'I am, but I don't have myself'
H. Plessner
I come to propose a trip, a path of uncertainty, a challenge. Follow me on the journey and I promise you that you will come out of this article understanding the game of writing in a different way.
Pause. Did you think at some point that you can understand this writing, with my initial request and my promise, why are you able to decode these shapes that we call letters? Yes, you performed an automatic task which was to decode this text. I'll explain it better: I, as a writer, chose to group this amount of signs and voids, letters and spaces, and the way I did it proposes some words that, by themselves, offer you a meaning and that will later be expanded when you have other words and the phrase is complete. You learned all this complex stuff when they taught you to read, when they told you: 'if you put this letter with this other, you can put together a word and you can understand it like this; If you have doubts, you can look up the meaning in the dictionary, which is the social agreement we established so that we all know, more or less, what we are talking about, understood?'
Now let's move on to the act of writing. Think for a moment about how complicated it is to put an idea in the form of signs, group thoughts and transfer them to paper so that someone else can understand them. We are talking about a very fragile bridge, so fragile that I don't even know how you receive this article, so weak because I don't know who you are when you read me; It is a fragile bridge between two imprecise sides.
Now, with what has been said up to this point, I can remind you of something even more evident: our legal system is sustained, mainly, thanks to that bridge generated by writing. Your name is attested because it is written on your identification document, your birth certificate, your medical record, the nomenclature of your house, the names of the streets, the ownership card of your vehicle, the bank account, your diplomas, certificates, text, text, text...
One more thing to add: we use the same code for serious things and playful things. And a text exactly written on one side can represent a different thing on another. That is to say, a legal opinion that puts a man in jail can be a story if it is published in a book that says, at the outset: 'legal stories', and they may not even change a comma in the opinion. Recommendation: I invite you to read La casa grande, by the Colombian writer Alvaro Cepeda Samudio and the great story of Fontanarrosa: Sueno de barrio.
To get more into the meat of the matter, let's think, initially, about the relationship that exists between written journalism and literature. A newspaper article can indict a murderer, it can incriminate people, and if the journalist does not have evidence, he can go to jail. Saying the same thing in a story, clearly suggesting the perpetrators, bringing a massacre to a novel and writing a family story around those events, saves you from judgment. Who can judge me if my fictional character is the biggest gangster in the novel and was also president for two terms, a lover of war and weapons? Nobody, because I invented it myself, who can deny it! I could give the book to the president himself and he would never have a way to prosecute me.
Of course, the reader who is unaware of these effects and contexts easily falls into the writers' traps and immerses himself in absurd passions. The writer, who knows the rules of the game, knows how to prepare the tricks and enjoys when they are well thought out. So, you have to get rid of naivety when reading. Of course, some are already asking the question what is written journalism and what is literature and how different they are. The discussion seems to be easily resolved when considering the setting in which each text is presented and who writes it: 'it appeared in the newspaper and a certain journalist wrote it.' However, in the face of contemporary productions, many of them virtual, there are multiple scenarios for writers and that makes the task of classifying their products complicated. In addition, writers of novels and short stories also tend to be writers of news, chronicles, reports, and things get more complicated.
Remember this, when referring to the contrast between literature and journalism we are constructing a discussion similar to that between the literary text and the historical text. The two artifacts have been confronted on multiple occasions with the same question (what is literature, what is history), and therefore, to better guide this journey, we will transport some arguments from that discussion and put them at the service of the general discussion, to understand the complete system.
To address the discussion, it would be useful for us to know that, with the emergence of institutions, whose objective is to keep social structures stable, the delimitations for what is written appeared. The speeches written for the legal, the historical, the journalistic, were established as possessors of the truth and were ethically committed, in all three cases, to account for the events as they occurred, without any alteration for convenience. In simpler words: what they write is taken seriously and should not be manipulated in the service of a few. The intention, as it has always been, was to give greater peace of mind to man about the 'truth' and his social system. Can you imagine a world without those limits?
In the same way it was done with literature and its forms, as if it existed at the other pole, only with the objective of being playful. They tell us: literature is not within the register of the serious and therefore 'does not have' a direct impact on the real-true. He does not have any ethical commitment to the truth and his speech does not propose to interact at the service or functioning of social institutions, since he is only responsible for the possible, never for the verifiable. In this way, literature is supposedly destined for enjoyment, with its aesthetic, ludic, intellectual, and philosophical nuances. Of course, this distancing, this difference in objectives that could leave everything resolved, is not radical and deserves some clarifications.
With the appearance of writing as a communication technology, man gained a feeling of security; He believed that he would preserve the historical-religious events, of utmost relevance for his community, in a reliable manner. He gave the written narrative the status of truth and thus wanted to live in peace: 'if it is written it is true.' For that matter, Hayden White tells us, in his text The historical text as a literary artifact and other writings, a fairly solid phrase: 'The historical narrative does not reflect the things it points out; remembers images of the things it indicates, as metaphor does.' In that sense, written narratives are constituted as a representation of reality, a transformation, a congregation of senses to access abstract ideas and concepts, larger and broader depending on the topic, about the events of man and what surrounds him. Therefore, the writing of any narrated event is a diffuse reflection of what is real, mediated by the interpretation of the man who writes them and who carries his set of beliefs on his back, an axiology; a man with his errors and inclinations that he keeps imprisoned by himself, always far from that 'objectivity that he could never achieve because he is indebted to his culture'. (D. Chiappe).
The aforementioned, which is known by many, puts us in crisis regarding the reception of serious fictions and this is important, positive and should invite us to be more cautious. We have already seen the scope of Fake news, of Whatsapp chains masked with seriousness, those harmful effects of what some call 'post truth'. In the case of journalism, we have seen that we talk about the version of events, not the only version. And whatever the case, its messages are still consumed in some contexts as if they were dogma. In that sense, the reader of what is written has been taught to be incredulous, to doubt, but we still have much more to learn about the system, the rules of the game, and the manipulation of the code.
As for historians, they have somewhat modified their way of expressing themselves in the face of so many mistakes and no longer speak of history as something immaculate or diaphanous, but rather they speak of historical truth. They obviously refer to what humanity has assumed as official, as true, but which will always harbor irresolvable aspects, shadows that are illuminated only by imagination and speculation.
Legal discourse, to take an example focused on criminal matters, is unmasked more frequently. We no longer talk about the truth, but rather about the plausibility of the evidence, the way in which the facts are argued for the benefit of the party.
On the other hand, literature does not suffer the same conflict, since it does not have any institutional obligation. It usually happens that the reader enters playful fictions more confident, lowering the guard of his critical observation and walking through the fable unprepared. This characteristic of literature allows a writer to sneak in and mimic thoughts, complaints, political positions, in order to launch them to the public and reveal realities that other types of texts would not dare to do, even daring to say more than journalism itself.
Wolfgang Iser, in his text The fictionalization, states that literature clearly opens 'a space of play between the manifest and latent meaning (...), what is said and what is meant can be combined in different ways.' Jorge Carrion, in Better than fiction, would mention a phrase by Hemingway that indicates something similar: 'There is always the possibility that a book of fiction sheds some light on things that were previously narrated as facts'. In this way, uncertainty is unleashed and the objectives of journalism and literature end up being linked.
Ultimately, in the face of the present, it is up to us to be less naïve about every text and develop critical thinking: put everything we have read into dialogue, including literature, and put it through the fire. Perform the exercise of intertextuality, communicate knowledge in our thinking.
Yes, it seems that I came to cast more doubt on the matter, but doubt is the key to stop stumbling so much. Well, who can guarantee that a journalistic or historical product is presented under an ethical rigor that allows us to admit its complete objectivity? It would definitely be more prudent to admit that reality will always escape being fully understood, narrated by man and that written journalism, even persevering in a professional ethic, will always work 'with the presumption of getting the reason for things and with the certainty of never finding the answer'. (D. Chiappe).
Finally, it is worth mentioning that understanding this taxonomy allows us to enjoy its mixtures, to enjoy as readers those diffuse and exciting products, the humor that says so much without saying it directly. And as writers, delve deeper into this advantage of knowing that you are working with the representation of something and launch into hybridization, into the mutual fertilization of procedures, of narrative mechanisms, of tools of inquiry, of styles, between literature, journalism, history. It is almost an obligation to launch into producing more attractive, pleasant and interesting texts. If we try at least that, beyond achieving it, we will be at peace with the reader that each one of us is when we write.