DISCURSIVE TRANSFER FROM CREATIVE-LITERARY TEXTS TO NARRATIVE JOURNALISM: THE CHRONICLE
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to investigate the genre of the chronicle as a sample of narrative journalism since its origins as a reflection and justified interpretation of a historical, literary and social reality. For this objetive, using a qualitative method and bibliographic survey on different points of view and authors, Spanish and Latin American, a first assessment and historical survey will be made on the various narrative strategies that, explicitly or implicitly, and within their persuasive, narrative, evolutionary or contextualized arguments, have brought this hybrid genre closer to the appreciation, sensitivity and imagination of its chroniclers together with their documentary and/or experimental research. The hypothesis of this study is to demonstrate that the chronicle as an informative-narrative genre, and therefore interpretative, according to its origins and origin, has a peculiar way of narrating the facts, of adopting and adapting to the journalistic language, to its routines and informative conditions, without forgetting to add important literary nuances in its texts. A peculiarity that will undoubtedly lead to deduce, as results and conclusions of analysis, not only a discursive transfer of creative-literary texts to narrative journalism, in general, and to the chronicle, in particular, but also a capitulation to the Hamlettian doubt about the journalistic veracity in the reflection and representation of reality, objectivity or objectification? That is the uncertainty.
KEYWORDS: Chronicle, Journalism, Narrative genre, Literature, Objectivity.
TRASVASE DISCURSIVO DE LOS TEXTOS CREATIVOS- LITERARIOS AL PERIODISMO NARRATIVO: LA CRÓNICA
El objetivo de este artículo es indagar en el género de la crónica como muestra de periodismo narrativo al ser, desde sus orígenes, reflejo e interpretación justificada de una realidad histórica, literaria y social. Para ello, se ha empleado un método cualitativo y volcado bibliográfico sobre distintos puntos de vista y autores, españoles y latinoamericanos. Se hará una primera valoración y sondeo histórico sobre las diversas estrategias narrativas que, de forma explícita o implícita, y dentro de sus argumentaciones persuasivas, narrativas, evolutivas o contextualizadas han acercado a este género hibrido a la apreciación, sensibilidad e imaginación de sus cronistas junto con su investigación documental y/o experimental. La hipótesis de la que parte este estudio consiste en demostrar que la crónica como género informativo - narrativo, y por ende interpretativo, de acuerdo con sus orígenes y procedencia, posee una peculiar forma de narrar los hechos, de adoptar y adaptarse al lenguaje periodístico, a sus rutinas y condiciones informativas, sin olvidar añadir importantes matices literarios en sus textos. Una particularidad que sin duda supondrá deducir, como resultados y conclusiones de análisis, no sólo un trasvase discursivo de los textos creativos- literarios al periodismo narrativo, en general, y a la crónica, en particular, sino una capitulación a la duda hamletiana sobre la veracidad periodística en la reflexión y representación de la realidad, ¿objetividad u objetivación? Esa es la incertidumbre.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Crónicas, Periodismo, Género narrativo, Literatura, Objetividad.
RESUMEN
Translation by Paula González (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Venezuela)
Keywords
Chronicle, Journalism, Narrative genre, Literature, Periodismo, Género narrativo, Literatura, Venezuela), Objetividad, Objectivity
INTRODUCTION
This research arises from the objective of analyzing a type of journalism classified as narrative ( ; Cuartero, 2017b; Sierra and López, 2016) (Egea, 2014; Herrscher, 2012) for opposing that which marks the dynamics of the media, subject to the rhythm of immediacy, the size of its texts, or the sobriety of its information.
To speak of "narrative journalism" is to designate, in good part, almost all of the current professional practice, according to its descriptive, expository, argumentative, or conversational possibilities. Even when this specific journalistic modality is classified as “non-fictional”, we are forgetting its linguistic, rhetorical, and narrative mediation that, like any other genre of discourse, requires taking up the event that occurred and reproducing it again to make its stories acceptable and somehow credible to its audience. What comes to configure, in any case, a "credible mimesis of the real" (Chillón, 2017).
