The People of Paper

In the second section of Part 1, both magical realism and metafiction signify the complex relationship between fiction and reality in this novel. The unusual position of Saturn as narrator, in particular, raises questions about The Ethics of Authorship and Narrative Control. Like a traditional third-person omniscient narrator, Saturn occupies a position outside of and above the world of the characters. Unlike this traditional narrator, though, he has a name and a visible (though nonhuman) body. He is thus vulnerable in a way that the omniscient narrator of a traditional realist novel never is: The people he observes can, in turn, observe him. They can form opinions about him, including critical conclusions about his influence over their lives, and they can even rebel against him. The author’s metafictional presence as a character allows the novel to explore the political and ethical dimensions of what it means to tell someone else’s story.

The notion of “the commodification of sadness” (53), introduced in this section of the book, deepens this exploration of the ethics of authorship, suggesting the author is exploiting the characters for financial gain. Although this phrase is attributed to Federico de le Fe by Froggy, it also applies to Plascencia’s concerns about writing the novel itself. He is coopting the stories of real people and their sadness in authoring his book, with the hopes of selling the novel to a publisher, thereby earning money and fame. As Federico tells Froggy, “We are part of Saturn’s story. Saturn owns it. We are listened to and watched, our lives sold as entertainment” (53).

One of the important characteristics of metafiction is that characters understand themselves to be characters at the mercy of a writer who holds power over their stories. Sandra, for example, echoes the sense of being a character who has no control when she mourns the loss of Froggy as an intimate partner: “But there are forces that don’t let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don’t own” (85). Sandra’s direct reference to writing and the story in which she figures demonstrates Plascencia’s use of metafiction to comment on the role of the author.

When the Virgin of Trinidad appears to Apolonio’s mother, the vision comes with real, physical consequences, as her halo is so bright that it burns Apolonio’s mother to death and later destroys her house. This blending of naturalism with the supernatural is characteristic of magical realism, a technique Plascencia uses to undermine the Catholic Church’s claimed monopoly on the miraculous. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary figure as miracles in the real-world Catholic Church, but the Church claims the sole authority to determine which miraculous apparitions are real, implying that visions it does not sanction are merely products of imagination. Here, the Virgin’s presence is so powerfully (yet accidentally) destructive that her realness is undeniable.

In a second use of Catholic imagery and iconography, the wrestler Santos’s identification as a saint satirizes the canonization process of the real Catholic Church. In effect, Plascencia uses the Catholic Church’s practice of documenting the miracles of the saints as the foundation for his fictional and surreal account of the death of a popular Mexican wrestler, ironically named Santos. This combination of real-world Catholic beliefs with the fictional beliefs of the characters serves to blur fiction and reality through magical realism.

Plascencia uses this section of the book to explore a variety of ways characters respond to loss and sadness. Federico continues his practice of burning himself to cope with the loss of Merced. Plascencia inserts the story of the Burn Collectors as well to suggest that Federico’s addiction is not an uncommon response. On the other hand, Apolonio’s gift of the Oaxacan songbirds to Froggy demonstrates another way of dealing with loss and sadness. Although Froggy mourns the loss of Sandra as his lover, the music of the songbirds distracts him from his pain and eventually partially heals him.

Throughout this section of the novel, Plascencia uses intertextual allusions to examine the literary trope of women as a foundational source of male sadness. Eve and Merced de Papel have already been characterized as women who cause the fall of men; in this section, Sandra and Merced joins their ranks by leaving men who love them. In his descriptions of Merced, Plascencia indirectly alludes to a story that has circulated since the Middle Ages, that of the vagina dentata. In this story, men suffer serious pain and injury by having sex with powerful women who have teeth or knives in their vaginas. Men who have sexual intercourse with these women suffer painful cuts and sometimes castration. Merced’s lovers experience terrible paper cuts because of their intimate connection with her.

Plascencia also uses the device of the collage in this section, particularly in his construction of Rita Hayworth as a character. A collage is literally an artistic creation made from scraps of paper, photographs, fabrics, and other bits and pieces. Postmodern literature often uses the artistic collage as a model for the construction of a text or character. In this case, Plascencia uses bits and pieces of Rita’s actual biography and inserts snippets of fiction so that what emerges is not a portrait of the real Rita, but rather a fictional biography of a character. The Rita in the novel leaves behind her old life as Margarita Carmen Cansino and makes herself over, using “scraps of paper cut from her birth certificate” (56), much as Plascencia has constructed a new, fictional Rita from scraps of the real person’s biography. For example, the real Rita was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, like the fictional one, but she was born not in Jalisco, Mexico, but in Brooklyn, New York. Later, Plascencia pictures Rita as the product of producers, publicists, and plastic surgeons who paste her together as a film star. Thus, Rita emerges in the novel as a collage of real and imagined events, the result of cutting and pasting both paper and flesh.

At the very end of this section, Saturn moves away from El Monte, as he can no longer read the thoughts of the other characters. This metafictional turn of events suggests Plascencia’s concern with the loss of control an author might experience over time spent writing a novel. Despite using narrative devices such as the three-column format and shifting points of view, Plascencia depicts Saturn as losing sight of the characters he has been controlling until this point. On the last page of Part 1, the column headed “Little Merced” is blank. Saturn cannot access her narration. Plascencia heads the third column “Mechanical Tortoise,” suggesting that a magically real being will handle the narration. However, Plascencia writes the narration in binary code, a series of unintelligible zeroes and ones. Several critics and readers have attempted to decode the message in the years since the publication of The People of Paper, but none have been successful in deriving any meaning from the code. It appears that Plascencia used random zeroes and ones in an imitation of binary code rather than using actual code. This authorial decision reveals yet another example of the blurring of fiction and reality.