Elevator Fiction: Robert Coover, Colson Whitehead, and the Sense of Infrastructure

Abstract

This article uncovers an overlooked yet crucial literary precursor for Colson Whithead’s The Intuitionist (1999), Robert Coover’s “The Elevator” (1967). In drawing attention to the many congruencies in Coover’s and Whitehead’s depictions of elevator infrastructure, I also use their works to suggest new interpretive and theoretical possibilities for the nascent literary-critical field of infrastructuralism. This field, I argue, offers scholars a salutary frame for discussing state formations in literature without an accompanying Foucauldian skepticism towards governmentality; however, its rhetoric effaces the bodily particularity and materiality of infrastructure’s diverse users. Coover’s and Whitehead’s fleshly elevators suggest possibilities for more inclusive political formations while nevertheless rooting these possibilities for change in particularities of embodiment as expressed by dynamics of felt sensation.

Robert coover’s 1967 story “the elevator” is an over-looked but crucial literary precursor to one of the most discussed US novels of recent times, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999). Coover’s story provides The Intuitionist with crucial templates for its plot and political imagination.¹ The templates take three main forms. First, like Whitehead’s work, “The Elevator” centers its plot upon an elevator crash that produces potentially revolutionary energies, energies that threaten to upend societal hierarchies. Second, in “The Elevator,” as in The Intuitionist, the potential revolutions suggested by elevator failure involve expanding public sphere participation. Each text evokes concerns of publicity by likening darkened elevator shafts to human throats that produce public speech. And third, each text figures the walls of elevator cabs as human skin, with political upheavals registered through the sense of touch, in notably fleshly, embodied forms. These texts’ affinities express a unique model for imagining political change. Despite their divergent political investments (“The Elevator” primarily addresses hierarchies of gender and class, The Intuitionist those of race), the texts each portray a widened sphere of public belonging as enabled by the destruction of basic infrastructure that undergirds everyday life. Each, moreover, renders this infrastructural destruction through tropes of bodily sensation; such tropes accentuate marginalized subjects’ bodily particularity as they are ushered into a normatively white and male public sphere during events of infrastructural collapse. Identifying this potential source for key events and tropes in The Intuitionist opens new ground in the rapidly growing body of criticism on Whitehead’s novel. In particular, it redresses a curious inattention to the material infrastructure that lies at The Intuitionist’s core. Beyond this, it charts the deeply embodied, sensuous nature of the reconfigured public that the novel imagines.

Coover’s and Whitehead’s works converse particularly well with “infrastructuralism,” a term that describes a recent and influential shift by many literary critics towards governmentality and politics.² “The Elevator” and The Intuitionist reframe this infrastructuralist shift by drawing attention to its underdeveloped account of the particularities of embodiment.³ After all, infrastructuralist critics often express infrastructuralism’s politically salutary potential through the universalistic language of human rights. Bruce Robbins, for instance, describes infrastructuralism as “a materialist version of the politics of human rights” (32). Robbins here refers to infrastructuralism’s attention to the politicized distribution of material infrastructure among a society’s users. In this way, infrastructuralism foregrounds networks of material infrastructure in order to trace exclusions from infrastructural provisions among marginalized groups-exclusions that often deprive such groups of basic rights (to, for instance, water or shelter). However, infrastructuralist work overlooks another sort of materialism germane to human rights: the materialism of the body. As Elizabeth Anker argues, liberal rights discourses “yield a highly truncated, decorporealized vision of the subject-one that . . . negates core dimensions of embodied experience” (2). A fully materialist politics of human rights must also address bodily materiality as a core object of critical attention. Coover’s and Whitehead’s works elaborate just such a materialist, embodied politics.

Other central infrastructuralist concepts also stand to be sharpened by a bolstered attention to embodiment. For instance, while infrastructuralist criticism frequently champions state provisions as admirably public goods, it does so without noting scholars who critique dominant accounts of the public sphere for their inattention to particularized embodiment.⁴ By casting elevator walls as human skin-that is, as organs of touch-“The Elevator” and The Intuitionist foreground embodied sensation as a crucial political force in struggles over infrastructure. Moreover, by representing the political potency of touch, they mobilize what Elizabeth Harvey has identified as the sense most closely tied to bodily particularity (2). Sensation in these texts emerges as contingent rather than natural and universal. In “The Elevator” and The Intuitionist, skin-like infrastructure discloses how sensation is ultimately inextricable from politics: political forces determine what we are able to sense, while that which lies beyond our senses remains also beyond the realm of political contestation. Reading these texts’ infrastructure requires that critics recognize that “the work of differentiation [between people] is not only expressed through discursive and juridical demarcations of rights, boundaries, and conflicting personhoods: . . . the viscerality of feelings of cultural distance conjoins corporeality, sentiment, practice, and the senses” (Trnka, Dureau, and Park 4).

Sensation operates as a crucial hinge in theories of what counts as properly political. Sensation’s high stakes become apparent in recent debates that animate infrastructuralism’s political program. Sean McCann and Michael Szalay claim that with the New Left’s advent in the 1960s, American progressivism underwent a debilitating transformation that enabled the ascendency of the New Right and, shortly thereafter, neoliberalism in US politics. The New Left-along with US writers and literary critics-turned away from a politics engaged with state institutions in favor of a cultural politics that cast symbolic action, self-realization, and engagement with mystical realms as exemplary (and sufficient) political projects. McCann and Szalay’s primary aim is to rebut the notion that “the ability to affect culture is, independent of other means, also therefore politically efficacious” (441). George Shulman has explored McCann and Szalay’s argument in terms that more explicitly address infrastructuralist claims. For Shulman, McCann and Szalay’s plea for greater appreciation of institutional politics by literary critics participates in a long tradition of Americanist critics “speak[ing] as if they occupy the real, and merely report on it, so as to depict a literature engaged in fantasies or genres that abstract from social reality” (549). McCann and Szalay’s realist rhetorical posture, in Shulman’s reading, obscures the fictive, and inescapably politicized, nature of the reality under observation, and overlooks “the worlds and subjects that different fictions (of the real) occlude or make visible, make impossible or available” (Shulman 550).

