The People of Paper

Part 2 of the novel, titled “Cloudy Skies and Lonely Mornings” represents a turning point in the battle over The Ethics of Authorship and Narrative Control. Chapters in Part 2 are shorter than in Part 1 and grow increasingly brief as the book moves on, demonstrating Saturn’s progressive and deteriorating loss of narrative control.

The opening of Part 2 takes place in the approximate middle of the book, as Smiley’s narration makes clear the metafictional nature of the novel. Smiley reports, “I knew the defeat of Saturn would bring our own end, that everything would conclude with its crash […] I thought of my own existence, of my place in this novel” (101). Smiley is clearly aware of himself as a creation and Saturn as the creator. If the EMF defeats Saturn and Saturn walks away from the novel, everything ends. In a turning point in the book, Apolonio reveals Saturn’s true identity to Smiley. He is Salvador Plascencia, the author of the novel.

Smiley’s incursion into Plascencia’s world allows the character to see that Saturn “ha[s] surrendered the story and his power as narrator” (103). In this moment, Plascencia tackles one of the most pressing issues of literary criticism: Who or what controls the meaning of a work of fiction? Some critics argue that meaning resides with the author: The biographical details of an author’s life and the author’s purpose and intent in writing the work determine what the work means. Other critics believe that meaning can only be derived from the text itself. For these critics, understanding a text requires close reading of the words on the page, and only those words. Finally, another group of critics locates textual meaning in the collaboration between the author and the reader. In other words, the reader’s background, moment in time, and cultural orientation interact with the author’s words to reveal meaning for the individual reader. With Saturn’s abdication of narrative control, Plascencia’s novel suggests that authors have virtually no control over whatever meaning can be derived from their stories. At the same, the growing inclusion of what seem to be biographical details from Plascencia’s life suggests that the only story a writer can tell is his own story.

A further metafictional complication arises with the introduction of Liz into the novel. Although Plascencia dedicates the novel to Liz, there is no guarantee that Liz is a real person. Another metafictional writer, Tim O’Brien, for example, dedicates his book The Things They Carried to “the men of Alpha Company and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa”—the fictional characters who occupy the novel (O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Broadway, 1998). By placing fictional characters in a space normally reserved for real people, O’Brien blurs the boundary between the fictional world and the real one. Regardless of whether the character of Liz in The People of Paper is based on a real woman, she is a fictional character within the novel, as subject to the choices of the author as any other character. As an author who maintains the narrative control of the story, Plascencia controls what details about Liz are included or excluded from his story. It is to this power that Liz objects. In telling her story, Saturn can subject her to the same kind of lies he tells about Rita Hayworth. For this reason, Liz begs Saturn to remove her from the story.

The question of authorial ethics and narrative control again emerges in Part 2. While Saturn accuses Liz of selling out her background, culture, and him by having an affair with a white man, Liz accuses him of selling out by using the intimate details of their lives as fodder for his novel. This accusation emphasizes Plascencia’s concern with the ethics of using others’ pain and trauma as the subject for his own creations and, by extension, as a way to make a living. He uses the text to raise questions about the responsibility writers owe to the real people who form the basis of their fictions. While Plascencia clearly explores these questions, none are resolved in this section. Indeed, the narrative becomes even more fraught with ethical questions with the introduction of a new lover, Cameroon.

In bringing in Cameroon, Plascencia creates one more character who uses her addiction to quell the pain of loss and sadness, and in so doing, Plascencia must interrogate his own contribution to Cameroon’s pain as well as his use of this pain in the story. Though Saturn is ostensibly the story’s author, he cannot control her addiction any more than he can control his narration of El Monte.

Plascencia also increases the use of visual elements and experimental typography to underscore his concern with narrative control. In addition to the three-column setup he used earlier, he also offers an illustration of the “chart of the food pyramid” with sadness as the base level (111). He also begins crossing out lines but leaving them readable, crossing out the gang graffiti of the EMF, and setting up a chapter as a dialogue. These interventions will increase in the next section and suggest a general unraveling of Saturn’s narrative control.

Finally, the chapters of Part 2 also trace Saturn’s responses to the loss of love. He moves through predictable stages of grief and pain. He initially experiences remorse and depression, believing that he is responsible for Liz’s abandonment and that his focus on writing the novel has caused his loss of love. In many ways, this remorse parallels Federico de la Fe’s belief that his incontinence led to Merced’s departure. However, as Saturn fully imagines Liz moving in with a tall white man, his remorse and grief turn to anger and rage. In this, he identifies with Napoleon, the short French general who waged war against all of Europe in the 19th century. Although Napoleon had a great deal of power, Saturn imagines him wounded most deeply by love.

For Saturn, it is a short step from blaming Liz for his own downfall to blaming all women for the fall of man. In so doing, Plascencia places Saturn in the lineage of men who blame women for all of humankind’s woes. The lineage is very long: In Genesis 3:12, Adam blames Eve thusly: “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” Early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian, Jerome, and Pope Gregory I, among others, all blamed Eve and, by extension, all women for the pain and sorrow of being human.

When Plascencia concludes Part 2 with Liz’s narration, it marks a shift. Liz tells Saturn, “Sal, if you still love me, please leave me out of this story. Start the book over, without me” (138). The appeal to Saturn’s love seems to move him away from his anger, something that becomes clearer in Part 3.