194 | 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
n times what happened one: this would be a repeating narrative
one time what happened several times: iterative narrative
Leila Guerriero’s profiles and, in general, the profiles of the New Latin American Journalism, are usually written with real-time dialogue scenes, or what we might call “singulative scenes”. These are, in turn, a characteristic of the New Journalism of the USA: recreating scenes with complete dialogues and detailed descriptions of the atmosphere and characters. In the extensive profile-book on Argentinean pianist Bruno Gelber (Opus Gelber, 2019), Guerriero recreates entire dialogues between the protagonist and the narrator, or between the protagonist and the people he invites to his home, or between the narrator and some of her interviewees. Some are slow-moving, with delays in descriptions of voice, tone, and appearance, yet they are often very fast, especially those of the narrator’s phone conversations with the protagonist:
-Hello, sweetheart. She fell in love with you.
- Who?
-Susana Reta.
-Ah. She has some great paintings. She showed them to me.
-She told me you saw them alone.
- No. She showed them to me. How could I get into the rooms of someone else’s house by myself?
-What did you talk about?
-You, most of all.
-No, I know you talked about other things.
-About what?
-I know everything you talked about.
-I’m going to call Gino Bogani. Will you tell him?
-You do what you have to do. You don’t have to ask my permission. You are going to do what you want anyway.
-How do you know?
-Because I know you (2019: 260-261)
As we have mentioned, the rhythm of short story is sometimes based on the alternation of the summary and scenes, but also on the alternation of the iterative and the singulative narration (Genette, 1989: 199), as we can see below. Leila Guerriero achieves rhythm by alternating summary stories (the protagonist’s biography, for example) with dialogical scenes. The paragraphs in Guillermo Kuitca’s profile are arranged as follows: a description, usually of some room in his house, such as the kitchen, study, living room, hall, etc., or a descriptive narrative about some period of his life, followed by a dialogue with Kuitca in which the voice that questions (the voice of the narrator) has often been silenced, and only the answer to the question is made available, which tends to be conclusive and gives highly relevant information about the character. In other words, a summary story is combined with (singulative) dramatic scenes:
He started using cocaine in 1983, one year after beginning the series, Nadie olvida nada (Nobody forgets anything), and continued to do so, steadily and increasingly, until 1987...