Blackouts

Deep into the pages of the novel “Blackouts” by Justin Torres, one of the included illustrations is a sketch comparing two vaginas–one a homosexual subject physically unharmed, the other with flesh tears caused by mutual sex play. Notes, not blacked out, indicate, in the context of scientific research, the gynecology of homosexuality is to be left to our censored imaginations. Real queer history, as represented by this sketch and other artifacts of the 1930s, is presented to us paratextually in the frames of “Blackout’s” fiction. “Blackout’s” postmodernism compels us to ask: Is the book before us a creation of its author or a creation of its characters?
A much-blacked-out copy of the 1941 medical text “Sex Variants: show more A Study of Homosexual Patterns”, is in the possession of Juan Gay, an older terminally-ill resident of a derelict sanitarium somewhere in the U.S. desert. Juan has been spending his last days on a project to reconstruct the redacted history of the study’s instigator, a pioneering lesbian sociologist who conducted hundreds of interviews with queer subjects in her goal to demystify and normalize queer life. The patriarchal medical establishment co-opted her work to misconstrue historical testimonies into scientized pathologies of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder and criminal activity. Juan is visited by a twenty-seven-year-old man named Nene, a drifter and sex hustler, and the novel’s narrator. The two were roommates in a mental hospital ten years earlier. Juan is a lover, but also a queer role model for Nene. At night, sharing Juan’s deathbed, the men share tales from their difficult personal histories growing up queer. During the day, as Juan sleeps and his health declines, Nene pores over the study, trying to draw sense from both its intactnesses and erasures. Torres’s text includes extracts from the non-fictional study throughout the novel and inside the fiction. The dying Juan enlists Nene to continue the project, his poioumena. Between material layers of the project, Torres presents the characters’s deathbed conversations regarding their troubled youths and families, experiences with ex-lovers and anonymous sex, the synopsis of subtextual children’s books, mental illness, the marginalization of Puerto Rican identity, and extemporaneously imagined movie screenplays about queer characters–embedded sub-fictions deployed to restore erasures and forbidden histories. Like the unedited footage of a documentary film, Torres gives order to the truthful breaks and ruptures–real advertisements, letters, photographs, and illustrations–while also acknowledging the necessity to incorporate fictionalized accounts of real people. Torres’s metafictional endnotes recall Nabokov’s fictionalized commentaries in his novel “Pale Fire,” and there are clear intertextual homages to Rulfo’s novel “Pedro Páramo” and Puig’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Juan teaches Nene that marginalized people acquire identity through a literarily-defined world. Through a view of history both true and imagined, Nene discovers queer history, instead of criminal and immoral, to be brave and inclusive. A grandly subversive inheritance, hidden in omissions, subtext, endnotes, uncatalogued letters and photos, under redactions, and shared in whispers down generations.
Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and postmodernist, in his 1977 essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", analyzed Nietzsche's use of genealogy as a way of critiquing traditional historical methods, of uncovering origins and power relations in established historical narratives. Nietzsche argued morality has a history that changes over time. They used genealogy to mean the lineage of societal beliefs and practices we live by today. Foucault writes that attitudes and dispositions toward sex and discipline do not move improvingly forward in time, but are contingent upon authorized passions and prejudices. Genealogy-history examines the origins of a specific concept of moral goodness, and a similar critique can be found in “Blackouts” regarding the genesis of attitudes about gender, sexual preference, and ways of defining and disciplining criminality. Foucault writes that attempting to capture the exact and pure essence of things such as primordial identity is a mistake, there is no perfect origin. Nietzsche wrote that the theological origin of humanity once made sense, Adam and Eve created in the perfect shadowless light of the first morning, everything from a plan with meaning. Nietzsche says, after Darwin the path of human sovereignty on Earth was blocked by a monkey standing at the entrance. And Foucault writes that the history of Enlightenment, claiming devotion to truth and precise scientific methods, is in fact made from the passions of its scholars’s hatreds, fanaticisms, and competitions. Personal conflicts forged the weapons of reason. Foucault writes that a genealogy approach to history unmasks the errors and accidents and dispels the chimeras of either divine or so-called rational origin. There is a single drama when a new idea or event develops: the domination between people. Successful understandings of history belong to those capable of dominating who is right and who gets listened to and why. Against this, Foucault suggests a new historical sense acknowledging causality and origin, acknowledging the plurality that went into the ideas and movements history represents, and breaking free from the history of identities we inherited. Some knowledge inherited from our complex past must be sacrificed, knowledge that was not simply objective but was the result of instinct, passion, chance, and sometimes malice–knowledge arising from a will to knowledge. What was, was the result of subjective emotions and desires. What was never an inevitable eternal truth can be rethought, reinterpreted, and reshaped.
“Blackouts” employs such a strategy of reconstructedness both in its literary and artifactual elements to prove how queer history contains the possibilities of counter-narrative and counter-history. The novel creates coherence out of fracture, its subjects imagined, historical, and sometimes dramatized emerge de-pathologized and human. And the true stories of unsung heroes are reclaimed. show less

This book won the National Book Award and after reading it, I can say that the judges really had no choice in the matter. It manages to be intelligent, innovative and full of heart, which is a lot for one book. The scaffolding for this novel is two men in a room, a small room in an old building in New Mexico, the curtains drawn. Juan is dying and his friend, who he last saw decades ago in a mental health facility, has come to spend these last days with him in this over-heated room, as they talk about their own pasts and read a bit from an old book called Sex Variants, where each page has been altered, words blacked out, making a new text. The also discuss the person who spear-headed the book's creation, her history and how she convinced show more a male doctor to be the head of the project, because she couldn't get traction as a woman, and how she was ultimately disappointed in what resulted.

