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ARTICLE
ABSTRACT – The contemporary Latin American chronicle features are very similar to
others found in Anglo-Saxon literary journalism. Furthermore: its variety of voices can
be framed into the classification of Eason (1984), originally applied to the American New
Journalism, that raises two poles of epistemological approach to the reality: Ethnographic
Realism and Cultural Phenomenology.
Key words: Latin American contemporary chronicle. Literary journalism. Non-fiction.
UMA APROXIMAÇÃO NARRATOLÓGICA À CRÔNICA CONTEMPORÂNEA
LATINO-AMERICANA DE ACORDO COM PARÂMETROS DO JORNALISMO
LITERÁRIO NORTE-AMERICANO
RESUMO – A crônica latino-americana contemporânea tem características semelhantes
às encontradas no jornalismo literário anglo-saxão. E mais: sua variedade de registros
enquadra-se na classificação de Eason (1984), originalmente pensada para o Novo
Jornalismo americano, que levanta dois polos de abordagem epistemológica da
realidade: o Realismo Etnográfico e a Fenomenologia Cultural.
Palavras-chave: Crônica latino-americana contemporânea. Jornalismo literário. Não
ficção.
MARCELA AGUILAR
Universidad Finis Terrae, Santiago - Región Metropolitana - Chile
ORCID: 0000-0003-0269-2146
DOI: 10.25200/BJR.v15n1.2019.1139
Copyright © 2019
SBPjor / Associação
Brasileira de Pesquisa-
dores em Jornalismo
A NARRATOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO
LATIN AMERICAN
CONTEMPORARY
CHRONICLE UNDER
AMERICAN LITERARY
JOURNALISM PARAMETERS
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1 Introduction
The growing importance of the contemporary Latin
American chronicle has been reflected in four areas (Poblete,
2014): 1) The creation of institutions and organizations designed
to promote the confluent exercise of journalism and literature. 2)
The increase of publications (magazines and books) dedicated to
the chronicle. 3) The circulation of documents in relation to the
chronicle: decalogues, prologues and ‘foundational’ and prescriptive
texts, which delimit the corpus and define the practice of what
journalists themselves consider chronic. 4) The creation of awards
such as the New Ibero-American Journalism Foundation Excellence
Prize; the Crónica Planeta/Seix Barral Award or the Nuevas Plumas,
awarded since 2010 by the University of Guadalajara and the School
of Portable Journalism.
Despite all this development, there are gaps in the academic
study of the contemporary Latin American chronicle: until now
scholars have not reached a common nor have its narratological
specificities been addressed. This research seeks to contribute in that
line. In order to analyze the narrative features in contemporary Latin
American chronicle, this investigation selected a sample composed
of cases that meet four criteria:
UNA APROXIMACIÓN NARRATOLÓGICA A LA CRÓNICA
LATINOAMERICANA CONTEMPORÁNEA SEGÚN PARÁMETROS DEL
PERIODISMO LITERARIO ESTADOUNIDENSE
RESUMEN – La crónica latinoamericana contemporánea tiene características similares a
otras encontradas en el periodismo literario anglosajón. Es más: su variedad de registros
se enmarca en la clasificación de Eason (1984), pensada originalmente para el Nuevo
Periodismo estadounidense, que plantea dos polos de aproximación epistemológica a la
realidad: el Realismo Etnográfico y la Fenomenología Cultural.
Palabras clave: Crónica latinoamericana contemporánea. Periodismo literario. No-
ficción.
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1. Texts of chronological anthologies in books published
from January 1994 to December 2017 and produced by:
a) contemporary writers who self-define or who are defined
by their peers as cronistas, through interviews, essays, prologues or
any text that works epitextually over chronicle;
b) selected for an anthology of international distribution,
which means being recognized as “chroniclers” in Latin America and
Spain. The two compilations that fullfil this requirement are Jaramillo
Agudelo’s (2012) and Carrión’s (2012);
c) with texts published in the media, in spaces intended for
journalistic content, and
d) published in at least one book defined by the author and/
or its publisher, as “chronicle”.
This leads to a list of fourteen authors: Leila Guerriero (2002;
2013; 2016), Martín Caparrós (2006; 2015), Alberto Salcedo Ramos
(2011; 2013), Josefina Licitra (2007; 2011), Juan Pablo Meneses
(2011), Gabriela Wiener (2008), Julio Villanueva Chang (2012),
Cristian Alarcón, Juan Villoro (2004; 2014), Daniel Titinger (2006),
Alberto Fuguet, Cristóbal Peña, Marcela Turati and Rodrigo Fluxá
(2014; 2017).
The selected corpus corresponds to authors of different
nationalities and generations. This heterogeneity, taken as a whole,
makes it possible to observe in better detail how the chronicle has
manifested itself in the period studied.
