I ask the question in the title to this post because one of the things which stuck out to me while reading The People of the Paper is how it was, for me, a novel which brought together several of the experimental fiction forms we have explored in the other novels up to this point.
Certainly it’s exploration into magical realism, and gender relations are two ways the novel is a creative work of its own, but two ways, in particular where I felt the other novels we’ve read at work in this one are narration (changes/multiplicity in narration, voice, style) and variation of the textual layout of the novel (House of Leaves was a 10, People of Paper is probably a 6 but its examples are there.
Admittedly, I was sort of on the lookout for recurring elements of the fiction we have already read in this novel. I just had an idea since I believe Prof. Sample has said previously that the calender and chronological organization of this course is no accident.It quickly became clear to me there were these examples in People of Paper and I tried to hone in on these two.
The narration, I think, mirrors some of what we saw in Calvino’s novel and House of Leaves in the frequent switches between narrative voice and style (1st person and 3rd person, none of Calvino’s preeminent 2nd person) and the sheer number of different voices and perspectives that are presented: Little Merced, Saturn, Rita, etc. As the novel progresses and we start to see the relationship between Sal (Salvador Plascencia) and Saturn, we observe an interplay between the fictionalized characters and the narrator or author himself. This reminded of the comparisons we frequently made between Johnny, Zampano and the characters in the Navidson record.
As far as the variation of textual layout in the novel, we see it pretty frequently. Like in House of Leaves, the purpose of the layout and designs featured on different pages isn’t always instantly clear and I get a sense I missed some connection between these images and the text. Nonetheless, these visual codes are presented and seem to necessitate some sort of interpretation.
Some are easier to interpret such as the illustrations of the playing cards on pages 21 and 22 and the crossed out EMF tag on 112. Others, however, seemed to require more thought (when I saw the first black box in the novel my first thought was “Nooo, it’s back!”). We are sometimes confronted with the same “barriers” in the text such as on page 189. This reminded me of some of Danielewski’s devices such as turning the text backwards and crossing text out, here, a paragraph of text is covered by a black box.
I’m going to take a wild guess that Plascencia was familiar with Danielewski’s cult-classic novel.
I like your description of the black boxes as “barriers”—they are definitely that. Yet (in the case of People of Paper) they nonetheless communicate exactly what they’re supposed to. Not being able to discern what the boxes are blocking is part of the novel, part of the story. In this way, not reading is actually a form of reading. An interesting idea to think about…