SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 44
Don't Try to Catch Me; You Don't Have Your Net:
Radial Suspense and Ripples from the Irradiant Node of Blackness
by Jermaine Anthony Richards
Introduction
“[Abstract art] messes with you.”
– Sam Gillam1
How do authors manage suspense when Blackness is the point from which the story
flows? “Don’t Try to Catch Me; You Don’t Have Your Net: Radial Suspense and Ripples from
the Irradiant Node of Blackness” launches a project examining suspense as contemporary
Afro-diasporic cultural production's organizing principle. Suspense is a page-turning essence.
It is the ongoing, unanswered question that cultivates and sustains attention. It is how what is
told as much as it is what is said, making it a delivery method and the substance the writer is
conveying. It is the fabric of the story’s arc and the arc itself. The element exists beyond easy
reproduction because although there are frameworks, there is no perfect formula. It requires
the audience’s enrollment over time by cultivating a narrative desire, 2 where even the writer is
part of the audience discovering the story as it passes through them. Suspense is as a function
that finds its form by flirting with time, exploiting setting, description, and stewing conflict.
The craft of suspense is about forging a “dilatory space” of narrative, the space of
suspense, where the audience and writer are spellbound and where “the truth is delated,” yet,
perhaps, at different moments for the writer who is writing and the reader who is reading
what has been written.3 Peter Brooks states that the work done is “through [and] toward…[a]
revelation of meaning that occurs when the narrative…reaches full predication.”4 Suspense
functionally obscures characters by withholding their motives and gradually betrays the
character by exposing their crimes for the audience’s payoff. The cultivation of suspense relies
on the author’s ability to perform betrayal on the page through a sustained anticipation.
Suspense craft is, in many ways, the liturgical arrangement of betrayal that demands precise
mastery and control over the objects and subject, requiring a closeness and readily deployable
cold distance to pull off.
However, does this fact about narrating suspense hold up where Blackness, an energy
that escapes domestication, is the object over which the author must wield mastery? In this
essay, I introduce and develop “Radial Suspense”—a concept, analytical lens, and narrative
technique revealing how texts generate tension from Blackness as figure, form, or philosophy.
It is a lens for sensing and understanding Blackness’ transfiguration of the suspense device.
It underscores a phenomenon occurring when Blackness becomes the narrative tension
carrying forth Blackness's unanswered question and suspicion by attempting to work at
1 Abstract Art Is Political | Artist Sam Gilliam | Louisiana Channel, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ciN6ZPDMJV4.
2 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, 7. print (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 2002).
3 Roland Barthes, S/Z, Collection “Tel Quel” (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1970).
4 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 18.
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