Once the sample was collected, a narratological analysis of
the texts was carried out (Bal, 1990), to find out if the chronicle has
unique features or if it corresponds to what literary studies by the
Anglo-Saxons call Literary Journalism, a genre that has been developed
in newspapers, magazines and books since the nineteenth century.
2 Why analyze non-fiction stories with categories
from literary studies
To tell a real story it is necessary to find the facts that are
linked to each other and find a beginning and an end, like someone
pulling a thread in a skein, within the chaos of reality. As David
Herman (1997) states, we manage to make sense of events by
assuming causal relationships between some facts and others, thus
generating scripts that are combined into stories.
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This way of understanding the world is related to what has
been called “the linguistic turn”, the idea that we can only apprehend
reality through words, giving it form in the process. Chillón (1999)
takes up these concepts and links them with his reflection on the
logomitic nature of language, which synthesizes knowledge and
image, abstraction and sensoriality:
This is, in my opinion, the decisive fact, derived from that
Nietzschean conception about the rhetorical structure of the
language on which we have been reflecting: that by giving
names, the subjects inevitably give form to the ‘reality’ in wich
we live, observe, evoke or anticipate; that all human diction is,
always and to some extent and in a variable way, also fiction; that
it is not that one of the possible modes of diction is fiction - with
the so-called ‘non-fiction’ and its genres, for example - but that
diction and fiction are constitutively one and the same thing;
and that the challenge for scholars, in any case, is to discern
the degrees and modalities in which the fiction constitutive of
all diction is given in the truly existing communication. (Chillón,
1999, p. 62, italics in the original).
The discussion has been long. Frus (1994) proposed that the
experience of reading stories about characters and events that we
know exist or have occurred “is the same as reading invented stories”
(Frus, 1994, p.36). In her opinion, the reader only distinguishes one
from the other thanks to the conventions of the genre in which they
are framed. Confusion is generated when an author uses conventions
of a referential genre to provoke an effect of reality in his work,
or to provoke a debate on the borders between some genres and
others. According to this perspective, it is the text itself that tells the
reader how it should be read. If that reading agreement is not clear
or is misleading, the reader will be confused or deceived. However,
Lehman (1998) affirmed, opposing Frus’ approach: although from a
purely textual point of view a fiction story and a non-fiction one can
be structured in a very similar way, even with brands that seem to
combine them in the same genre, the nonfiction text will always be
evaluated in a different way, because inevitably it will be compared
with the real facts, as the characters portrayed in it will be evaluated
in comparison with their references in real life. This is what Heyne
(1987) defined as the condition of adequacy of a text, which is judged
by others different from the author. A text may completely fail in its
adequacy even if the author has declared his intention to tell a true
story (what Heyne calls his factual condition).
The fiction text is judged as a complete work, the nonfiction
text can only be judged properly in relation to the reality that inspires
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it. Frus explains that a particular reader, or many of them, or almost
all, has no possibility of contrasting the text against its references. But
that does not extinguish the referential nature of that text, its original
vocation. If a reader discovers that this text fails in its condition of
adequacy, as Heyne would say, that destroys the story as real.
Of course, the factual condition and the adequacy condition
are only the starting point of a nonfiction story. To be a story it must
be structured as one. From that perspective, the narrative analysis
of fiction and non-fiction texts is the same; the same concepts and
analytical tools are applied, because in both cases it is literature,
something that Chillón defines as “a mode of knowledge of aesthetic
nature that seeks to apprehend and express linguistically the quality
of experience” (Chillón, 2014, p.92). That definition fits well with
what Gabriel García Márquez said about the journalistic-literary
chronicle: “Literature constructed with materials from reality” (cited
in Caparrós, 2015, p.52).
The first part of this article focuses in the narrative
mechanisms of Latin American chronicle and shows that they are
similar to those used in Anglo-Saxon literary journalism. Based on
these similarities, the second part states that the contemporary Latin
American chronicle can be studied using classificatory proposals
originally thought for New American Journalism, and that have
already been updated and applied to the production of non-fiction
literature in Europe. Establishing this dialogue can be relevant in
future studies on Literary Journalism.
3 Narrative analysis of the contemporary
Latin American chronicle
Genette (1989) takes Todorov’s classification (1978) about
the problems of the story: time, aspect (point of view) and mode
(distance, which in American criticism is usually approached as
problems of showing/mimesis, or telling/diegesis), and redefines
them as problems of time, mode and voice. Whenever there is a
distortion of one of these aspects, says Genette, it is because it seeks
to cause an effect on the reader.
Studying the temporal order of a story is confronting the
order of events or temporal segments in the narrative discourse with
the order they have in history. Any alteration is an anachrony, which
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can be a prolepsis (“any narrative maneuver that consists in telling
or evoking a later event”) or an analepsis, that is, “all subsequent
evocation of an event prior to the point where we are at the history”
(Genette, 1989, p.95).
The analepsis can be external, that is, to occur completely outside
the time of the main narrative (the present of the narration); internal, if it
occurs completely within the time of the main story, or mixed, when its
starting point is earlier and its end is within the main story.
In the chronicle it is common to use the analepsis, that is, the
leap backward, towards a time that is outside the time of the main
story, to explain how a character or a situation came to be as they are
now. “The external analepsis, by the simple fact of being external, is
at no risk of interfering with the main story, because its mission is to
complement it” (Genette, 1989, p.105).
In the chronicle there is also prolepsis, that is, the leap into the
future. The usual way to use it is in the conditional: months later, I would
remember, for example. This use provokes an authoritative effect of the
narrator, because it shows that he knows how the events are projected
from the present, something that it’s out of the reader’s reach.
Saavedra (2001) distinguishes this resource as one of the ways
in which the nonfiction narrator demonstrates his knowledge and marks
his authority over the reader. Thanks to the fact that the narrative is
situated in a present different from the real present, when investigating
the events the chronicler can organize the story in such a way that
events that already occurred in reality appear, in the plot, as events that
will occur in a future that the protagonists still do not know.
Here are two examples of prolepsis in the work of Salcedo
Ramos. Both are from his chronicle “Memories of the last brave. The
story of Rocky Valdez”, part of the anthology La eterna parranda
(2011). In the first one, prolepsis is combined with iteration:
Wherever you go, people will follow you with their eyes.
Wherever you go you will stumble upon some villager who will
raise his thumb in front of you as a sign of reverence. Wherever
you go you will stumble upon countrymen aware of your path.
The eldests, because they knew you when you were in the
news; the youngest ones, because they have seen you already
become a legend. (Ramos, 2011, p. 26).
In the second example there is a curious mixture of prolepsis
and analepsis in free indirect style, which also seems hyperbole, but
refers to real data from the biography of the boxer “And let’s not
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mention – the pedestrians will insist when they come across you – the
bustle that you caused in Europe among the most renowned actors of
the time. Jean Paul Belmondo would pick you up at the Paris airport,
Omar Shariff would visit you at the hotel in San Remo, Alain Delon
would go shopping with you in Monte Carlo” (Ramos, 2011, p. 24).
In the Latin American chronicle, Leila Guerriero dominates
with mastery the jumps in time. The following examples will show
that prolepsis is one of the brands of her style. The first one is from
“The giant who wanted to be great”, published for the first time in the
Spanish magazine El País Semanal in 2007 (all the texts that follow
were selected in her anthology Frutos Extraños, 2009): “It will be a
strange night. He will talk for hours and, when it is over, the rain will
stop, the street will be a carpet of insects under the milky light of the
lanterns, and the next day there will be an incendiary sun. Endless”
(Guerriero, 2009, p. 33).
It is also in “The trace in the bones”, originally published in El
País Semanal and Gatopardo magazines in 2008: “In a while they will
ring the bell and Patricia will go down the stairs with a small urn. There,
in that urn, will carry the remains of María Teresa Cerviño” (Guerriero,
2009, p. 90). “Tomorrow, in a discreet room in the neighborhood of
Once, over the newspapers with news of yesterday and in the lumpy
light of the afternoon, everything will dry: the bones, the broken
sweater, the shoe like a rigid tongue” (Guerriero, 2009, p. 99).
And in “René Lavand: magician of a single hand”, published
for the first time in Frutos Extraños (2009), before in press:
Afterwards, he will cry twice. Brief, almost dry: the handkerchief
from his pocket to his eyes, an incandescent jellyfish in the
afternoon that barely illuminates. He will cry, first, remembering
his father: the way his father feared a cruel destiny for that son
committed to the impossible: to be a single-handed magician.
He will cry, later, remembering a woman he did not choose. That
he let go. (GUERRIERO, 2009, p.268).
