Heteroglossia of Alienation: On Gabriel Blackwell's "Correction"

Gabriel Blackwell | Correction | Rescue Press | April 20, 2021 | 236 Pages

Gabriel Blackwell’s searing new work, Correction: 101 Readymades, may be the closest anyone’s come to capturing the bleak unsettling strangeness of American consciousness in the age of social media. The book, a rollercoaster ride of recursions, functions like a “Great American Novel” purged of pesky constraints like the delay-of-desire and labored exposition. A series of witty, disquieting fragments in which an anxiety-ridden “I” narrator appears only intermittently remains when these constructs have been removed, leaving the reader to spend most of their time with a host of unnamed protagonists (“the retired colonel,” “the sheriff’s office’s social media manager,” “the mass shooting survivor’s parents”) and remote historical figures like Wittgenstein and Heinrich Schliemann (the latter providing a clever cautionary tale re: the destructive-creation of a “work of art”). And, yes, as this is a work set in the modern era, Donald Trump, cruel and malignant, repeatedly appears to goad the powerless into rages.

As the reader moves through each fragment in turn, a heteroglossia of alienation begins to take shape. Nearly each character populating Correction is othered in a fundamental way. Their stories startle with uncanny familiarity. We can’t help but see ourselves reflected in forlorn souls such as “the man, 41, lonely” (was there ever a more perfect summation of a character whom Cheever or Yates would have spent pages and pages describing?) who becomes enamored of axe-toting bus passengers in “Anachronism” or the “proud mother of two Christian boys” encountering grammar snobs and trolls in her post about her husband’s death in the masterful “Griefing.” To say nothing of the narrator in “What is This Thing?” who confesses, “My health problems are the only way I have to relating to other people anymore.” Reading Correction, I was reminded of the moment in that notorious X-Files episode about killer cockroaches in which Agent Mulder tries to talk down a gun-wielding man by telling him, “I’m just as human as you are, if not more so!” Blackwell is writing about people eerily like us, taking pains to showcase their foibles in the spotlight of impeccably-manicured flash prose.

 The vignettes, the longer ones anyway (longer here being a relative term—no section of the book lasts more than three pages), tend to involve intricate layers of mediation. To get a sense of how the “unnamed protagonist” pieces tend to unfold, picture James Joyce’s immortal short story Araby—that quintessential tale of boy-goes-to-court-unattainable-girl-and-suffers-existential-collapse-for-his-trouble—except that instead of going to the titular market and seeing himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”, etc. etc. the boy simply stalks the girl online and develops off-putting notions about who she is such that he feels compelled to commit a vile act. Now picture the story of the boy’s act told from the perspective of someone who thought they knew him: his mother, say. Or, better, from a journalist who interviews the mother and has their own agenda (and the agenda of their media overlords) to consider. Or, better still, consider the story of the act from the point-of-view of a deranged blogger parsing the reporter’s resulting article and deciding that the boy’s act was, in fact, not real but staged by crisis actors and then sharing this “revelation” on social media. Blackwell’s story would be written from the perspective of a person reading about that “revelation.” Once this individual has read the “revelation” however, they might then be distracted by a stray intervening thought (regarding perhaps: death, paranoia, self-consciousness, all topics Blackwell relishes in exploring). These intervening digressions act as vital hinges in some of the sharpest vignettes in Correction, taking mini-narratives spiraling in new and inventive directions before abruptly cutting off. Indeed, Blackwell’s insistence on brevity at all costs is akin to that of Lydia Davis or Stuart Dybeck. The components of Collection never last longer than they need to. 

Like those venerable masters of the form, Blackwell is slyly playful with language. The profusion of parenthetical asides in the first vignette, “Silence,” make the reader feel as if they are no longer simply the author’s external coconspirator in meaning-making but that they have been ushered into the text to eagerly collude from within. It a pleasingly disorienting sensation. Thankfully, this emphasis on style is usually balanced by heartfelt substance. There’s a winning sense of the confessional in pieces concerning the aforementioned “I” narrator who frequently reassures us that the anecdotes they are sharing are “true” stories. This likable presence (is it a stretch to refer to them as Blackwell’s authorial avatar?) appears more often in the latter half of Correction, their musings on the writing life a welcome respite from our friends the “unnamed narrators” who, while compelling for the reasons described above, have a cumulatively bludgeoning effect (non-epiphanies, as they pile up, can inspire fatigue instead of empathy). Just try not to smile at the nervous narrator in “Photoshop” who balks at the idea of having their picture accompany a story published in an online journal as they, “didn’t much like the idea of so many iterations of myself existing at once.” It is worth noting that the “hinge” at the end of “Photoshop” is the moment in which Correction most aptly revises the tricks of granddaddy Minimalists like Carver, impressing a relationship on the reader with a bold central image, except that here the hand-drawn cathedral becomes its cursor-pruned opposite. 

By the end of Correction, one is left with a sense of a journey explored from above, if not directly in the way old world narratives used to force us from point A to point B in search of powerful Meaning (whether or not such a traditional book can actually be enjoyed on the other side of the Postmodernists’ ironic wormhole is, of course, the purview of a different article). So it goes with a patchwork of voices. Instead of seeing a Hero travel through a vast, unfriendly landscape to perform performative tests of strength and philosophical cunning, we witness a cast of characters like us if not more so experiencing the world from existentially-stunted vantage points. It may seem audacious to craft such a book. Who, after all, would voluntarily seek out a text in which so few people strive, in which so little is spoken, in which life-shattering events, if they happen at all, occur between the lines? It is a testament to Blackwell’s craft that it is very hard to put Corrections down. Blackwell’s (every-)people may fail to engage with one another, but, in watching them, we, at last, see them for who they are. This may be the ultimate correction.