Closed Reading: On Gabriel Blackwell’s “Doom Town”
Gabriel Blackwell | Doom Town | Zerogram Press | May 2022 | 204 Pages
In “The Invention of an Island,” from Gabriel Blackwell’s 2020 collection of short fiction, Babel, a man attempts to make the cramped, cluttered apartment in which he and his wife reside feel more capacious by installing a continual series of mirrors. Furniture is removed, as are family photos and wall art. The mirrors cover not only the walls, but the ceilings and floors, too. The mise-en-scène so intrinsic to domestic fiction—the familiar table-setting which legibilizes our characters’ tastes and desires, their failures and flaws—is evacuated entirely. The mirrors’ effect on our narrator (nameless here, as is the case with the majority of the characters that populate Blackwell’s recent fiction) is nauseating. He can do little more than whittle the hours away asleep on one of the floor-mirrors. After his wife leaves him, added to the agenda is sitting and staring at the smudge his sleeping body has left on the floor-mirror, trying to remember his wife’s name, his son’s name, and the plot to Casares’ half-obscure The Invention of Morel.
“See, if I sit perfectly still and look straight ahead, I can open my eyes without feeling dizzy,” our narrator explains. “What this means, though, is that I’m looking straight into my own eyes, and this has become, by now, disconcerting.” This short text, pitched to the Blackwellian register of aporia and différance, continues to warp around itself, shifting focus and attention and subject at a sentence-by-sentence pacing. The effect is akin to how you may imagine it to be sitting surrounded by mirrors. The central point feels at once so propinquous and yet so removed.
A bilious room such as the one posited by Blackwell is one which intends to surround you with your own self but which also never truly can. It can never reveal anything unknown/-able to you, never be anything more than external gestural representation of the bubbling cloy you feel yourself to be. In a roomful of mirrors you are only ever surrounded by an image of yourself, an image always already slightly deferred in space and time owing to the speed at which light bounces off the reflective surface, a speed ever so slightly less than instantaneous.
“The me I’m seeing is a person that doesn’t exist anymore,” our narrator comments before describing a dream in which his wife and son’s departure is restaged in the house of mirrors. It is little wonder why he opts to instead spend his waking hours gazing at the smudge his body has left on the mirror. As if the sweaty brute functioning of the body were respite from the self.
Our narrator has a remarkably similar voice and temper (and timbre) as the many other nameless narrators in Blackwell's recent fiction. They are verbose and digressive, aggrieved and affronted. They have a wife, also unnamed. They probably have a son, unnamed and conspicuously absent. They are struggling writers and teachers. It is tempting to regard these expressions of the central Blackwellian archetype as autofictive. And, if not autofictive, then at least as something cognizant of the impulse a reader in the early 2020s has for identifying moments of generic autofiction.
“Rather than being intractable . . . it’s just that I want to think things through before getting into them (natural, I’d say, for a person who writes about his life as much as I do), and there’s always a lot of thinking to do.” Such self-reflexive moments allow space for play between the producing-self and the discursive self—between the writer writing and the writing being read. Out of this playful space, autofiction qua genre emerges. Though I imagine Blackwell’s narrators would themselves take issue with some of the above.
First, the phrase “discursive self” implies legibility and, as Blackwell aims to demonstrate, no matter the extent of analysis to which you subject yourself, you will always remain indecipherable. You can try to render yourself discursive, but it will only ever come across as so much deferred babble, as a “confused sound, an almost-nonsense [indicative of] . . . some human being within earshot who we nevertheless find we cannot understand.”
Second, “play,” a grad school term if there ever was one, implies release, a joyous buoyancy, an epiphenomenal evocation—but Blackwell’s narrators can’t escape the weight of referent. They are rived from the roomy comfort of the meditative, self-reflexive self and jammed back into the real, into the endless confrontation with tragedy and loss, and with failure in all its forms, personal and relational and professional and creative and paternal and spousal. The real is indifferent to whatever narratives you concoct as a guiding morality and is actively hostile to the idiosyncratic hermeneutical methods you devise for the sake of its analysis. This is not “play,” likely not even “work” or “labor.” This is instead toil. To analyze the real, to filter the real through yourself as if you were a fish bladder, is to taint it with your own symbolic composition, leaving you with little more than a reconfiguration of your own self, this same self you’ve been trying to transcend. There are no articulable points. No conclusions. It is all “almost nonsense,” possessing the form of meaning but evacuated entirely of its transmittable content.
