SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 55
SINE QUA NON
plot in their mind because the source material from which they have emerged and their story
seeks to evoke—Blackness—be plotted or structured because it is an always-in-motion, hyper
liquid substance that will escape any form that tries to contain it while changing the form
that wanted to contain it.33 But to say Blackness is 'abstract' not because it is unknowable
but because the term describing its attributes makes opaque the exact unit of Blackness we
are discussing: as a philosophy, concept, feeling, affect, emotion, figure, or one of its infinite
forms. Because it readily changes shape and form, the story’s plot and structure must be fixed
enough and complete enough to guide Blackness ripples to flow through the plot and structure
like an aqueduct instead of trapping it into a shape. The result is a literary product that feels
recognizable, should be recognizable, but is different. Critically acclaimed and polarizing.
Right and wrong. Great American Novel-worthy right now, and something beyond later.
Radial Suspense and the Irradiant Node of Blackness
“[Abstract art] convinces you that what you think isn’t all. It challenges you to
understand something…different…Just because it…resembles you, doesn’t mean you
[understand it].”34
– Sam Gillam
Having established the theoretical framework and set Ellison's techniques in contrast
to Highsmith's approach, I now closely examine Invisible Man to understand how radial
suspense shows up in the novel. Through detailed analysis of key scenes, with particular
attention to the prizefighting sequence, we will explore Ellison's crucial distinction between
"Blackness" as a spectral, abstract protagonist and "blackness" as the embodied, racialized
experience of the narrator. The differentiation exposes how Ellison reconfigures suspense by
positioning Blackness as an irreducible force that ripples stakes and tensions outward, where
the stakes and tensions are the same: uncertainty.
Perhaps the most profound scene in Ellison’s Invisible Man unfolds in its opening
chapter. Among the many famed perspectives on the novel, special attention often gravitates
toward scenes charged with physical conflict: the initial altercation and, most strikingly, the
grotesque bestialization in the prizefighting battle royal. In this latter encounter, the narrator
is thrust into a ritualistic melee. It is a brutal brawl among other Black men like himself. The
scene drips with irony as he, believing he was invited solely to deliver an earnest speech on
the plight of Black U.S. Americans, instead becomes a pawn in a savage spectacle staged for
Reading ‘Blackness’ as a substance, or what I would even call an energetic substrate, that transforms
everything it touches, draws on Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s ‘ontologized plasticity.’ In Becoming Human, in
dialogue with Alexander Weheliye (Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human) Jackson produces nuanced insight on plasticity where blackness and blackened people
are molded to support empires built on ranked ontological hierarchies. It “maintains that black(ened) people
are not so much as dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed
as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human simultaneously and in a manner that puts
being in peril because the operations of simultaneously being everything and nothing for an order—human,
animal, machine, for instance—constructs black(ened) humanity as the privation and exorbitance of Form”
(Jackson, Becoming Human, 35). If blackness is morphed into whatever serves civilizational mores that cite it as
source material. It changes that which molds it by granting the molder a perceived ascension. This “perception”
is the problem because it produces false claims about one’s place within and over the world which subsequently
justify violence.
34
Gilliam, “Abstract Art Is Political | Artist Sam Gilliam | Louisiana Channel,” YouTube video, 6:03.
33
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