As it is distinguished in the previous quote, Guerriero can
jump to the future and within that prolepsis make an analepsis. And
the opposite too: she constructs prolepsis within the analepsis, that
is, when he is telling a moment in the past she makes a leap into
the future – which is still past for the main story, but which is a
more recent past –, in order to generate an omniscience effect. In
this passage of “Blood ties”, published in Paula in 2005 and, with the
name of “The stolen granddaughter of Buscarita Imperi”, in Gatopardo
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in 2006, the ability with which Guerriero moves through the time is
noticed in two paragraphs:
Thirty-four years later, on June 14, 2005, the Supreme Court
of Justice of Argentina declared unconstitutional the laws
of Final Point and Due Obedience, established in 1986 and
1987, which prevented the repressors of the dictatorship the
country had suffered between 1976 and 1983 were judged for
their crimes. To declare the unconstitutionality of the laws, the
Court would be based on the case of a Chilean citizen named
José Liborio “Pepe” Poblete and his wife, the Argentine citizen
Gertrudis “Trudy” Beatriz Hlaczik, both abducted, tortured and
disappeared in the year 1978 in the El Olimpo concentration
camp in Buenos Aires, parents at the time of an 8-month-old
girl, also kidnapped, named Claudia Victoria Poblete, who would
reappear twenty-two years later under another name as the
daughter of a lieutenant-colonel in battalion 601 of Intelligence
of the Argentine Army and his wife, a housewife of 70 years.
But that September 17, 1971, Buscarita did not know anything
about all that -she had no way of knowing- and put the teapot
to boil.
September, behind her, began to be the cruel month. (Guerriero,
2009, p. 232).
The initial paragraph of Guerriero’s “The man from the
backdrop” is an achrony: it is a monologue of the main character
that is impossible to place at an exact moment in the story. Here it is
evident that certain temporal phenomena are also voice phenomena.
This culminates, as if it were a staging, to make way for the story:
I, of all men, pass my hands through this dark cloth like thick
blood that seeps into my sleep and my vigil and I ask him to
speak to me, tell me what those who made you wanted for you.
I, Miguel Cisterna, Chilean, resident in Paris, passenger inhabitant
of Buenos Aires, alone, hidden, denied, boarded up, crazed,
obsessed, I am the one who knows. I am the one who embroiders.
I am the man from the backdrop. (Guerriero, 2009, p.273).
In the chronicle, the story dominates in real time, through
the dramatic construction scene by scene, with a detailed record of
the dialogue and the meticulous description of the environment and
the characters. This provokes in the reader the sensation of living the
moment related at the rhythm it really happened. As in this passage
from “The pozole man”, by Marcela Turati, compiled in Los malos
(Guerriero, 2016):
It is not yet eight o’clock in the morning, but today, Monday,
January 13, 2014, at the home of Mrs. Rita Lopez, in Guamúchil,
Sinaloa, there is an atmosphere of turmoil. Two of her daughters
are accommodated in the chairs arranged in the covered
backyard. They wait for the call that Chago -as they name
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Santiago- will make from jail. On days like today, when they
are waiting the call, Doña Rita prohibits turning on the radio,
television or any other device that makes noise and could
prevents to hear the phone ringing.
– Is the phone well hung? – asks nerviously Doña Rita (qtd.as
cited in Guerriero, 2016, p.101).
In this passage another resource is noticed, which is mixed
with the scene: the iteration, which allows to account for what
happens again and again in the lives of its characters. Turati moves
frequently between the story in real time and the summary: it is her
way of managing information without losing the dramatic tension.
Here is another fragment of the same text, which combines dialogue
and summary:
– How many people did you dissolved?
With his left eye almost closed by inflammation, scrapes on his
face and a bump on his head, Santiago Meza replied:
– Like three hundred.
The answer was followed by a shower of questions from the
reporters:
– What kind of people did you dissolved?
– The ones they brought to me.
– You killed them?
– They brought them dead.
[...]
– What did you do with the remains?
– I threw them in a pit.
– In what pit?
– Here, in this house.
Meza Lopez then made a gesture with his head to the ground
they were walking on, the military and the reporters: a vacant
lot bordered with cement blocks. The interrogation lasted less
than five minutes and, although brief and concise, Meza López
answered everything they asked him. He said there were no
women or children among his victims and that he received
600 dollars per month for his work. He said first that he had
dissolved 300 people in a single year, although afterwards
he clarified that 300 was the total number of victims he had
discarded during the 10 years he had practiced the trade. He
gave details to the press about his way of working, with a
somplicity that surprised everyone. The main component was
caustic soda. The cooking method, high heat for a whole day.
The capacity per week, three bodies. (qtd. as cited in Guerriero,
2016, pp. 97-98).
As seen in this passage, the change in speed in the story is
not due to stylistic reasons, but to the needs of the story. The dialogue
at the beginning shows the personality of Meza López and places the
reader in the middle of the horror, as if he himself were standing over
the common grave. The summary, with its accumulation of data, is
designed to provoke nausea. The narrator has total control of the
story: she knows how to hit where it hurts the most.
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4 Peculiarities of voice and mode of the narrator
in the current Latin American chronicle
The speaker can be a narrator who does not participate in
the story (heterodiegetic) or one who participates (homodiegetic).
Usually the one who does not participate tells the story using the
third person (he, she, they), while the one who participates usually
narrates through the first person (me, us). These two types of voice,
according to Genette, combine with the mode or point of view of the
narrative. He distinguishes three possible combinations:
•Internal focalization, in which the narrator seems to know
the same as one of his characters (this regardless of whether the
narration is in first or third person). It can be fixed or multiple.
•No focalization, or zero focus, in which the narrator seems
to know more than any of his characters.
•External focalization, in which the narrator only seems
to know what is possible to observe from outside, from a certain
position or place, which prevents him from moving in time and space
as well as having a vision of the inner life of his characters.
When analyzing the texts of the Latin American chronicle
according to its narrative elements, the dominant presence of an
external narrator is distinguished. He is a narrator who speaks in
the first person, but not because he concentrates on telling what is
happening to him, but because he often interjects comments about
what happens in the reality he is observing. Usually the narrator tells
what the character thinks, feels or perceives, through narrativization,
but there are also chronicles that have only external access and that
show the characters through dialogues and observation. In both
cases, however, the aspect of the narrator’s reflection is present.
Among all the chroniclers analyzed, Martín Caparrós stands
out as one of the most recognizable personalities, as a narrator in his
texts and as a media character, outside of them. In his book Lacrónica
(2015), he claims paternity of the current concept of chronicle, at
least in the Argentine press. In his 23 texts included in this corpus
a narrator is clearly distinguished, with characteristics that he has
made explicit in his essays on the subject:
My chronicler is Argentine, looks closely, listens greedy,
is surprised, knows less and more than I know; from time
to time he is happy to be where he is, from time to time he
has a bad time in those places. My chronicler is moderately
educated, very middle class with sensitivity to others, poverty,
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ways of oppression and disgrace. My chronicler, from time to
time, doesn´t care about anything and takes care of himself,
but in general it is an apparatus of looking: one that absorbs.
(Caparrós, 2015, p. 144).
Of course he narrates in the first person, although he
avoids writting “about the first person” (Caparrós, 2015, p.166). He
combines aspects of narration and reflection, and his writing is very
consistent (it maintains the same elements in all the corpus analyzed)
except in the angle and access: in the stories related to characters
and phenomena of current affairs in Argentina, it usually has a simple
angle, while his travel stories usually have a multiple angle, which
allows him to complete the experiences of the trip with information
from other times, for example.
Despite all the stylistic freedom he adopts, his narrator rarely
has inside access to the characters. He even takes care to expose the
limits of his interviewees’ statements, as he reveals in his chronicle
“The yes of the boys”, when the “pimp” Bobby acts as an improvised
translator of the testimony of Jagath, a child prostitute from Sri
Lanka: “Bobby said Jagath was telling him [...) Bobby said, and I’ll
never know if everything was invented” (Caparrós, 2015, p.184).
Caparrós conjectures about the inner life of his characters
in his book Amor y anarquía (2006). In a chapter (republished in
Lacrónica, 2015) he recreates how, according to forensic evidence,
were the last moments before the suicide of the protagonist, an
Argentine girl living in Italy:
Let us suppose that around five o’clock in the morning of
Saturday, July 11, 1998 María Soledad Rosas entered her room
with the certainty that she was living her last minutes. Let us
suppose that she had decided: that she entered thinking that
she had finally understood this was her destiny; that she had
finally found the courage needed to do so. (Caparrós, 2015,
p.345).
Thus, each paragraph begins with a “let us suppose”,
which opens the way to the details: the broken curtain, the
shower cable wrapped around the neck, the knees bent to
drop the weight, so that the reader is carried away by what the
narrator conjectures, until in the last line Caparrós wakes up:
“Although everything may have happened in so many other ways”
(Caparrós, 2015, p.347).
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5 The distance in the narrator of the Latin American chronicle
Booth (1996) distinguishes between dramatized and non-
dramatized narrators. In the case of dramatized narrators, whether in
the first person or in the third person, some are mere observers and
others are narrators-agents who produce effects in the flow of events.
The narrator may or may not comment, and here we distinguish three
types: the ornamental, the rhetorical and those that make up the
dramatic structure.
Crossing the distinction between observing narrators and agent
narrators, there is the distinction between narrators self-conscious of
themselves as writers and narrators who rarely or never discuss their
scriptural tasks, as if there weren´t aware of being writing.
When applying the analysis of Booth to the contemporary Latin
American chronicle corpus, it reveals having predominantly a narrator:
•Dramatized, that is, built as a character in the text, through
his comments.
•Close to the implied author (agrees with him in his views of
reality, is reliable).
•Close to his characters: usually he does not question them;
on the contrary, empathizes with them.
•Close to the reader: the chronicle’s narrator considers
himself as someone who is on the same level as the reader, is like
him. He does not necessarily handle all the information and many
times his stories are about how he discovers events. He usually
says where he got the data from and who told him what, and often
expresses doubts about what he has achieved or even about the rigor
of his record of events. The mediation of the narrator is evident and
causes the effect of receiving a version of the facts: as if the reader
were listening to the oral story of a witness.
A very clear example of this kind of narrator is found in
the work of Salcedo Ramos. Its closeness is manifested in various
narrative constructions. In “Memories of the last brave. The story of
Rocky Valdez”, he uses the second person to rhetorically dialogue
with his protagonist:
Now, as you walk with me through a narrow corridor lined
with street vendors, you distill an air of complacency. You
can tell from a distance that you like to be who you are. You
can tell by leagues that, although you insist that the past is
“an old scabbard”, you love to evoke it. Not in vain you keep
all those garments that prolong the already remote time of
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splendor. When you show them off, you knock Briscoe out
again, you’re the one you’ve always been: the master and
lord of courage. The champion, my friend. The champion
(Ramos, 2011, p.30).
The closeness to his characters and the reader leads him to laugh
at himself, in “The testament of the old Mile”, in the same anthology:
Zuleta asks me, with an air of mockery, if I have any idea about
how they produced the fire. He is convinced that I ignore the
answer and he makes me feel it with a certain irony in his eyes.
Maybe he also thinks that I am a diminished creature, a poor
Christian who would be killed if civilization did not act for him.
When he confirms that, in fact, I do not know what the hell
he is talking about, Zuleta answers his own question. (Ramos,
2011, p.44).
And that closeness allows him to be vulnerable to
misfortune, as is shown in another text of the anthology, “A
country of mutilated”:
At the end of the trip, when I begin to transcribe the testimonies
of the victims, I will be overwhelmed by so many horror stories
that are similar and, nevertheless, different (...). Life loses
meaning when the act of walking unsuspectingly on the land of
the ancestors is like playing the sinister Russian roulette. The
soul falls apart, falls into the death trap long before the foot.
And it leaves us more and more broken and more fucked up.
(Ramos, 2011, p. 390).
6 How the definitions of literary journalism are
applier to the chronicle
After this analysis, it is worth asking if the narrative
characteristics found in the Latin American chronicle are different
from those found in other types of Literary Journalism. For this, it
is necessary to compare the findings of this research with other
studies. The most studied genre is the so-called New Journalism, so
it is useful to look at the conclusions of the researchers who have
focused on it.
The New Journalism captured the academic interest
practically from its emergence. The research has focused on the
similarity of this non-fiction genre with the realistic novel that
Wolfe (1973) had already enunciated in his famous Prologue to the
anthology The New Journalism.
Weber (1980) distinguishes between an existential and
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a rational form in his book Literature of Fact. However, it fails to
fit everything published in Literary Journalism in his matrix. Eason
(1984), in his essay “The New Journalism and the image-world:
two ways of organizing experience”, proposes a new classification,
according to the way in which they approach reality.
The texts characterized as New Journalism, says Eason,
share some important characteristics: “Reporters usually focus on
events that symbolize a deeper ideology or cultural mythology,
emphasize the worldview of the individuals or groups under
study, and show absorption of the aesthetics of the reporting
process by creating texts that are read as novels or stories”
(Eason, 1984, p.52).
Despite these similarities, he says, the texts reveal two
approaches to the reporting experience. One of them, more clearly
reflected in the works of Wolfe, Talese, Capote and Sheehy, can be
characterized as “ethnographic realism”. The other, represented by
Didion, Mailer, Thompson, Herr and Dunne, can be characterized as
“cultural phenomenology”.
Ethnographic realism responds to cultural fragmentation by
giving an account of “what is happening there”, which suggests “this
is real”. Cultural phenomenology describes how it feels to live in a
world where there is no consensus on a frame of reference to explain
“what all that means”. Instead of arguing “this is reality”, the report
focuses on the experiential contradictions that put into question the
consensual versions of reality.
The difference between these two ways of organizing social
reality is revealed in three dimensions, which from my perspective
can be reduced to two, as seen in chart 1:
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Chart 1- Dimensions of organization of social reality
Reporting
dimension
Eason classification
Relation
between
reality and
appearance
Ethnographic Realism Cultural
Phenomenology
It organizes the
experience in terms
of the traditional
duality between
image and reality.
The reporter
penetrates the facade
or public image to
reveal the underlying
reality.
It describes a
world in which
image and reality
are ecologically
intertwined. The
omnipresence of
this world-image
calls into question
the common sense
visions of reality.
Effect of the
observer on
reality
The reporter is based
on the conviction
that observing reality
to narrate it is a
passive act that does
not imply existential
responsibility.
It suspects that the
reporter transforms
reality by entering it
to observe it, which
forces him to take
ethical decisions.
