Post-Print Fiction

          I have to admit, the assignments for this week made me feel in touch with a “nerdy” side I usually don’t experience. I definitely enjoyed these MUCH more than the interactive fiction of last week, as I felt more in control.

          I got really hooked into I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies; give me a game where I have to complete levels and I’m in love (nerdy side talking). However, I felt like I got too into the actual movement of the game, trying to get through the mazes, and paid less attention to all the surrounding media/literature. Whenever I hit some word that exploded, I’d stop and read it, and then my eyes would avert to the surrounding clips and images; but I felt like I was more interested in getting through it than reading and interpreting what was written as I went.

           However, my favorite piece out of the selection was Genes the Hobo King. For one, I thought the entire set up, the images, videos, text and the genetic display was incredibly well put together; I could every type of media (video, music, recordings, etc.) that I wanted, and it kept appearing in ways that I didn’t expect, like lines of text automatically running across the bottom of the screen. A quick blurb on the oddest gene I clicked on: it was a voice recording that was supposed to be “hillbilly” chatter, sounding like someone was talking with a mouthful of food, and there would be one clear word every so often. I honestly don’t even know what I made of it; I think it just added to the effect of uncertainty that the site gave to me.

          I found the “gene” 4:n.h to be the most relevant to the previous readings we have done in class. This section was entitled the Hawthorne Aimless Way Gene, and each block you clicked on gave a different rotating picture underneath. At first, I just thought that these images were DNA, correlating with the whole genetics theme; however, when you scroll over them, it gives you an aerial view of the picture, which I then saw was a maze. In most of the readings so far, labyrinths or mazes have been addressed, or I have just felt trapped myself. In the interactive fiction (especially Violet), I was so frustrated by not being able to do what I wanted, and not selecting the right verbs, that I didn’t make any progress; it was a verbal maze that I couldn’t complete. In House of Leaves, the hallway literally becomes a maze of life and death, enclosing and killing members of the excavating crew, and mentally entrapping other characters, like Navidson and Truant, unable to escape the mysteries of the hallway. “Perhaps the way out is within the way out, or perhaps wrong” was a quote for one of the red boxes, which just left me feeling even more like I was in a maze.

When we were first given this assignment, to spend hours of our time playing online computer games, I was a bit giddy. Not to say the assignment, and these games, weren’t one of the more enjoyable assignments I’ve had, there was definitely an element of frustration that came with the fun times to be had playing these games.

Echoing some of my classmates comments, the distractions were abounding in these games and at times they seemed almost impossible to see around. In the past few weeks, in reading HoL and People of Paper the topic of visual barriers in literature was something I focused in on and something that became easy to notice in these games as well. It became clear to me early on that I think Jason Nelson was almost more concerned with stuffing these games with every bit of audio and visual art he felt inclined to than he was about the way the game actually played (jam-packed with artistic devices sounds a bit like MZD, doesn’t it?). The fact that these games served the artist as much as the gamer became even more clear to me when I realized that in all of the games it was impossible to die. If you ran into a noxious object or fell off of a cliff, you simply started at the beginning of that level. This was a substantial divergence from my previous gaming experience which is usually “play for hours, get stuck, get frustrated and give up.” Usually, games are meant to be challenging. We heard in the “Get Lamp” documentary that early Interactive Fiction gamers spent weeks or months trying to solve the challenging puzzles in those games. There weren’t really any puzzles in these games that inhibited the players ability to complete the game. The only puzzle or real challenge was trying to make sense of it.

One of the few “games” we played where I felt relatively comfortable offering an explanation for was the Weather Visualizer. I wrote “games” because for me, it was difficult to label the Weather Visualizer a game, at least in the popular sense of the word. Certainly it is interactive, but it reminded me a lot of “We Feel Fine.,” which I never really saw as a game. I think Weather Visualizer was a database just like it. I think there’s a reason it was the last in our list of “games” to explore this week and was separate from the rest of the group. Unlike the rest of the games, with the arguable exception of Sydney’s Siberia, this game didn’t involve navigating levels, jumping over objects and traversing a course. Rather, it took data and allowed you to make decisions on how to visualize it, offering an opportunity to blend visual artistry with raw data. I think the data element set it apart from the rest of the games we played.