Shulman’s critique offers a suppler schema of the political “real” than emerges in either McCann and Szalay’s argument or major infrastructuralist work.⁵ Indeed, in ways that recall the protocols of surface reading, infrastructuralist scholarship deploys realist rhetoric in exhorting critics to train their gaze on what is palpably present but conventionally overlooked in everyday social life.⁶ Like McCann and Szalay, infrastructuralists position their methods as both a return to the “actual ground” of politics and a turn away from Foucauldian antipathy to institutional government (Shulman 549). Shulman instead advocates an alternative vision of politics informed by Jacques Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible. For Rancière, sharing the data of sensory experience is both an aesthetic and, ultimately, a political act. The politics of communal sensation emerge in what Rancière terms a sensus communis, a community soldered by a range of commonly sensed, and therefore meaningful, objects: “The ‘distribution of the sensible’ refers to the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. . . . Strictly speaking, distribution therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of exclusion” (13). The question of political inclusion and exclusion depends upon what is apprehensible to sense in the political community. “The Elevator” and The Intuitionist figure elevators as both fleshy and representative microcosms of wider social stratifications, and thereby portray sensation’s role in shaping the contours of the political real. More than simply emblematizing a public good under neoliberal threat, infrastructure in these texts discloses the very forces that regulate public sphere membership itself.

Coover’s and Whitehead’s works accentuate infrastructure’s sensuous qualities in order to imagine a renovated public sphere. The public sphere they envision is one attuned to bodily particularity-that is, a public sphere distinct from Habermas’s notion of depersonalized agents engaged in rational-critical debates. As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon asks, “to what extent is the logic of . . . rational ideas in the open space of the public sphere . . . politically circumscribed in advance?” (323). If these texts mobilize embodied sensation in reconceiving public sphere belonging, they do so most pointedly by elaborating their visions of revolutionized publicity precisely at the moment of infrastructural collapse. In part, their focus on collapse affirms one of infrastructuralist criticism’s central tenets: that infrastructure, along with the governmental goodness it betokens, only becomes apprehensible in its moment of breakdown.⁷

Coover’s and Whitehead’s elevators suggest sensation’s political powers at the moment of ruin: after all, material ruination has long been understood as a process that shunts objects across the threshold of sensibility, from the depths to the surface of sociality, enacting what Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle call a “dialectic between absence and presence, fragment and whole, [and] the visible and the invisible” (7). At the moment of collapse, commonly overlooked elevator infrastructure emerges into public sense, crossing what Rancière calls the partition of the sensible. By casting such infrastructure as itself a skin-like sensory organ, “The Elevator” and The Intuitionist signal how their respective moments of ruin usher the very category of sensation into the political arena, calling attention to sensation’s politically contingent qualities. Their political imaginations identify infrastructure as a substrate for upheavals in public belonging, yet such upheavals only become apprehensible under certain conditions. Understanding these conditions requires that critics replace models of normative publicity with notions of publicity more attuned to the sensuously specific, particularized forms of embodiment that characterize infrastructure’s diverse users. This sensuous infrastructure’s oblique politics emerge in “The Elevator” and become amplified and more explicit in The Intuitionist. Where Coover’s text marshals sensuous infrastructure in elaborating political hierarchies of class and gender, Whitehead’s reorients elevator technology towards racial politics. Despite their divergent political interests, what these texts jointly offer is a vision of infrastructure’s vital role in sustaining a public sphere comprised of differentiated, and differently sensed, material bodies.

I. fleshly quivers

The plot of Coover’s “The Elevator” revolves around an awakening of consciousness in its protagonist (an ineffectual white-collar worker named Martin) as an elevator collapses in his office building. Like other stories in Coover’s collection Pricksongs & Descants, the diegetic world of “The Elevator” consists of fractured, parallel realities that appear across a set of non-sequential narrative fragments.⁸ Binding these fragments is the elevator’s material infrastructure, whose skin-like surfaces register jolts in everyday infrastructural functioning. In the first of the fragmented plot strands to unspool, Martin, who rides the elevator to the fourteenth floor “every morning . . . , and without so much as reflecting upon it,” chooses to press the button for the basement instead. The story closes, meanwhile, with another fragment in which Martin “reflecting upon [the elevator] for once,” instead opts to climb the stairs, just before the empty elevator crashes (125, 137).

Between these strands, centered upon Martin’s gain in awareness, the story places a scattershot set of scenes that includes, among others: antagonism, and even violence, between Martin and a clique of workers who routinely ridicule him during their elevator trips; an imagined encounter between Martin and Death, who merges with the darkened elevator shaft; the monologue of an anonymous coworker who describes a mythical Martin deified for the size of his penis; and Martin’s rapturous, unanticipated sexual encounter with an elevator operator as their freefalling cab plunges toward ruin. Shunted from scene to scene like elevator passengers carried between floors, readers traverse parallel and incompatible pasts, presents, and imagined futures, experiencing in the text’s narrative form not only elevator-like qualities but also the temporal and epistemological instability that characterizes ruins.

The elevator that plummets to ruin in this text represents a piece of infrastructure understood both within and beyond the text as a vehicle for social stratification. Numerous scholars have noted how, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, elevators enabled the vertical urban growth whose iconic markers, skyscrapers, have historically served as metaphors for social, political, and economic inequality. As Andreas Bernard notes, the popularization of elevators from the mid-nineteenth century onwards “reinforce[d] the brittle veneer of social identity with rigid spatial separation,” prompting a redistribution of class distinction along the axis of verticality, with the highest floors of buildings no longer occupied by the poorest residents but the richest, who could now easily reach a perch above the urban fray (190).⁹ In this reading, elevators silently organize class distinctions along vertical urban axes, acting as vehicles for broader systems of social differentiation.¹⁰ Within Coover’s story, elevators connote both the development and the possible collapse of such differentiating systems. As Coover’s narrator intones, “the elevator resumes its upward struggle. The accretion of tragedy. It goes on, ever giving birth to itself. Up and down, up and down. Where will it end?” (133-34). Here elevators enable the “upward struggle” necessary to erect societal hierarchies, with the passage’s concluding question posing the possibility of such hierarchies’ demise even as it leaves that demise uncertain. Coover’s story ultimately ascribes to elevator infrastructure a foundational position in facilitating the “tragedy” of stratification; however, it also identifies the elevator as a locus for potential renewal. The crash that brings Martin’s elevator into ruinous consciousness prompts an awakening, an unprecedented instance of “reflection,” that allows for an expanded awareness of political belonging, a redistribution of political sensibility.

