Naus que deslocam: semelhanças, memórias e caminhos em a jangada de pedra, de José Saramago

Abstract

The aim of this research is to propose an interpretation of José Saramago's novel The Stone Raft, articulating a comparative analysis with the figure of the Ship of Fools, which appears in Foucault's text on the History of Madness. It also aims to broaden this comparative analysis by looking at the figure of the Iberian Peninsula allegorised as a ship and noting how the narrative stirs up the Portuguese and Spanish imaginary about sailing, the sea and travel. To do this, the research seeks to understand the process of composing such an allegory in the narrative around the theme of travelling. Thus, the work aims to interpret the figure of the raft as an allusion, an allegory of other images of boats from a European and Iberian literary and artistic past. On the one hand, we bring The Stone Raft closer to the Ship of Fools, the ship of exclusion present in the centre of the European continent. On the other hand, we articulate this approximation between the raft and navigations with debates on Lusitanian culture and imagery, made by Eduardo Lourenço (1994, 1997, 1999, 2001) and present in founding literary works that reflect on Portugal's navigational mythology, from Camões to Fernando Pessoa (2022). After this comparative analysis, the research shifts to thinking about the space of the stone raft in the midst of Africa and the Americas as an alternative space that Saramago sought for the Iberian Peninsula based on another Foucauldian concept, that of heterotopias. Regarding the theoretical framework used to understand the allegorical procedure in Saramago's work, some of the author's own texts were collated, as well as a range of critical references on his work and on the concepts of allegory, such as Bernini (1998), Penha (2007), Lopondo (1998), Hansen (2006), Kothe (1986), Cerdeira (2000)