After tackling the complexities of House of Leaves for three weeks, Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper reads like a children’s book. I suppose I’m using “children’s book” as a double entendre. I mean that I do not have to spend a majority of the book coddling harsh typography, footnotes, and other “features,” but I can focus more on the plot. I also want to indicate that the novel features strong tinges of magical realism or when imagination/fantasy is paralleled with reality in a casual manner. Though I have only read up to the middle of Section Two, I have already encountered a multitude of instances where the reality of the narrative is intertwined with fantasy. At first glance, I assumed the title, The People of Paper, would reflect a novel chronicling novelists, poets, and the like, or people obsessed with money (“paper”). However, Little Merced quickly challenged my metaphor-seeking tendencies and introduced that there are certainly people made of paper in the book, “I looked at her newsprint arms and at the green construction paper wrapped around her ankles and asked if I could touch her…I put my hand on her arm…expecting it to crumple and collapse” (25). As Rabinowitz’s “Before Reading” article suggests, readers have to view fiction, “…as a contract designed by an intending author who invites his or her audience to adopt certain paradigms for understanding reality” (23). The readers of Plascencia’s book have to adopt these arrangements of transformative textuality in order to accurately perceive the fantasy.
Similar to Calvino’s postmodernist If on a winter’s night a traveler, the multiplicity and metaphysical shape of the narrative presence have to be appropriated in order to properly navigate through the novel. The magical realism in Plascencia’s novel is not to be taken as a digression, but as a contributing detail to the overall digestion of the plot. This can be especially seen through Little Merced’s experience with the fortune teller, as the blister’s pus attempts to transmit fluidity through Merced’s past, present, and future, “The outer lines of my palm became tributaries feeding into the main river. I lifted my hand toward my face and saw that I was holding the river of Las Tortugas” (61). As the pus travels through Merced’s hand (timeline) it as almost as if Merced’s presence has transcended numerous generations. As Ashley’s post also addresses, the characters can be seen pushing their narratives through the novel as a way to overarch Saturn. I think this could also be seen as a type of texual/magical realism as Saturn’s narratives begin to divide themselves into smaller and smaller columns as Merced has more authority and as Federido de la Fe becomes more prepared for the attack on Saturn.
Interestingly enough, the only other novel I have read with such strong pings of magical realism was entitled Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. This novel was also Mexican-American, like The People of Paper. I have to wonder if the presence of this narrative technique is predominantly a Spanish approach or if it is one that is familiar to authors of other regional locations.