In Blackwell’s most recent book, the aggressively digressive Doom Town, the centripetal voice of his domestic short fiction is sustained for the length of a novel. Part satirical campus novel, with as acerbic a generic eye as White Noise or Nice Work; part domestic novel about spousal decay (largely the source of the word “Doom” in the title) in which the narrator and his wife avoid asking the unarticulated question they are always “working up to finally ask each other”; and part guerrilla spec-fic that, like REYoung’s monumentally underread Unbabbling, is ever unclear whether it is taking place in a near-future, a hyperbolic present, or even in a post-Katrina Louisiana past, in which absurd acts of obscurely motivated violence trickle in as the mise-en-scène around which our central couple absentmindedly navigates, more pressingly haunted instead by the aftermath of the domestic tragedy which has galvanized the destruction of their relationship. It is a novel concerned with the modes by which meaning is produced, and whether or not this meaning can ever be shared.
The suspicion of logocentric meaning ever present in Blackwell’s work (the aforementioned Babel, yes, but also the recent and very strange and absurdly compelling Correction) is always a thematic strain which is reflected formally. That is, rather than a narrator saying point-blank, “Ever since I was young, I was always skeptical of meaning,” it is instead the very process of how one literally reads the text which is affected. But Doom Town extrapolates this formal philosophy to its logical conclusion. It is constructed almost solely of winding, linear sentences, themselves consisting of parentheticals nested within parentheticals, delimited by dashes and colons and semicolons, all against the backdrop of pages-long run-on sentences, sentences constantly interrupted with an “I think” or a “that is.” Though these latter idiomatic phrases are intended to clarify, they are yet carefully deployed for the opposite purpose: to obfuscate, to confuse, to pull the reader out of the flow of the narrative, forcing them to backtrack: does this “I think'' refer to the previous dozen half-completed thoughts, or to the next half dozen?
It probably refers to both simultaneously. Like the aspatiality of “The Invention of an Island,” wherein our narrator cannot locate himself despite being very literally surrounded by a tool meant to indicate one’s positioning, Doom Town opts instead for a weak syntax of atemporality. Halfway through any given page, you likely will need to abandon the line of thought being pursued, and instead reverse course, flying backwards through the sentences in search of the original narrative impetus. Such a tactic calls forth the sheer impossibility of adhering life’s events to a narrative chronology that is universally legible.
It is, too, through the novel’s narration that these life-events are made discrete: the only organizational matrix beneath which the events are gathered is that of our narrator’s narrativizing subjectivity. Details merge together, disappear into the past, and a paragraph or sentence or chapter refuses to let you know precisely where in the rough chronology of events it is occurring. We are likewise never sure of our narrator’s own self-positioning: is he speaking on the text’s events from a little bit or deep into the future? Does his narrational voice transcend temporality the same way in which it diegetically resists temporality?
Our narrator, a linguistics professor, has lost faith in communicative tools entirely, insofar as these tools “make things that can be communicated with even the tiniest bit of specificity seem as though they’re being recalled perfectly in every detail.” The tension here is also the same tension intrinsic to the generic signifier autofiction. Our narrator calls into question any ability to accurately recall minute quotidian detail; simultaneously, our doubting narrator is the sole narrational voice under which the text is gathered—a reticulative method in which the method itself is exposed as too human. We are told things and tacitly instructed to dismiss them. It is like the late Beckett short text “As the Story was Told,” in which an imprisoned man is forced to write something even though he does not know what it is he needs to say; he presents his writing to another man—who is likely an extension of the imprisoned man—who reads the paper and then tears it up, forcing the imprisoned to continue writing until he, one day, dies.
Doom Town is the rare text which is actually narratologically deconstructive, insofar as it is a text awkwardly sutured around a central aporia. But then, too, it recognizes one cannot deconstruct without then reconstructing, even though reconstruction is little more than imposition:
There was a sense that, because I couldn’t think of myself as an authority on anything—I knew better than to think that—it was difficult for me to act with authority without also feeling as though I’d harmed myself in some way, as though I was, as a result, making myself more inauthentic and so less myself, a kind of assault on the core of my being . . .
By doubting his own authority as a narratorial voice, experience—that is, the stuff that “actually happens” in the novel—is flattened out even further, even as these events seem to be “recalled perfectly in every detail.” Our narrator is catatonic, insofar as he doubts his efficacy as an actionable protagonist, and is interminably suspicious:
I thought . . . language was, at its core, deceitful in the extreme, because it relied on an understanding of the movement of time that incited its speakers to a specious kind of inductive reasoning; just the act of retroactively recounting some event or action—which is, after all, the most typical use of language—was always really an attempt on the part of the person doing that recounting to give meaning to an otherwise meaningless act they’d already carried out (because the other option was, I guess, to despair that there was no meaning to anything one did, or, as I had, to accept that nothing meant anything anyway and that language simply added this layer of deception to the other layers of which existence was, ultimately, made), and that this was really the only purpose of language, as far as I could tell, to give an illusion of meaning where, manifestly, no such meaning existed.
