Disposable, renewable, impermanent. <\/p>\n
In his initial dedication, Salvador Plascencia writes \u201cto Liz, who taught me that we are all of paper.\u201d He later cuts out this dedication, emphasizing his point.<\/p>\n
We jump into the story with a little boy buying back his three pounds of feline and reconstructing his slaughtered cat Figgaro. The prologue sets us up for themes of destruction, loss, and subsequent rebirth or renewal. It also places us in a magical realism situation, where we must accept that people can be made of paper.<\/p>\n
Plascencia takes us into a world of impermanency, one where people are constantly shedding skins or changing. In the most physical sense, there\u2019s Merced de Papel, who \u201cnever allowed history to accumulate, her skin changing with the news of the world.\u201d (164) Other characters are changing themselves physically (burning, cutting, patching, covering up in lead); fleeing their own lives and leaving dust; or altering their identities in some other way. People become non-people, or at least not themselves. Rita Hayworth, for example: \u201cMargarita Carmen Cansino shed syllables from her name and velvet curtains from her stage, rising, leaving a tail of draperies and scraps of paper cut from her birth certificate, to emerge as a star\u201d (56) Hollywood\u2019s presence, in the form of carried winds and background music, is a constant reminder of temporality. <\/p>\n
Salvador Plascencia becomes a non-person too. He forgets about his characters (poor Smiley\u2026) and then shuts them out to the point where they are able to censor their thoughts from him and the readers. <\/p>\n
But I think The People of Paper<\/em> also ironically confirms the existence of some kind of permanency. His one paper character is the last of a dying breed. And this novel is Plascencia\u2019s way of physically documenting history. Incriminating himself for casting Liz in a bad light, he leaves everything he\u2019s already told us where it is and writes on without her, or rather, with just her presence hanging over him much like Saturn hovers over de la Fe. He hasn\u2019t actually deleted anything or pushed her out of his mind (or ours). She just becomes the girl who can\u2019t be named. Paper allows his version of history to live on and be consumed by voyeurs like us who, like he says, don\u2019t even know these people. <\/p>\n He also makes us aware of the book and its physicality, its history and process, even its price. He goes so far as to imply some readers would lick it to simulate licking Merced de Papel. I found Plascencia\u2019s author\/book\/reader relationship more thought-provocative than, say, Joanna Russ\u2019s abrasive\/defensive approach in The Female Man<\/em>, even when Plascencia denies us access to the text by blocking it out or relating to us the inner thoughts of the mechanical tortoise in binary code.<\/p>\n In fact, I like the complementary nature of form and function (combined with imaginative, often heartbreaking writing) so much that is my favorite book we\u2019ve read so far. Plascencia manages to insert himself as a character halfway through without making me want to throw the book into a door. And just when I start getting annoyed with his despondency, he goes ahead and starts over right in the middle. He is repairing his history with paper, like Merced de Papel repairs her skin, like Antonio repairs his butchered cat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Disposable, renewable, impermanent. In his initial dedication, Salvador Plascencia writes \u201cto Liz, who taught me that we are all of paper.\u201d He later cuts out this dedication, emphasizing his point. We jump into the story with a little boy buying back his three pounds of feline and reconstructing his slaughtered cat Figgaro. The prologue sets … Continue reading Paper<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[52,97,83,14,87,88,96,51],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-14-people-of-paper","tag-joanna-russ","tag-lead","tag-magical-realism","tag-music","tag-people-of-paper","tag-salvador-plascencia","tag-saturn","tag-the-female-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":727,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions\/727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}