This is the kind of book that ranges far and wide while staying in the same place. It's clever and intelligent, with the erasures revealing more than the original text did. It shares a format with Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, a connection that Torres points out. It's a novel that deserves to be read slowly and ideally as a physical book, the object itself playing a part in how well this book holds together, with illustrations and photos enhancing the story being told. show less

What is the source of our identity? Every historical narrative has the potential for a counter-narrative, as demonstrated by Blackouts, which also implies that each of us has identity ruptures and gaps—the book's title blackouts—that are kept together by narrative continuity.

I was reminded of Nabokov's lyricism and intricacy by the narrative. The story is slowly, gradually revealed through vignettes that this reader found fascinating. As the essence is revealed the book became more and more incredibly engaging to read. Adding to this was the creative use of blacked-out source materials in conjunction with the story. The result is a book that deserves the accolades that it has received.

Juan and Nene's extended deathbed conversation show more about sex, family ostracism, Puerto Rican identity and films they love like Kiss of the Spider Woman (an inspiration for this novel), is a way of imaginatively restoring some of that "forbidden" material. show less

An intellectual study of humanity, desire and debauchery disguised as fiction. A story of love, discovery and endings that remove generational divides. What makes this book unique and brilliant in its messaging is also it's greatest downfall - the complexity of stories within stories within stories, of the images, interpretations and redactions. Poetically written, but I struggled to maintain focus and motivation throughout.

National Book Award winner that you can't help appreciating and admiring for its writing, more than appreciate reading it. Justin Torres is amazing - I loved "We The Animals," but this takes his skills to a whole other level. The book alone could be a semester course in Queer Studies - there are so many layers. The basic premise is the narrator, presumably destitute, travels to find ancient Juan Gay, at the Palace, which seems like a decrepit public nursing home (though explained later). Juan is dying and wants the narrator to finish a life-long research project on Jan Gay (real person) and the book Sex Variants (real book, 1940s). It all comes across a bit like a fever dream, but in the time Juan has left, the two men share stories and show more confidences and Juan reveals his personal connection (fictional?) to Jan and the book - and maybe this book is the finished product? "there were three stories Juan wanted to alloy: (1) the story of how I'd arrived at the Palace...(2) the story of the Sex Variants study itself, Jan Gay's story....(3) the final story, Juan's own," (113) The title works on several levels too- from physical blackouts - both men were institutionalized for mental illness, which is how they met long ago - to memory lapse, to the 'blackout' poems the author has created and included from the original text of Sex Variants, to the blacking out of queer history, which is also facing a dark future. Torres says it "about reading absence." Truly a masterpiece and deserving of its literary prize, but definitely not a casual read. show less

Clearly inspired by [b:Kiss of the Spider Woman|588242|Kiss of the Spider Woman|Manuel Puig|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403179094l/588242._SY75_.jpg|765288] (1976) by Manuel Puig, I enjoyed this novel’s recreation of the tender, caring bond that develops between two rather different men in Puig’s novel as they pass the time in a small cell-like space (literally a cell in Puig, figuratively here) talking, imagining life through the lens of film, and through being their true selves countering a dominant ideology that pathologizes queerness.

Juan, an elder man on his deathbed, wants his young visitor to take up the work of recording queer history and identity begun in a lengthy old research show more report in his possession, which was co-opted and misused for their own purposes by straight male doctors decades ago. Reflecting this erasure, the volumes themselves are mostly blacked out and images of its pages are printed here in the style of creating found poetry, which is not usually something I have much interest in but it works quite well in this context. And as Juan fades into delirium near the end of the novel, reality is further erased until the arrival of the ultimate “blackout”, if I may.

There is not so much a plot though as a rich and complex characterization of these two men and the bond that was created between them over only eighteen days they shared being forced into a mental institution prior to the younger’s suicide attempt and subsequent departure, that then survived a decade of no contact, and which is now revived and developed after the unnamed narrator has tracked down the dying Juan in his small, dark room.

Juan was dying, but only in the light, and only in the body. In the dark, his voice filled the room, sharper and more alive than I.

Through the skillful dialogue that is most of the book, Torres shows these two men sharing their lives with each other and in their relationship demonstrating the love of neighbor that should be striven for even as we often come up short.

4.5 show less

Poetically written novel in the form of an intimate discussion between two men – one older and one younger, who originally met in a mental hospital ten years earlier. Juan, the older man, is nearing the end of life. The younger man is not named but Juan calls him “Nene.” They tell each other stories, focused on family relationships, past experiences, and mental health “treatments.” It specifically refers to an outdated (real) psychiatric book called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns.

The term “Blackouts” of the title refers to both blackouts experienced by the characters (which they analyze during their storytelling sessions) and blacked out (redacted) pages of the Variants book, where the remaining words create show more poetry. It has an atmosphere of intimacy. It contains a number of literary references, and a commentary on misunderstandings of homosexuality (previously classified as a mental condition). I am not quite sure how well it works as a novel. I prefer a little more of a storyline, but it’s definitely creative and I appreciate it as a work of art. show less