The story expresses elevator infrastructure’s sensuous aspects through its motif of jiggled, jolted flesh. For instance, while the elevator’s brute machinery “rumble[s]” and “thump[s],” these sudden movements manifest themselves as “shudders” upon Martin’s skin (131, 129). The cab’s materiality (and thus its physical vulnerability) emerges as vibrations across human skin: “The elevator halts jerkily . . . , quivering [the passengers’] sallow face flesh” (133). Insofar as the cab’s surface can be conceived as a “skin” that separates elevator riders from the shaft’s fearsome darkness, these passages reveal how “The Elevator” likens infrastructural skin to its human analogue by rendering the play of mechanical vibrations across surfaces. Moreover, the story uses its representation of elevator infrastructure to suggest how the spatial stratifications elevators enable are not only experienced in particularly embodied ways by citizens, but also themselves condition public discourse. Such concerns arise through the story’s tendency to liken elevator shafts to human throats, investing elevator infrastructure with figurative powers of enunciation. While the story attributes vocal qualities to the elevator’s halting movements, calling them a “grinding plaint,” the shaft’s likeness to a throat emerges most conspicuously in a description of “breath lurching out” of it (131, 128). The shaft’s physical confines here figuratively replicate embodied constraints upon human speech in the public sphere. In this way, by displaying attributes of its human users, Coover’s elevator affirms Hannah Arendt’s claim that built space (and its easily overlooked infrastructure) materializes political community between sensuous bodies: “to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common” (52).

In a text that catalogues infrastructural breakdown, the elevator prompts Martin to reflect upon its deep entanglements with a wider polis whose physical and social conditions it helps shape. Coover’s elevator, however, not only bodies forth a public good but, in its moment of ruin, demonstrates the mutability of categories of public belonging. The narrator presents fleshly elevators as loci of seemingly naturalized and unalterable properties: “As the . . . elevator begins its . . . ascent, Martin muses absently on the categories. This small room, so commonplace and so compressed, . . . this elevator contains them all: space, time, cause, motion, magnitude, class” (129). At first glance, the formulation “the categories” suggests insuperable forces that delimit human action, and thus render action “compressed”; however, of the categories discerned by Martin in the cab’s structure, “class” seems distinct from the others in its contingency. Martin’s cab functions as an invisible elaborator of class hierarchies, but also as a container for volatile encounters across class (and gender) boundaries.

Indeed, the story’s most compelling plot strand inverts hierarchies of class (as well as of gender, a “category” absent from Martin’s list) through an exposure of skin amid elevator collapse: as their cab plunges earthwards, Martin addresses the heretofore silent “operator, a young girl,” suggesting that she lie atop his body (which will absorb the crash’s impact) as he lies on the floor (127). Whereas early in “The Elevator” this silent operator finds herself ridiculed by her building’s office workers, here one of these workers sacrifices himself for her. This moment of hierarchical inversion unfolds through the language and logic of touch: as Martin prostrates himself, he adopts the posture identified by Constance Classen as most closely associated with touch (since prostration has cultural associations with earthliness and animality) (165). Moreover, the female operator, overcome by Martin’s generosity, makes love to him as they drop towards death, the narrator relating this moment in highly sensuous language: “The elevator shrieks insanely as it drops. Their naked bellies slap together, hands grasp, her vaginal mouth closes spongelike on his rigid organ” (134). What the story offers us in this moment of infrastructural collapse is an upending of seemingly natural societal hierarchies registered by jolted flesh (the “slap” of their bellies) and felt communion (“hands grasp”). Finally, this moment is the only one in the story that suggests-through the word “mouth”-prospects for speech by the formerly subordinated elevator operator.

More obliquely than The Intuitionist, Coover’s story hints at possibilities for social upheaval produced by infrastructural failure, registering these possibilities through the sense of touch. Elevators in this schema embody not just a beleaguered public good, but also-through their corporeality-features of embodiment through which redistributions of political sensibility become felt. The operator’s elevation to recognition-that is, her emergence to sensibility-by office workers like Martin occurs because of infrastructural failure, and through sensuous language of fleshly contact, as infrastructure and its ostensibly natural “categories” collapse.

The story’s fractured form works to collapse several other “categories” elaborated by elevators: relationships of “time” and “cause” become scrambled in the text’s fragmentary plot. The story’s form engenders utopian possibilities in its closing pages, where bodily sensation once more registers potentially transformative upheavals of the polis. These redemptive energies emerge in a surreal scene where Martin, seemingly impossibly, leaves the elevator at the fifteenth floor of his fourteen-story building. The narration provides no precise sense of setting, but the qualities of the space Martin occupies-an “utterly dark” zone where he can “see nothing distinctly”-evoke those of the throat-like elevator shaft (132). The narrator conveys the tactile feel of this space by describing the “wind gnaw[ing] at [Martin’s] ankles, the back of his neck” (132). It is, however, in the scene’s final, broken-off sentence that a moment of inchoate spatial upheaval is registered through touch: Martin “pressed himself against the wall, couldn’t find the button, couldn’t even find the elevator door, and even the very wall was only” (132). The sentence’s fractured, ruined form-breaking off after the word “only”-leaves open a seemingly limitless range of adjectives for describing the shaft-like wall, suggesting the possibility of rewriting this infrastructural form; a broken-down literary form here evinces capacities for renewal.¹¹ This renewal, moreover, remains bound to fleshly touch, as Martin’s body, “pressed . . . against the wall,” figuratively merges with it, partaking of its openness to new, revolutionary inscriptions. Nevertheless, “The Elevator” falls short of elaborating a specific program of political revolution rooted in sensory relations; rather, within its relatively confined narrative universe, it merely insinuates revolutionary possibilities for class and gender relations, expressing such insinuations through the vehicles of touch and infrastructural ruin.

