Chapter summaries Blackouts Justin Torres

Chapter 7: Blinkered Endnotes – A Collage of Memory, Erasure, and Queer Survival

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Chapter 7, “Blinkered Endnotes,” is a non‑linear collection of personal annotations on photographs, medical texts, and literary fragments inherited from Juan. The narrator opens by recalling Juan’s wish to carve “BIDDEN OR FORBIDDEN, YESTERDAY IS HERE” above his door, likening the approach of the past to an optometrist’s finger moving toward one’s temple. The endnotes move through images from the Sex Variants study, Jeanette H. Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature, and Erving Goffman’s Stigma, exploring the idea that stigmatized people live in a literarily defined world. Photographs of queer icons (Francisco Moncion, Edna Thomas) and everyday figures (naked hustlers, nurses) are woven with references to Puerto Rican colonial violence, including the 1937 Ponce massacre and the misdiagnosis of ataques de nervios as “Puerto Rican Syndrome.” The narrator reflects on their own transient youth, the act of looking, and the constant presence of loss. The chapter closes with a Puerto Rican riddle: the dead eat nothing.

Key Events

  • The narrator recounts Juan’s modification of Jung’s Latin motto: “BIDDEN OR FORBIDDEN, YESTERDAY IS HERE.”
  • The reader learns the source of the first epigraph: Jeannette Foster’s preface to Sex Variant Women in Literature, which the narrator erases.
  • A letter from Jan Gay to the committee renouncing George Henry’s manuscript is cited, showing her objection to the Sex Variants study’s bias.
  • Two quotes from Pedro Páramo and Susan Sontag’s commentary are used to mirror the narrator’s multivoiced sojourn in the past.
  • Photographs of Edna Thomas (as Lady Macbeth in Voodoo Macbeth) and Francisco Moncion anchor queer visibility in the archive.
  • The narrator discusses the creation of “Normman and Norma” sculptures, based entirely on white body measurements.
  • A Puerto Rican riddle is finally located in a 1916 folklore journal; the answer is nada (nothing).
  • The chapter ends with the image of a toy seller in San Juan, linking colonialism to everyday life.

Character Development

  • The Narrator: Continues to evolve as both inheritor and interpreter. Their voice shifts from self‑doubt about seeing the past to active research: tracking down references, contacting the author of a Harper’s Bazaar article about Jan Gay, and sleuthing for the Puerto Rican riddle. This chapter shows the narrator moving from passive receipt to engaged practitioner of Juan’s method.
  • Juan (in memory): Appears through remembered dialogue, especially the chanting of Ezra Pound’s “What thou lovest well remains” and the teasing “Pull down thy vanity.” His push for the narrator to understand Goffman’s “literarily defined world” and the value of getting lost in what has been said about one’s kind becomes the chapter’s intellectual backbone.
  • Jan Gay: Emerges as a central figure whose work on nudity and sharp critique of Henry’s manuscript illustrate the tension between scientific objectivity and personal ethics.
  • Edna Thomas / Pearl M.: Her placement at the start of the Sex Variants “Women” volume is highlighted as a deliberate act by Jan Gay, foregrounding a proud queer woman of color.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

  • Blinkered vision – The narrator uses the metaphor of horses wearing blinkers to describe the difficulty of seeing the past. The chapter itself is a conscious attempt to remove those blinkers, even if only partially.
  • Yesterday is here – Juan’s motto transforms the past from a distant time into a living presence that can be bidden or forbidden. This recurs in every scrap of archive the narrator handles.
  • Literarily defined world – Borrowed from Goffman, this concept holds that stigmatized individuals are constantly presented with (and shape) a written or filmed version of their own condition. The narrator collects these versions.
  • The dead eat nothing – The riddle from Puerto Rican folklore becomes a metaphor for erasure and the hunger for recognition. The answer “nothing” links to the empty spaces in the historical record that the narrator tries to fill.
  • Colonial diagnosis – The invention of “Puerto Rican Syndrome” and the omission of the Borinqueneers’ court‑martial show how medical and military institutions pathologize resistance.

Why This Chapter Matters

“Blinkered Endnotes” functions as the book’s formal manifesto. It explains the narrator’s method – personal, glancing, not scholarly – and justifies the collage of images, quotations, and memories that make up Blackouts. By conjoining queer history with Puerto Rican colonial history, the chapter widens the story from a single archive to a larger system of erasure. It also gives the reader the tools to read the rest of the book: the narrator is not a dispassionate archivist but a person haunted and enriched by the voices of the dead. The riddle’s answer – nothing – underscores the zero at the core of many of these lives, yet the endnotes themselves are an act of feeding that nothing with attention and love.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the narrator use the optometrist metaphor to frame the chapter’s approach to memory?
The narrator describes the past as something that surfaces in peripheral vision, like an optometrist’s finger moving from the side toward the eye. This suggests that memory cannot be faced directly; it must be glimpsed from the corner of one’s attention. The “blinkers” worn by racehorses represent the narrator’s earlier reluctance to look at painful history, a constraint that the endnotes try to overcome.

2. What does the Puerto Rican riddle “¿Qué es lo que el muerte come?” reveal about the theme of erasure?
The riddle’s answer, “Nothing,” points to the idea that the dead consume only absence. In the context of the chapter, this nothing is the void left by suppressed histories – the erased testimonies of queer people, the ignored massacres in Ponce, the sanitized medical reports that omit colonial violence. The narrator’s act of searching for the riddle among Puerto Rican folklore is itself an attempt to make the dead eat something meaningful.

3. Why does the narrator include the letter from Jan Gay to the committee?
The letter shows that Jan Gay explicitly rejected Dr. Henry’s manuscript because it applied personal moral judgments rather than scientific objectivity. Including it demonstrates that the Sex Variants study was contested from within, and that the narrator is not simply inheriting a passive archive but one already marked by dissent. It also reinforces the theme of “professionalism” as a euphemism for selling out – Gay chose principle over publication.

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