Would anyone pose an argument that Weather Visualizer was a game, much like the rest we played? I’d be interested to hear it.

Similar to Jon’s concerns with Electronic Literature, I was also taken aback by the busyness of the majority of Jason Nelson’s pieces. I had this same frustration as I navigated through the complexities of House of Leaves. Am I supposed to focus more on the novel’s plot or the idea of the novel serving as a spectacle? The level of distractions seems to almost be a consistent theme, one that is to be highlighted. With all of Danielewski’s ramped typography, colors, and footnotes, it was challenging to digest the plot without coddling the distractions first. In Nelson’s case, his mixing of text, images, and sounds leaves no room for the reader’s imagination. If the reader can see and hear everything all at once, the piece invokes more vacancy than engagement. Are those distractions part of the plot? There is almost a depersonalization in employing such “loud” colors, arrows, flashing lights, etc. With so many distractions, the reader cannot identify with what he or she is playing/reading. I have a hard enough time reading Mrs. Dalloway with music in the background let alone playing Evidence of Everything Exploding. I became more concerned with navigating my arrow through the dashed walls than actually reading what was exploding on my screen. See, there is that binary between playing and reading again! How is it that some of Nelson’s pieces are to be played, but others are to be read? On the main page of Everything Exploding, I noticed that at the bottom, in parentheses reads “an art game creature / digital poem.” Is electronic literature only to be presented in a slashed identity? Can it not thrive as separate entities?

With this question in mind, I chose the most “static” of Nelson’s literature, “reading” his electronic poem Sydney’s Siberia. I don’t think I actually finished the poem, as I kept being presented with redundant tiles. I think that was the poem’s biggest limitation. Because it was so set on the electronic aspect of the piece, it lacked in the actual literature of it. As for the content, I thought it was counterintuitive toward the presentation of the poem. The message of the poem seemed to represent irritancy with society’s favor of consumerism/materialism over organics/minimalism. However, the manipulation of text and color (and further, the electronic presentation of the poem) seemed to deflect or dissuade the reader from appropriating that mindset. Also, because there was no distinguishable end to the poem, I felt like it was a hollow experience. I felt dissatisfied quitting instead of finishing. Therein lies the answer to my slashed identity question. When presented as two types of avenues, one has to be minimized to empower the other. Because this genre is entitled electronic literature, the electronic aspect has to be dominant. Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge and its remixes could not just be online poetry to be considered “electronic”, but had to incorporate an automatic descending to be considered electronic. For those who want literature electronically, that is where the Kindle or Nook would be more appropriate.

Interacting with I made this.  You play this.  We are enemies by Jason Nelson really reminded me of House of Leaves and all of layers the novel had.  Everything was connected to something else.  Even the layout of the screen reminded me of Pelafina’s letter asking for forgiveness where the words just piled on top of each other.  The same thing happened in this electronic literature.  It is not just a game where you get to use controls to get from point A to point B.  The background is a web capture of a website, for instance, in level 5 it is The Walt Disney webpage.  The space where you can travel has been drawn over top of the web capture.  Once you jump from one place to the next, he indicates the new spot you have gone to.  There are also characters moving rapidly across the screen.  You have to figure out not to hit them or they’ll send you back to the beginning.  Level 5 is time sensitive and there is a “Death by Dalmatian” where the puppies from 101 Dalmatian crowd onto the screen.

However, although I thought the different layers added to the game, I found them to be a little distracting and at times overwhelming.  When we talk about what is significant to notice, in this electronic literature I was not sure what was important.  Should I only focus on how to get from one place to the next?  For The Walt Disney page, he creates arrows and bright circles that direct you to where you are supposed to go.  Besides poking fun at Disney by saying it is a “super earned lawsuit club,” is that the most important thing we should be focusing on?  Why did he choose to highlight this instead of something else on the page?  I wonder if there was a deliberate choice and what he choose us not to see.

