By DANIEL BRAZIL*

Commentary on Ana Rüsche's newly released book

1.

The discussion about the Anthropocene has been going on for more than two decades, and the term is still not familiar to most people. Naming an era is different from naming a new species; it requires a scientific consensus that we are still far from achieving. However, it is becoming increasingly urgent to understand the deeper meaning of the concept, which is increasingly linked to the climate changes we are experiencing. Naming things is an essential process for humanity.

Ana Rüsche, in the book Chimeras of the Now, thoroughly unravels the issue. The volume, which has the subtitle Literature, ecology and political imagination in the Anthropocene, the author maps the emergence of the word-concept, and based on the most accepted definition discusses its symbolic meaning in science and fiction literature.

Anthropocene would be the era in which human action (anthropos) caused measurable changes on the planet, whether in the soil, atmosphere or oceans, interfering in the lives of other species. Or of the species itself, since there is a tendency to consider the beginning of the era to be the arrival in the Americas, bringing diseases and weapons that exterminated more than 50 million native inhabitants and caused an environmental imbalance.

There are authors who propose other nominal references (Plantationcene, Capitalocene, Quintário), and the author explains this in a didactic way in the first part of the book. The result of post-doctoral academic research, her objective is to show how literature anticipated this discussion, through utopias and dystopias, representing human interference in nature and the emergence of chimeras and monsters that escape the control of the supposedly “dominant” species.

Ana Rüsche starts from classical thinkers, such as Plato and Thomas More, dedicates attention to Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), reaches contemporaries such as Lovelock, Ailton Krenak, Naomi Klein, Fredric Jameson and Donna Haraway, and calls upon a series of authors of so-called science fiction.

The so-called anticipatory literature often raised the issue of environmental imbalance, the destruction of other species, uncontrolled pollution and human overpopulation, and the author treats this as a symptom, a harbinger, zeitgeist, with numerous examples of cyberpunk, solarpunk and other aesthetic currents of the genre.

2.

Brazilian literature deserves attention, with emphasis on the dark You will not see any country, by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, released (and censored) during the dictatorship. From the utopian pasargadae from Manuel Bandeira, through the scientific naturalism of Euclides da Cunha, the notion of a country that was once poetically called “lost paradise” gains the perverse denotation of a lost paradise, indeed.

We can find symptomatic echoes of the environmental imbalance caused by man in the well-known work of JJ Veiga, The Hour of Ruminants, published in 1966, and even in Monteiro Lobato's curious anticipation in The Reformation of NatureOf 1939.

Obviously the author cannot have read all contemporary fiction written in Brazil, but we can certainly establish connections with recent works such as The Sound of the Jaguar's Roar, by Micheliny Verunschk, which starts from the scientific expedition of Spix and Martius through Brazil in 1817/1820, or from the book of short stories We, the blind, by Sandra Godinho, where the narrative thread is guided by a tree in the Amazon, in a more fabulist style.

the awardee The Imperfect Poem, by Fernando Fernandez, a professor at UFRJ, can also be considered a work that revolves around these themes, and which was even turned into a film, despite not being fiction. The subtitle, Chronicles of Biology, Nature Conservation and its Heroes, is self-explanatory. The author also wrote The Full-Belly Mastodons, and his chronicles can be read as short essays.

Fernando Fernandez defends the hypothesis that the large vertebrates of the end of the Quaternary (mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed tigers, glyptodonts, among others) did not become extinct due to climate change, but due to human action, which could be a new milestone for our Anthropocene.

American scientist, son of immigrants, Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, raises another frightening possibility: that several empires and civilizations of Antiquity did not disappear because of wars or internal conflicts, but because they did not know how to face their environmental problems. An idea that profoundly alters our concept of History, to say the least.

While science discusses the issue, fictional literature continues to be an inexhaustible field of speculation and hypotheses. As Ana Rüsche says in the opening of the work, “Giving shape to ideas and portraying the world are the core of literary work. (…) Naming is building a world, a concept, a way of understanding things, even if they depend on materiality to actually happen.”

From this, it proposes questions that stimulate readings and re-readings, and make the need for fiction as an element for understanding the world we live in even more urgent, before it is destroyed.

* Daniel Brazil is a writer, author of the novel suit of kings (Penalux), screenwriter and TV director, music and literary critic.

Reference

Anna Rüsche. Chimeras of the now: literature, ecology and political imagination in the Anthropocene. New York, New York, 2025, 150 pages.https://amzn.to/4jA2alH]

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE