SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 45
SINE QUA NON
multiple registers of interpretation: narrative, craft, and aesthetic. Unlike the controlled
binary poles architected through formal mapping of narrative suspense (e.g., Life ↔Death or
Solution↔Irresolution), radial suspense acknowledges the ripples of suspense and how reading
the ripples flowing outward from an undefined and undefinable node, the irreducibility of
Blackness, can change how a story might be read in and out of time. Such understanding
creates multiple vectors of abstraction that “mess” with the reader in ways that would make
them believe they understand the text, but that force questions about whether they do or can.
I draw from Black studies, aesthetics, visual studies, and literary theory to bear the opticality
of the writer’s craft through the suspense element.
Parallels appear between the radial and Roland Barthes’ notion of circularity. Barthes'
circularity of the codes calls to the interaction between textual codes: the proairetic (actions/
causalities), which drives the story forward, and the symbolic (metonymy of symbols), which
provides layers of meaning that correct for causal sequences that bring about the proairetic.
The circular interaction between the proairetic and symbolic creates a vortex, that space of
suspense, which manages the multiple meanings the audience derives from the text, toward
a promised resolution by the end. However, radial suspense differs in that Barthes speaks to
interpretive meaning, while radial suspense speaks to metaphysical and ontological stakes.
In contrast to Barthes's focus on how meaning emerges from the circular interaction
of textual codes, my concept of radial suspense describes Blackness not as a theme, but as
a "structural principle" whose inherent irreducibility creates a disruptive extra-dimension.
Within this dimension, Blackness generates infinite competing and ineluctable stakes that
oscillate and warp the reader's capacity for complete meaning-derivation beyond what
aesthetic regimes deem meaningful. At the center of radial suspense, Blackness is distorted and
weighed down; its capacity to fulfill these stakes is unevenly distributed across the narrative.
Yet harmony emerges through the temporality of these stakes, which radiate outward to
unify the seemingly fragmented character. As a result, the character seems haunting and
haunted beyond the page and forever ‘sat’ in the reader’s mind. Because Blackness remains
uncountable—the central node of distortion—it generates multiple, competing stakes that
defy the assumption that Blackness could only want what it has been assigned. Such disbelief
propels a magisterial discourse on Blackness’ unpinnability, spotlighting our limited attempts
to grasp what Blackness might desire beyond its assigned role within regimes that treat it as a
container for any enclosed spectrality.
The story’s narration orbits the potent node of Blackness, which coordinates its goals,
fears, and desires on the page and how it moves through the market in which the story
circulates. These orbital elements do not move uniformly: some maintain stable paths while
others stray into contradictory zones, creating fractures in the story’s surface. Though the
system appears stable from a distance, no tension arc remains static. The story’s action
accelerates toward Blackness or decelerates into a clash elsewhere, never reaching a final
resolution. The dynamic betrays the story’s suspense and transcends the simple fulfillment of
legible stakes. Instead, it becomes an ever-shifting relation to Blackness—a perpetual turning
and returning, with each revolution generating fresh collisions. Suspense thus abandons any
linear path to a neat finale, for the node’s pull resists neutralization. The resolution, in turn,
appears as recurring confrontations between the narrative and Blackness, sustaining stakes
whose outcomes, however legible, always fall back into Blackness’ orbit to reconfigure its
legibility. The pithily legible stories where Blackness is the source from which all flows explain
why some of these texts can be read as Great American Novels (GANs), while also falling out
of favor with and surpassing it.
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