Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

Narratives of Death: Journalism and Figurations of Social MemoryBruno Souza Leal, Elton Antunes & Paulo Bernardo Vazrepresentations of events, journalism acts as a kind of public forum for reminiscences usingits own objects as artifacts of memory (Kitch, 2002).When a journalistic narrative deals with the issue of death, it involves the productionof a particular social memory. The constant news coverage of traumatic or commemorativeevents associated to death emphasizes the role of memory. Wars, tragedies, the deaths ofordinary people or of well-known personalities support the extensive journalistic work ofremembrance. All these “great events” have the power to affect the world. Haiti’s earthquake,for example, managed to break from the seriality of everyday life and made thecover of several newsmagazines, of daily newspapers and of the entire mediatic apparatusall over the world (Vaz & França, 2011). Therefore, such an event has the obvious power tobreak away from everyday life, as Quéré puts it, as well as from expectations, and is almostforcefully echoed by the media.However, is it true that the daily news coverage of ordinary people’s death also contributeto the construction of social memory? Based on Brazilian media narratives related todeath as a “daily fact of life”, this paper aims at understanding some of the relationshipsbuilt between journalism and social memory. Since it is a potentially disturbing event, deathchallenges journalistic rationality and its newsworthiness will often depend on other associatedissues such as the overcoming of loss and pain, road conditions, heroism of the policeforce and so forth. It is precisely this kind of news that explains the peculiarity of journalisticnarratives and their propensity to promote a sort of “double oblivion”.This double oblivion, which involves simultaneously a double “remembrance”, includes,on the one hand, the narrative format of such news, usually fragmented or short and encapsulatedas faits divers whose conventions and strategies tend to be imperceptible. At thislevel, oblivion characterizes the news media movement that dooms these little deaths todisappearance in its regular cycle of succeeding news and publications. On the other hand,this double oblivion also involves death and the dead that, although emerging at the textualsurface of journalism, are often apprehended and configured in a generic way. Therefore, theapparent register of the deaths or the dead is marked by indifference, and as soon as theyappear, they are relegated to forgetfulness. Therefore, as opposed to “great events”, theselittle ones seek to “make us forget” that we die, that death is incomprehensible and occursto us all, randomly.We will first characterize this double oblivion by a short reflection on the temporalrelationships in journalism, using the meta-concepts of “the space of experience” and of“the horizon of expectations”. Here, these categories will not be used to explore journalistictemporalities in depth, but as a methodological exercise to clarify the special relationshipsof news events related to “little deaths”. The next part of this paper will focus on this typeof news as well as on their specificities. The characterization of the first dimension of thisdouble oblivion, the textual dimension which is built on realism, the dominant aestheticsof narratives in today’s journalism, will be treated in part three. At the final part, we willexplore the relationships between journalism and memory regarding little deaths and theirdeads.Narratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches107