SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 51
SINE QUA NON
terms, yet also activates surrealist techniques that cast Blackness as a central node unsettling
standard suspense mechanics. He eschews resolutions and keeps readers uncertain because the
story resonates beyond the page.
“Radial Suspense,” as I introduce here, is a narrative technique that mimics ongoing
discourses of Blackness at the moment of reading rather than the time of the text’s creation.
In other words, the story can’t be resolved because Blackness is an irresolvable discourse.
Radial suspense resists neat categorization, constantly reintroduces meaning through infinite
stakes, and mirrors how blackness, antiblackness, and black people intertwine to maintain a
self-perpetuating tension requiring ongoing reconsideration by the state.
Although Invisible Man contains elements that might place it under the protest novel
umbrella (the famed prizefighting scene is a prime example), Ellison transcends that narrow
frame by harnessing abstraction and surrealism within the suspense device. These choices
let him explore the layered complexity of Blackness beyond realism’s limits, primarily
through his virtuoso manipulation of suspense. As subsequent sections will argue, Ellison
pairs the foregrounded and famed battle royal scene (“the white”) with deeper subtexts
about “Blackness” as a spectral protagonist (“the black”), especially evident in the phrase
“the blackness of my invisibility,” where the “my” possessive determiner and “the” article
externalizes Blackness from the black figure, spawning another being experiencing a story
exceeding the physical brutality of the ginger-colored character. Through sustaining a suspense
arc balancing reprehensible physical reducibility through violence with metaphysical opacity
and omnipresence, Ellison confronts the far-reaching possibilities of how a literary device
can be temporarily integrated into and exceed the constraints of its aesthetic regime as time
stutters forward.
Highsmith and Ellison’s Relationship to Suspensecraft
The examination of Ellison's narrative technique gains particular clarity when considered
alongside Patricia Highsmith's systematic approach to crafting suspense. Highsmith's
emphasis on carefully controlled pacing, precise narrative balance, and methodical tensionbuilding is an illuminating counterpoint, helping to identify and articulate the innovative
mechanics of radial suspense seen through Ellison's Invisible Man.
Patricia Highsmith’s writer’s reference Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction offers
Highsmith’s position on writing craft and the tradecraft of suspense cultivation. Systematically,
Highsmith engaged that idea generation beginning with a “germ” of an idea stemming from
an event, observation, or emotional experience - the writer uses this to develop a story. In
the development, characters, setting, and atmosphere serve this idea. The plot is the stage of
outlining the drama, tempo, and sequence of events. By this point, the writer must focus on
structural elements such as pacing, proportion, and ways to insert plot points that thicken
the narrative. Once they have completed this, they revise until the story is cohesive. Even in
this, Highsmith offers room for flexibility with the plot, playing with emotion, leaning into
intuition, and even avers wanting to be surprised by her story, suggesting that suspense is
nuanced.
Patricia Highsmith’s theory of suspense writing materializes vividly in Deep Water,
where she crafts narrative tension from what she calls the “germ” of an emotional event—in
Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge (Mass.): the Belknap press of Harvard
university Press, 2014).
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