Writing
dimension
Possibilities of
the story
The reporter has
faith in the ability of
traditional models
of interpretation
and expression,
particularly the story,
to reveal the reality.
Although reporters
incorporate a certain
cultural relativism
in their attention to
the various symbolic
worlds of their
subjects, this attitude
does not extend to
the reporting process,
which is treated as a
natural process.
It considers the
story as a way to
bring the writer and
the reader together
in the creation of
reality. The narrative
techniques point
to evidence that
stories are a cultural
practice to make a
common world.
Source: Elaborated by the author based on the information in Eason (1984,
pp.53-55). First column is an interpretation of the author
Reporters who practice ethnographic realism explore social
phenomena with the conviction that they can discover, understand and
communicate the reality. Instead, says Eason, cultural phenomenology
declares itself incapable of accounting for a single reality. These
writers constantly reflect on the limits of human knowledge and their
own ability to understand the world around them.
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In the Latin American chronicle these two poles can also
be distinguished. Moreover, assuming them helps to organize the
extreme diversity of styles of research and writing of the chroniclers.
If this classification is applied to the corpus studied, the vast
majority of the texts’ narrators reflect on the limits of what they can
know, and raise doubts about the possibility of reaching an absolute,
objective truth. They have, therefore, an approach that Eason would
classify as closer to the Cultural Phenomenology than to Ethnographic
Realism. Their voices are clearly heard in their texts.
Pedro Lemebel and María Moreno, for example, are chroniclers
who doubt about the possibility of knowing the final truth about
the facts and the characters that surround them. They reveal their
subjectivity -their memories, emotions and sensations, their thoughts
and mistakes- because they are convinced that the only thing they
can be sure of is their own experience. And, sometimes, not even
that, as María Moreno warns – with sharp irony – in the preliminary
text of her anthology Theory of the Night (2011):
I write about what I do not know; if I knew, why would I
write it? Far from the vain glory of responding to a stock of
knowledge that an authority in absence and sphinx has given
it the pleasure of starting to roll, writing invents. In short, I am
a journalist: faithful to the anecdote of that aspiring editor of
the Crítica newspaper who was given the test of writing about
God, and wanted to specify “for or against”? (Moreno, 2011,
p.9, italics in the original)
The works of Moreno, Villoro, Wiener and Caparrós (specially
in his recent books) borders the essay and the Op-Ed. Near them, in
Chile, are Francisco Mouat and Alberto Fuguet, but with a greater
effort to collect and show facts of reality. Fuguet, for example, in
“Leyendo Londres” (compiled in Aguilar, 2010) decides to spend his
first 48 hours in London visiting bookstores instead of following the
classic tourist route, but he knows that it is a very personal and,
therefore, risky option:
I’m tired, dizzy, I do not want any more books. Now I want
a city.
I look at the time, I have two hours left, I’ve wasted my time. Or
is it gone? Where did it go?
What have I known about London? Almost nothing. And almost
everything.
The plane takes off.
I open one of my new books. Says London 09.
I smile (qtd. as cited in Aguilar, 2010, p.90).
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Further away are authors who have an ethnographic
approach to the chronicle with a very recognizable authorial voice,
such as Guerriero, Alarcón, Salcedo Ramos and Licitra. At the pole
of ethnographic realism are, for example, Rodrigo Fluxá, Marcela
Turati and Cristóbal Peña, who seem to be totally committed to
reality. Their texts leave little space for the reflections of the narrator,
which does not imply that there is no narrator: there is, and he is
powerful because he controls the progression of the story, quietly
and masterfully administering the information to the reader.
They develop investigative journalism with an obvious
narrative component, but because of their emphasis on reporting and
not on the way of telling the story they have insisted on their interviews
to declare themselves “simply journalists” and not “chroniclers”.
Giles and Roberts (2014) update the Eason typology, emphasizing
the narratological aspects of their categories, characteristics that
Anderson (1989) had already detected: ethnographic realism includes
texts that use literary techniques associated with social realism, while
cultural phenomenology is associated with literary journalism. In
this way they combine Eason’s model with Webb’s on rationalism and
romanticism in journalism (1974): this author also poses two poles,
one that emphasizes objectivity, that is, the adaptation of the reporter’s
intellect to objects (the data, the facts) and another that assumes that
in this adaptation a subjective component always comes. For Webb, all
the New Journalism and the literary journalism in general moves near
the pole of the romanticism, while the classic informative journalism,
the one of the agencies of the news, is the one that situates in the
rationalist pole.
