ABSTRACT
While everyone on Marianne Wiggins’ island has heard and read the story of Robinson Crusoe, no one in Victoria Slavuski’s Argentinean novel, Música para olvidar una isla (1995), has actually read the novel. Like many contemporary readers; however, they are all familiar with the basic plot. Moreover, Slavuski’s characters live or vacation on Robinson Crusoe’s “real” island off the coast of Chile and are familiar enough with the history of the novel to debate amongst themselves the details of Defoe’s account versus histories of Alexander Selkirk’s abandonment on this particular island. Since the nineteenth century, the idea of that Defoe was influenced by the journal of a famous castaway, Alexander Selkirk, even led to speculation that Defoe had plagiarized or stolen Selkirk’s original manuscript.1 These debates, alongside the making of a would-be documentary of the island, multiple reinventions of the island’s name, and magical grottoes which reveal different aspects of the island’s past to different observers, reveal Música’s deep investments in the concept of revision, translation, authenticity, and authority. Slavuski’s narrative techniques repeatedly emphasize the problem of forgetting and what it means to reconstruct history in the face of political oppression. Slavuski’s novel performs a transnational dissent; in restoring the multiple histories of Crusoe’s island, she rewrites the composition of the island into a musical score that will allow us to forget the actual island.