While I was browsing through the electronic literature websites it was hard for me to understand or attempt to make sense of the games when at every angle I was being distracted by videos, moving text, and the games themselves. Though I realize that the websites are considered to be electronic literature, I question whether the creator’s approach to embedding meaning within a game is effective. I came into each website with the idea that there is a significant meaning behind the games, but what ended up happening was that I became so involved in continuing each level and ending the game that I forgot that there was even a storyline in the first place. Looking back at Interactive Fiction, I thought that the games were extremely frustrating and somewhat dull, but at least I had an idea of the characters and of where the plot was heading whereas with such websites as “Game, Game, Game, Again Game”, and “I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies”, I was unsure of their point. Instead, I was overwhelmed with all the graphics and videos that the websites contain.

The closest website that I came to understanding is “This Is How You Will Die”, I tried to understand the poems in “Taroko Gorge and its remixes”, but the phrases passed by so rapidly that I was unable to make sense of the poems. It also did not help that I could not scroll back to the top of each individual poem. To a certain extent, I also encountered the same problem with the website “Weather Visualizer”. Every time I selected the “Prose: Poetics” tab, I found myself becoming so distracted by the sounds and background of the page that I was unable to focus on the narrative.

I feel as though the creators of these websites do not want for their viewers (players) to understand the significance behind their games which could explain why they place more emphasis on the graphics and sounds rather than on the main storyline. In the game “I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies” the fourth direction writes “stop trying to “get it” – the creator, himself, throughout the game also tells you to not try to make sense of the game.

Interestingly, after I finished a certain level in “I Made This. You Play This. We are Enemies” and “Game, Game, Game, Again Game”, I was told to e-mail the creator telling him that I reached that particular level which lead me to believe that the creators want you to e-mail them after you reach a certain level because you were not intended to get up to that point. The intention of the creators is for you to give up before reaching that point, therefore, preventing you from ever reaching the last level and discovering the underlying storyline of the game. I also noticed that with each level the game becomes harder, as I expected; once again the creator does this to prevent their players from reaching the end of the game.

The graphics combined with videos and sounds, more in respect to the games such as “I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies”, “Evidence of Everything Exploding”, and “Game, Game, Game, Again Game”, brings me to an ultimate conclusion – where is the distinction drawn between pure game and electronic literature? Each video game has a storyline and significance behind it, therefore, what sets apart the Tales game franchise from electronic literature? As I mentioned in my Interactive Fiction blog, I am not a gamer which might explain my difficulty in differentiating the two, but from an outside perspective while I was playing “Evidence of Everything Exploding”, I cannot distinguish the differences between electronic literature websites from pure games. Pure meaning a game that was intended to solely be a game and not electronic literature.

The only website that I felt could truly be categorized as electronic literature is “Taroko Gorge and its remixes, while the other four websites fall somewhere between pure game, electronic literature, and indescribable. The games that I mentioned above assert to the statement that was made by Richard Bartle in the documentary “Get Lamp” – “text will always be inferior to graphics.” After having played these games, I have a new found appreciation for Interactive Fiction because it is more direct and consequently easier to understand. Electronic literature is scattered minded and distracting with its graphics, videos and sounds, therefore, making it easier to become lost within the game that is on the surface – neglecting its meaning.

 

After I forced myself to get over the fact that this is a women-bashing story of a little man who just can’t get over the fact that a girl left him, I tried to look for the ways in which this book qualifies as a post-print fiction book.

I think the book incorporates a lot of the elements of the new media into the traditional print form. Starting with the presentation and the physical structure of the text, we see similarities with digital works presentations. There is a lot of use of white space, different fonts, and the format changes from columns to uninterrupted text, definitely separating from “Gutenberg’s archetype of the unmarked text.” (Drucker 95)

Another incorporation of new media is the way in which the story is delivered as a compilation of characters’ points of view of an incident instead of using dialogues and an all-powerful narrator to which traditional narrative has accustomed us. This approach reminds me of the idea of databases explained by Lev Manovich and where the sequence of a beginning to the end is less important to make sense of the story. This gives a reader a much greater power of interaction with the book, for example one could chose to read all the pieces of a character from beginning to end and then another, and so forth. This way the experience could be a different one in each read or to each reader.

