Suspense

For other uses, see Suspense (disambiguation).

Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead up to a big event or dramatic moment, with tension being a primary emotion felt as part of the situation. In the kind of suspense described by Hitchcock, an audience experience suspense when they expect something bad to happen and have (or believe they have) a superior perspective on events in the drama's hierarchy of knowledge, yet they are powerless to intervene to prevent it from happening. In broader definitions of suspense, this emotion arises when someone is aware of his lack of knowledge about the development of a meaningful event; thus, suspense is a combination of anticipation and uncertainty dealing with the obscurity of the future. In terms of narrative expectations, it may be contrasted with mystery or curiosity and surprise.

Aristotle

According to Greek philosopher Aristotle in his book Poetics, tragedy is the imitation of an action "with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions" (Poetics 1449b 27-28). Even though catharsis remains a very controversial notion, we can consider it as "the end toward wich the formal artefact is functionally directed" (Shaper 1968: 131), and we can relate the more general concept of "suspense" (see Sternberg 1978) to passions such as "pity and fear". So, in artistotelian tradition, suspense can be considered as the telos of some kind of literary narrations.

Fictions and plot

Even though suspense and, more generally, narrative tension (see Baroni 2007), does not have good reputation in the field of canonized literature, some consider it as the dynamic aspect of the plot. Meir Sternberg, in a rhetoric-functionalist view, consider suspense as one of the main features of narrative interest. According to him, narativity can be defined "as the play of suspense/curiosity/surprise between represented and communicative time (in whatever combination, whatever medium, whatever manifest or latent form). Along the same functional lines, [he] define[s] narrative as a discourse where such play dominates: narrativity then ascends from a possibly marginal or secondary role […] to the status of regulating principle, first among the priorities of telling/reading." (Sternberg 1992 : 529). In this conception, suspense can be opposed to curiosity, because the former needs a chronological narration (the interest relying on the obscurity of the future), when the latter creates mystery by modifying the order of exposition of the events in the teleology of the narration.

Raphaël Baroni (2007) uses the more general concept of narrative tension to define the kind of likable anxiety produced by any puzzling narration postponing the resolution of the plot, stressing on the reluctant act of telling and its aesthetic effects. In his view, suspense, curiosity and surprise (which are the different aspects of narrative tension) can be narrowed to the notion of discordance in Ricoeur's analysis of time and narrative (see Baroni 2009). Insisting on the importance of tension in the dynamics of plots allows to reconsider the common asumption that "emplotment" ("la mise en intrigue") consists essentially in an act of configuration. On the contrary, we can consider that building a good plot consists more in producing a defiguration of the story by a reluctant narrator who wants to "intriguish" or puzzle his narratee (Baroni 2009: 45-94). In such a view, plots produced by puzzling stories (mainly fictions) could be contrasted with narratives (such as historical books) which tend to build a clear configuration in order to explain the past. Anyway, in this broader conception of narrative tension, it can be assumed that suspense is not only a feature of popular fictions, Hollywood movies or detective novels, but also a fundamental aspect of fictional tradition , as well as the form of temporality itself in its most salient phenomenological manifestation.

The paradox of suspense

Some authors have tried to explain the "paradox of suspense", namely: a narrative tension that remains effective even when uncertainty is neutralized, because the audience, for being repeater, know exactly how the story resolves (see Gerrig 1989, Walton 1990, Yanal 1996, Brewer 1996, Baroni 2007). Different theories are opposed: some assume that true repeaters are extremely rare because, in reiteration, we usually forget many details of the story and the interest is simply displaced on these holes of memory (see Brewer), others claim that uncertainty remains even for often told stories because, during the immersion in the fictional world, we forget fictionnally what we know factually (Walton) or because we expect fictional worlds to look like real world, where exact repetition of an event is impossible (Gerrig). The position of Yanal is more radical and postulates that narrative tension that remains effective in true repetition should be clearly distinguished from guenuine suspense, because uncertainty is part of the definition of suspense. Baroni (2007: 279-295) proposes to name rappel this kind of "suspense" whose excitment relies on the ability of the audience to anticipate perfectly what's to come, a precognition that is particularly enjoyable for children dealing with well-known fairy tales. Baroni adds that another kind of suspense without uncertainty can emerge with the occasional contradiction between what the reader knows about the future (cognition) and what he desires (volition), especially in tragedy, when the protagonist eventually dies or fails (suspense par contradiction).

References

• Baroni, R. (2007). La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité, surprise, Paris: Seuil.
• Baroni, R. (2009). L'oeuvre du temps. Poétique de la discordance narrative, Paris: Seuil.
• Brewer, W. (1996). "The Nature of Narrative Suspense and the Problem of Rereading", in Suspense. Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Brooks, P. (1984). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Gerrig, R. (1989). "Suspense in the Absence of Uncertainty", Journal of Memory and Language, n° 28, p. 633-648.
• Grivel, C. (1973). Production de l'intérêt romanesque, Paris & The Hague: Mouton.
• Phelan, J. (1989). Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
• Prieto-Pablos, J. (1998). "The Paradox of Suspense", Poetics, n° 26, p. 99-113.
• Ryan, M.-L. (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Schaper, E. (1968), "Aristotle's Catharsis and Aesthetic Pleasure", The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 18, n° 71, p. 131-143.
• Sternberg, M. (1978), Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Sternberg, M. (1992), "Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity", Poetics Today, n° 11, p. 901-948.
• Sternberg, M. (2001), "How Narrativity Makes a Difference", Narrative, n° 9, (2), p. 115-122.
• Vorderer, P., H. Wulff & M. Friedrichsen (eds) (1996). Suspense. Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Walton, K. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Yanal, R. (1996). "The Paradox of Suspense", British Journal of Aesthetics, n° 36, (2), p. 146-158.