Dear Friend,
What an experience it is to sit again with a favorite writer. I can’t count the number of times I’ve recommended Justin Torres’ We the Animals (nor the number of times I’ve refrained from recommending it when I worried the person asking might not appreciate it.) So, to meet again, to be in conversation again, is a treat.
There’s been so much to enjoy and engage with in these first one hundred pages, that it’s hard to know where to start. I think I’ll focus on a few items that stand out to me most: allusions, gay tropes, and history.
Something I was most tickled by, as I always am when I’m reading, is that Blackouts is littered with literary allusions, so much so that it often feels like I’m reading a piece of meta-fiction. In the first twenty or so pages, I noted a number of instances with allusions, wordplay, and references. What I find most interesting about this, though, is that much of these are in support of character building rather than reinforcing the author’s “chops,” so to speak.
In literary fiction, I’ve noticed writers may sometimes introduce these techniques to prove themselves, through their narrators. It also goes a long way toward carrying on the literary conversation, the one that transcends time and space, and even language. For Torres, though, much of his treatment of rhetorical technique is specifically attached to one of the main characters, Juan Gay (pun intended?). It’s not clear, yet, why this might be, except that it figures into his being a worldly sort, and like many gay men depicted in literature, an artistic, educated one.
Which brings me to tropes. I’ve had such fun reading Blackouts because it brings me back to my doctoral studies and my research into the “gay tradition.” There’s such a rich history of gay writers speaking to their audiences, and to other gay writers, through various methods, including codes and tropes, symbols and character traits. In Blackouts, we see this in some of the common gay social stereotypes, like the narrator’s distaste for aging/the elder body, as well as the “sense of knowing,” commonly referred to a “gaydar.” Tropes are also present in Juan’s characterization as learned and metropolitan, and in the relationship between the elder Juan and the younger narrator, which reflects an ancient tradition in gay relationships between mentor/mentee. It exists, too, I think, in the literal and metaphorical “blackouts” that structure the book. The literal blackouts exist in a two-tome edition of texts on male and female sexuality, similar to studies done by Hirschfeld and Kinsey. What I originally read or imagined to be blackout-as-censorship is perhaps turning out, instead, to be a kind of poetry or artistic expression. And the metaphorical blackouts that occur in our narrator’s memory hint at problems with trauma and perhaps self-acceptance. All of this, of course, reflects gay identity and experience.
A final feature I’ll touch on in this post is the inclusion of history, which is so important to gay fiction–a genre that still (like the people it represents) struggles to assert its genuine presence throughout time. The main characters discuss the nineteenth century sexologists in Germany, the twentieth century sex studies in the United States, and the experience of men and women in the 1930s who were “freer and more fluid when it came to sex acts, roles, identities . . . a time when much had yet to be defined” (99). They also touch on how the Nazis crushed some of the most important scientific and social progress in Europe to that point, and how eugenics became such a threat in both Europe and the United States, under guise of freedom and progress.
A novel like this one is highly informative as much as it is entertaining, and for readers with little experience of the history of sex, of psychology or sociology, and of homosexuality, there’s such a richness of information. It’s enough, one hopes, to change perspectives, to open minds, and to reveal to the modern reader a long, complex history of humanity, gender, and sexuality.
Meditation
“The magic of God is three. We were the magic of God.” -Justin Torres
May love be the fact of your history and of your future,
~Adam
Contemplative Reading Project 
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