Looking at form, The People of Paper has many characteristics of the House of Leaves. The text does not limit itself to a traditional format or even a single column down the page. It breaks into seemingly concurrent narratives, each column clearly denoted with its own heading. The narratives are amended with blackouts and strikethroughs which emphasize the text’s self-awareness as well as the feeling of being in real time, keeping pace with characters’ thoughts and feeling and the revision of these thoughts and feelings. Incidentally, the typographic revisions also inject emotion. Instead of writing “And for Liz who taught me that we are all of paper,” Saturn writes, “For Liz who fucked everything” (Palscencia 122). This statement, identical to the book’s dedication page, contributes to the metanarrative and informs it in a new way. When we reflect on the dedication page, is there a sense that it will be revised or that it was revised and then returned to its original state? Is there a feeling of tenderness or hostility? Again, this calls to mind the House of Leaves’ dedication page, “This is not for you.” How do we read that? Is it a static warning? Is it written with light-heartedness or hostility? Regardless, the fact that we are considering the dedication page at all is quite postmodern.
Salvador Plascencia excels in his use of grammar and tense. Like many other Spanish writers, he does not submit to a singular tense; rather, the narratives interweave the past (e.g. 91), present (e.g. 181), future (e.g. 118), and conditional (e.g. 180) tense, expressing the complex relationship between these spheres. Moreover, Plascencia does not feel clausal shame. His sentences are inundated with modifiers: “In the bathtub, while his toes thawed and Cameroon sat in the next room reading impossible books about capturing birds with peppers and salt, Saturn dialed” (236). By allowing himself the syntactical space, he gains a panoramic lens.
In the tradition of South American writers like Marquez and Borges, he does not fear passive voice. He does not seem to fret over “telling” his story. Consequently, he retains a sense of authorial power in the text-above and beyond the metanarrative. The passive voice evokes a history of story-telling and oral tradition. In doing so, he points to the power of the narrative in everyday life: the stories that we tell ourselves and our responsibility in constructing these stories:
Saturn concentrated on the future, staring at her finger and the way it seemed to hover the longest over the ringed planet, and then looked at her face, wondering what it would be like to touch her Gypsy hair again, to wake in her bed and taste her paper lips and write love letters complete with graphs and charts on her paper skin as she slept, so she would wake and say, ‘You wrote all this for me?’ and Saturn would simply nod. (245)
From a thematic perspective, The People of Paper lands antithetical to the House of Leaves. While Danielewski would have us believe that we have no control over our own narratives, Plascencia emphasizes the pursuit of narrative control rather than end result of that struggle.
I like what you say about the book’s dedication. There is a sense (in the general world) that a dedication is, like diamonds, forever. We don’t generally allow for dedications to be revoked, much less rewritten halfway through a book. That one simple act raises a host of questions about sincerity, permanency, and devotion — all issues that loom large in The People of Paper.