The People of Paper

Plascencia uses metafiction to call attention to the narrative as a constructed object—inserting himself into the novel as a character who is also its author and even staging a war in which his characters seek to overthrow him and establish autonomy over their own lives.

When Federico de la Fe tells Froggy, “We are part of Saturn’s story. Saturn owns it. We are being listened to and watched, our lives sold as entertainment” (53), he presents the relationship between author and character in Marxian terms, as a form of exploitation. Federico and his comrades must live their lives, including all the suffering that comes with them, while Saturn alone reaps the profit.

When Smiley crawls through the hole in the sky and lands in Saturn’s home, he undergoes a radical reappraisal of his own centrality and of the relationship between author and text. He realizes that he is one of Saturn’s creations just as Saturn is self-admittedly an avatar of Salvador Plascencia, a character whom Plascencia intends to represent himself as. In this way, Plascencia overtly inserts himself into the story, using this avatar to instruct Smiley on the nature of fiction and authorship: “Saturn sat down and explained that there are many characters, plots, and devices, and in the jumble of things, sometimes minor characters are forgotten, even by the author” (105). The author, then, is not an all-powerful, all-seeing god but an ordinary human who creates and uses characters for purposes he may not fully understand and who may misuse them or even forget about them. This information has profound and unsettling implications for Smiley’s understanding of his own existence.

The politics and ethics of authorship, then, become critical questions for The People of Paper. Plascencia uses metafiction to raise questions about the author’s responsibility to the characters and the world they create. In the first place, Plascencia demonstrates through his ongoing use of intertextuality that an author may be nothing other than a mouthpiece for their own culture and history. Intertextuality is the complicated interrelationships between a text and other texts/artifacts in the construction of meaning. In The People of Paper, Plascencia repeatedly connects his novel to biblical stories, the works of other authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, folk stories and myths, and icons of popular culture such as Rita Hayworth. He does so to suggest that fiction is never the work of one individual writer, but rather is always a collage created by an author situated in a particular culture at a particular time in history. The author uses bits and pieces of that culture, time, and place to construct the work at hand. This can happen unconsciously with some writers, who attempt to create “realistic” texts. With a metafictional writer such as Plascencia, the collage becomes not only overt and deliberate but also the means with which to interrogate cultural beliefs and practices, such as racism, colonialism, and immigration.

An author’s ethical responsibility also becomes a subject for interrogation through The People of Paper. When Liz argues that Plascencia, posing as Saturn, has sold out his family and friends by telling their stories to make money, she is accusing him of acting unethically. However, since Liz herself is a character in the book, that is, a creation of Plascencia’s, he is using her voice to ask himself important questions about the “commodification of sadness” (53). Likewise, by describing trauma and traumatic self-harm as a technique of self-soothing, he is drawing on other people’s pain for his own purposes while simultaneously questioning the ethics of such usage.

These questions are disturbing and powerful, and Plascencia allows them to nearly overwhelm his novel as they overwhelm Saturn, who loses control of the narration over the course of the book. As Saturn’s story becomes ever more entwined with Plascencia’s life, Saturn as the narrator gets pushed out and shredded. By mid-book, Smiley reveals that Saturn “[is] now blind to the progression of the story” (105) and that “he ha[s] surrendered the story and his power as narrator” (103).

Thus, while Plascencia uses innovative and experimental typography and visual elements in an apparent effort to control the narrative, what he ultimately illustrates is the way narratives in fiction (and reality) can proliferate and undermine themselves, with each character’s telling of the story molding and changing the story itself. An author’s intention to tell one kind of story cannot withstand the violence readers and characters alike can do to that intention. “It was never Saturn’s intention to destroy any of them if only they had not rebelled and just lived their lives without looking up” (46), Plascencia writes. In The People of Paper, Plascencia metafictionally destroys the boundaries dividing the author, characters, and readers.

Immigrants from Mexico arrive in El Monte, California, largely in response to the demand for workers to harvest carnations and roses from huge flower plantations in the area. Plascencia explores cultural identity and the immigrant experience throughout the novel, including details and stories in the text to demonstrate the way that an influx of immigrants maintains their cultural identity while experiencing lives as immigrants in a new culture. He writes,

El monte was one thousand four hundred forty-eight miles north of Las Tortugas […] and while there were no cockfights or wrestling arenas, the curandero’s botanica shops, the menudo stands, and the bell towers of the Catholic churches also pushed north, settling among the flowers and sprinkler systems (34).

Plascencia makes clear that language is an important marker of culture, and the characters of The People of Paper are Spanish speakers. One of the most used Spanish words in the novel is curandero, or folk healer. Curanderos provide much of the health care for the El Monte community, using herbs, prayers, and rituals in healing. Apolonio is such a curandero and plays an important role in the book. Not only does he provide medicinal healing, but he also serves as a kind of spiritual and psychological therapist, providing advice and support to the community. Similarly, foods are a traditional and common culture identifier. In the case of El Monte, Little Merced comments on the menudo stands. Menudo is a popular tripe stew among Mexican immigrants, and Federico de la Fe and Little Merced visit the stands frequently.

The immigrants also bring with them a set of religious beliefs that combine Catholic doctrine with traditional and folk beliefs that challenge the Church’s authority. The immigrant population is largely mestizo, that is, combining indigenous and Spanish heritage, and many of their beliefs originate in indigenous traditions that predate the arrival of Spanish colonists. For this reason, while they are nominally committed to the religion of Rome and the Vatican, throughout The People of Paper, Plascencia indicates the tension between the immigrant beliefs and the bureaucratic Vatican. The people venerate both popular and canonized saints and fully believe in miracles. These beliefs sometimes put them at odds with Rome; Apolonio, for example, loses his shop to Cardinal Mahoney and Vatican soldiers who close it down and charge him with heresy.

The most poignant way that Plascencia illustrates the immigrant experience, however, is through the character of Little Merced. She goes to school with white children who shun her. The poor immigrant children bring their lunches in brown paper bags, while the white children have lunch boxes. Little Merced believes that all that separates her from eating with the white children is the absence of a lunch box. Her father buys her what they believe is a lunch box, but it turns out to be a typewriter case. The children ridicule her, and Little Merced is humiliated and angry with her father. She wants to fit in but is unable to do so. In addition, when she contracts head lice, the teacher treats her without compassion, sending home a mimeographed note with instructions on how to get rid of lice. This also sets her apart from the other children and is an embarrassment for her. Not long after, she leaves school for good to help her father wage war. In the story of Little Merced at school, Plascencia offers the most realistic narrative in the book, one that illustrates in a straightforward way the challenges of dealing with racism, classism, and xenophobia.