Invented characters: journalism and fiction in the First (mediatic) World War (1914-1918)

Abstract

The article starts from the perspective, elsewhere studied, that the mass media in Portugal − which has its zero year in 1865, with the foundation of Diário de Notícias, and since 1881, with the appearance of the newspaper O Século, its unstoppable expansion − transformed the Great War of 1914-1918 into the first mediatic war. The apotheosis of the war did not lack the use of fiction, in the literary sense, what the young journalist Mário de Almeida then called a «literature of war» as a «vacant field» ready to «pass the plough above», and which I designate as war fictions. From this fictional representation came a textual corpus, published in the magazine Ilustração Portuguesa (belonging to the mediatic empire of O Século), in a set that did not complete four dozen texts in a chronological arc that extended, with decreasing regularity, from 1 February 1915 to August 28, 1916. Except for one or another author looking for a place in the literary field, the initiative came from a new and specific journalistic field in statement process, but still in half walls with the literary writings. These war fictions were intended to feed all the sensationalism of war, plus the emotion that the creation of characters could credibly lend to the climate of the conflict, that is to say a greater efficacy in staging the real, as was expected by the interlocutor in a story about a Christmas in war: “Give it some literature and there’s a subject for a Christmas tale ...” Not so much for the interest of the fictional themes or narrative strategies, are the characters who, even if stereotyped and sometimes ill-defined, meet the emotions market created by the mediatic propaganda, with his example of personal determination, effort, sacrifice or moralizing glory.