Samuel R. Delany on the Modern Reader's Inability to Pick up on Suggestion

"Suggestion is a literary strategy.  [T]he age of innuendo and the coyly placed line of white space, as the hero envelops the heroine in his arms, ended [in 1968]....

"In Tiger! Tiger! the demonic antihero, Gully Foyle, invades Robin’s exploded apartment and stalks across her living room to where she cowers away from him on the couch. There is a line of white space ...

"At fifteen I knew perfectly well Gully went on to rape her....

"the climax of Heart of Darkness, when the pilgrims stand at the steamer’s rail, firing their rifles at the natives on the shore, fifteen or twenty feet away.... [W]ith a line of white space, the scene ends ... 

"Year after year, more than half my students fail to realize that the white men have just killed the black woman Kurtz has been sleeping with for several years."

-- Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210 [Paris Review Interview by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah]