ABSTRACT

This article reads Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity”, an ethical and esthetic stance that values impeding comprehension. This novel’s opacity arises from various limiting mechanisms – linguistic, translational, and formal – 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 and Glissant’s thought together shows how Plascencia’s text thickens and complicates readerly engagement, and so increases the esthetic purchase of the novel. The People of Paper both invites and deflects the idea that esthetic experience might offer a route to understanding the social or that it provides the foundation of a more ethical relation with others. In parallel, 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 incorporating the physical medium of the book and the workings of genre history as components of an opaque poetics.

摘要

本文阅读 Salvador Plascencia 的The People of Paper (2005)，与 Édouard Glissant 的“不透明”概念对话，这是一种重视阻碍理解的道德和美学立场。这部小说的不透明性源于各种限制机制——语言、翻译和形式——它们既邀请又抑制解释，从而打开了读者可以与文本一起思考的空间。将《纸人》和 Glissant 的思想结合在一起，展示了普拉森西亚的文本如何使读者参与变得厚实和复杂化，从而增加了小说的审美购买力。纸人审美体验可能为理解社会提供一条途径，或者它为与他人建立更道德的关系奠定了基础。与此同时，普拉森西亚对书页的创新使用以及他对这种创新的互文史的援引扩大了格利桑特理论的范围，将本书的物理媒介和体裁史的作品作为不透明诗学的组成部分。