The flight of the mysterious peacock in the imaginary of contemporary media narratives

Abstract

Cordel literature presents itself as a fertile space for the investigation of phenomena of the collective imagination (Durand, 2012), particularly of the Brazilian Northeastern people. In it, mythological foundations are updated and resignified in the contemporary media context. One example is O romance do pavão misterioso, a cordel by José Camelo de Melo Rezende (2011), which brings in its repertoire archetypal elements (Jung, 2007) that point to millennial values ​​of a mythological/universal representation. Considering the symbolism of the peacock as an object of reference, this study analyzes the primordial constituents that wove the aforementioned pamphlet and that update contemporary media, investigating: i) how does the myth-analytic process of the collective imagination and the resignifications of symbolic elements in Rezende's work occur?; ii) in what way does the narrative offer representative potentialities for the production of other media?; and also, iii) what is the meaning behind the symbolism of the peacock, as an anthropological semiotic resource, used to weave two series on the Netflix streaming platform Sagrada família and Manifest: the mystery of flight 828? Through bibliographical and documentary research with media objects, based on an anthropological semiotic approach (Rodrigues, 2011), oral tradition (Zumthor, 2000), and an imaginary (Durand, 2012) and symbolic (Jung, 2007, 2021) bias, it was inferred that, according to Rodrigues (2017), there is a process of movement/maintenance of archetypal voices that update the current media universe and feed the collective imagination, creating a link between tradition and modernity, a phenomenon that imposes itself as relevant as it dynamizes the cultural plasticity of media productions in contemporary times.