{"id":684,"date":"2009-04-21T16:56:59","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T21:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=684"},"modified":"2009-04-25T15:20:27","modified_gmt":"2009-04-25T20:20:27","slug":"syntax-and-semantics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=684","title":{"rendered":"Syntax and Semantics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking at form, The People of Paper<\/span> has many characteristics of the House of Leaves<\/span>.\u00a0 The text does not limit itself to a traditional format or even a single column down the page.\u00a0 It breaks into seemingly concurrent narratives, each column clearly denoted with its own heading.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Incidentally, the typographic revisions also inject emotion.\u00a0 Instead of writing “And for Liz who taught me that we are all of paper<\/span>,” Saturn writes, “For Liz who fucked everything” (Palscencia 122).\u00a0 This statement, identical to the book’s dedication page, contributes to the metanarrative and informs it in a new way.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Is there a feeling of tenderness or hostility?\u00a0 Again, this calls to mind the House of Leaves’<\/span> dedication page, “This is not for you.”\u00a0 How do we read that?\u00a0 Is it a static warning?\u00a0 Is it written with light-heartedness or hostility?\u00a0 Regardless, the fact that we are considering the dedication page at all is quite postmodern.<\/p>\n

Salvador Plascencia excels in his use of grammar and tense.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Moreover, Plascencia does not feel clausal shame.\u00a0 His sentences are inundated with modifiers:\u00a0 “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).\u00a0 By allowing himself the syntactical space, he gains a panoramic lens.<\/p>\n

In the tradition of South American writers like Marquez and Borges, he does not fear passive voice.\u00a0 He does not seem to fret over “telling” his story.\u00a0 Consequently, he retains a sense of authorial power in the text-above and beyond the metanarrative.\u00a0 The passive voice evokes a history of story-telling and oral tradition.\u00a0 In doing so, he points to the power of the narrative in everyday life:\u00a0 the stories that we tell ourselves and our responsibility in constructing these stories:<\/p>\n

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)<\/p>\n

From a thematic perspective, The People of Paper<\/span> lands antithetical to the House of Leaves<\/span>.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking at form, The People of Paper has many characteristics of the House of Leaves.\u00a0 The text does not limit itself to a traditional format or even a single column down the page.\u00a0 It breaks into seemingly concurrent narratives, each column clearly denoted with its own heading.\u00a0 The narratives are amended with blackouts and strikethroughs … Continue reading Syntax and Semantics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[39,32,87,88,96,34,65],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-14-people-of-paper","tag-danielewski","tag-house-of-leaves","tag-people-of-paper","tag-salvador-plascencia","tag-saturn","tag-space","tag-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684"}],"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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":726,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}