Literature for a non-dystopian digital future: A Brazilian example

Abstract

The end of the 20th century introduced the digital into our lives quickly and unequivocally. In just three decades, the personal computer, the internet and the mobile phone, at first perceived as technical media, gave rise to qualified media (ELLESTRÖM, 2017; 2020) without which it is no longer possible to live. The presence of these media affects our manner of living and all our affections, changing the way we feel about the others and the way we feel concerned with environment. Within the perspective of these considerations, this work aims to reflect on the role of digital technologies for a future whose roots are found in a present of identity questions (such as alterity) and a growing environmental crisis. Bearing in mind the critical reading proposed by Martin Puchner in Literature for a Changing Planet (2022), the work undertakes this reflection by analysing the novel O som do rugido da onça (The Sound of the Jaguar's Roar), by the Brazilian writer Micheliny Verunschk (2021). In this novel, digital communication plays a fundamental role, in connecting the present of an acculturated indigenous character, immersed in an urban reality, to the historical past of colonization, in which German expeditioners took two children as souvenirs or “samples” of Brazilian nature, along with plants and animals of various kinds. Technology, thus encompassing everything from the galleon to the smartphone in the novel, propitiates discoveries, adventures, feelings and questions about the future of both the indigenous protagonist and the civilizing ideal that has appeased her culture and dominated the planet. In contrast to predominantly dystopian readings of the contemporary world or the so-called “climate fiction” (ANDERSEN, 2019), as well as ecocriticism (BRUHN, 2021), this work sees in Verunschk’s novel a glimpse of a possible future world in which current digital communication does not appear as a villain to the natural world but articulates affections that enable a new relationship with it.