On the roads of this Earth

(re)figurations of mobility in José Saramago’s The Stone Raft

Abstract

The travelling characters in José Saramago’s The Stone Raft (1986) embark on a journey through the Iberian Peninsula, just set loose from the remaining Europe. Neither the characters nor the narrator can dissociate the mobility that they practice from the imaginary that is shaped by previous practices and representations of mobility, portrayed in literary genres with an acknowledged Iberian tradition, such as the chivalric romance or the report of shipwreck. Thus, the characters are positioned in a long lineage of figures of mobility, of whom they constitute a refiguration. This circumstance, however, does not prevent the journey depicted in the novel – as well as, therefore, the characters that take part in it – from acquiring distinctive traits and better identifying with the one that is usually represented in a more recent genre, indebted to those other categories, whose presence (also) in Portuguese literature needs to be mapped: the road novel.