ABSTRACT:
This article examines Harold Bloom's work on Portuguese and Catalan literature (especially his promotion of José Saramago) and his reception in Portugal and Catalonia.
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In 1986, José Saramago - the Portuguese Nobel laureate whom the American critic Harold
Bloom believes is the greatest living novelist - wrote 'A Jangada de Pedra' ('The Stone Raft'),
a magic-realist fiction in which the Iberian peninsula breaks away from Europe and drifts out
into the Atlantic, until it halts at a location off the Azores, halfway to North America. More
recently, the Yale Professor of Humanities and author of 'The Western Canon' and
'Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human' has paid significant literary visits to the Iberian
peninsula - Portugal in May 2001, Barcelona in May 2002 - and has both times been
welcomed by a reception considerably warmer than he would be likely to find in his home
country, where the antagonisms persisting between him and much of the university
establishment are notorious. Indeed, Bloom's trajectory in Portugal and Catalonia conjures up
images of the septuagenarian critic standing on the 'stone raft', a lone mariner facing the
hostile sea-spray.
**
