From the Earth’s scream to the mountain’s message: listening and inhabiting the end of the world

Abstract

The paper explores two modern fictional texts, When the Earth Screamed, by Conan Doyle (1928), and O recado do morro, by Guimarães Rosa (1956), comparing two fictional regimes related to a geological listening: the scream and the message (recado). In Doyle’s story, the Earth—treated as a female organism and violently pierced by a modern scientist—releases a dreadful and threatening scream that denounces an extractivist hubris. In Rosa’s work, the Morro da Garça (Heron Mountain) whispers an open-ended message that engenders a becoming regime: gradual transformations, multiple translations and betrayals, creating bonds. Unlike the traumatic scream, the recado is polyphonic; it generates an immanent relation with the land and its living beings. This reflection engages with pressing concerns in contemporary thought, both European and Brazilian, which seeks new ways of grounding and reinhabiting a world threatened by the climate crisis and its implications.