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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...