The coolest approach is the interaction of the characters with the author, who is himself a character of his own story, diffusing the line between what the author is going through while writing his novel and the story of the novel itself. Suddenly he loses control over the characters of his books—which has been admitted by many an author in the past— but also people from his own life seem to find the way into his novel apparently without his permission. I think this is the most fascinating part of the story, when he appears to be looking down in his backyard and see those characters interacting at their own will instead of him writing about them, and then to his surprise, real people from his real world show up to the village and there is nothing he can do about it. This enhances the element of virtual experiences so in vogue through the digital and interactive narratives of today.

While the story is not as self-aware as that of Italo Calvino or that of Danielewski, Plascencia focuses his attention on the relationship of the writer and his characters and how he is a character also manipulated by the others in the story. The story proclaims itself as a “war on omniscient narration.” (218)

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.

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.

 

As LLauzon pointed out in her post, The People of Paper smacks of magical realism. By the prologue’s conclusion I was already thinking of how much this book reminded me of 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Marquez, who helped popularize the style. It’s been some time since I read Marquez’s work, so the MR elements stand out more  in People than in 100 Years to me, however without actually checking I feel the elements are more prominent in this text. It’s uncanny how disinterestedly people react to a woman made out of paper walking about.

What is important about the magical realism in this text seems to be its relationship to romance, or perhaps more accurately sex. Sexual betrayal seems to be a heavy theme in this book. Federico’s wife left him for her lover, Ramon Barreto was abusing Merced de Papal (paper lady) for his own satisfaction, and Froggy killed Sandra’s father while they (that is Froggy and Sandra) were sleeping in bed. Invariably this leads to a the woman in a given case leaving their lover, and while the man in question tries to deal with their grief through some exploration of the magical.  I’m 100% sure what Plascencia is trying to communicate her but I do feel there is a pattern.

In the examples given we have various destructive relationships. In the first example it is Merced the elder who is the destructive force in her relationship with Federico. Her affair and abandonment of the family leads the distraught Federico to scar himself and flee his sorrow and go to America. The book goes so far as to say this is what is driving the narrative; not Saturn’s machinations but rather Federico’s grief. As far as magical realism is concerned, Federico’s grief is chiefly where this theme exhibits itself. His sorrow is presented as some kind of ailment,  one with peculiar symptoms such as his itchy hand, and is solved through illogical act of self mutilation.

The Second relationship is a mutually destructive one. Both Merced de Papal and Ramon end up hurting one another when the have sex. Usually it is a lopsided relation where one party experiences pleasure at the expense of another; either Paper Merced cuts badly cuts Ramon when the two engage in intercourse, or in an attempt to make sex more palatable for Ramon,  he ends up literally destroying and consuming parts of Merced (which was just weird to read). Here neither actor is intentionally malicious to the other, with the effected party brushing off what ever abuse they suffer. Her magical realism presents itself as the means by which the two damage each other. Were it not for the suspension of disbelief over the fact that a character like Paper Merced is impossible, this episode could not transpire. The apparent implication that there is something “magical” about a mutually destructive relationship is unsettling, and as I said earlier, I’m not at all sure hoe that figures into the narrative.

Finally in Froggy and Sandra’s relationship it is the man who is the sole force of destruction. Again, in this case Froggy was not acting maliciously, in fact he was only acting out of good intent to protect his lover, but in doing so destroyed something that was dear to her (despite all common sense). Though this particular episode is not overtly sexual, it is implied by Plascencia that Sandra ends the relationship because she can longer bear to have sex with Froggy. Romantic feelings have nothing to do with her decision, she simply “…could not sleep in the same room with the man who had killed my father.” In his attempts to deal with his loss, Froggy nearly goes so far as to bring back Sandra’s father from the dead. What prevents him from doing so is not the absurdity of such an endeavor, but the moral realization that this would not absolve him of the act that destroyed his relation with Sandra.

