SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 49
SINE QUA NON
Highsmith musters up a murderous tale. By contrast, Invisible Man lapses in and out of
time to trace the journey of an unnamed, “ginger-colored”15 narrator roaming the United
States. The narrative teems with anticipation as he travels from the Deep South to Harlem,
each vignette disclosing new threats to his life and livelihood. His precarity fuels the reader’s
suspicion—never knowing when or how his livelihood might be denied fosters a suspended
certainty around the devaluation (or negation) of “the black.”
Despite their differences, both novels harness suspense: for Highsmith, it centers on
thrill and resolution; for Ellison, it is bound up in questions of form and formlessness. The
former text focuses on the nation's ‘accepted’ successes and failures: “the white,” which comes
to a resolved end. Conversely, the latter foregrounds the accepted successes and failures of
the nation “the white,” while accentuating its failures. It goes further to nuance “the black,”
the unchanging irresolution reflecting the unaccepted successes and failures incompatible
with statecraft. Still, both deploy suspense to mediate the nation’s successes and failures,
thereby speaking to the “American soul,” however repentant or avoidant. Highsmith’s
suspense controls; Ellison’s suspense lingers. One plots its way to catharsis through a resolved
or resolving tale; the other orbits its irresolution through an unresolved condition.
A specific question arises: how did Ellison’s work become a GAN? During the early half
of the 20th century, many claimed “there is something (or nothing) in the Negro experience
that makes it not quite right for the novel”; Ellison countered, “That’s not true.” From this
framing, one might infer that because “the Negro” was assumed unresolved, it was supposedly
incompatible with a literary canon built on resolution or official repudiation. In a defiant
stance, Invisible Man can be read, in part, as a rebuttal that foregrounds “the black” or “the
negro” as spectral and subject to disappearance or predation. So while texts like Deep Water
are readily legible within the Great American canon, the question of what resistance Ellison
encountered becomes more perplexing.
We must consider James Baldwin's critique of the Protest Novel to appreciate the stakes
of Ellison’s intervention in Invisible Man. Baldwin identified the protest novel as a genre that,
despite appearing to oppose racial injustice, reinforced the status quo by reducing Blackness
to a national ornament. No critique of placing Black literature within the GAN canon is
more biting than Baldwin’s.17 Baldwin's contention centers not on the attempt but on the
inherent contradictions that emerge when writers endeavor to make Blackness conform to
established literary categories. In Baldwin's view, what manifests is invariably the Protest
Novel—a form reinforcing existing non-gratuitous functions of race.
First is the Protest Novel’s contradiction. As opposed to disturbing the established
aesthetic order, the protest novel becomes, in Baldwin's formulation, "an accepted and
comforting aspect of the American scene."18 Upon examination, such comfort derives from
the novel's reliance on two key elements: fantasy and sentimentality. These elements function
in concert to obscure what Baldwin identifies as a "secret and violent inhumanity"19 beneath
the surface of works. These works become catalogs of violence. They transform social death
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Vintage International ed., (New York: Vintage International, 1996), 21.
The New York Times, “Interview: Ralph Ellison,” The New York Times, October 21, 2021, sec. Books, https://
www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/review/ralph-ellison-invisible-man.html.
17
Though my counter against Baldwin’s claims of the ‘Protest Novel’ sets up a tension between the two, where
Ellison’s Invisible Man is seemingly trying to 昀椀t blackness into the Great American canon, I do not accept
the logic that black subjection should be used as ‘bait’ to achieve ‘human’ recognition. Radial Suspense calls
attention to the identi昀椀ed authorial strategy, not its rightness.
18
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 19.
19
Baldwin, 14.
15
16
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