Part and parcel with his suspicion of language as a communicative tool is his suspicion of language as an authoritative tool. Our narrator does not want to tell his family what to do, for fear of assaulting the “core of [his] being.” Later: “I felt as though in not making those decisions, I was also, in my own way, doing them a service, no matter how frustrating those situations might have been for them in the moment (and I have no doubt they were frustrating).” This service being to take the blame and remain catatonically apathetic “so that my wife or my son could have the opportunity to exercise their own agency, taking on a responsibility they might not otherwise have had.” Similarly, he tries his utmost to avoid telling us what to see or think, often describing a scene of domestic strife before undoing its tension entirely by mentioning that he does not want to give us the “wrong impression,” does not want us to necessarily believe the way in which he has discursively (re)presented it. This catatonia is even instantiated as a riff playing off how one first learns of a protagonist’s “role” in a novel. That is, we are frequently taught in grade school Language Arts classes that it is a protagonist who “drives” the narrative forward: in Doom Town, however, our narrator is either forbidden from literally driving by “my wife,” or is too afraid to drive, or is the cause of some sort of real-world physical harm whenever it is he does drive. It is simpler for him to retreat.
This begs the question: if our narrator sees his catatonia as a mode of divining agency, what sort of gracious service does our narrator thereby think he is imparting unto us through his continual effacement? What agency are we exercising in reading Doom Town? Ultimately, it is an agency of imposition (not exposition), of chronology, of temporality: the agency of narrative reconstruction.
By emphasizing that narrative is only ever collage, a sort of non-totalizable multiplicity always encroached upon by a subjectivity which necessarily totalizes it, Doom Town thus posits that it is only through the recounting of details as best as we think they have happened that we can educe a structure of sorts to which we can then make adhere certain composite events that occurred “out there.” Something happens “out there” and then, in here, we record it, totalizing this into a structure (a Tower of Babel, perhaps). This structure is internal, comprehensible to us alone and thereby comfortable to us alone. It is easier to retreat into the self—to legibilize the real into a gleaming symbolic order—than it is to reckon with the horror (the horror!) of a symbolic hinterland.
The specter of solipsism looms. Retreat within the self too easily turns into a rapturous attention paid only to the frozen resonance of autogenerated ideas echoing throughout the skull. These are ideas engendered by a reading of your situation within the real: and watch as idiosyncrasy sublimates into isolation (this is also why Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good movie, by the way).
To return to the text at hand, crucial to consider in the above light is how our narrator teaches the few remaining linguistics courses which instructorship is still allowed him. He refers to his unique style of lecture as “story-lectures.” That is, instead of standard lectures—the relaying of theory and different interpretations of theory—our narrator simply stands in front of his class and tells a legend or myth or narrative pulled from history (my favorite being when he recites the plot to Frankenstein).
This is not a historiographical gesture, either, wherein he speaks first a little about the society from which this narrative has been pulled, the socioeconomic/-political conditions from which the narrative may have emerged. He simply stands in front of the class, tells a story, and then dismisses them. His intent with these story-lectures is (to him, at least) clear: what you learn is contingent on what it is you manage to glean from these lectures—how closely you listen, how invested you are in various subplots, the specific parts to which you pay a more intense attention —all of this can augment or diminish the efficacy of the lecture.
He is, as such, within the environment of humanities departments which grow more and more addicted to quantifiable grading schemas, not a hit, his position constantly on the line: “there were more important things to worry about, I didn’t say [to my wife]; my always-tenuous employment to consider and the pressure I was under to produce some publishable scholarship because the department’s politicking was working against me.”
Telling someone what you mean means nothing. But the successful transmission of a vibe, a feeling, a mood is something else entirely, as it represents a total retreat from language, from that aforementioned compromise, from an index of symbolic ordering which can only ever at most roughly outline what it is you mean to communicate:
I’d been adamant that my thoughts as such were not moods, could not be moods, but still the end result of her referring so often to my moods was that I became less certain that my thoughts weren’t in fact the result of my moods, which led me to wonder what moods were anyway, and whether they weren’t in some way coterminal with thoughts, or else were maybe collections of individual thoughts constrained by time rather than by subject. A mood, I remember thinking, might not be a train of thought, maybe wasn’t anything quite so linear, but might instead be a cloud or a swarm of perceptions and observations all occurring at roughly the same time.
The transmission of mood is the transmission of playful evocation. It is not subject to the same perforation that a thought with a tangible point is. For a mood, insofar as it is a “cloud or a swarm of perceptions and observations all occurring at roughly the same time,” must necessarily take these same perforations into account. It is a championing of atemporal nonlinearity, in which multivalenced positions and subjectivities are not only considered, but are in fact powerful actants in the production of such a mood. The transmission of a mood—a narrative—is not intellectually suspect. It is, in fact, the only way one can be honest, as it does not feign neutrality. It is communication without hypocrisy.
