Lila Mae Watson faces drastically different challenges of modernity than those James Axton recognizes. Where Axton is an upper middle class caucasian man with the means and ability to move about the globe and hold a somewhat prestigious job, Lila Mae is the most talented Elevator Inspector in the city and can glean little to no respect from her peers and society due to Whitehead’s pre-civil rights setting. Lila Mae’s central test stems from her gender and race.
The other African American or mixed characters in the novel, Fulton and Pompey, are also inspectors but both of them are male and “pass” as white ensuring them a egree of respect not granted to Lila Mae. Watson, however does not hide her lineage or race but yields to societal rules pushed upon her; she does not complain about her janitor’s closet of a room at Academy and she is consistently almost disturbingly polite in every form of situation, which gives the impression that Watson is purely trying to survive in a white male world.
These personality aspects and her racial disposition, which place Watson at a disadvantage to her peers, are exactly what makes it so easy for them to blame Lila Mae when an elevator she inspected goes into free fall without an nvestigation. By nature of this claim versus Lila Mae’s previously perfect inspection record, she is forced to come out of her comfort zone of politeness and investigate the cause of Elevator 11 on her own, making way for the classic “hero’s quest” in which Watson will discover self and begin to force the Empiricists into racial and gender modernity.
Lila Mae is fully aware of the political power she brings to the Inspectors society by being their “token minority”. By this Lila is conflicted with a deep issue of self as she maneuvers the tricky world which is set o far against her that her failure is taken as a given rather than a freak accident or sabotage.
At the start of the novel Watson herself falls prey to the institutional racism present in the Elevator Guild believing that Pompey, her only black colleague, was the culprit of the incident, on the opposite front she trusts Natchez who turns out to be working for the Guild suggesting that it is not other African American characters she distrusts, but the Guild itself. She, much like James Axton, is so ostracized that she has a mistrust of most everyone around her but, unlike Axton, Watson has every reason to expect this sort of treatment and fall into a pit of self doubt.
It is also relevant to note that Lila Mae is a transplant to the big city. She is a southerner who has moved up North to a place of vertical expansion and freedom and winds up feeling more trapped by the one way streets and no U-turns than she did back home. The fact that Watson is a relatively recent transplant offers an explanation the the city taking on human characteristics. She identifies with the south and not with this new New York, which parallels to Watson’s discomfort in her own being and she moves farther and farther from being able to identify herself, Intuitionism, or Empiricism.
As the novel progresses Whitehead shows the readers James Fulton’s deception of the Intuitionists entire mode of inspection, an idea that if accepted by Lila Mae will bring the entirety of the Guild forward and back in time simultaneously. James Fulton has spent his entire career hiding the fact that he is part African American. Without having hidden his identity there would be no way that the socially elite Elevator Guild would have allowed him to rise to such a high rank.
However, since Fulton looks white, he is able to have unmistakeable agency in Inspection which he uses to reinvent the entire way in which the book works thus writing and giving birth to Intuitionism. Hidden by books that governed Intuitionist training, Fulton’s theories serve as a reminder of “the hatred of the corrupt order of the world, the keen longing for the next one, its next rules. ” In this Fulton is able to create a society that was currently unimaginable to him, a society in which people like he and Lila Mae Watson could rise on their own volition, not n spite of the color of their skin.
At the start of The Names James defines himself in relation to the Parthenon. He is dumbfounded by the aura that surrounds what is essentially to him a heap of rocks. Axton rationalizes to the reader, or perhaps just to himself, that he prefers to spend his time in “modern” cities with their imperfections rather than wandering around the perceived dignity and perfection of the Acropolis. It is the perfection of the temple that brings Axton to criticize it as doomed expectations personifying the building as himself as if it ill confront him with his own inadequacies and highlight his idea of the madness of society surrounding him.
By comparing himself to such a monument James creates elaborate sense of self-importance. Through the challenges he faces with modernity throughout the novel highlighted previously James is able to conquer his fear of the Parthenon. The tourists he previously pitied he now sees as families, all units speaking languages to one another “one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong” he goes on “This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our ffering is language” illustrating that Axton has come full circle to see more than himself and his own shortcomings within the monument.
He has grown exponentially in who he is DeLillo showcases a new man at the end of the novel, one of self- assurance and faith in humanity. Prior to Lila Mae’s discovery of Fulton’s essential lies, The Intuitionist world of elevator inspection is a metaphorical representation for a society hindered by social division, each group designated and confined to their own “boxes”. The tension between the Empiricists, and the Intuitionists, the seemingly inferior competitor who treats nspection with passion and gut feeling, elicits a symbolic comparison to a more palpable reality of racial hierarchical divisions.
Within The Intuitionist Whitehead hides a seemingly insignificant reference to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he is referred to as the “man who is so loud down South” This brings the fictional novel in an alternate world back to reality. Discussing Dr. King also reminds the reader that this alternate way still has an undetermined future. Whitehead returns his audience to the past, giving Lila Mae potential at the start of the ivil rights movement that in reality she might not have had.
The implied future inspires hope for a different world today if the reader is able to trust in Watson’s final act of inscription. By doing this Lila Mae is able to give the reader a faith in Fulton’s dream of unity making it clear that Lila Mae is entering into a new, transcendent, modern world. Axton and Watson’s stories create a clear view to what modernity is to society today through their close inspections of language, relationships, gender and race. These novels highlight the idiosyncrasies that go into a culture and society.
By neither story being placed in the geographic reality of America the characters are able to identify parts of American society that are not incredibly present to those immersed into the culture in everyday life. This is how Axton learns to accept himself through language and how Lila Maw comes to peace with Fulton’s betrayal. Additionally, the power of language is deeply significant in each novel. Language has always been more than a vehicle for individual or personal expression. Like the Acropolis, language is a social construct that has its own beauty, dignity, order and proportion.
Unlike the Acropolis, it is a vehicle for a dynamic relationship between people. Just as language connects people and things or people and other people, it defines, manages and controls the relationship between the two. It allows people to discover the world and, having done so, it allows them to relate to it. However, inevitably, the relationship involves elements of power, control and persuasion. Thus, it is the fundamental mechanism through which politics operates. Which means that it can be abused. Within mass society, language becomes an instrument of oppression.
