SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 46
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man showcases radial suspense in action, where Blackness
operates as an “irradiant node”—an undefined center from whence uncertainty radiates
outward, sending forth competing stakes that stalemate the possibility of deriving a clear
resolution. The essay then examines how Blackness short-circuits the suspense device by
comparing Ellison’s surrealist depiction of its physical presence and metaphysical absence with
Patricia Highsmith’s formal suspense tradecraft. Positioning Ellison within contemporary
Black Studies, the essay re-situates Invisible Man as a challenge to both Great American and
Protest Novels. It destabilizes their boundaries even as it is canonized within them.
My impetus for writing this essay draws from personal experience. Almost a decade ago,
I enrolled in a graduate-level creative writing seminar called “Advanced Suspense Writing.” In
my short fiction, “Mama’s Boy,” I endeavored to pen a verse fiction about a black character
raised in a hyper-religious town who is reeled back against his will. With heavy-handed
allusions to Christian iconography, Southern Gothic Christology, and scriptural possession
through maxims from Black church cultures, the story takes the reader on a ride through a
world where even “the trees bowed down to God in adoration.”5 The instructor did not get it.
Yet, a younger, wide-eyed version of myself could not resolve the incongruity. He tried to help
privately, stating, “Let me know what I can do to help you. You’ve got major talent.” In public
workshops, he held an iron rod and my story to the fire for being unhelpable—so much so
that I was scolded and penalized when he could not help. For him, the story did not fit the
prescribed diction of suspense: it had no suspense; it was a mess. It didn't make sense because
it didn’t align with the specified text (Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs). Its abstraction
messed with him, too. Such became evident when he impermissibly and admittedly toured
the story draft across the English department. I soon compromised the tale when I whipped
it into formal legibility. It became something I did not like, and it still did not satisfy the
instructor’s demands.
Some years later, I realized that not even the Black radical or aesthetic tradition could
fully capture what I was trying to do: I was attempting to make a traditionally understood
element, suspense, squirm – and it just so happened that my method came through attempts
at incorporating Blackness into the fold. The stakes, though undefined, were there. However,
as with Blackness, the stakes were irreducible to form in service of a larger function. Such
an experience prompts the opening of this dialogue on whether suspense in literature
casting Blackness as a protagonist can be understood by conventional vocabularies when
the undefined point of Blackness acts as the story’s source from which everything ripples
outward.6
Inquiries into Afro-diasporic literature have raised questions about literary style. Henry
5
Jermaine Anthony Richards, “Mama’s Boy,” (unpublished manuscript, July 1, 2018), typescript.
‘B/blackness,’ ‘Blackness,’ ‘blackness,’ ‘the blackness,’ and ‘the black’ are distinct. First, ‘Blackness’ refers to
the ontological framework, a site, or substance, aligning with Fred Moten's concept of paraontological blackness,
which distinguishes blackness as a concept from black(ened) people. Second, ‘blackness’ refers to race as a
derivative lived experience after racialization: the material realities and social dynamics. I delineate the two
using capitalization. Blackness calls to the relationship between the unde昀椀ned and unde昀椀nable “irradiant” point
(‘Blackness’) from which the story's concepts radiate to germinate blackness (experience), and the blackness
(the non-apparent ripple). Third, via Invisible Man, I use ‘the blackness’ to channel my interpretation of Ellison’s
use of the term, where ‘the blackness’ is a spectral protagonist. Ellison's scripted “of” in “of the blackness”
signals a de-interiorization and partial separation of Blackness as a whole and invisibility (the condition of
those who have been black(ened) as part. From the whole spectral entity, the story radiates. The deuteragonist
is a ripple 昀氀owing from Blackness. Thus, “the blackness” is the ‘ripple’ that carries the force of ‘Blackness.’
Fourth, ‘Bblackness’ refers to the linked racialized experience of ‘blackness’ with the whole site or substance
of Blackness. I take up explorations of ‘B/blackness’ in future works.
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