Creating Anew, Again: Deserted Islands and Textual Inhabitations in Bernardo Atxaga'sObabakoak

Abstract

Desert islands haunt the Western imagination: textually, cinematically and philosophically, in critical thinking and in reality television, artists, writers and filmmakers seek to inhabit the terra incognita of the empty isle. In these cultural productions, the island takes many guises: it can be a place where rules no longer apply, where Shakespeare’s Prospero brings down magical storms and Golding’s schoolboys descend into savagery; or it can be a place where rules are re-imposed, where Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe colonizes and cultivates the island around him in order to replicate the social subsystem he inhabited prior to his shipwreck. Defoe’s 1719 novel is undoubtedly the most famous Western fiction of desert island life and, just as Crusoe himself bestrides his island, so Defoe’s text bestrides twentieth-century cultural productions of, and about, desert islands, inspiring multiple variants, parodies, and ekphratic translations. In fiction, Michel Tournier’s phenomenological rewriting of the Crusoe story in his 1967 Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday, or, The Other Island) converts the island from passive recipient of Crusoe’s colonization into a life force in its own right. Concrete Island, J. G. Ballard’s 1974 retelling of the story, moves his castaway to a traffic island beneath three motorways near London, morphing Crusoe’s deserted sea into a roaring mass of transportation which proves no less alienating to the protagonist. In cinema, Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 film Cast Away updates the Crusoe story to 1995, replacing Defoe’s sailor protagonist with a Fed-ex employee, and Man Friday with a Wilson Sporting Goods volleyball. The desert island has also proved inspiring