room, and Lila Mae turns that into a picture, too. The ascension is a red spike circling around the blue cone, which doubles in size and wobbles as the elevator starts climbing. You don’t pick the shapes and their behavior. Everyone has their own set of genies. Depends on how your brain works. Lila Mae has always had a thing for geometric forms. As the elevator reaches the fifth floor landing, an orange octagon cartwheels into her mind’s frame. It hops up and down, incongruous with the annular aggression of the red spike. Cubes and parallelograms emerge around the eighth floor, but they’re satisfied with half-hearted little jigs and don’t disrupt the proceedings like the mischievous orange octagon. The octagon ricochets into the foreground, famished for attention. She knows what it is. The triad of helical buffers recedes farther from her, ten stories down at the dusty and hard floor of the well. No need to continue. Just before she opens her eyes she tries to think what the super’s expression must be… ‘I’m going to have to cite you for a faulty overspeed governor,’ Lila Mae says. ‘But you haven’t even looked at it,’ the super says” (1, pp. 6-7).

Comment

In the above description, Lila Mae is not using intuition in the usual sense of that concept (2). Obviously, she is basing her inspection on her conscious, synesthetic reactions to the elevator’s objectively perceivable vibrations, which she relates to her knowledge of how elevators work (just as an auto mechanic may know what is wrong with your car when he hears the kind of noise it is making).

Synesthesia is well known (3) and is an attribute of many people (4).

Since I have just started this novel, I don’t know how much will be made of the protagonist’s synesthesia. But since it is not mentioned in most, if any, reviews, and since it makes the title of the novel a misnomer, I’m expecting that the novel will not make it a major issue, and may even drop the issue altogether.

If there is a major discrepancy between the way a protagonist is portrayed at the beginning and end of a novel, I consider it evidence of the author’s split personality. One of the novels I’ve discussed that has this is Nabokov’s Lolita.

I call this discrepancy a “split inconsistent narrative” (please search it). I won’t know whether this applies to The Intuitionist until I finish reading it.

1. Colson Whitehead. The Intuitionist. New York, Anchor Books, 2000.

2. Wikipedia. “Intuition." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition

3. Wikipedia. “Synesthesia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

4. Wikipedia. “List of people with synesthesia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_synesthesia