The History in Review. José Saramago and O Conto Da Ilha Desconhecida

Abstract

The relationship between fiction and history in José Saramago’s literature is recognized. Many of his novels deal with the plot with materials collected in Portuguese historiography. But this is not only observed in the so-called historical novel and can be investigated in other works by him, such as O conto da ilha desconhecida. This text finds its materiality in the historiographical fiction model and this is observed when we approach some of its contextual elements. EXPO’98, the event for which the story was written, celebrated the relevance of the discoveries of the last decades of the 15th century, culminating with the Great Navigations, while its narrative is, in short, a man’s search for a boat to discover an unknown island. Based on the consolidated history-fiction mark in Saramago’s literary production, we seek to read this literary text, highlighting similarities and dissimilarities between the two fields in order to observe other possible traits in the borders of the great metaphor that it contains and how the narrator takes the usual marks of history subverts them and turns them into fiction.