Opaque Poetics in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper

Abstract

This article reads Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant's concept of 'opacity', an ethical and aesthetic stance that finds value in impeding comprehension. This novel's opacity arises from various complicating mechanisms -translational, intersubjective, formal, and intertextual -which both invite and inhibit interpretation, and in so doing open up a space in which readers can think with the text. Bringing The People of Paper andGlissant's thought together shows how Plascencia's text thickens and complicates readerly engagement, and so enriches the ethical and aesthetic purchase of the novel. Conversely, Plascencia's innovative use of the page and his invocation of an intertextual history of such innovation expands the scope of Glissant's theory, by using the physical medium of the book and the workings of genre history as components of an opaque poetics.