A Typology of Islands Part 4 - The Moving Island

The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago

If the island signifies death it does so by sinking one set of meanings and allowing another to float to the surface. Down into the depths go the island as a retreat, a place of renewal, the location of a life properly lived. 

Bobbing to surface come the stinking corpses of the island as the end of hope, the island as solipsism, selfishness and loneliness.

These islands are dead ends. They signify the end of curiosity, the stifling of growth, the closing off of the future, the stagnation of imagination and the tyranny of ignorance and cowardice; in one way or another the islands I have already pointed to share these features:

The tortured insanity of Shutter Island. The atavistic brutality of The Wicker Man. The heartbreaking loneliness of Szymborska’s “Utopia”. The scandalously unheroic stasis enjoyed/endured by Odysseus on Calypso’s Island in The Odyssey. The commodification of the Aeolian Islands in Caro Diario. The scientific chauvinism of Jurassic Park.  The erasure of the native in Robinson Crusoe.  The arrogance of a new empire spreading its acquisitive and brutal influence from Manhattan in King Kong.

Of course, in all of this I’m really talking about people, not islands. I can’t really blame the islands themselves, can I? I mean if islands could speak they’d say that they’re not responsible for the vices and stupidity, the violence, greed and vanity of human beings.

Islands can’t speak but sometimes they move.

Moving islands are interesting because they refuse stasis. They open up the future, they demand curiosity, they stimulate growth and demand that their inhabitants confront their ignorance; they force the islanders to look out, to question, to open their eyes, hearts and minds.

A moving island is a geographical, geological, semantic, logical and existential challenge. Unlike the islands I mention above it is a living island.   

The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago is set on such an island.

Saramago’s novel is about the sudden detachment of the Iberian Peninsula from mainland Europe and its journey westward, northward and finally, southward while it rotates on its own axis.

The plot of the novel winds its way across Spain and Portugal following the picaresque journey of five friends, 2 horses and a dog. Each one of these people is specially connected in some mysterious way to the sudden mobility of Iberia.

   

The uncertainty generated by this geographical catastrophe liberates the characters. If a whole landmass can just up and move away into the ocean, nothing is certain anymore. How can normal life go in under  these circumstances?

The movement of the peninsula sets off a double  reaction – centrifugal and centripetal  - that tears each of the five main characters away from the duties and adhesions of their normal working and domestic lives and  towards one another. They find one another and form a new, more powerful, more meaningful  ‘family’.  

As a family, they set out on a perpetual journey traversing Iberia with abandon and utter freedom:

“In times like these you rarely find people where you would expect to find them” (271)

There is no real aim to their journey.

They go to Mediterranean coast to see Gibraltar pass but leave before it does so.

They eventually get to the cliff where the Pyrenees split in two but there is not much to see there.

Of course, remembering Saramago’s short story The Unknown Island we know that this state of aimless, open minded wandering is, for this author. a much preferable way of life than what is usually on offer when the ground doesn't move so radically beneath our feet.

The author’s communism bleeds into the narrative at points: the population of the Algarve decides to seize control of luxury hotels which had been vacated by tourists fleeing the ‘disaster’. Their own homes were nowhere nearly as well appointed as these exclusive accomodations.

There are frequent references to the geopolitical calculations of the Americans, the Russians and Mainland Europe but really, the main focus of this novel is on the lives, and most particularly the love lives of the five main characters.

Although the five main characters remain together as they travel the roads of Spain and Portugal under a horse – drawn carriage, the two younger men and women pair off and fall in love, leaving for much of the time, the older man, Pedro Orce,  in the company of their dog, Constant.

Towards the end of the novel both women become pregnant at the very same time.

However, because both women had – out of pity - slept with the older man the paternity of these children is uncertain.  

These pregnancies and their uncertainty point to the philosophical core of the novel.

For Saramago, pregnancy is both symbol and metonymy of life and freedom. Maternity is therefore a vehicle for the novelist’s vision of a life well lived.

It is tempting to reduce this book this metaphor. This is especially because, it is, in my opinion, overlong and excessively digressive and ultimately tends to reduce itself in just this way by equating the movement of the island/peninsula with the movement of a child as it is about to be born:

“…the peninsula is a child conceived on a journey and now finds itself revolving in the sea as it waits to be born in its watery tomb….”

Pregnancy then becomes widespread! Every woman in Iberia becomes pregnant at the same time:

“…why should we be astonished that the wombs of women should be swollen, perhaps the great stone falling southward fertilized them…”

Just as amongst the five characters in the novel’s central ‘family’ paternity is uncertain:

“…how do we know if these new creatures are really the daughters of men rather than the offspring of that gigantic prow, that pushes the waves before it, penetrating them amid the murmuring waters, the blowing and the sighing of winds ” (283)

Saramago’s  wandering island celebrates motherhood and denies the proprietorial claims of paternity. 

It is a place that gives birth but it is not a place that allows that offspring, that new life, those births to be claimed, possessed, controlled:

“One of the most interesting consequences of that inspired comparison [island equals child being born] was the resurgence of the maternal spirit, of maternal influence….The women undoubtedly triumphed. Their genital organs, if you’ll pardon the crude anatomical reference finally became the expression, at once reduced and enlarged of the expulsive mechanism of the universe….” (281-2)

So, in summary, this moving island shakes things up so that maternity is celebrated as the highest value. 

I suppose feminists would have field day with these ideas. Is this book a novel length rephrasing of the Freudian cliché “anatomy is destiny”? 

Is Saramago wrenching Iberia out into the Atlantic to found a matriarchy or an enormous maternity ward?

I suppose that would be a question for the inhabitants of a country where every single woman of child bearing age suddenly became pregnant simultaneously. Would anything change? Clearly the arrival of tens of millions of children all more or less on the same day would demand a total and utter rethinking of how society is organised.

But again: matriarchy or maternity ward?  Would such a mass pregnancy result in a transformation  of how power is held and wielded, would it give women more power in politics, in education, in the workplace or would it send them back to the dark ages of perpetual child rearing and exclusion from public life?

Saramago leaves this question open - obviously if the only thing that life has to offer women is childrearing then this island has been moving around to no other end than to become a place as deathly as the static islands that I mentioned in previous posts signifying 'the end of curiosity, the stifling of growth, the closing off of the future, the stagnation of imagination and the tyranny of ignorance'.

At the same time Saramago raises the question of exactly what value is to be placed on maternity. 

Just because he celebrates it does not mean that he is recommending that as the sum total of all that woman can aspire to. 

At the same time, what is more overlooked and taken for granted than the unpaid (slave) labours of motherhood? 

Any politics that seeks to widen the range of possibilities for women by adding to the historical erasure of motherhood is just as misogynistic as the structures, practices and discourses it opposes.