The Playful Opacity of Justin Torres: On Blackouts
Justin Torres loves a riddle, and he knows how to deliver one. His new novel Blackouts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) is a conceptual, formal, genre and even graphic riddle—but the fun is not in ‘solving’ it as much as in relishing its wit. The riddle is multi-layered: the book is centered around a historical manuscript called Sex Variants, which really exists. Torres plays with the lines between fact and fiction, genre (is this a novel or a sequel of We the Animals, Torres’ debut autobiographical novel?), the archive (as the title Blackouts suggests, the erasure and rewriting of queer and Puerto Rican history are central concerns of the text), and form (the text is interspersed with images that are sometimes referenced in the text and others only in an unruly set of ‘endnotes’ at the end of the book). This breadth of thematic and formal experimentation cements Torres’ place as one of the most exciting voices in Puerto Rican, Latinx, and queer contemporary literatures.
In the book’s gorgeous cover, a hyena peeks out of a torn black square. Containment and that which exceeds it is a recurring theme for Torres: his previous book, We the Animals, employed animal metaphors to address finding queer liberation that transcended attempts at institutionalization. Animals themselves have a lesser role in Blackouts (though a hyena does make an appearance), but the theme persists, this time on a much more ambitious scale. Thematically, the plot of Blackouts follows a young queer man who must uncover the mystery of a manuscript that is full of redactions. On the book’s inner cover/end papers and interspersed throughout are images of the manuscript, with the redactions revealing provocative snippets that resignify the medical pathology that used to be on the page, offering poetic glimpses into the lives of those being described. The blackouts are the hyena: the wildness that cannot be contained, or in the words of protagonist Juan Gay: “a counternarrative to whatever might’ve been Dr. Henry’s [George W. Henry, the eugenicist scientist author of Sex Variants] agenda. No particular benefit to reading in order. Flip through any page and there is a sketch of a life, ever unfolding, rising up out of the past, each a single testimony of how that person did or did not get over.” (89)
I have previously written about Torres’ use of opacity, a concept developed by Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant, as a textual strategy in We the Animals. Opacity refuses flat or clear visibility of the ‘othered’ self to their dominant counterpart. In Blackouts, Torres extends this strategy to the book’s genre and form by playing with the possibilities of the archive. I mentioned that the manuscript for Sex Variants did exist, and the book ends with a section called “a sort of postface” that states “Blackouts is a work of fiction” (295) and then proceeds to refer to a title character, Juan Gay, in a first person that blurs the line between the protagonist, the queer young man who could be a stand in for Torres himself, and Torres as author of the book we have just read. The reward of the riddle is not in a solution—Torres goes on to tell us “[n]ot all ambiguities need be resolved” (296) except as intricate layers of the world he builds. There is a ludic opacity in the project’s form but not its political horizon, which sets out to rewrite the intertwined archival erasures of queer and Puerto Rican history.
We never learn the protagonist’s name, only that he is affectionately called “nene” by his sickly lover, Juan Gay. The book starts when nene sets out to find Juan, a man he had bonded with while institutionalized years before, and he joins him in an obscure hospice called the Palace. The Palace seems to be populated by queer people who are sick, which offers strong echoes of Mexican author Mario Bellatín’s Salón de belleza in the presentation of The Palace as a place where beauty and queer kinship are animated by death and decay. Gay had been working on a project with the blacked-out manuscript, and under the looming threat of his death, he bequeaths the task to nene. Through the charming dialogues between them, while lying together in bed in ‘The Palace,’ we learn the story of how Juan gets to the manuscript, of nene’s life as a gay trickster and the memory lapses brought on by his institutionalization, and ultimately about a history of pathologization (of queer people, Puerto Ricans, and beyond) that spans multiple generations and continents. Their bedside conversations are the resignified truth that emerges from the blackouts of the suppressed and erased archive of hegemonic history, but they are also fun and easy to read, like peeking into lovers’ intimate and playful banter that recalls the writing of Argentinian gay author Manuel Puig (one particularly fun section entails Juan and nene narrating stories of their lives cinematically, complete with stage directions).
Blackouts re-writes an archive that has been silenced, a structurally produced and deliberate silence, to borrow the phrasing of Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot. In this, the novel’s conceptual premise joins the work of Saidiya Hartman and other writers of color who propose critical fabulations to imagine and correct the violence of erasure and misrepresentation.(I also thought of recent work by Puerto Rican novelist Marta Aponte Alsina, who also engages in critical fabulation as redress of Puerto Rican colonialism, albeit from a different tradition than those listed above). Torres’ contribution to the idea of imagining worlds otherwise is to insist that the otherwise has been there all along if we know how to listen, in the telling of our rich stories that never make it to the written archive and dominant narratives. It is no coincidence that dialogue is the preferred narratological medium of Blackouts, as it invokes the orality of stories that are not contained by the page, invoking José Esteban Muñoz’s ephemeral queer archive of which gossip can be a central part.
I’ll offer one example: in a section called “The Kinship,” Juan tells nene about the pathologization of queer desire written into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which in fact pathologized homosexuality as a disease until 1973, and then proceeds to disclose that the same book contained the diagnosis for the so-called Puerto Rican Syndrome. This was an actual syndrome diagnosed by army doctors in the 1950s that pathologized the grief and trauma of colonization and war as a form of hysteria, a history chronicled and challenged in Patricia Gherovici’s 2003 book The Puerto Rican Syndrome. The attention to the intertwined history of queer and Puerto Rican pathologies and their shared origins in eugenics is a remarkable feat of this book. How thrilling to read such a lyrical and powerful corrective of this oppressive history from one of the most important voices of contemporary Latinx letters! That such a book has been dominating “best of” lists and has just received the National Book Award in Fiction (Torres is the first Puerto Rican and queer Latinx person to receive the honor) is nothing short of momentous.
The scale of Torres’ story spans multiple generations and countries, charting geographies from Berlin to Santurce to New York, across the 1930s, and 1940s, and up to today. Torres’ fabulation crafts a story where these intersect in ways that feel surprising but perhaps shouldn’t be: Puerto Ricans are a central part of New York history, and thus of New York’s queer histories. His own archive and intertexts are vast in scope: Bellatín and Puig but also Juan Rulfo, Jaime Manrique, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and Black Puerto Rican labor activist and journalist Jesús Colón, to name a few. This is a decidedly male canon, and the novel occurs within a mostly cis gay male universe and literary tradition. Still, the lesbian female erasure from history’s annals is also thematized in the character of Jan Gay, the woman who brings Juan from Santurce to New York, who has researched lesbian lives but has her research coopted by the (male) medical establishment.
In taking up the themes of representation and the past pathologization of gay identity, Torres speaks to today’s growing attacks on queerness and LGBTQIA+ communities. Today’s fury of legislation against drag shows, bodily autonomy, Trans healthcare, and other forms of queer repression are direct descendants of the old and ugly history of pathologization that has criminalized queer desire by associating it with medicalized perversion. Granted its cis gay male focus, the novel offers a timely intervention into the dignity of queer life at a time of alarming peril. Torres does all of this without losing his striking lyricism, in a prose that is loaded with sensory pleasure and a tender heart.
Zorimar Rivera Montes is Assistant Professor of Latinx Literatures and Cultures in the English and Spanish departments at Tulane University. She studies Caribbean Latinx cultural literatures and popular cultures of the late 20th and 21st century. Her research focuses on Puerto Rican cultural texts under the combined forces of neoliberalism and coloniality, studying the impacts of colonial neoliberalism on aesthetic products.