Chronicles are considered a cross between journalism and literature as they have a documentary character as well as formal freedom in their language (Camenforte, 2019; Carrión, 2012; Chillón, 2014). Clear opposition to the corseted journalistic discourse by employing literary strategies that could even distance them "from any purpose of objectivity", when the chronicle message is the one that adapts to the author's style and not the other way around (Brunetti, Luque, & Orellana, 2015, p. 73-74).
Here, the term narrative journalism is used instead of literary journalism because it is considered less confusing and has a greater acceptance by the scientific community, especially in Latin America.
In Latin America, in the 90s and 2000s, the chronicle took hold as a hybrid genre between journalism and literature, based on its ability to tell a true event with visible participation of the narrative self and cover a wide range of topics. In this context, a variety of alternative media and specialized magazines arise where the best narrative journalism of our continent is expressed (Camenforte, 2019, p. 12).
Narrative journalism that understands the chronicle as the look, experience, or "nose" of its journalist observer who, without forgetting the rules and main journalistic leitmotif, includes creative, quasi-literary resources when developing its structure, descriptions, tone, climates, speeches, or scenes. Practicing narrative journalism does not mean making fiction or inventing stories, but creating attractive designs or contexts as if it were a literary work (Guerriero, 2009).
The authors Bernal and Chillón (1985, p. 89) already spoke in their journalism manual of a new style, which they call “creative news journalism”, justifying it not only by an aesthetic or formally cared purpose but by an ethical, political, and ideological attitude as a challenge to purely informational journalism. This was alluding to the American formula that emerged in the sixties-seventies as a protest against objective and rigid journalism, which, however, at that time did not have a great impact in Spain because genres such as the chronicle, the article, or the opinion column already had less strict stylistic features in our country (Cantavella, 2002; Chillón, 1999; Pan, 1996).
However, at present, the ecological complexity of communication and the new information mediation processes place us in a different scenario, more incoherent and sometimes even contradictory, so that consumption habits, knowledge transmission, and cultural manifestation distance us of that Cartesian reasoning, a guarantor of truth through its logical order. In this sense, Chillón (1999, p. 30) argues that there is no innocent or transparent journalistic style, but rather various styles of journalistic communication that each build their own represented reality.
Here, the proposition of productive intertextuality theorized byBajtín (1981) and sustained by Greenblatt (2001, p. 62) becomes feasible, when it maintains that language, like imagination, lacking borders, “[…] cannot be totally predicted or controlled”. Texts "dialogue" with each other as a result of a dialogic universalization. And to that intertextuality or interweaving of texts that different authors, implicitly or explicitly, take from other authors, we must add, among other parameters, the hybridization that the same text can acquire according to different genres or discursive modalities.
In this way, when Genette speaks of "transtextuality", he encompasses the general -or transcendent- categories to the same text, such as the types of discourse, its modes of enunciation, or the literary genres to which it may belong. He points out that genre is only one aspect of the architext, since “[…] the text itself is not obliged to know, much less to declare, its generic quality” (1989, p. 13).
For this author, style is the key to the poetic or literary capacity of all kinds of texts. Thus, any of them, historical or biographical, as well as fictitious, can survive their original value (documentary, historical, philosophical, etc.) thanks to the individual or collective taste that revalues their aesthetic qualities, due to historical, social, cultural conditions; and, therefore, it is subjectivity that allows such appreciation (Genette, 1991, p. 10).
LITERATURE REVIEW
This article tries to research the main characteristics that have led to the chronicle becoming the paradigm journalistic genre of narrative journalism, due to its hybrid nature between journalistic and literary qualities, as several authors have pointed out on different occasions (Chillón, 2014; Gil González, 2004; Hartsock, 2000; Kramer, 1995; López Pan, 1996; Rodríguez and Angulo, 2010; Sims, 1995; Vanoost, in 2013, among others) (Chillón, 2014; González & C, 2004; Hartsock, 2000; Kramer, 1995; Pan, 1996; Sims, En, Norman, & Kramer, 1995).
