Just another love story?

At the beginning of the semester one of our classmates said that If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller was just another love story, and Professor Sample said that each of the stories we would read this semester might, indeed, be a love story.  I think anyone would say that People of Paper is definitely a love story, but I think this is true in more ways than one. On the surface, the story is about love lost (more specifically, men losing the women they love), but if you connect all of the love stories together, you get the story of an author’s love of fiction.

The narrator, or “Saturn,” is the implied authorial persona of Salvador Plascencia. We can see his love of fiction in many different aspects of the story. The fact that Plascencia references so many well known stories, characters and  like that of Samson, Rita Hayworth and Nostradamus shows how much he reveres established fiction. He also fictionalizes them within his own story: likening himself to Samson, creating a fictional subplot of Rita Hayworth’s rise to fame and, well, Nostradamus is a baby.

Plascencia also shows his respect for fiction in the attention he shows to the delicacy of the material that stories are printed upon: paper. Antonio’s paper creatures are initially created as a way of filling a hole created by sadness. This could be a metaphor for the people who use fiction as a way of replacing real life with fantasy. And while the paper people of the book are all women, and thus stereotypically “fragile,” Plascencia warns the reader to “be cautious of paper-to be mindful or its fragile construction and sharp edges.” This shows all of the agency that the author gives the paper people, or the characters of a story. The “sharp edges” also create a lot of the bloody imagery that speckles the novel.

Another way that the author shows his love of fiction is the metafiction that runs rampant in the novel. Plascencia creates a very visual structure within the novel that the characters call attention to and even create a diagram for. In this way, Plascencia celebrates the different ways that fiction can be structured.