II. racing the machine

Whitehead’s text, like Coover’s, raises readerly attention to the material infrastructure of urban verticality. Each text’s elevator represents the infrastructure of a skyscraper verticality that, in the popular imagination, reinforces and symbolizes societal hierarchies. In The Intuitionist’s Jim Crow-era setting, not only does skyscraper verticality figure hierarchies rooted in flesh, but the infrastructure (i.e., elevator cabs and shafts) that enables skyscrapers is itself fleshly.¹² This novel of elevator maintenance, regulation, and care clearly positions elevators as potential vehicles for racial justice. In The Intuitionist, elevator infrastructure comes to embody a seemingly natural distribution of the sensible that demarcates membership in The Intuitionist’s polis: just as subjects commonly overlook the mundane infrastructure so essential to everyday social life, so too do they commonly overlook the changeable, contingent boundaries of political sensibility. When infrastructure collapses in The Intuitionist, so too does this regime of sensation, prompting an expansion of the public sphere.¹³

A novel preoccupied with “the sensitive skin of . . . elevators,” The Intuitionist installs sensuous, corporeal infrastructure at its plot’s core (225).¹⁴ Set in a New York-like midcentury metropolis, the novel conjures a comic parallel reality in which elevators-and, more specifically, the construction and maintenance of them-generate fractious academic debate and political intrigue. Lila Mae Watson is her city’s first female African American elevator inspector. She is also an adherent of “Intuitionism”-a practice of elevator inspection in which the inspector appraises an elevator’s health through sensuous bodily contact with its wall, allowing the inspectors to attune themselves to the object’s physicality, intuiting its mechanical operations (and possible malfunctions).¹⁵ Inaugurated in revolutionary books of elevator theory by the eminent but eccentric scholar James Fulton, Intuitionism has prompted a schism in the city’s Elevator Guild. Adherents of the traditional doctrine, Empiricism, deride Intuitionism in racially charged terms as a pseudoscience. Propelling the plot is a sensational elevator crash (as the mayor visits a civic building whose namesake, Fanny Briggs, was an escaped slave); this crash threatens Lila Mae’s professional reputation, since she had deemed the elevator healthy only shortly before. Seeking to clear her name, as well as to restore the credibility of the Intuitionism she practices, Lila Mae goes on the lam, investigating the crash. In so doing, she unearths more startling discoveries, such as the covert African American lineage of Intuitionism’s founder (a lineage that, if known, would have prevented his writings from ever becoming canonical). She also discovers a more insidious attempt by private elevator manufacturers to manipulate both warring Empiricist and Intuitionist factions of the Elevator Guild in an effort to retrieve Fulton’s apocryphal plans for a revolutionized elevator design: the “black box” that would enable new modes of elevation and urban form. Beset by henchmen of these private interests, Lila Mae finds Fulton’s papers, surrendering copies of Fulton’s “black box” blueprint to each rival manufacturer while retaining her own, which she uses to extend Fulton’s work, continuing his project of writing a “second elevation” that encompasses not just infrastructural upheaval but racial justice.

Concluding as Lila Mae begins writing her revolutionary tract, The Intuitionist can be read as a Kunstlerroman¹⁶ in which its protagonist both discovers her creative vocation and becomes a Faustian developer who, as theorized by Marshall Berman, fabricates infrastructure amid cycles of creative destruction. Her characterological arc, however, generates not Berman’s tragedy of development but instead what Michael Rubenstein has called the “comedy of development,” a “development of the common good” (13).¹⁷ Moreover, The Intuitionist represents the complex political entailments of bodily sensation in everyday encounters with infrastructure. As implied by the novel’s immediate pre-Civil Rights era setting, the “second elevation” presaged by Lila Mae’s writing is far more than infrastructural. Throughout The Intuitionist, elevators are sites and engines of racial discrimination: Lila Mae and her coworker Pompey constitute (in a show of token diversity) the lone African American inspectors in the Elevator Guild, while Lila Mae’s father, Marvin, an elevator operator at a whites-only department store, suffers racial abuse while operating his cab.¹⁸ Elevator infrastructure provides the physical ground for figures of racial uplift and social renewal achieved by expanding the bounds of public sphere participation.¹⁹ Less obliquely than Coover’s “The Elevator,” The Intuitionist figures the darkened shaft as a throat capable of speech: Fulton’s ideal elevator allows its passengers to merge with the shaft, acquiring “true speech” in which, amalgamated with infrastructure, its human users “no longer have lungs” (87, 222).

Political hierarchies pervade The Intuitionist’s Jim Crow setting, and Whitehead takes pains to figure these vertical hierarchies through the spatial distributions and exclusions enabled by elevator technology.A specific property of elevator design-the cab wall that separates passenger from shaft-furnishes The Intuitionist with an infrastructural model for the division between the realms of sensibility and insensibility that animates the novel’s sensuous politics. Bearing out Kate Marshall’s linkage of material infrastructure to media architectures in Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction, the cab wall’s built form infiltrates descriptions of media technologies that sustain mainstream public discourse. For instance, Lila Mae as a child hears a radio program about Fanny Briggs, the escaped slave and namesake of the building whose elevator crashes:

One time a radio program featured Dorothy Beechum, the most famous colored actress in the country, reading parts of Fanny Briggs’s account of her escape North. Lila Mae’s mother called her into the drawing room. Lila Mae’s legs dangled over her mother’s lap as she leaned toward the brown mesh of the radio speaker. The actress’s voice was iron and strong and did not fail to summon applause from the more liberal quarters of her audience, who murmured about noble struggle. Tiny particles of darkness pressed beyond the cracked, wheaty mesh of the speaker, the kind of unsettling darkness Lila Mae would later associate with the elevator well.

(12)

The actress’s voice, “iron and strong,” recalls an elevator cable moving behind the speaker’s mesh, in darkness akin to an elevator shaft’s. Indeed, the broadcast technology by which the “liberal quarters of her audience” consolidate themselves signifies racially through the description of the speaker’s “brown mesh.” This mesh separates Lila Mae, like an elevator cab’s wall, from “unsettling darkness,” intimating a spectral blackness lurking just beyond the limits of everyday surfaces and sensibility, and shadowing mainstream public discourse. The mesh’s textured, palpable nature, evinced by its “cracked” surface, positions public discourse as emerging from a rupture in infrastructural surfaces that are already racially coded. The snapped cord that sends the Fanny Briggs Building’s elevator plummeting towards the shaft’s black pit figuratively haunts this passage by evoking the specter of the speaker’s cord-like voice similarly falling back within an “unsettling darkness” towards static-like incommunicability. The communicability by which media systems sustain a public sphere hostile to African American participation remains vulnerable to a cable-like snap that would plunge it within an unseen darkness. Linking elevator infrastructure to media technology, The Intuitionist summons to sensibly darkened, occluded elements that structure public discourse by merging those elements with material intermediaries (radio mesh, cab wall) that lie contiguous to this darkness but, through their contiguity, also work to conceal it.

Across the novel, communications systems exhibit elevator-like properties, with elevators’ physical verticality materializing in urban form hierarchies intrinsic to public sphere participation. The novel’s mass media subplot, involving newspaperman Ben Urich, ascribes to media systems public-producing powers that unfold across vectors of sensation and embodiment. In doing so, it implicates media in creating what Michael Warner describes as the normative whiteness of the ostensibly anonymous public sphere participant. A crusading journalist with knowledge of Fulton’s “black box” blueprints who strives to publicize their existence through his industry journal, Lift, Urich seeks to uphold the “sanctity of the journalist’s creed” (70). In a novel that thematizes the psychic and material conditions of public service by dramatizing two forms of such service in Urich’s journalism and Lila Mae’s tasks of infrastructural maintenance, Urich’s claim that he tries to “serve the public, . . . adhere to the values instilled in him by his mother at an early age, while she painted placards arguing for a women’s right to vote” affiliates his efforts to publicize Fulton’s black box with campaigns to expand categories of political belonging such as the women’s suffrage movement (70). The novel does not dramatize efforts merely to discover Fulton’s lost papers but also to publicize them. As a form of public service, Urich’s journalism involves not only reporting for a public composed of those already empowered with full political participation; rather, Urich seeks to expand the bounds of the public itself by facilitating infrastructural upheaval that promises to incorporate new, previously occluded voices within public discourse.

Fulton’s blueprints portend ruin for existing elevator infrastructure, with the “second elevation” promising to send existing elevators “plummeting down the shafts like beautiful dead stars” (255). In conveying the ruinous and revolutionary stakes of publicizing these papers, The Intuitionist charts the dependence of media organs on material infrastructure-the novel depicts Lift’s office as permeated by infrastructural grids in descriptions of “ventilation grates” (200), “hum[ming]” walls (201), and “electricity” wires (201). More than this, however, it imagines a sensuous, embodied politics generated by encounters, whether immediate or mediated, with basic infrastructure.²⁰ A central motif of infrastructural representation in The Intuitionist involves depicting infrastructure’s users as “citizens,” a connotatively fraught term: on the one hand, amid the novel’s playful shifts in narrative register, “citizen” evokes a journalistic idiom which the narrator offhandedly satirizes when describing Urich’s work; on the other hand, referring to everyday urbanites as “citizens” raises the question of which citizens actually possess citizenship’s rights. This term, signifying political belonging, becomes Lila Mae’s barometer for gauging her own social marginality: she can accurately “predict just how much suspicion, curiosity and anger she will rouse” in others during her calls as a female, African American elevator inspector by reference to a “locus of metropolitan disaffection . . . situated in the heart of the city, on a streetcorner that clots with busy, milling citizens” (4). The vertical vantage of a bureaucrat’s or journalist’s professed objectivity, produced by the description of clotting citizens, here renders recognition as a citizen dependent upon what is apprehensible from the elevated, eagle-eyed perspective the passage adopts.

Conspicuously denied the appellation of citizen throughout The Intuitionist, shunted beyond the apprehensible surfaces of the polis, Lila Mae achieves citizenly status proleptically at the novel’s end, her body entering the realm of political sensibility in an instant of infrastructural ruin her writings promise to provoke. A passage that emphasizes haptic communion between Lila Mae and an elevator’s surface discloses that “it warms her to know that the perfect elevator reached out to her and told her . . . [t]hat she was a citizen of the city to come and that the frail devices she had devoted her life to . . . would all fall one day” (255). The elevator’s sensual reach intimates to Lila Mae a future redistribution of political sensibility that would broaden the bounds of citizenship to include her marginalized body. In this way, the novel accords with Christopher Breu’s claim that much postmodernist “literature of materiality” locates powers of “political resistance not so much in . . . those who occupy categories of citizenship but in . . . those who fall outside the protections of citizenship,” devoting “attention to those forms of materiality-especially those of the body-that have been most exploited . . . in the production of our sublime fantasies of material transcendence” (59). Lila Mae’s acquisition of citizenship in a moment of sensory and political upheaval highlights the bare materiality that exceeds the persistently anonymous, unraced category of citizen. Yet this political upheaval, wrought through infrastructural ruin, hinges upon channels of mediation and publicity like Ben Urich’s journalism and Lila Mae’s radio speaker-channels that summon into apprehension the “unsettling darkness” that lies occluded beyond radio mesh, elevator walls, and limits of social belonging and sensation (12). The novel’s upheaval in sensation is also an upheaval of normative publicity.

The Intuitionist’s rendering of distinctly embodied, sensuous relations with media networks extends across the novel.²¹ The novel’s concerns with mediation, infrastructural ruin, and sensation coalesce especially amid a redistribution of the sensible (in Rancière’s sense) during the “Funicular Follies,” the Elevator Guild’s annual celebration. The scene revolves around an elevator crash before a public audience: a replica of Elisha Otis’s original elevator topples unexpectedly, embarrassing the Guild’s powerbrokers. At this event-a theatrical evening with political overtones as the Guild Chair, Frank Chancre, runs for re-election on an Empiricist platform against an Intuitionist challenger-Lila Mae attends incognito by disguising herself as a member of the (unanimously black) waiting staff who serve the (nearly unanimously white) diners. In keeping with The Intuitionist’s critique of tacit norms of embodiment for both citizens and public servants, none of Lila Mae’s fellow inspectors recognize (or even appear to see) her in this new uniform. (Seemingly, all that renders her body politically apprehensible is the governmental uniform she wears when on duty.) She then witnesses a minstrel show featuring a joke that involves a white man who does “nuttin all naht long but tekkin’ [a homeless black man] upstairs an trowing [him] down de elevator shaft” (155). In this joke, a shaft’s verticality and darkness function as infrastructural channels of social occlusion.²² It is no accident, then, that when Frank Chancre appears atop a replica of the revered safety elevator invented by Elisha Otis, he bellows Otis’s slogan, “All safe.” Otis’s slogan registers not only the alleged trustworthiness of his invention but also, in The Intuitionist’s setting of post-WWII urban crisis, the escape from (racially coded) urban clamor furnished by verticality for a privileged few.

This spectacle’s sensuous politics engender a sensus communis as the onlookers “feel tremors assail their skin,” cutaneous ripples which circumscribe a zone of political sensibility beyond which lie marginalized and shafted others (158). While Lila Mae remains invisible to her coworkers during the Funicular Follies, in the exact instant of infrastructural ruin, she attains fleeting social sensibility. Subverting Chancre’s racially charged rhetoric of “safety,” his replica elevator collapses on stage, and this collapse coincides precisely with Lila Mae’s recognition by a detective assigned to investigate the Fanny Briggs crash: the detective “grabs the shoulder of the woman, she turns, he sees the face of Lila Mae Watson. He hears a loud crash [from the elevator’s fall]” (159). In this instant, the spectacle of ruined infrastructure, as well as the subversion of an ideology of “safety” enabled by elevator verticality, incites sensory upheaval that ushers Lila Mae into recognition.

In relaying the twinned visual and haptic (“grabs the shoulder”) aspects of recognition in this scene, The Intuitionist reinforces its narrative privileging of touch as a vector for political renewal amid infrastructural breakdown. The scene reveals touch’s wide-ranging role in a politics of sensuous community-building catalyzed by flesh-like elevator infrastructure across the novel. Touch provides a sensuous avenue for producing community between bodies cast beyond political apprehensibility. Notably, for instance, Lila Mae recalls having “felt [her father’s] words in his chest against her back” as he teaches a young Lila Mae to read from an elevator catalogue; tutelage here becomes sensuous as Lila Mae learns The Intuitionist’s crucial activity, reading, by reference to an infrastructural system represented in language felt against the flesh (119). Later, having eluded private henchmen by stealing into a dancehall, Lila Mae takes cover by dancing with the hall’s “only colored gentleman” (215). In an encounter rendered through the language of touch-Lila Mae observes the old man’s hand, “rough [and] . . . crenellated by toil”-their dance becomes both a form of elevation and a platform for recalibrated dynamics of social recognition (215). The dancing pairs, borne “aloft” (215) by their movements, prompt in the narrator ramifying questions of social relationality: “Who is she to him now[?]” “Who are they to each other[?]” “Who is he to her?” (216). The anaphoric repetition of “who” evinces an impulse to broaden the bounds of the known, to confer identity upon entities previously unknown, expanding the range of recognition and politicized sensation. The Intuitionist affiliates this impulse with the second elevation’s promised millennial infrastructural upheaval by likening the dancehall to what Fulton describes in his writings as the black box’s bubble-like amorphousness: “The city is gone. This room is a bubble floating in the dark murk” (217). Amid what the novel portrays as a city of failing infrastructure, tropes of elevator ruin enable reimagined political configurations wrought through sensory recalibrations.

This scene-and The Intuitionist more broadly-traces an emancipatory politics of recognition by reimagining recognition’s pathways in ways congruent with infrastructuralist reading models. Lila Mae emerges to societal sensation and recognition alongside fleshly infrastructure that itself achieves recognition at its moment of collapse. The term “recognition” evokes debates among philosophers such as Charles Taylor about the politics of recognition, debates imported into literary criticism by scholars such as Winfried Fluck.²³ Fluck succinctly describes the politics of recognition as turning upon the belief that “society and the state . . . have a moral duty to eliminate forms of institutional exclusion and to create conditions that permit an equal recognition of all members of society” (46). Whitehead’s and Coover’s fleshly infrastructure, by collapsing in an instant of political upheaval, suggest a new frame through which to understand these politics: if political-philosophical discussions of recognition presume that recognition occurs only between human actors, “The Elevator” and The Intuitionist formulate an expanded terrain of recognition that embraces not just humans but-à la new materialist concepts such as Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter”-inanimate objects typically cast beyond the domain of political struggle.²⁴ In these texts, infrastructure itself achieves recognition in a sensuous, embodied manner, reconstituting itself as the polis widens the ranks of those granted recognition.