If we focus on its etymological meaning -from the Latin chronicas and the Greek cronos- the chronicle is understood as a literal narration of events, according to chronological order; a meaning that varies and enriches its discourse in its various stages. If at first it was understood as an account of events from "within a short physical, mental, and ideological distance" (Gomis, 2008, p. 117-118), it became "revealing of historical events in a temporal order", to get involved in the magic of literary tradition (Vilamor, 2000, p. 290), until it became the journalistic genre that we now know. The chronicle, therefore, admits a diverse and polymorphous production that is accompanied by its panoramic vision throughout its history. We begin with this hypothesis and present it as an argument for reflection in this article.
Furthermore, in the current journalistic field, the word chronicle does not find a universal and clear definition in its concept and meaning either, since it contains certain different nuances, even in dissertations on its identification as an informative genre, which also differ according to the geographical area where it is addressed, Spain or Latin America (Jaramillo, 2011; ; Palau and Cuartero, 2018; Puerta, 2017; Rueda, 2012) (Lago, 2014); and its meaning can even vary substantially from one country to another (Parratt, 2008). In this way, under the common journalistic umbrella of hybrid and polysemic genre, it can be understood: as a brief modality linked to current affairs and as an ambiguous genre in concept and form, as the narration of a news item with evaluative elements, which must always be secondary (Albertos, 1988; Carreter & F, 1976; Núñez, 1985); as “news interpreted, valued, commented on, and prosecuted” (Vilamor, 2000, p. 341); as a genre on the border between news and opinion (Gutiérrez, 1984) or guarantor of an essay formula that takes the news element only as a starting point (Bernal, 1997; ) (Mateo, 2001); being admitted as a "long-winded" journalistic production by not following the most immediate news and dealing with more extensive and elaborate creations (Palau, 2018); being part of the so-called “slow journalism” according to rigorous, creative, and quality information (Rosique and Barranquero, 2015); being halfway between literature and journalism (Brunetti, Luque, and Orellana; 2015) in which both texts “embrace” (López Pan, 1996, p. 123), and, ultimately, as “a discursive site of open and porous borders” (Bernabé, 2010, p. 6).
Likewise, the term chronicler which, at first, acquired nuances of the narrator of contemporary events, went on to become a reporter of events, compiler of sources, or costumbrist writer, until it remained in a journalistic profession with increasingly clear and precise guidelines, or characterized by its free style and signature of its author (Borrat, 1989, p. 122).
Although the chronicle along with the report -besides the article and the opinion column- are the genres most prone to the formula of narrative or literary journalism, there is a controversy between the first two, which, on occasions, converge and confuse. García Márquez (2001, p. 2; cited by Yanes, 2006, p. 4) does not find the boundaries between the chronicle and the report well defined, even between the chronicle and the short story or novel. "A chronicle is a story that is true", would remain as an emblematic phrase of this writer.
For authors such as Montoro (1973), it is the report, and not the chronicle, the genre that shares the most traits with literature, in contrast to other estimates, such as that of Gil González and C (2004), who points out that the report cannot be considered the link between literature and journalism for being a genuinely journalistic invention. Yanes (2006, p. 4) specifies the clear separation between the chronicle and the report with the presence or not at the scene of the events, and other authors (Elías, 2003) mark this difference in temporality, dispensable in the report and fundamental in the chronicle.
Something similar also occurs with the ambiguity between chronicle and article. The Great Larousse Encyclopedia (1987) defines the chronicle as "a journalistic article in which a current issue is discussed." In the same way, Martínez Sousa develops this meaning by qualifying the chronicle as a "narrative, evaluative, interpretive, and informative article, of variable length and about current issues […]" (1992, p. 135-136; cited by Gil González, 2004, p. 32). Some appreciations that we share with Gil González as erroneous since, although both are interpretive genres, the chronicle has as its reference the interpretation of a real event, while the article only exposes its opinion or comment on it. In the journalistic chronicle, narration and interpretation are combined, as the subjective way in which the facts are told.
The truth is that the news and reality are the common thread of the chronicle, taking elements of literature for the construction of a story; their stylistic limits converge in not exceeding fiction (Puerta, 2011, p. 56).
Thus, the current chronicle, with its different nuances and meanings, becomes an interesting journalistic genre by combining, as Salazar (2005, p. 3) points out, “the eternal from the enduring”, accepting a variety of genres except for fiction. For this author, the hybridization or trans-discursiveness of the chronicle works as a way of breaking or violating the rules, that which is established. Its inherent transgressive will is the source of its ambivalence.
In an interview with the chronicler Alberto Ramos (2017), he indicates that it is a serious mistake to assure that what is literature is not journalism or what is journalism is not literature. For this Colombian journalist, the chronicle is literature when it is well written because it is based on aesthetic beauty, and it is journalism when it informs because it allows one to learn something that was not known. A reflection that had already been made by Martín Vivaldi (1998, p. 249) when he points out that both disciplines overlap because while literature has a lot of communication, journalism is subjectivism about reality itself.
Albert Chillón (1999, p. 70) considers that there is no thought without language, but thought in language. In this way, Chillón explains that a linguistic turn in journalistic communication, that is, the awareness that we know the world as we designate it with words and construct it syntactically in sentences, leads to the overcoming of the hypothesis that an objective reality external to the subjects exists.
A genre, that of the chronicle, which acquires an endless number of present meanings but which also reached different nuances in the past, as is briefly reflected in this article, through an exposition of different authors and researchers, to get certain results, that are related to the practice of current journalism in Spain.
METHODOLOGY
The analysis method used is based on explanatory research through a theoretical exploration supported by the bibliographic review, detecting the main discourses, interpretations, analysis, and reflections on the central topic of this article, the chronicle in its historical context. To do this, a dump of the basic bibliography on the line of research has been made and two relevant databases on scientific articles have been systematically used: Google Scholar and Dialnet. With filtering of those texts and monographs on narrative and literary journalism or on the chronicle genre itself that, focused on local or excessively generic or technical aspects, do not respond to the search object.
This article is considered as a first study stage, where the chronicle is selected as a starting point and sample of analysis for various reasons. In the first place, because the chronicle, together with the report, is the champion of narrative journalism fundamentally in Latin America, but also in Spain; because of its literary and historical antecedents, which is perhaps the greatest difficulty for its classification as a pure journalistic genre; and, lastly, and as the main reason, for having obvious subjective features in its narration, which distance it from the other news genres.
It is the first assessment of this central axis, the chronicle and its evolution and historical influence, which will be completed with another after this initial work where methodological tools will be chosen through the content analysis of the current chronicles from their different variants to answer the objective raised about the current chronicle in Spain and its incorporation, or not, in narrative journalism, as well as to look for the comparative parameters that contemplate it within a journalistic quality and minimum informative objectivity.
In the historical route proposed in this article, an attempt is made to reconstruct and specify the valuations and the most outstanding features of the chronicle in three of its most significant moments: when it is linked to the historiographic phenomenon, the literary world, and the journalistic world. To search and reflect on the antecedents that give the current chronicle that hybrid character that, while maintaining a narrative, interpretive, and, therefore, subjective character, has achieved an informative or objective recognition of reality in journalistic practice.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Claudia Darrigrandi (2013, p. 125) proposes a classification on the historical evolution of the Latin American chronicle that she divides into three key stages: the first begins with Las crónicas de Indias, whose stories were historical compilations referring to the Spanish colonization; the second symbolizes the modernist chronicle, at the end of the 19th century, and the third represents the current chronicle production, identified within narrative journalism. In this article, the chronicle will be adjusted to three fields of study: historiographic, literary, and journalistic.
The chronicle as a historical narrative
The chronicle, among its various techniques and modalities, is considered as the original form of historiography and one of the most used procedures to transmit history from generation to generation. One of the concepts that the RAE has about the chronicle is that of "historical narration in which the consecutive order of events is followed." Likewise, the Spanish and historical-critical etymological dictionary of Corominas (1981) also admits its historical character in the “First General Chronicle”.
However, between the 9th and 14th centuries, and in almost the entire Christian West, the chronicle is “[…] handled as a propaganda story put at the service of a cause” (Gil, 2004, p. 27). An assertion that had already been presented by Manuel Bernal when he warns that:
[…] The relationships and chronicles are not limited to the objective account of current events, but pure information coexists with interpretation and, on occasions, with propaganda, especially when the story revolves around royal people or great lords (1997, p. 10-11).
