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38.The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

Really, it's a chilly, well-crafted book about progress. It's a book that is practically a single, unmixed metaphor about progress. Is progress good or bad? Does progress move forward or backward? Is progress about technology or is it about people? But Whitehead never says the word 'progress'. He uses the phrase "black box", a triumphant insight on his part because it communicates two simultaneous ideas: one, that progress is about moving toward a future point that is presently unknowable and two, that at present any rational definition of American progress is going to have to focus on improving the lives of black Americans.

Our protagonist, Lila, is the first "colored" (edit: colored female, rather) elevator inspector in city history. Whitehead plays with the surface level significance of that, with her struggles for recognition in the department, with the hidden suffering of the previous "colored" inspectors, with the almost circumstantial torment of watching her colleagues put on a minstrel show. Underneath, he shows her questing for the "black box", the perfect elevator that only her Intuitionist beliefs can lead her to. But Intuitionism is a joke, a stupid fiction (It's significant, I think, that Intuitionism is validated Empirically by the fact that its inspectors are more accurate. Intuitionism is about secretly rebelling against being captive to a broken system). And progress is both its own means and ends. Lila, like Fulton before her, can push the elevator inspectors forward, but whether or not they'll resist is not up to her, but to bigger forces beyond her control.

Which is a scary, big idea. The Intuitionist is good at making scary, big ideas seem small and manageable.



39.The Conjure Woman by Charles W. Chesnutt

Now that I have a Nook, I'm looking to read more ebooks. This has led me to Project Gutenberg and its African-American Authors bookshelf, which is where I found this story collection. It comes highly recommended.

A collection of late 19th century short stories by Chesnutt, they are narrated by an Ohio carpetbagger who has bought a North Carolina vineyard and describe the folk tales that the carpetbagger's ex-slave coachmen tells about plantation witchcraft. Cannily written, you have to look twice to see that these aren't the gentle, humorous folktales they initially look like but rather grim stories about the horrors of slave life. Littered among the colorful conjurers, people turned into animals, and other fantastical details are stories of families broken up because an owner loses a slave in a bet, women forced to marry men they don't want to, slaves unreasonably punished for minor offenses, disease, and pain.

The coachman, and consequently the majority of the stories, speaks in "plantation dialect". This is, needless to say, problematic. It certainly has the potential to reinforce stereotypes. On the other hand, since the stories function as critique of the more uncritical Uncle Remus stories, the use of dialect serves as coded signal about the genre the stories are situating themselves within. These are stories, in short, that demand a critically engaged reader.

The frames are often relatively thin, but they're not pointless. Chesnutt uses his framing story to offer commentary and context to the folk tales, as well as to develop all of the characters in the frame. His frames often point out problems with his folk tales, or suggest that the narrator's perspective is compromised.

tags: a:chesnutt charles w., a: whitehead colson