The People of Paper. Salvador Plascencia. McSweeney's Books isbn 1932416218
I have always wondered why Graciela Limón is so hard on her women characters. The mother who goes in search of her lost son, Bernabé, suffers incredible hardship, one thing after another, in a wonderful novel. Hard-driving, immensely successful but lovelorn, Ana Calderón, finally finds a passionate true love who fulfills her immensely, only to become a Chicana Jocasta, in another superb novel.
These women have done nothing wrong, no monstrous sin nor hubris, certainly nothing to deserve the anger of whatever gods there be. “Why is the author so hard on her characters?” I asked on the wonderful old CHICLE discussion board. Limón wrote back, “My characters tell me how to write them.”
Despite having other writers tell me the same thing--the characters control the story, not the writer—I’ve found that a perplexing perspective. Now comes Salvador Plasencia’s impressive experimental novel, The People of Paper, once and for all to lay the question to rest.
Plasencia peoples his book with characters revolting against a writer’s omnipotence. At first, this isn’t obvious. The book opens with an impressively imaginative story, a tour de force revolving around an origami-based genesis. A renegade group of monks fold paper into various shapes. Form of a cat, breathe life into it, paper becomes cat. A monk folds heart, lungs, liver, places inside the folded body in the shape of a woman. Puff! She becomes a flesh-and-blood woman. Magical. The plot begins to unfold when the Pope, threatened by the competition, expels the monks, who go wandering in search of safe refuge to fold more people of paper and pass along the knowledge of their sacred book.
One monk falls off the line of march, and it is his creations who people the book. Migrating from Mexico to El Monte, California, the characters find community among the flower picking cholos of EMF. Their relatively idyllic existence begins to crumple when an agitator convinces EMF to take up arms against an all-seeing being whom they call Saturn.
Saturn reads El Monte’s every thought, eavesdrops every conversation, looks down on every private act. Saturn has a name: Salvador Plasencia. The patient reader learns this just as the book turns back on itself. In fact, Plasencia re-starts the tome after chapter fourteen, posting anew the dedication page, the title epigrams, and title page.
Obviously, “experimental” is a fit term to describe the work, not “novel”. To read it from start to finish demands patience—to get to some funny stuff here and there—and tolerance. The latter because the writer abandons any effort to create a literary work in pursuit of self-indulgent vengeance against a former lover.
Plasencia was the subject of a lively discussion at La Bloga in response to a Los Angeles Times interview quoting the writer’s pleasure at being published outside what he views as a chicano literary barrio.
His point is well taken. Despite the book’s peopling with Mexican and Chicana Chicano gente, its Mexico and El Monte settings, and its use of conventional Chicano literary property, The People of Paper is not Chicano Literature. Self-indulgent name-calling to settle old romantic scores makes it roman a clef. Literatura Chicana, Chicano, tends to thematic content intent on community-building stuff, formation of an ethos, an exhibition of intercultural writing skills bridging the divide between the Mexican and the Unitedstatesian.
Self-indulgence isn’t foreign to Chicana Chicano work—take Rain of Gold, for example—but a work of such authorial selfishness as The People of Paper might better have been put aside until the author’s writer’s block had dissipated enough to complete the novel promised by the stunning opening pages.
Speaking of self indulgence, did you hear about the vaquero who walked into the bar dressed in cellophane? He had cellophane boots, cellophane trousers, cellophane chaps, cellophane camisa? He was arrested for rustling. ta-dum.
Hasta, raza.
mvs