 

From the moment I glanced at the table of contents, I realized that The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia would challenge my need to find meaning in every element of the book.  In the table, each of the three major divisions includes a hand symbol, and each chapter is assigned one to three dots or bars, with no explanation of the code.  Fortunately, the meaning of the dots and bars became clearer as I read and noticed the pattern of alternating voices, but I have not forgotten that feeling of being in unfamiliar territory.

The text throws the reader off-kilter from the first three sentences of the Prologue, which quickly establishes a surreal setting with elements both familiar (papal decrees concerning reproduction) and fantastic (people created out of mud and bones).  The reader keeps looking for familiar elements to put the story into context, but there are certain elements that cannot be reconciled with reality, such as a man making people out of folded paper.  Discussing rules of coherence in Before Reading, Rabinowitz states that “The most general rule here, familiar in part through such critics as Wayne Booth and Mary Louise Pratt, states that we should read a text in such a way that it becomes the best text possible” (45).  In the case of People of Paper, I assumed from the start that the story is told through the lens of magical realism, with some big mysteries explained as the reader progresses, such as Saturn overseeing the action.

This novel is remarkable for its self-awareness, and for the presence of the author as a rather unlovable character.  This Sal is no Bill Gray from Mao II, but his relationship to his characters is much clearer and more clever.  It is hard not to think of House of Leaves when encountering text layout tricks such as black boxes in this book, and also as the novel deconstructs itself for the reader.  With People of Paper, the characters rise up and emerge from the book, the author reveals himself, and the reader is left with text and a new idea of what it can do.

              I personally found People of Paper to be the most interesting read, from the beginning, out of all the books we have read. I particularly like the individual stories all in one, and that the previous one introduces the character in the next. We are getting multiple viewpoints of the same occurrences, which interests me as a reader, delving into the minds of multiple characters.

              I found the reoccurrence of Saturn, to be very interesting. The chapter one, the first section is titled “Saturn,” giving an overview o the characters and the storyline. Is Saturn the narrator? That was my perception, even though the characters were also narrators throughout the story. So who is Saturn?

             My first thought when I read Saturn was the planetary system, so I did some research on the planet. Saturn is the furthest planet that can be seen by the unaided eye, a point that I thought was important, because it puts Earth and Saturn at opposite spectrums, almost as if destined to be enemies because of their polarity. The core of Saturn is also extremely hot, giving the planet a orange-yellowish glow, which reminded me of the use of fire to alleviate pain and suffering among Federico and his gang.

            After doing a little research on the planet, I came to the realization that Saturn was also a mythological God. He was the god of agriculture which relates to the novel because the EMF gang and many of the other workers in Los Angeles worked picking flowers and on plantations. Another interesting fact that I stumbled upon was that Saturn was in a war with his son Jupiter that almost destroyed the universe; Jupiter’s forces were those of the fifty-headed monsters. While the war with Saturn was of those on Earth and in the EMF, I thought of the connection of a war against Saturn, by those of some disfigurement (the EMF from their fire/pain alleviation).

Nod to my classmate Jon Vela for his concise and effective dissection of male/female depictions in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper. I would like to continue his discussion as I believe his blog brings up many good points and is worth some more dialogue.

Having spent the entire novel wondering why the author would use “Saturn” as his name, I went to the trusty and faithful source – ahem– of Wikipedia to learn a little more. The only interesting thing that came up was the association of Saturn with the Greek god: Chronus or Kronos. The father of Zeus, he was eventually overthrown by his son. Kronos himself castrated his own father, Uranus, with a sickle. Also in the good form of a paranoid despot, Kronos devoured his children to prevent them from causing his downfall. Zeus was hidden away from him and consequently saved. The short of it: He was a very powerful god who ultimately loses his power to his son in a long war.

So, my Wiki-revelation didn’t shed any light on the novel, except for seeing the recurrence of some themes like war and power struggles – unless, perhaps, the People of Paper are viewed as children of Saturn, or a kind of offspring of the Creator. Then their war and desire to overthrow him makes some sense. But it is actually Liz which “castrates” Saturn when she chooses a white man, therefore destroying the chance of producing a blood line faithful to Hispanic heritage. Jon mentions this in his blog, and discusses the turning away from roots/family/heritage in favor of fame and fortune (which may be, in Plascencia’s opinion, the only way to achieve those things in America). The important question Jon asks is whether Plascencia has done this himself.

