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The literary chronicle is a contemporary narrative genre, the product of the rapprochement between journalism and literature, in which the reader is offered real episodes (or imaginary, but framed in real contexts) narrated through literary tools and resources.
Literary chronicle is usually considered as a difficult genre to define, which mixes fiction and reality, points of view and research data at will, with the aim of offering the reader a very close reconstruction of the lived experience by the author.
In this sense, the Mexican chronicler Juan Villoro defines it as "the platypus of prose", since it has, like the animal, characteristics of different species.
- It can help you: Short Chronicle
Characteristics of the literary chronicle
Although it is complex to fix the characteristics of such a diverse genre, the chronicle is often thought of as a simple narrative, with a strong personal tone, in which a historical or chronological context is offered as a framework for the events narrated.
Unlike the journalistic or journalistic-literary chronicle, in which fidelity to the true facts is taken care of, the literary chronicle provides subjective descriptions that allow transmitting their personal perceptions.
In some cases, as in A Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez or in Martian Chronicles from Ray Bradbury, this context serves rather as an excuse to explore entirely fictional events. Other approaches, such as those of Gay Talese or the Ukrainian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Aleksievich, pursue a more journalistic effect, clinging to the lives of real characters or verifiable events in history.
- See also: Literary text
Example of a literary chronicle
"A visit to the city of Cortázar" by Miguel Ángel Perrura
After reading so much Cortázar, Buenos Aires becomes known. Or at least a kind of Buenos Aires: French-style, cafes, bookstores and passages, with all the magic that this Argentine author printed on him from exile.
And it is that Cortázar opted for French nationality in 1981, as a protest against the military dictatorship that ravaged his country, from which he had left, at odds with Peronism, decades before. Arguably, stripped of the royal presence of his city, the author of Hopscotch He proceeded precisely to create his own city, based on memory, longing and reading. This is why its characters never spoke like contemporary Buenos Aires, to which it returned in 1983 when democracy returned, but rather like that remote Buenos Aires that it had left behind when young.
For a Cortázar reader like me, Spanish by birth, Buenos Aires had that magical and paradoxical aura of real life. Not so, of course, or not exactly so. The Argentine capital is, certainly, a charming city, of cafes and passages, of bookstores and marquees.
I saw it when I first stepped on it in 2016. I was going on a very short vacation, for just three days, but I had a secret mission inside of me: to rebuild the city of Cortázar as I walked it. I wanted to step on the same places as the cronopio, I wanted to drink the same coffees that he took and look at the street with his eyes, guiding me through his marvelous work. But of course, not everything turns out as one would expect.
The traffic between the airport and the city was gloomy, at midnight, despite the lights everywhere. From the plane he had seen the city as an altarpiece of light, a glowing grid that broke into the vast blackness of the Pampas. I could have slept most of the way, victim of the jet lagIf it weren't because I was running the risk of waking up, like the protagonist of "The night face up" somewhere else, and missing my arrival in the South American capital.
I got out of the taxi at two in the morning. The hotel, located in Callao and Santa Fe, looked quiet but crowded, as if no one knew despite the time that he was supposed to sleep. A hallucinated city, insomniac, very in tune with Cortazarian work, lavish in sleepless nights. The architecture around me seemed ripped from the Europe I had left at home twelve hours ago. I went into the hotel and got ready to sleep.
The first day
I woke up to the noise of the traffic at ten in the morning. I had lost my first rays of sunshine and had to hurry if I wanted to take advantage of the dim winter days. My rigorous itinerary included the Ouro Preto café, where they say that Cortázar once received a bouquet of flowers - I don't know which ones - after he participated in a carambola in a demonstration. It is a beautiful story contained in Cortázar by Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires by Cortázar by Diego Tomasi.
He also wanted to visit the north bookstore, where they used to leave packages for him, since the owner was a personal friend of the writer. Instead, I went out to find a breakfast among the tidal wave of coffees with croissants and sweets that the Buenos Aires pastry shop consists of. In the end, after walking and choosing for more than an hour, I decided to have an early lunch, to have energy and walk. I found a Peruvian restaurant, true gastronomic pearls in the city that nobody or few speak of, probably because it is a foreign element. And everyone knows how resistant Argentines are to the outside.
The next thing was to buy the SUBE and a T Guide, city map, and spend more than an hour deciphering it, before I gave up and took a taxi. Buenos Aires is a perfectly squared maze, I was not surprised that at any turn of the corner I could stumble upon the tall and lanky figure of the cronopio, going or coming on some secret and impossible mission, like his Fantomas.
I finally got to know the bookstore and I got to know the cafe. I was surprised by the absence of plates in his name or of cardboard figures that reproduced it. I can say that I spent a good time in each place, drinking coffee and checking news, and I never stopped feeling their absence as a fellow ghost. Where are you, Cortázar, I can't see you?
The second day
A good night's sleep and a few hours of consulting on the Internet made the picture much clearer for me. Plaza Cortázar emerged as a vague reference point, as much as Café Cortázar, full of photographs and famous phrases from his novels. There I did find Cortázar, one recently carved into the local imagination, so lavish in Borges, Storni or Gardel. Why isn't there more of Cortázar, I wondered, as I wandered behind his mysterious clues? Where were the statues and the streets with his name, the museums dedicated to his memory, his somewhat ridiculous wax statue in the Café Tortoni near the Plaza de Mayo?
The third day
After a prominent, meat-eating lunch and consulting with several taxi drivers, I understood: I was looking for Cortázar in the wrong place. The Buenos Aires of the cronopio was not that, but the one that I had daydreamed of and that was written in the various books in my suitcase. There was the city he was chasing, like sleepwalkers, at noon.
And when I understood that, suddenly, I knew that I could start back.
- It can help you: Report