In this way, as Alvar, Mainer, and Navarro (1997, p. 107-205) also affirm, the proliferation of chronicles and historiographical works of all kinds, which have been happening since the beginning of the 12th century, constitute the first example of the use of a peninsular Romance language and a genre in the writing of historical works.
And it is from Alfonso X (13th century) when historiography in the Romance language acquires great importance by serving as education of the nobility, which finds in chronicles examples of the past, justifications of the present, and, on occasions, worthy entertainment.
In medieval literature, of oral tradition, Gil (2004, p. 28-29) points out, the chronicle as a historical story that broadened its semantic field by introducing heroic and adventure narratives, with portraits and dialogues between characters that distance themselves from their original sources, and is closer to creativity and literary fiction than to historical rigor. An example is the Chronicle of the Constable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo or the Chronicle of the famous knight Cid Ruy Díaz Campeador. This same author highlights two of the fundamental historiographic aspects that will constitute its later identity sign. On the one hand, its version as an account of events according to chronological order; secondly, the importance that the author of the text attains as a “privileged witness of the facts” who, regardless of the ideological purposes he defends, is in charge of structuring the events according to his creativity, as long as he obeys a series of characteristics imposed by historiography (Gil, 2004, p. 28).
Along the same lines, Juan Carlos Gil, citing Bernal Rodríguez (1997, p. 39) and Baquero Goyanes (1998, p. 55), sees a certain similarity and a common thread between this type of medieval chronicle and the historical novel; which also highlights the care of language and rhetorical resource on the part of its rapporteur who, being many times a witness of these events, fulfills the double function of entertaining and seducing with his narratives and of serving as a vehicle of journalistic communication thanks to his descriptive meticulousness. Following these same premises and going back much further in time, one can find in some of the Greek writings, such as laws, contracts, decrees, or agreements, documents “[…] with some characteristics of the chronicle” (Vilamor, 2000, p. 282), as well as in epics, deed songs, or romances. In this case, when chronicles are included in romances, their characteristics also bear some resemblance to the current ones (García and Cuartero, 2016, p. 4).
The literature that interests the Greek world of the 5th century BC manifests itself through hundreds of writers who work in the genre of History. And here The nine books of History, of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and the History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides stood out. We will refer to this last work of the Athenian general who served in this war and wrote a chronicle of this conflict from the reality of the experienced events, and which was also contextualized in a world without divine interventions, to spread it to the Greek world. Unlike Herodotus who spoke about the Medical Wars half a century after they were concluded. A revolutionary methodology used by Thucydides in his chronological accounts -treatment of the sources, exact chronology, and pretense of objectivity of the narrated facts- that gave him the current qualification of the best historian of classical antiquity and consideration as the first scientific historian. Another special innovation to take into account of this chronic predecessor is the entertaining and understandable way of writing and austere style of his speeches, avoiding rhetorical figures typical of his predecessors and epic and anecdotal elements that could break the common thread of the narrative.
However, in this historical and diverse trajectory of chronicling, the production of a literary recreation of a historical event cannot be ignored. For this perspective, we turn to the Greek epic and the first western literary text that recounts a historical event: the Trojan/Ilion war. The Iliad, the oldest epic poem in Western literature written by Homer five centuries after the event (8th century BC) which, together with the Odyssey, were considered by the Greeks of the classical age and later generations as real historical accounts; Although it was not history but rather an epic, it revealed the Greek values and ideals of the time (Sanz, 2010).
The chronicle in the social and literary sphere
In Spain, the practice of this type of literary and social chronicle appears in the 19th century, with the figure of Mariano José de Larra and Ramón de Mesonero Romanos as its highest representatives, and continues in the 20th century with modernist writers who also combine literature with journalism.
The nineteenth-century Spanish costumbrismo symbolized by local scenes, places, behaviors, or institutions is represented in articles of customs, of a didactic, moralizing, humorous, or satirical nature. Its objective, as a precursor of realism and naturalism, is to objectively reflect reality, without opinions or interpretations. José de Larra himself expresses it this way in his article La vida de Madrid:
am a journalist; I spend most of my time, like any public writer, writing what I don't think and making others believe what I don't believe. How can you write praising! That is, my life is reduced to wanting to say what others do not want to hear (Larra, 1968, p. 259-260).