That the woman is the castrator and the weaker sex who succumbed to the temptation of pale fruit, seems to run strongly throughout the novel. Is this simply because Liz turned away from Saturn? It is especially disturbing to see written repeatedly (in italics no less) the worst word that could ever be used in cursing a woman. Why is it that a woman breaks a man’s heart and is violently treated by his despair, and yet women who act out from that same pain are considered “crazy” and “psycho”? Is it because this man’s pain is somehow transformed into “art”? I don’t think Cameroon was convinced, nor Julieta, nor Rita, for that matter.

Granted Plascencia tries to even out the score by providing examples of women at the mercy of men, but the pervasive current is the injury of the little man standing on a stool. Where does this little man complex come from? Is it the thinly veiled representation of a little man-tool? Are we back to “size matters” and a pissing contest which takes over Europe in the wake of failed love…or wars against imaginary foes in the sky…or writes novels?

I have felt the dagger depths of failed love, and have raged at fate for my loss (as I am sure we all have). But maybe it is the “nature” of a woman to get over it. Maybe because as women, we don’t have any other choice. We fold, we flex, and we adapt in the shadow of men. We keep loving what is in front of us to love. That is our gift. I don’t see it as weakness – neither in Little Merced, or Cami, or Julieta. I see it as our greatest strength.

In the final analysis, I am afraid that Plascencia turns women into shiny hard Madonnas, lifted up on a pedestal and given a mysterious and unfortunate power. He bows down and worships, yet then goes on to smash the thing he worships. He thinks he loves, but he just idolizes. His sadness is a wounded narcissism which cannot accept that HE would be rejected. The real sadness is that he doesn’t have the eyes to see what is truly divine, even when it is sleeping beside him.

One of the more theoretical questions that this novel has posed is What is the real relationship between characters and their authors? Naive readers of any fiction will assume characters to be complete constructs of an author’s psyche, unless they are explicitly grounded in reality–for example, the characters Rita, Saturn (Salvador) and even lovesick Napoleon. However, People of Paper makes the relationship between the “fictional” characters and the author’s life explicit and transparent. For example, Federico de la Fe’s wife, Merced, seems to mirror Salvador’s estranged lover, Liz. After learning about Liz, it is impossible for us to ignore the parallels that Salvador creates when he “invents” Merced’s character. Applying this broadly, we can conclude that no fictional characters are drawn straight out of thin air. Even creatures of fantasy–Albus Dumbledore, for example, or Bilbo Baggins–must be rooted in someone or something that their creator/author once knew and felt passionate about. That which we call “fiction” is never really false, just fragmented rearrangements and re-dressings of everything around us.

This discussion is further complicated by Plascencia’s extended metaphor of war between novelists and their characters. Throughout the novel, Plascencia replicates an ongoing battle that his characters are waging against him. At first I thought that this was a symbol for writer’s block–writers often struggle with characters who they are unable to develop, who seem to refuse to cooperate with their ideas for the story. Instead of blaming himself for constructing such disagreeable characters, Plascencia reverses the roles of writing and attempts to convey a passive author and active characters.

However, we have to question whether Plascencia’s portrayal is accurate, or even at all possible. One question I’ve been struggling with as I read People  of Paper is the potential for autonomous characters. Sure, Plascencia has created a world where they exist. But is this world itself a fictional construct? For example, can characters in a novel actually wage a war against their creator, or are the EMF and the people of El Monte only doing so because Plascencia himself has allowed them to, given them permission to, and decided it was important for them to do so? I have trouble imagining a book where the characters have any true agency or control over their fates. Is it even possible for characters to think independent thoughts? Isn’t everything a character says actually thought by the author, constructed by the author, and included in the text because the author chose to write it down? While I grapple with these questions, I think they are precisely the questions Plascencia is asking of his readers to confront. If the answer is that characters don’t ever have agency–what does this tell us about their authors? I think Plascencia’s world of independent characters poses these  important questions that are critical to our discussion of post-print fiction, I think it is ultimately an optical illusion.

I will say now that I still have 50 pages of reading left to do, which I can’t attend to until Wednesday. Maybe some of my questions will be answered in these last few pages, or my classmates can provide their own answers for me!

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.

I found it interesting that while in most novels the Hispanic, Asian, and African American communities are scrutinized, in The People of Paper it is the Caucasian community, more specifically the Caucasian man that is viewed in a negative light. Saturn (Salvador Plascencia), Federico De La Fe, and the lettuce pickers were all left by the women that they loved in favor of a Caucasian man, and as a result the men resented their past lovers for it.  It seems to me that the men are more angered by the fact that they were left for a Caucasian man rather for having been left in the first place. Angered by Liz’s betrayal, Saturn writes to her: “You weren’t supposed to spill out of the dedication page. But then you fucked everything. Made holes in my ceiling, cracks in my ribs, my whole wardrobe to dust. All for a white boy. (117)

Similarly, Federico De La Fe and the lettuce pickers share the same sentiment. The lettuce pickers told Rita Hayworth to “go fuck her Hollywood white boys”(211), and even went as far as to call her a sellout and a whore for leaving her Mexican roots behind in exchange for a life of glamorous in Hollywood. Interestingly, however, Rita Hayworth was the daughter of a Spanish man and an Irish and English woman – Rita was by no means Mexican. On page 138, Liz confronts Plascencia for labeling her as a “sellout” in his book, after she had left him for a Caucasian man all while Plascencia, himself, had “delivered all this (the novel) into their (the readers) hands, and for what? For fourteen dollars and the vanity of your name on the book cover” (138).

This brings me to question whether Plascencia is a sellout much like he claims Rita Hayworth is. Unlike Rita Hayworth, who left Mexico to pursue a career in Hollywood, Plascencia left El Monte and the world of picking flowers for a career in writing. In contrast to the lettuce pickers, Plascencia not only received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, but he also wrote The People of Paper. Based on these accomplishments alone, if Plascencia were to be examined under the same microscope as Rita Hayworth, he would be considered a “sellout.” Perhaps, Plascencia included Rita Hayworth into the novel to allude to his own sellout.

The allusion of Rita Hayworth and Plascencia both being sellouts are one of the examples of the double standards that exist in The People of Paper. Rita is called “the sellout, the faithless one, the Malinche, the whore (137).Yet nothing is mentioned throughout the novel, besides Liz’s confrontation towards Plascencia, of Plascencia’s own success as a writer and departure from El Monte. Why was there the need to call Hayworth a sellout and whore when Plascencia is obliviously no longer living in Mexico or in El Monte picking flowers? Additionally, throughout the novel the women characters are described as promiscuous, deceiving, man-eaters, and so forth which not only alludes to the stereotypical characteristics of the female gender, but it is also another example of the double standards in the novel. Rita, Merced, Merced de Papel, and Maricela are all made out to appear as whores, but once again nothing is mentioned of the various relationships and women that Saturn and Froggy have.

The People of Paper might be considered a “post-modern” novel but it is more traditional, if not out dated, in the way that women are perceived. Rather than creating strong and independent female characters, Plascencia relies on stereotypical female traits to create his female characters. The problem that the male characters have with the Rita, Liz, and Merced is not only grounded on their exchange for a Caucasian man, but also in that the men have had a hard time accepting that the women left them, where traditionally it is the men that leave women. The men are angered by the switch of gender roles, and are also sensitive to having been left for Caucasian men whom are believed to be more educated and successful than flower pickers. Their manhood was hurt and as a result the men, especially Plascencia, fought back by calling the women derogatory terms and including them in People of Paper in a less than a flattering manner.

As a side note, personally being of Hispanic descent, Plascencia’s perception of the Hispanic community is also outdated (though I realize that the book is based on Plascencia’s own experience) because whereas in The People of Paper, Rita Hayworth is criticized for being successful, if she were in fact Mexican, today she would be celebrated much like other famous Latinas like Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Sofia Vergara, Christina Aguilera, and so on – the list is endless.