“It’s a New Day”: The Intuitionist, The Wire, and Prophetic Tradition

Both Colson Whitehead’s debut novel, The Intuitionist (1999), and David Simon’s Home Box Office (HBO) series, The Wire (2002–2008), are driven by tensions that undercut vertical hierarchies and the promise of technology in failing urban landscapes. Indeed, these works reveal and then subvert how embedded technologies shape urban spaces: The Wire takes its title from the wiretaps the police set up in each season to attempt to break their cases, and The Intuitionist’s plot involves the structural soundness of “theoretical elevators.” The Intuitionist centers on rival factions of elevator inspectors; the vertical potential of their elevators is a primary concern of the novel, as is the novel’s greater upending of traditional “uplift” discourse.¹ Each season of The Wire examines the intertwined verticality of Baltimore’s various infrastructures. In the drug culture, one rises from a “hopper” (coined from “grasshopper,” the apprentice children working the lowliest jobs on the drug corners and in the “low-rises”) to a lieutenant in the high-rises and, ultimately, to a drug kingpin, although the positions are precarious ones; these trajectories have parallels in the rise up the ranks and spectacular free falls of police commissioners, union leaders, or mayors.² Given the catastrophic failures of each city, Whitehead and Simon critique the notion that purely technological advances in surveillance or building construction will fix broken cities. In order to prevent the physical and metaphorical collapse of American cities, these works suggest that we must recognize the importance of prophecy and the written word in order to restore visibility and voice to the urban underclass.

Although little work has been done to examine The Intuitionist and The Wire together, they offer significant revisions of the African American prophetic tradition. This tradition is a long and vibrant one, spanning from the works of Nat Turner and David Walker to James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is inextricably intertwined in the political, religious, and literary experience of slavery and abolition (Hobson 618). Certainly the Hebrew and Christian roots of prophecy are essential to the African American tradition, but, as George Shulman points out, our understanding and use of the term prophecy today encompasses not only Biblical tradition but a wider range of sources from William Blake to Allen Ginsberg (2) and includes figures who “announce” or “forewarn” often unwanted truths (5). Both The Intutionist’s Lila Mae Watson and The Wire’s Detective Jimmy McNulty end up as witnesses to the urban racial crises of their respective texts. Notably, Whitehead and Simon, as the creators of each work, have also been granted a kind of prophetic status by critics for their insights on racial tensions in the urban scene as their protagonists draw attention to the moments of crisis and reckoning at hand in each city. The Intuitionist and The Wire are driven more by prophecy as a pop culture rhetorical gesture; these are postmodern, secular texts largely unconcerned with traditional spirituality. Christianity has little overt influence on Lila Mae while in The Wire, church is merely the locus for political pandering during campaigns or cause for the occasional Sunday cease-fire between rival dealers and hit men. The works suggest that the figure of the detective replaces the figure of the prophet in the postmodern, secularized American city.

Prophecy reintroduces a reliance on human voice and interpretation to counteract the technologically driven view of urban improvement that prizes rationality, impersonality, and mechanization. It allows renegade detectives to circumvent the corrupt bureaucracies at the intersection of urban development, politics, and criminal enterprise in their cities. Lila Mae, employed as an elevator inspector, is charged with forewarning of imminent mechanical failure; as a Baltimore police detective, McNulty is the quintessential watchman.³ Lila Mae is as much a detective, in her own way, as McNulty; as Jeffery Allen Tucker notes, Lila Mae Watson “shares her surname with the sidekick of the most famous fictional detective of all” (152), and central to Whitehead’s disruption of the hierarchies of urban infrastructure and racial aspiration is bringing the sidekick to the fore and...