"Once but no longer the prow of Europe": National Identity and Portuguese Destiny in José Saramago's "The Stone Raft"
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: It seems paradoxical when a self-professed Marxist produces novels evincing deep scepticism about the viability of the "scientific" Marxist project of materialist historical analysis.1 Jose Saramago and his fiction have presented such a paradox since Baltasar and Blimunda (.Memorial do Convento , 1982), a paradox seemingly most acute in The Stone Raft (A Jangada de Pedra , 1986).Saramago's earlier novels merely questioned the accessibility of objective truth about the past.Yet the tale of an Iberian Peninsula sailing away from Europe not only denies the reader any explanation of the bizarre occurrences that it relates, but also seems to refute the possibility even of establishing a reliable approximation of the truth about the past.Moreover, the book's publication in the year of the Portuguese and Spanish states' commitment to membership of the EEC led many critics to interpret the forces that propel the fictional Iberia away from Europe as promoting not socialist internationalism but a form of separatist Iberian nationalism.Such an interpretation, however, fails to take account of two aspects of the text: first, its championing of the praxis of socialist revolution, and second, the full range of its postmodernist questioning of the nature of knowledge and historiography.While doubt is cast on the foundations of Marxist revolutionary theory, there are also clear indications at the novel's end that abandoning Europe is not in itself a solution to Spain's and Portugal's problems.This study reads The Stone Raft as a text that, while conducting a postmodernist critique of the historiographical premises of Marxist revolutionary theory, simultaneously attempts to redirect the aims and values of Portuguese society away from the construction of a single European free trade zone and towards the construction of an egalitarian socialist society.
DOI: 10.62791/5vxjxf22
Author: Mark J. Sabine
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2783755269