On the urge of nonfiction: narrative journalism and its political and literary challenges

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the recurrent statement made by Latin American writers and journalists about the impossibility of writing fiction in oppressive contexts. I analyze two narratives, Dead girls, by Selva Almada, and The vampires of reality only kill the poor, by Eliane Brum. The stories are presented as factual narratives of intervention. My hypothesis is that if fiction is claimed to be impossible, it is also essential since narratives of this kind demand it. I first discuss the emergence and ambiguities of the nonfiction notion and propose, based on Jacques Rancière, the understanding of fiction as an intelligible structure composed through the enchainment of certain situations and actors. This idea of fiction blurs the boundaries between literature and journalism. In the narrative analysis, I demonstrate the crossings from the documental to the literary and the way in which a certain fictional awareness is textually manifested, even in the face of the alleged urgency of nonfiction.