However, his texts -as Curvardic points out- have a metatextual character by using his own writing process as a topic:
The incorporation of this procedure allows us to verify that even aesthetics oriented towards the objective observation of social reality, as in the case of journalism, end up canceling or suspending the reality effect that in principle guides their proposals (Curvardic, 2010, p. 95).
In the same way, the modernist chronicle, like the costumbrist, in its coherence between literature and journalism, marks a new typology in which the writer must adapt to the rules of the journalistic market, to the taste of the receiver, to the plurality of the covered topics, to pay attention to the space of the page where they write, and to some deadlines, which translates into “[…] a serious limitation to the artistic development of a writer” (Palau-Sampio, 2018, p. 198; citing Mateo, 2001, p. 31). In this way, “[…] the chronicle could only appear as a kind of advanced aesthetics within the newspaper that exhibited another way of writing at the same time that it marked the limit of the informative discourse” (Bernabé, 2010, p. 1).
For Brunetti, Luque, and Orellana (2015, p. 64), the chronicle of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would determine the origin of the author chronicle or simply the "chronicle" par excellence, because these renowned modernist writers (Costumbrists) were joined, in the newsrooms of the newspapers, by other anonymous chroniclers who undertook a new innovative process of 19th-century journalism in search of a new reading public.
The chronicle in the journalistic field
In Spain, there are numerous authors, both writers and journalists, who, since the middle of the last century, and especially since the 1990s, have practiced narrative journalism, as chroniclers or columnists. We are talking about journalists-writers like Rosa Montero, Juan Luís Cebrián, Carmen Rigalt, Raúl del Pozo, Francisco Umbral, or Arturo Pérez Reverte, to put only an incomplete list of excellent Spanish authors.
[…] In the first decades of the 20th century, a clear line seems to be drawn between journalists and writers, but also between the news and the chronicle, as in the space of journalistic collaboration in which narrativization is always admirable (Brunetti, Luque, and Orellana, 2015, p. 68).
A tradition of journalistic works that, without abandoning the rigor and veracity of the information, make use of the tools of literature, and that has continued throughout the 20th century, inside and outside our borders. Latin American authors such as Rodolfo Walsh, Gabriel García Márquez, or Elena Poniatowska; famous names, such as Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, or Norman Mailer, in the United States; or George Orwell, Ryszard Kapuściński, Oriana Fallaci, and Svetlana Aleksiévich, in Europe (Palau and Cuartero, 2018, p. 963).
In Spain, a new journalistic identity also appears, that of the professional chroniclers present at the scene of the events, as reporters, who must not only transmit information but also seek it and interest readers through their journalistic nose and intuition and their writing and personal style. We find journalists-writers like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Maruja Torres, or Manuel Leguineche. In this way, the chronicle becomes part of the news genres although, as Martín Vivaldi points out, as a hybrid that surpasses the information itself and reporting by adding the interpretive and evaluative element of reality. For this author, journalism is not a minor literary art, but a different literary art (1998, p. 249).
Features of current literary or narrative journalism
At the moment, there is a slight controversy in the academic field about how to name the space of convergence between journalism and literature (Carrión, 2012; Chillón, 2014; Egea, 2014; Herrscher, 2012). As Bak (2011, p. 130) points out, the conception of narrative or literary journalism is a social and cultural construction, influenced by the journalistic culture in which it develops, which is why it is susceptible to being presented under different names (Josephi et al., 2009, pp. 75-76).
To the classic names of literary journalism, new journalism, or journalistic literature, labels such as 'Literary news writing' (Parratt 2003, pp. 96-100), 'Nuevo nuevo periodismo' (Boynton, 2015) or 'Slow journalism' (Greenberg, 2012, p. 381; Rosique and Barranquero, 2015, p. 453) have been added in recent years, which expand the references pointed out by Chillón (2014). In the Anglo-Saxon context, the commitment to the term 'Literary journalism' has prevailed for decades (Roiland, 2015; Sims, 1984), although in recent decades the term 'Narrative journalism' has prevailed (Ángulo, 2017; Cuartero, 2017a, p. 54; Palau, 2018; Palau and Cuartero, 2018, pp. 963-964).
In this way, while some authors consider that both worlds are disparate, due to their methods and objectives, others affirm that certain genres -such as the chronicle- reflect elements of creation close to literature. This relationship between literature and journalism is the subject of numerous research works.
It should be noted, besides the similarities set forth, that there are clear divergences between journalistic and literary matters such as the function of supposedly truthful informative immediacy, easily assimilated and understood by its consuming public that is opposed to a more concrete literary public that does not seek, among its multiple expectations, the newest current affairs but the leisurely enjoyment of the formal style and the expressive beauty of its texts. These differences are mitigated in narrative journalism whose informative function introduces elements and linguistic resources typical of literature.
We chose this definition that seems to synthesize reciprocity on literature and current narrative journalism:
We understand or define narrative journalism as a journalistic phenomenon that mixes journalism and literature as well as history, essays, sociology, and documentation and that, without abandoning its proposal to inform and tell a true story, it does so by using various tools to build a narrative structure as attractive as that of any fiction text, but always without renouncing its truthful principles (Cuartero, 2017a, p. 44).
ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
It is found that the name of the confluence space between journalism and literature generates controversy in the academic field, although it does not seem that this baptism is less problematic for its authors, who define their activity under a heterogeneous range of options, which shows that the terminological and conceptual issue is far from being resolved. However, Spanish journalists interviewed by Palau and Cuartero (2018, p. 269) between 2015 and 2016, such as Xavier Aldekoa, Alberto Arce, Álex Ayala Ugarte, Nacho Carretero, Ander Izagirre, or Virginia Mendoza, identify their work under the label of narrative journalism. Their justification is based on the fact that they are journalistic creations that are nourished by the compositional and stylistic techniques of literature.
Likewise, the appearance of new publication channels, with reference magazines such as Gatopardo or Etiqueta Negra, or editorials and collections focused on narrative journalism, has aroused attention around a genre that allows journalistic commitment to long formats, novel approaches, and the creative freedom that narrative journalism requires (Palau and Cuartero, 2018, p. 262).
It is no longer enough to inform (Bello and López García, 2004, p. 28). Journalism wants to take advantage of the inheritance received from these centuries and seek new ways that respond to current challenges. The return to the roots gives strength to undertake one of the main challenges: to contribute to the management and dissemination of knowledge.
One of the objectives of narrative journalism is found in the rhetorical component, in the desire to convince, persuade, and conquer the receiver, to obtain one of the main and traditional purposes of the chronicle: the transmission of knowledge, leaving a mark from the society and era in which it is written.
Narrative journalism, through its chronicles, is a form of writing that, due to its characteristics, which include finding characters, recreating actions, and contexts, wants to maintain a living memory of civilizations, of the history that beats, that will continue to live, and it will become valid every time someone dedicates themselves to studying it.
The chronicler, historian, writer, or journalist, has always been appreciated, besides as being a connoisseur of the issue, as a witness to the event, raiser and disseminator of its direct sources, establishing the balanced proportion between the appropriate dose of information and the appropriate comment.
Likewise, the chronicle has been associated with exposition clarity for better understanding. And except on very exceptional occasions, both among chroniclers of historical narratives and literary authors, as in the case of modernists, for example, chronicles have always tried to adapt to a more usual language recognized by the general public.
It should be noted that the chronicle, at the moment, is the journalistic genre par excellence in Latin America. The Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano has given a boost to a genre that had been seen as minor, has consolidated the figure of the chronicler and the master of chroniclers which, in turn, has unleashed a series of workshops that have helped its consolidation and diffusion throughout the continent (Puerta, 2016, p. 494).
CONCLUDING POINTS
Literature and journalism maintain and have maintained a close relationship that has related and enriched them in their different historical stages. Although both disciplines work with words and language, they have always tried to differentiate one from the other. Thus, from the classical conception, it has been said that literature is directly related to fiction and that writers’ intention should be to free their readers from the real world to take them to a fictional universe, where they can appreciate sensations and experiences impossible to perceive in that one.
Within these relationships, it is worth highlighting narrative journalism, and its manifestation in the chronicle, which assumes the commitment to information and the aesthetic component, besides the particularity of transcending in time. The chronicle is one of the textual typologies that, although not fictional, can be considered as forms of literature because fiction should not be determined as the only criterion to define literariness, its literary character.
