Resumen de Journalism in the works of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy L. Sayers: newspaper-men, sleuths and con-artists
Ever since Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the authors of literary works aiming at increased credibility and disguising the true nature of their work often masqueraded as ‘editors’ of truthful stories or even as ‘journalists’, a sleight of hand which is based on the ‘fact’ vs ‘fiction’ (or ‘journalism’ vs ‘literature’) duality: the factual nature of ‘real stories’ would, in those cases, represent a safeguard against accusations of frivolity, fancifulness or downright lying to the readers, all of them features commonly to be found in ‘mere novels’.
Moving beyond this strict and judgemental divide, mixed forms of literature that entwined fact and fiction, (i.e. literary and journalistic methods) were being experimented with and eventually became widespread (Underwood 2008). Both journalism and literature are exercises in writing and they share a number of characteristics, which means that the thin frontiers between fact and fiction were often crossed. The concepts of ‘journalism’ and ‘novel’ were also shifting at Defoe’s time. The designation of ‘journalist-writer’ could, in fact, apply to many literary figures of that time, since the simultaneous production of literary works and writing of news for a number of periodicals and newssheets on a variegated number of themes was common practice. ‘Novels’ were still to be defined as a separate genre, and at Defoe’s time many of them presented realistic worldviews and fact-based stories which guaranteed the desired credibility to literary works, although they retained ‘artistic’ value due to the literary artifices and devices used to organise the narrative and develop the plot.
This symbiotic (and fruitful) relationship between journalism and literature is also visible at a more superficial level in works that present them selves as pure literary works. It is the purpose of this paper to look into three different forms of relationship between these two areas in three novels published in the early decades of the 20th century: P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith, Journalist (1915) and Money for Nothing (1928), and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase (1932). In all these works, references to journalism and the inclusion of newspaper people in the plot are important catalysts for action. By using these three novels as the corpus for this work, three possibilities of intersection will be explored: (1) journalism as the theme of the literary work itself; (2) journalism and its sensationalist practices as plot enhancers and character-defining features; (3) exploration of journalistic paralinguis tic features (in this case, letters to the editor) as an added source of humour.
