55 pages • 1 hour read
Salvador PlascenciaThe People of Paper
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Salvador Plascencia
Salvador Plascencia was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the state of Jalisco. The members of his family were farm workers and sharecroppers, and Plascencia spent many of his early years on his grandparents’ ranch in Las Tortugas. At the ranch, Plascencia heard and absorbed many family stories and myths. He states that his idea for The People of Paper began when he was five years old at Las Tortugas. At that time, he saw a group of nuns walking through mud (“An Interview With Salvador Plascencia.” Nashville Review, 1 April 2010). He uses this image, changing the nuns to monks, in the opening of the novel.
By the time Plascencia was in third grade, the family lived full-time in El Monte, a city about 12 miles from Los Angeles. He uses a fictional version of El Monte as a setting for portions of The People of Paper. After finishing high school, Plascencia earned a bachelor’s degree at Whittier College. He next attended Syracuse University, where he earned an MFA in creative writing under the guidance of short story writer George Saunders. Although he began a PhD program at the University of Southern California, working with another notable short story writer, Aimee Bender, he did not complete the degree. Both Saunders and Bender influenced Plascencia’s development as a writer.
Plascencia wrote The People of Paper in 2005. McSweeney’s publishers brought out the first edition of the novel in the same year. In 2010, HarperCollins reissued the novel, and it quickly attracted critical attention for its experimental narrative techniques and visual appearance.
Plascencia’s awards include the National Foundation for the Arts Award in Fiction in 1996, the Peter Neagoe Prize for Fiction in 2000, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2001. In 2008, Bard College awarded Plascencia the Bard Fiction Prize for The People of Paper.
Plascencia began teaching creative writing at Harvey Mudd College in Los Angeles in 2015. He also taught summer classes at the Institute for American Studies University of Leipzig. In 2023, he was named a Picador Guest Professor at this institution.
In The People of Paper, Plascencia draws on his Mexican heritage and immigrant experience to create a metafictional work that comments on the role of the author, the blurred boundary between fact and fiction, and responses to heartbreak, among other topics. His use of magical realism, multilayered narrative techniques, and experimental typography have earned him a positive reputation for his contributions to Postmodern American literature.
Literary Context: Other Writers’ Influence
The People of Paper demonstrates the influence of many writers. Most notable among them is Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Literary scholars widely consider García Márquez to be the father of magical realism, a style of writing that renders fantastic and impossible situations in realistic detail and, at the same time, describes everyday occurrences as if they were magical.
Another South American writer who influenced Plascencia is Jorge Luis Borges, whose short stories often question the role of the author. Notably, the story “Borges y Yo” (“Borges and I”) examines the relationship between the private individual and the persona of the individual who writes stories. The complicated relationships among Saturn, Plascencia the character, and Plascencia the author demonstrate Borgesian influence.
In addition, Plascencia frames the novel with a creation story very much like that described in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of the foundational pieces of literature in English. Paradise Lost is itself intertextual, a retelling of the story of creation found in the Bible, and it also draws on the many Old English and Middle English texts collectively known as “The Fall of Man.” Paradise Lost includes the Garden of Eden scenes, the war in heaven between God and rebellious angels who do not want to be governed by God, and Adam and Eve’s exit from Eden. The People of Paper loosely parallels this structure.
Plascencia freely acknowledges the influence of other writers on his work. He notes that he reread One Hundred Years of Solitude repeatedly and that “if you comb through The People of Paper, yes, you will find parts plucked from other places” (“An Interview With Salvador Plascencia.” Nashville Review, 1 April 2010). Intertextuality, or “plucking from other parts,” as Plascencia calls it, results in the incorporation of phrases, ideas, allusions, and details from a wide variety of literary and historical texts and is a key strategy at work in this novel.
Philosophical Context: Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida
Plascencia’s metafictional exploration of authorship and his wide use of intertextuality in The People of Paper reflects the writings of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. In his influential 1969 essay “What Is an Author?,” Foucault argues that the idea of an author as an individual is a relatively recent concept, developed largely during the time of the Protestant Reformation so that someone could be held responsible for statements deemed heretical by religious authorities. For Foucault, the culture itself is the source of literary texts; no text is the work of one person alone. Works of fiction grow out of the language, history, and power structures of a culture. It is the culture that is speaking, while the author functions merely as the conduit for that speech. Plascencia himself draws on the language and history of his cultural context to create this novel. He cobbles together bits and pieces of history, philosophy, religion, poetry, and fiction into a kind of literary collage. This is not the same as plagiarism, where someone takes a text from someone else and tries to pass it off as their own work. Rather, the intertextuality of The People of Paper demonstrates how a culture uses, reuses, and transforms language to compose the story of itself.
The novel also reflects the deconstructivist philosophy of Jacques Derrida, another important French poststructuralist. In Of Grammatology and other works, Derrida argues that there is no inherent or stable relationship between words and the concepts they signify. Words have meaning only in relation to other words, and the network of these relationships between words gives rise to what we think of as reality. In a break with the assumptions underlying literary realism, Derrida argues that there is no such thing as an unchanging, objective reality that texts attempt, with varying degrees of success, to describe or capture. Instead, the text creates its own reality in a collaborative exchange between writer and reader. By the end of The People of Paper, Plascencia signals that his characters and their situations, no matter how “real” they seem, are no more than ink on paper. They bleed ink, not blood, and when they walk off the page at the final moment and the language of the story ends, their reality is extinguished.
