SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 52
this case, a husband's quiet resentment. Vic Meller’s unsettling declaration, “If I really don't
like somebody, I kill him,”22 emerges from mood: the unspoken, the ambient, the affectively
off intonation of impassioned discontent. Characters, setting, and atmosphere thicken this
psychological disturbance, with Vic’s garden herbs, snail tanks, and dispassionate affect all
reinforcing a tightly stitched emotional logic. Highsmith structures her suspense around
proportion and timing, layering ambiguity across scenes of domestic banality, allowing
tension to build along a clear narrative axis. Although she leaves room for surprise and
intuition in her writing process, the suspense is structured—it drives forward and culminates.
In this way, Highsmith exemplifies a classic model of suspense as linear, psychological, and
plot-oriented—one that sharply contrasts with the dispersed, stake-multiplying logic of radial
suspense. Highsmith's suspense radiates inward. Her protagonist emits a disquieting calm
that implodes readerly trust in emotional legibility. In Deep Water, Vic's casual confession, "If
I really don't like somebody, I kill him," creates a center of narrative gravity around which
anxiety accumulates.23
In contrast, radial suspense disperses infinite stakes as ripples, pulsating outward from an
irradiant node of Blackness to obstruct linear narrative resolution. Ellison’s “suspenseful and
sardonic” story, Invisible Man, evokes surrealism to suspend readers in a tale about a nameless,
“ginger-colored” man of “desirable conduct” who treads from the Deep South to Harlem
while navigating interstitched vignettes of bestial animalization. What changes, however, is
the attempt to incorporate Blackness into the fold. The in-and-out-of-sight descriptions of
Blackness—visible or invisible—allow a reader to see how the idea of Blackness and the
physical mark of blackness cuts between existence and non-existence, being and non-being
while forcing a re-examination of how the “germ” of an idea of Blackness can be developed,
plotted, structured, and revised even though it is an unstable and uncontainable ‘germ’ derived
from the nation’s curation of blackness’ mundane existence. Unlike radial suspense, which
thrives in metaphysical and narrative diffusion through ontological or epistemic multiplicity,
Highsmith's form remains tightly psychological, localized in affective restraint.
The writer’s racialization of blackness does not privilege any more ability to contain
Blackness than those not privileged with it. It is almost as if only Blackness can roam the
page, shifting in and out of physicality and spectrality depending on its goals. And so, where
Highsmith emphasizes careful control of the idea, plot, and story to maintain a precise
balance, it is worth considering whether it is possible to master Blackness if Blackness is
operating as a force from which the story flows and from which the blackened writer has,
themself, emerged and orbits. In that case, “the black” of the story resists authorial mastery or
control, as Blackness is neither controllable nor containable. The blackened writer invites the
infinite stakes of Blackness across the page, which often links with the existential blackness
of the physical character, while still exceeding it. For writers seeking to offer a throughline
with a resolution, it is so that the one primary thread, “the white,” the accepted successes and
failures of the United States, is often the most legible stream that will indefinitely conceal all
other stakes.
Radial suspense operates as a mode of craft operationalization that forces form to break
open because Blackness animates it from within. Unsurprisingly, after Invisible Man was
canonized as a GAN, numerous other Black-authored works entered the fold; it fractured
the structure of what the GAN could be, creating space for works previously dismissed as
22
23
Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water, 1st ed (W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2003), 17.
Highsmith, Deep Water.
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