Learning How to Read

As Lila Mae Watson picks up Theoretical Elevators by James Fulton after all she has learned about his intentions for writing the piece, she looks at it with new eyes. "She is teaching herself how to read," the narrator reports (186). And it is because she finds out that Fulton is black that she is able to look at the "race" word, supposedly about elevators, and find the royal "we" in Fulton's book. She realizes, like the readers of The Intuitionist, that Fulton's book isn't really as much about elevators as it is about creating a new way of looking at the world. "She has learned how to read, like a slave does. one forbidden word at a time" (230). In reading this novel, readers are also able to learn how to read with a different lens on.
When I described the novel to some of my friends they really didn't know what to make of it. Like the Empiricists and Fulton's book, my friends took the plot for face value and disregarded it because of the ridiculousness of Intuitionism. But, by looking at this novel as Colson Whitehead wanted us to- with the allegorical lens on- we see that the elevators are African Americans: and just as elevators are often not seen or thought about by most of Americans, so the African American struggle and existence is often not thought of as well. It is learning how the invisible daily struggle should be seen and dealt with, through a constant unearthing of how this America actually works. Lila Mae sees Fulton as a completely different man once her vision of this one powerful white man was unearthed and seen in another light. Through a constant probing of his true identity and then a reworking of her own thoughts and stereotypes about this man, she is able to identify and truly see why Fulton named her as "the one."
Learning how to read through the eyes of someone else is one of the greatest gifts a novel like Whitehead's is able to do for Americans. We are used to having one way of seeing people, events, and situations in society; and we usually keep those things in our consciousness for less than a month. The way in which people read is so shaped by their experiences, and like Lila Mae we often close ourselves off from the possibility of our notions to change. It is only when we receive startling news, when our world is somewhat rocked by a new idea (which as the older we get is more rare) that we begin to think of the world as something completely different. Fulton in his work didn't intend for anyone to take his "joke" seriously at first, but all the readers were looking at it with the same eyes they looked at every other text about elevators- real elevators. They didn't get it, and the joke became a reality. It ended up being a better and truly theoretical reality, but Fulton didn't know that was going to happen.
Lila Mae was able to see that new and greater theory by looking at the text without walls. Most of the things I read are put into a box of "good or bad", "worthwhile or crap," which only ends up limiting me to things in my own small world of experience. It is learning how to read with a new vision that will give me the most of everything that is good. Whitehead might have taught me how, along with others before him, how to read outside of myself: it might not just be about me.