While one may imagine our narrator’s story-lecture method of delivery as lazy and easy, especially for what is established as ultimately being a lower level course, the amount of time our narrator seems to dedicate to it throughout the novel evinces it as anything but: he is always taking notes on his next story-lecture, losing sleep thinking about his next story-lecture, waking up early to jot down extra details for his next story-lecture, arguing with “my wife” over not being able to drive their child to school as he is too busy thinking up the next story-lecture.
Of course, on the one hand, this is meant as an acrimonious joke at academia’s expense, in that someone spends the entirety of their un-/low paid time stressing over finding a way to rephrase or reinterpret some story of yore. On the other, this opens up a crucial tension: why spend all this time if the interpretation of such a story winds up suffocatingly subjective? If you can’t ever be sure whether or not someone will glean from your sentences what it is you’d hope them to? The reverberative effects of such an approach to communication is fully evinced in our narrator’s interactions with “my wife.”
Whenever he attempts to tell her a story meant to console or comfort her in the wake of the domestic tragedy the two of them are separately working through, she stops him before he can finish. The fictive parallels with the painful real-world event overwhelm and infuriate, and she stops the story before he can reach the conclusion: this being the part so necessary in making it all cohere. After he is stopped they sit in silence, in the same room, maybe, though certainly not together.
Strange for Blackwell’s fiction, too, is that Doom Town is one of his only texts which doesn’t constantly return to real-world authors. Shelley is mentioned by last name, but every other story/legend/myth mentioned is, of course, authorless. And even in the case of Shelley one must consider that Frankenstein is a recapitulation of Prometheus, itself tragicomically ironic in light of our narrator’s inaction. One could imagine our narrator arguing for what authorship looks like in an ideal world. In an ideal world authors are formless centers of inexistent places, mouths without body, puffs of freighted air blowing clods of dirt into your eye. Narrative in this world becomes something which just occurs, which avoids the troublesome stain of the subject engendered in the act of recording. Authorship is impure. Avoid it if possible.
Ultimately, with this impurity of authorship in mind, there can be no autofiction, because there can be no autobiography, because there can be no narrative untainted by the symbolic ordering of the subjectivity which has recorded it. An autobiography is not a record of what has happened, so much as it is an indexing of a hermeneutical method: the method by which the writer percolates the real through to themself: the method by which the producing-self produces the discursive self. Autofiction thereby becomes a self-conscious production of narrative, a simple matter of imposing a coherency onto the self by leveraging the producing-self into a piecemeal rendering of the discursive self. The discursive self becomes a sticky ball of organic gloop rolling through the lint and dirt of the real, recuperating within its structure that which happens to adhere to it. This is narrative: without arc, without rise-and-fall, without fabula or syuzhet, without comedy, but with plenty of tragedy. A non-chronologically successive series of the people you’ve hurt and people who’ve hurt you. The only common factor here is yourself. And insofar as the self is atemporal, it is likewise non-chronological, and thereby non-narrative.
Our narrator’s story-lectures are intended to capitalize on this. In turning the communicative transmission of knowledge into a dialectic of loose ineffable wisdom, our narrator obliquely encourages to his students an immersion back into the self. You will never understand what it is the other is saying. So you may as well pay attention to only that which you find immediately haunting. The rest is expungeable.
This fundamental lack of communicable ideas is only an issue if you make it one. You can always educe some sort of legibility from the congeries of the real. But the tragedy now is this thing you’ve educed is only ever a representation which is itself only ever legible to you. It is singular, idiosyncratic, necessarily divorced from the consented-to symbolic order of meaning in which we are all immersed and through which and with which we communicate. To others it may (if you’re lucky) possess some degree of aesthetic resonance, and now, congrats, you’re an artist.
But it is just as likely, if not more so, that this representation over which you labored so intensely to give breath is yet little more than some misshapen homunculus figure, little more than the uncomfortable physical cataloguing of your each and every most shameful hang-up and obsession, the embodied form to which you have unwittingly yoked your truest essence, an essence removed from and alien to that selfsame surveillatory symbolic index which encourages the sort of behavior with which one can hold easy eye-contact, and maybe too with which one can expect to have a friendly conversation, the type of conversation where decisions are reached and information is parsed and the both of you conversants can walk away from the interaction feeling good about the interaction and the decisions reached in the interaction and more broadly about people’s ability to effectively communicate their needs and desires within interaction and through this efficiency move forward in a state of permanent compromise, a compromise yet made pleasant by virtue of the fact that that word, “compromise,” is a word which guarantees two people, each thrumming with meaning and singularity, can overcome an allegiance to their own specific representative maps of the world and can, instead, at the very least share some of the key cartographical details with one another, translating them into a language which neither prefers in and of itself: but which both prefer to being alone.