A revolução da Rainha Vermelha: a representação revolucionária do período pós-soviético em Pequeno irmão e O simpatizante

Abstract

After the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the West entered a period known as the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992). This period is characterized by the hegemony of liberal democracy, the institutionalization of the left and the discrediting of revolutionary politics. Despite this ideological stagnation, revolutions continued to be a theme explored in fiction. Taking into account the lack of prospects for overcoming capitalism and liberal democracy, how do these works of fiction represent the revolution? This dissertation analyzes and questions revolutionary representation in two novels from the post-Soviet period, Little Brother (2008), by Canadian writer and journalist Cory Doctorow, and The Sympathizer (2015), by Vietnamese writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. The first deals with hacktivism as a form of resistance to the PATRIOT Act of 2001, and the second deals with the revolution and the Vietnam War in the 20th century. Given that these works are products of the culture industry, it is to be expected that the representation will be ideologically conformist or reactionary for the reader. We investigated the relationship between the narrator and the narrative point of view on the political and social events described, based on the reflections of Benjamin (1992), Iser (1996), Adorno and Horkheimer (2006), Arantes (2015), Fisher (2009) and Žižek (2015). Thus, we note that Little Brotheris a conformist representation when it explicitly proposes a revolution for a liberal democracy, because the reader is not challenged politically in any way beyond the parameters that are already hegemonic in his daily life. It is to be expected that representations of this kind would portray the transition from an authoritarian government – such as a monarchy, back to a period in which the bourgeoisie was revolutionary, or a generic dictatorship – to liberal democracy, thus exposed as a product of a revolution. The Sympathizer, on the other hand, is a reactionary representation that must create a narrative that opposes the revolution, showing its results as undesirable