198 | nº 31, pp. 187-205 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
Literary resources used by Leila Guerriero in her journalistic profiles
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
what such a character knows; with long passages of external focalization; the narrator knows only what he or she observes; and on rare occasions non-focalization story; the narrator knows more than the character.
In the profile of Facundo Cabral (2013), Guerriero uses all three forms of focalization. It is written in a dimmed third person –the narrator occasionally appears in the text: we can read Cabral’s answers, but not the questions the narrator asks him; or Cabral’s questions, but not the narrator’s answers.
-Tell me if there are any wells. I can only look forward. I can’t see either downwards or upwards.
The wooden walking stick probes the tiles of the Plaza San Martín, one of the most elegant parts of the city.
-Will you come with me to pay for the phone? (2013: 199)
The text has an internal focalization; the narrator says what Cabral knows, interspersed with brief passages of external focalization; and the narrator knows only what he or she observes, as in the case of Cabral’s dialogues with people on the street, in which the narrator is a mere observer, acting as a camera that captures what lies in front:
At the mobile phone company’s payment office, Facundo Cabral waits in line in front of one of the windows.
–Come on up, says one woman, and Cabral moves forward.
–Hello. What’s your name, my dear?
–Ivana.
–Ivana, you are the light of my window, and for me, life without Ivana is worthless. How much is it, Ivana?...
Ivana smiles, checks something on her computer and asks:
–Are you Cabral, Rodolfo Enrique? (Guerriero, 2019: 201-202).
In the profile-book Opus Gelber (2019), there is a curious gradation in the appearance of the narrator. The story is narrated in the first person, but this first person sometimes seems like a dimmed third-person. At the beginning of the book, the first person rarely appears, but her presence increases as the story unfolds, and to the extent that the narrator-journalist becomes more involved in the relationship with his interviewed character. The relationship between the two is a kind of love affair in which the narrator also becomes the protagonist: Leila Guerriero’s character appears and the character allows herself to be seduced by Bruno Gelber. This process of seduction needs to be narrated in the first person. Firstly, Leila Guerriero as the character observes Bruno Gelber’s home, Bruno Gelber himself, as well as his friends from an outside point of view (external focalization). After months of meetings and interviews, the character of Leila Guerriero becomes part of Bruno Gelber’s life, or a part of the story she is telling.
According to what has been analysed, it can be said that Leila’s profiles are mostly written in a dimmed third person, as she has been present in reality, but appears only occasionally in the text, and the story is built from direct observation. At times, in the case of deceased people, this third person becomes a reconstructed third person, and at other times, as in Bruno Gelber’s profile, it becomes a consonant and perhaps even dissonant first person. In other words, she narrates her own experiences and life experiences, though always in a subtle way. Applying Genette’s terminology, she changes from a heterodiegetic narrator who is absent from the story she is telling to one that is homodiegetic, present as a character in the story, but always playing a secondary role of observer or witness.