In narrative journalism, the language of the chronicle transcends the merely informative, it represents reality, it is not reality. It pretends that this representation, that creation, which does not imply falsehood, is alive, is updated in the mind of receivers to turn them into a witness.
Among the multiple samples and definitions of a chronicle, it is estimated that it can be broadly considered, and from its inherited origins, as a hybrid genre -historical, literary, or journalistic- between the information of the fact that is narrated and its interpretation, opinion, or assessment. A genuinely Latino genre unlike any Anglo-Saxon journalism genre (story and comments).
Vargas Llosa (2013) refers to the work of Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero with the idea that journalism can be one of the fine arts and produce works of value, without renouncing its primary obligation, which is to inform:
[…] Techniques that are those of the best novelists, but her method of structuring texts, using different points of view, and playing with time, as well as giving the language primary importance —both in the choice of words and their silences—, never prevail over the informative will, they are always at its service, without allowing the form to cease to be functional and end up transcending that subordination to objective reality, which is the exclusive domain of journalism.
In this sense, a great conceptual imprecision is found when the current Spanish audiovisual media gives way to “the chronicle of a correspondent…” if what is actually announced is a news item in which there is no assessment by its author.
Ultimately, the chronicle is a genre that has always been linked to the formal care and use of language, which is why it is and has been related to narrative structures typical of literature, although limited by documentary objectivity and the real, temporal, and even in-person referent. However, it is precisely the subjective judgmental elements, even if they are not verifiable, together with the narrative style, which give efficacy and relevance to its message.
Chronicles, from any analyzed perspective, are difficult to classify, finding as many varieties as the styles of those who write them. Each chronicler prints their personal stamp and in this reconstruction of reality, each chronicle stands as the direct testimony of an era and represents a part of a whole. It is closely linked to the social and technological changes of the different historical periods.
A hodgepodge of genres, literary colors, informative and interpretive nuances that implies the convergence of all these categories into one referred to by Haro Tecglen (1998, p. 12; cited by Gil, 2004, p. 36) "[ ...] today everything is exploded: what was sometimes a continuous line of narration has exploded and pieces are found here and there. The personal has been inserted among the general; one's own life among the data of history. This is a chronicle".
REFERENCES
AUTHORS
Julia González Conde
Proviene del ámbito profesional de la radio y la televisión pública (RTVE) y es Profesora Contratada Doctor de la UCM, desde 2012, con un sexenio de investigación. Docente en el Área de Audiovisual, del departamento de Periodismo y Nuevos Medios, en la Facultad de Ciencias de la Información, de dicha Universidad, donde ha impartido Periodismo Multimedia, Información en Radio e Información en Televisión, en el Grado de Periodismo. Además de otras materias audiovisuales en el Máster Universitario de Periodismo Multimedia Profesional, Máster profesional de Radio (RNE) y seminarios especializados en técnicas de expresión oral para profesionales de la radio y la televisión en el Instituto de RTVE.
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8375-8420
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=w4NTnQQAAAAJ&hl
Hugo Prieto González
Es licenciado en Derecho y Filosofía y Letras. Profesor de Secundaria y Bachillerato en el área de Lengua y Literatura en la Comunidad de Madrid. Coordinador durante el curso 2020-21 del Plan Refuerza en dicha Comunidad. Asimismo, está vinculado al departamento de Periodismo y Nuevos Medios de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Información de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, donde está realizando su tesis doctoral.
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2463-3817
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=O6-3ofoAAAAJ&hl
Teresa Barceló Ugarte
Profesora Adjunta del departamento de Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Comunicación de la Universidad CEU San Pablo desde el curso académico 2005/2006. Coordinadora del Grado en Comunicación Digital desde su puesta en marcha en 2012 hasta 2018. Imparte docencia en los grados de Comunicación Audiovisual, Comunicación Digital, Periodismo y Publicidad y RRPP, así como en el Máster Universitario en Periodismo Cultural y en el Máster Universitario en Relaciones Públicas y Organización de Eventos.
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1722-5065
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=19ZCU2IAAAAJ&hl=es