202 | 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
Reproduction of entire dialogues, instead of the fragments used in daily journalism; scene by scene development, just like a film; the incorporation of various points of view, rather than telling a story only from the narrator’s perspective; and attention paid to details that convey the status of the interviewee, such as appearance and behaviour. Strictly speaking, the New Journalism can be read as a story (Boynton, 2005: xvi).
Guerriero uses some of these techniques, an example of which is the creation of scenes and the reproduction of entire dialogues. She takes the latter technique to the highest level in her book-profiles. In Opus Gelber (2019), the dialogues take up several pages and help one to understand the psychology of the character, and also the nature of the relationship that is gradually being established between the journalist, who is already a character in the story, and the person being profiled. This re-enactment of dialogue, at times apparently banal, is a resource found in all of her profiles. Sometimes they are dialogues that occur in person, and other times they are telephone conversations. Even in cases when the person Guerriero calls does not want to talk or give her an interview, the journalist chooses to transcribe the conversation rather than report that the person refused to give her an interview.
The creation of scenes is one of Guerriero’s trademarks. In all of her profiles, we find at least one scene in which she places the character in his or her environment with tidy descriptions and make the person act, and even interact, with other characters. The reader sees the interviewee in a way that is nearly like watching a film: how the person moves, how he or she breathes, and how they speak. This is what Tom Wolfe called the act of recounting the subjective or emotional life of the characters. He explains it thoroughly when he describes how a New Journalism reporter carries out his or her work:
It seemed important to be on the scene when dramatic events took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, and the details of the surroundings.
The idea was to offer a completely objective description, but with something extra, which was something that readers had only been able to obtain through novels and stories: the subjective or emotional life of the characters (Wolfe, 1972: 18).
Everything explained by Wolfe appears in Guerriero’s scenes. It also has to do with her mastery of description and with another characteristic of the New Journalism: paying attention to details that convey the status of the interviewees, such as their appearance and behaviour. Guerriero describes the atmosphere, such as the light, to which she gives great importance, as well as the smell and textures... all of the sensations that our senses can capture. She also depicts the way the interviewee is dressed and the details of his or her surroundings.
The scenes are sometimes fragmented, starting with a paragraph, followed by a paragraph of information, and then returning to the scene. In the profile on the young woman imprisoned for parricide, entitled Sueños de libertad (Dreams of Freedom) (2012), Guerriero goes to visit her in prison. She describes where the prison is located in detail, what its interior looks like, what happens when the prisoner is called, and her first meeting with the woman. In the next paragraph, she continues with other information, but later returns to the first conversation with the young woman, and follows that same technique throughout the profile. It seems as though the first scene of the prison was a single scene with a postponed ending that extended along the entire profile as a guiding thread. Let us look at the start of the scene on page 37: