SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 54
action leading to continued life holds the same payoff. The writer achieves the feat of suspense
through careful curation of surprise, atmospheric tragedy, tempo, believable plot twists, and
sensory appealing details.
For Highsmith, crafting suspense is so intricate that having none, too few, or too many
could thwart the writer’s ability to control the story’s homeostasis and the reader’s engagement.
She writes:
The beauty of the suspense genre is that a writer can write profound thoughts and
have some sections without physical action if he wishes to, because the framework is an
essentially lively story…29
Highsmith and Ellison depart here. Although Ellison holds to the shared mastery of
craft, he does not find a mastery of elemental expression as fixed or structured. There is a
formula for literary production, but a formula will not make literature. In an interview with
The Paris Review, Ellison states:
If you go back to the beginning of the book you will notice, after the Prologue, that
the action starts on a fairly naturalistic level… but as [the narrator] moves through his
experiences they become progressively more… ‘surrealistic.’ Nothing is as it seems and
in the fluidity of society strange juxtapositions lend a quality of nightmare.30
Ellison’s gesture towards the ‘naturalistic’ mode of the Invisible Man prompts a question
of what some would fit into the quarters of the term Black aesthetic inquiry or inquiries
about writing in the Black Radical Tradition—a concept scholars have taken up in attempts
to investigate how Blackness lives within literature, language, and communication through
text. With particular attention to Zora Neale Hurston, in “Characteristics of the Negro
Expression,” acknowledges that the stylistic shape and language of Blackness is anomalous in
its reformations of form.31 I take this up to suggest that, even more, the terms of the tradition
are shifty (constantly changing) and shifting its containers. Even more, I would argue that
Blackness is not mimicking the requirement of the form that it is attempting to appear as,
which is, in this case, a Great American Novel, but that it is also mimicking the transtemporal
discourse of Blackness that can, at any time, be put against the text because it produces a well
of infinite stakes.
Highsmith’s perspective, however, holds some room for complication. She presents, “A
plot, after all, should never be a rigid thing in the writer's mind when he starts to work. I
carry this thought one step further and believe that a plot should not even be completed”—in
the writer’s mind.32 I suggest that the fictionist working with Blackness should have a rigid
Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 37.
Adam Bradley, “Surreal Encounters in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man,’” The New York Times, June 3, 2021,
sec. T Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/t-magazine/ralph-ellison-invisible-man.html.
31
Zora Neale Hurston, “The Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 1934.
32
Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, 44.
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