Aare (2016) states that the most important aspect when
classifying literary journalism texts is the consistency between
narrator and author (what Booth would call distance). She follows
Cohn (1983), who divides the narrative first person into a person
who lives the experience and a person who narrates (experiencing
and narrating self). Cohn thinks that consonance and dissonance
exist within this divided person, which can also be detected between
narrator and characters in third-person narrations. Applied to the
chronicle, this classification stablishes that the consonance prevails
if the narrator-chronicler identifies with the reporter-chronicler (his
alter ego who lives the experience) and the focus of the story is on
the perceived events, that is, on the observation. Dissonance occurs
when the narrator-chronicler reevaluates, criticizes or in some other
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way distances himself from the perceptions and actions of the
reporter-chronicler.
In the book Sexografías (2008), there are good examples of
that dissonance between the narrator who lives the experience and
the one who recounts it. Gabriela Wiener-narrator writes footnotes
of the compiled chronicles to reveal details of the Gabriela Wiener-
reporter that were not in the first versions of those texts. This
dissonance causes the attention of the reader to focus more on the
reflections, doubts and self-criticisms of the narrator than on the
story itself. This emphasis of Wiener has been accentuated to the
point that all his books published after this one focus almost entirely
on herself: her body, her memories, her emotional relationships have
become virtually her only object of research and writing.
It is consonance that moves the text towards a more mimetic
end, while dissonance moves it towards the pole of subjectivity. Aare
proposes a typology of five groups, which can also be applied to the
current Latin American chronicle:
•Narrator in the third person reconstructed. The reporter has
not been present in the story narrated. The scenes are reconstructed
from testimonies and documentation. It can be combined with the
three forms of targeting. It can be objective or subjective. Corresponds
to Eason’s Ethnographic Realism. Examples of this type of story: the
profiles of Leila Guerriero about already deceased characters, such as
Idea Vilariño, Manuel Henríquez Ureña or Roberto Arlt.
•Narrador in the third person retouched. The reporter
has been present in reality, but has been silenced in the text. The
scenes are constructed from direct observation. It can be objective to
subjective. Corresponds to Eason’s Ethnographic Realism. Examples:
some texts by Marcela Turati and Rodrigo Fluxá.
•Narrator in third person attenuated. The reporter has been
present in reality, but only appears occasionally in the text. The
scenes are constructed from direct observation. It derives from the
internal focus on the reporter, but can, in long passages of the text,
be combined with external focus, internal focus on a character other
than the reporter, or non-focalization. It can be objective or subjective.
It does not appear in the Eason typology. Examples of this narrator are
found in the chronicles of Cristian Alarcón, Josefina Licitra, Alberto
Salcedo Ramos, Leila Guerriero and Juan Pablo Meneses.
•Narrator in first person consonant. It focuses on the reporter’s
experience. The scenes are constructed from direct observation. It
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has internal focus on the reporter, but is objective (focuses on the
object, reality). It lacks a name in the Eason typology. The chronicles
of Juan Villoro and Martín Caparrós fit into this category.
•Narrator in the first person dissonant. It focuses on the
narration of the reporter. The scenes are constructed from direct
observation. It has internal focus on the reporter and is subjective (the
story focuses on the subject, his reflections on reality). Corresponds
to the cultural Phenomenology of Eason. Examples: the chronicles of
María Moreno and Gabriela Wiener, who are constantly questioning
what they did, thought or felt at the time of reporting.
The textual analysis allows us to affirm that the chronicle
shows similar narrative characteristics than the genre known as
literary journalism, and that classifications that have been defined
for the Anglo-Saxon corpus can be applied to the Latin American one.
From the point of view of the narrative, the current Latin
American chronicle dialogues with examples of this journalism in
Europe and the United States. That does not mean that it derives
from the New American Journalism: in Latin America there has been
an important tradition of literary journalism; Operation Masacre, by
Rodolfo Walsh (1957), was published before The New Journalism by
Tom Wolfe (1973); Colombian reporting tradition recognizes influences
from French reporting rather than from the United States (Hoyos,
2009), and in Argentina they link literary journalism with its modernist
chroniclers and their twentieth-century novelists (Moreno, 2015).
However, the Latin American chronicle also dialogues with the texts
of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer, as well as with
other cultural pieces, not only from literature, but also from cinema,
television, theater, opera, tango and even vallenato. It is the dialogical
dimension of texts, enunciated by Bajtín (1982; 1986) in 1956: no
chronicle is written in a vacuum; each chronicle responds to a previous
text, and it is possible to recognize that dialogue although there are
decades or even centuries of distance between one statement and
another, between a question and an answer.
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MARCELA AGUILAR. Associated professor at
Finis Terrae University (Santiago, Chile), and has
a PHD in Communication’s Sciences from the
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC).
E-mail: maguilar@uft.cl
RECEIVED ON: 21/07/2018 | APPROVED ON: 30/09/2018