These theories of recognition, however, highlight a blindness in infrastructuralist hermeneutics. As Fluck notes, these theories commonly assert that society “has to institutionalize forms of recognition that go beyond the liberal guarantee of individual rights” (46). By rendering elevator infrastructure sensuous, “The Elevator” and The Intuitionist conjure a public good linked to bodily materiality and particularity overlooked by infrastructuralism’s invocations of bloodless liberal rights schemas. Their flesh-like elevator surfaces allow these texts to cast skin “not as something static and essential, but as something that changes, something that is in motion” (Musser 20). If, as infrastructuralist logic suggests, we sense in infrastructure a wider public sustained by it, then “The Elevator” and The Intuitionist recall for us this public’s pliable boundaries, its capacity to shift in encompassing and recognizing a broader range of actors. And the recognition achieved is not simply tokenistic or symbolic,²⁵ enhancing identitarian equality while ignoring financial inequality under neoliberalism.²⁶ Rather, Coover and Whitehead situate infrastructure centrally within a new political vision. Seen through the lens of this modified, expanded infrastructuralism, their works’ respective elevators elaborate a politics of recognition that remains attuned to institutional politics, to a politics of the public good.

Spencer Morrison

University of Alberta

Spencer Morrison

spencer morrison is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. His work on twentieth-century American literature and culture has appeared in ELH and American Literature, as well as in numerous essay collections.

notes

This research was enabled by a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship. I want to thank the Killam Trusts for this generous support. I also want to thank the anonymous readers who reviewed this article for Arizona Quarterly; their comments greatly enriched the piece.

1. Saundra Liggins has observed that both Whitehead’s reviewers and the author himself have counted canonical postmodernists such as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed among his writerly influences (368). This article expands Whitehead’s circle of postmodernist influences to include Coover.

2. This shift can be felt in books and articles by figures such as Bruce Robbins, Michael Rubenstein, and Patricia Yaeger, as well as in a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to the topic. Infrastructuralist scholars combat the Foucauldian impulse to view state formations as merely coercive by casting attention on state capacities represented by basic infrastructure and public utilities. The term “infrastructure” includes commonly overlooked networks such as sewers and electrical grids, as well as more visible public provisions such as highways and libraries. Ultimately, what matters for infrastructuralists is that the often invisible substructures undergirding everyday life be recognized and placed within the domain of political struggle. As Robbins notes, “we don’t usually think of infrastructure as something to be planned, funded, built, regulated, and sustained” (28). In a twenty-first century that has witnessed both the widespread privatization of public utilities and, for many in the global South, the deprivation of basic amenities such as power and water, an infrastructuralist turn offers critics a methodological path to critiquing calls from the right to shrink government and privatize parts of the commons. Its ethos animates Amanda Claybaugh’s assertion that “government is good,” an assertion that she finds substantiated by recent literary criticism that identifies within culture “the benefits that government provides [which] become invisible as we become accustomed to them” (161).

3. Robbins himself cites The Intuitionist as a text ripe for infrastructuralist reading as he “engage[s] in archive building” for the nascent critical movement (28).

4. Take, for example, work by William Connolly, Nancy Fraser, and Michael Warner.

5. While Shulman convincingly charts the contours and stakes of McCann and Szalay’s realist rhetoric, straw-man reconstructions prop up his rendition of their argument. For instance, in writing that for McCann and Szalay “the welfare state is the necessary basis of social justice” (564), Shulman elides his interlocutors’ own admission that “there is no question that American society has been transformed by the new social movements that flourished during and after the [sixties]” (McCann and Szalay 441). Moreover, by observing that “even if we credit that the left has ceded formal politics and the state in ways that allowed their capture by culture warriors and neoliberalism, it did not withdraw from politics into individualism” (564), Shulman reveals that his article does not so much rebut McCann and Szalay’s claims that the New Left’s cultural politics entailed a loss of faith in state meliorism, as it does attribute a greater degree of political efficacy to such changes than do McCann and Szalay. In a sense, Shulman’s own fictive reconstruction of his interlocutors’ argument demonstrates the sheer difficulty of analyzing the categories of the fictive and the real: once one trains one’s vision on their indefinite, seemingly ever-shifting relationship, the categories risk replacing one another vertiginously, ad infinitum, in mise-en-abyme fashion. As will become clear, my reading seeks to draw on Shulman’s incisive eye for realism’s rhetoric in Americanist criticism for the purposes of formulating an interpretive frame that ascribes importance to the welfare state which McCann and Szalay view as a central engine of social justice.

6. For a primer on surface reading’s protocols, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s introduction to the topic. Ramón Saldívar has linked debates over surface reading to The Intuitionist’s metaphorics of elevation: “The metaphor of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ implicit in the elevating processes of the novel can be seen in relation to the current debate in literary critical theory concerning ‘symptomatic’ reading” (16). While parsing The Intuitionist in relation to these debates exceeds my article’s scope, it is worth noting that Intuitionist practices of elevator inspection represent a form of depth (or symptomatic) reading insofar as they disclose an elevator’s concealed workings through the sensations its surfaces generate.

7. Examples of this tenet include Patricia Yaeger’s claim that “infrastructure may be taken for granted in global cities (unless it breaks down)” (7); Kate Marshall’s recognition that it “tend[s] to remain invisible until . . . struck by catastrophe” (82); and Robbins’s assertion that infrastructure “is a heritage of which we are usually unconscious until it malfunctions” (32).

8. The story arguably anticipates J.G. Ballard’s postmodernist foregrounding of elevator infrastructure through the high-speed elevators of his 1975 novel High-Rise.

9. The history of elevators’ place in public culture turns upon their apprehensibility, since a defining shift in their representation occurred when elevators began to be constructed within enclosed shafts rather than open corridors visible to travelers: “One could say that the early history of the elevator lasted as long as there were still photographs of cab exteriors. The real Age of the Elevator began with the end of its representability. . . . From then on, the elevator’s location was only indirectly perceptible to its occupants and those waiting to board” (Bernard 40).

