A Review of Justin Torres’s Blackouts (FSG, 2023)

[ccape]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

Occasionally, you read outside of your established field and want the world to know about a book you’ve read. Such is the case with Justin Torres’s Blackouts, which follows his equally stunning but very different debut We the Animals. Torres’s signature, gorgeous prose grounds us, but Blackouts is a different “beast” entirely, made of up archival documents, pictures, redacted portions of apparent academic studies concerning sexology and queerness, especially as it developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s clear that Torres had to engage in some robust research for this work, which informs and animates his characters and the narrative itself.

Let’s let the publisher do some work for us: “Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?”

I was thinking about Torres’s choices here: to reconsider the place of both women and minorities in the archive of queer studies. Their lives and their histories have been typically marginalized and, in some cases, as this novel shows, co-opted entirely by other scientists and scholars. Torres seems to be interested in reminding us though that erasures create other erasures. If Jan Gay’s name is buried, so too is Juan’s presence as well, which leads us back to the presence of the narrator, who exists as a kind of younger foil to Juan, someone eager to discover the history of a kind of queer, BIPOC ancestor. I do not know if Torres found robust evidence of such figures in the archive, but the confluence of documents collected (whether fictionally generated or not) suggests that BIPOC individuals were typically objects of study. Thus, narrative provides Torres the apparatus to reconsider the centrality and psychic/emotional expansiveness in characters like Juan and the narrator, while also reminding us that the toil of existing on the margins is truly a madhouse that one is never guaranteed to survive.

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