10. Unnoted by commentators is how Whitehead’s The Intuitionist adds to a strain of African American culture fascinated with the expression of racial hierarchies through urban verticality and its attendant infrastructure. Take, for instance, Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” whose speaker occupies a building without elevators, in which the remote and topmost floors are the most socially marginal: “all the time / I’se been a-climbin’ on, / And reachin’ landin’s, / And turnin’ corners, / And sometimes goin’ in the dark / Where there ain’t been no light” (8-13). See also chapter six of Cheng’s Second Skin for an account of Josephine Baker’s relationship to skyscraper infrastructure. While Cheng discusses skyscraper verticality in relation to race, she does not address the elevator infrastructure so crucial to skyscraper development from the outset.

11. Coover’s fractured sentence adheres to a wider strategy, identified by Breu in other postmodern fiction, for evoking physical tactility beyond the discursive: “Moments of the return of the material repressed . . . become the sites where syntax breaks down and where violated, exploited, and abject forms of materiality break through the web of the symbolic and forcefully intrude into the subject’s field of perception” (40).

12. By linking elevator infrastructure to human flesh and its embodied sensations, my reading of Whitehead affirms recent work in African American studies that construes flesh as an infrastructure hidden beneath discursive constructions of race. See, for instance, Amber Jamilla Musser’s claim that “by theorizing sensation we acquire a way to understand structures at a level beyond the discursive” (23). For Musser, “as a marker of difference, sensation reveals something of the underlying structure that binds assemblages together” (22). See also Alexander G. Weheliye, for instance, who describes flesh as “the ether that holds together the world of Man while at the same time forming the condition of possibility for this world’s demise” (40). Both Musser and Weheliye draw on insights from Hortense Spillers, who argues that flesh transmits unspoken currents of power that shape the polis, serving as a “zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (67).

13. Despite being foregrounded prominently in The Intuitionist, sensation has received scant attention in Whitehead criticism. The lone exception is Lauren Berlant, for whom utopian changes in elevator infrastructure represent in The Intuitionist “the technological context for new sensoria, movement, and space” (70). Moreover, Berlant sees these “new sensoria” as entailing a reconfigured apprehension of the social and political realm: the novel “provide[s] a sensorium for a reconceptualized present” (92). While Berlant perceptively tracks changes in the personal sensorium of the novel’s protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, her focus on individual sensation obscures how Whitehead uses elevator infrastructure to, like Rancière, ascribe collective sensoria to wider polities. The Intuitionist’s depictions of sensation exceed the “new confirming stabilizations of being” Berlant astutely describes in Lila Mae’s experience of infrastructural collapse.

14. See in particular the novel’s extended comparison of the Fanny Briggs Building’s elevator’s collapse to an exposure of the elevator’s “secret skin” (231).

15. Because Intuitionist practice involves direct contact with elevator walls whose flesh replicates the prime engine of discrimination in Lila Mae’s Jim Crow-era polis, we can read Intuitionism in this novel as an instinctive feeling of racism, as a sense of embodied hierarchies present in public (and infrastructure-supported) spaces ostensibly open to all. That is, racial embodiment leads to a unique set of feelings and intuitions in the purportedly universalistic public sphere, to a sense of feeling differently.

16. Lila Mae’s development as an artist in this novel of elevators faintly recalls Ralph Ellison’s 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, in which Ellison describes how a lavish, eighth-floor writing space donated by friends served “as a catalyst for the wild mixture of elements that went into the evolving fiction” (viii). Notably, Ellison correlates this artistic growth with his growing familiarity with the building’s elevator operators, who, after first questioning Ellison’s “presence in such an affluent building,” eventually “became accustomed to [his] presence” (viii, ix).

17. While critics have claimed that Lila Mae subsumes her voice beneath Fulton’s own in extending his work, these readings overlook Lila Mae’s relative autonomy as a writer: “Fulton left instructions, but [Lila Mae] knows she is permitted to alter them” (255).

18. This aspect of The Intuitionist’s plot recalls Richard Wright’s Black Boy, in which an elevator operator, Shorty, allows a white passenger to kick him for a quarter.

19. In making this claim I expand upon a cogent reading of The Intuitionist by Jeffrey Allen Tucker: “The Intuitionist . . . demonstrates the remarkable and remarkably frustrating tendency that social progress has of lagging far behind technological progress” (149). I believe that the issue is more complicated than this: in The Intuitionist, technology encodes both materially and sensuously the inequalities of the society it serves. This is precisely why a “second elevation” is necessary in the novel: the first elevation is associated with racial inequality.

20. According to Linda Selzer, the papers Lila Mae seeks to publicize “convey troubling indications that [Fulton’s] quest for the perfect elevator entails a rejection of all that is messily imperfect-including . . . the physical body itself” (692). However, this claim overlooks how Intuitionism depends upon bodily sensation in its attention to fleshly elevator surfaces and what lies beyond them. Likewise, Selzer’s argument that racial uplift in The Intuitionist hinges upon “engaging the imperfect, experiential fray” obscures the fact that Lila Mae’s methods of elevator inspection are experiential and sensory right from the novel’s outset (697). Rather, I claim, the novel links social reform to transformations in-not engagements of-the sensory and experiential fray.

21. Pompey-Lila Mae’s lone fellow African American elevator inspector, and a figure whose name evokes the specter of material ruin-struggles to remove from his body a clinging “tentacle of newspaper,” suggesting his identity’s emergence by and through public sphere mass media (169). Ben Urich, meanwhile, pays for his muckraking by losing a finger-an instrument of both self-expression and touch-at the behest of the city’s mob kingpin, Johnny Shush, whose name suggests that the various forces arrayed against Lila Mae all seek to “shush” dissident streams of public discourse.

22. The building hosting the Follies suggests the event’s discriminatory nature in its likeness to that paradigmatically hierarchical machine, the elevator: the building’s “strata of old paint” recalls the first elevator we see Lila Mae inspect, a cab with a door whose “pitted texture . . . tells her that management has painted it over” (152, 5).

23. See Taylor’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition.

24. See Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

25. In the sense of “symbolic” criticized by McCann and Szalay, as well as by Walter Benn Michaels.

26. In addition to the McCann and Szalay article cited above, see Michaels’s The Trouble with Diversity.

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