‘Un hilo tenue de azares triviales’: Quixotic Echoes and Adaptive Imitation in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad

ABSTRACT

This article considers the significance of allusions to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–1615) in Sefarad (2001) by Antonio Muñoz Molina. Understanding Cervantes’s novel as a key instance of adaptive imitation, it argues that the narrator of Sefarad also relies on quixotic echoes and narrative patterns reminiscent of Cervantes’s novel in the construction of his narrative. The narrator’s allusions thereby reflect the aesthetic and narratorial practices which he employs in piecing together imagined memories and testimonies of the ravages of twentieth-century European history. Drawing on and extending previous analyses of the continuum of adaptive imitation that exists between the two writers, this article suggests that the echoes of Cervantes’s masterpiece in Sefarad encapsulate and complicate the ambiguities, both aesthetic and ethical, of Muñoz Molina’s narrative. By indicating metaphorical comparisons between both texts, this article reveals heretofore underexplored elements of the aesthetics and the narrative stakes of Muñoz Molina’s novel. To the extent that quixotic echoes of adaptive imitation between these two literary works offer a mirror of textual composition, they also reflect constitutive tensions in Sefarad concerning the tapestry of traumatic experiences reimagined and woven together across the novel.

KEYWORDS:

• Miguel de Cervantes
• Antonio Muñoz Molina
• adaptive imitation
• ambiguity
• metaphor

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Duncan Wheeler, as well as the anonymous readers, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For further discussion of Sefarad alongside the novels Dora Bruder (1997) by Patrick Modiano and Austerlitz (2001) by W. G. Sebald, see Ellison (2022).

2. References to Sefarad will be cited hereafter in brackets in the main body of the text as S followed by page numbers. These correspond to the 2013 critical edition of the novel referenced below.

3. As a former soldier, a prisoner of war, and then a tax inspector, Cervantes was not an exile himself per se, yet throughout his life he was something of a wanderer (and not always by choice).

4. See also Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells (2011).

5. As O’Donoghue points out, accusations of ‘appropriation of the biographies of Holocaust victims for the purposes of fiction’ were levelled by numerous critics (O’Donoghue 2016, 332).

6. For discussion of Don Quixote as both a telling and a retelling of historical transition in the master narrative of early-modern Europe from feudalism to capitalism, see Quint, David. 2003. Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

7. For further discussion of this, see Cascardi (2002); Williamson, (2012, 20–21); and Gracia (2016, 43).

8. Muñoz Molina’s liberal narratorial range is not unlike Cervantes’s treatment of the Sancho Panza’s friend the Morisco shopkeeper Ricote in Don Quixote, a sympathetic figure who at times both critiques and endorses the expulsion of the Moors from Spanish territories in 1609. See also Robbins (2022, 200–203).

9. As Roberto González Echevarría notes, since the ‘-ote’ ending in Spanish denotes a grotesque version of whichever noun it is appended to, ‘Quijote […] was meant to sound abasing and ridiculous, particularly when paired with don’ (Echevarría 2015, 7)

10. Valdivia later elaborates this idea of a ‘pacto ficcional’, suggesting that Muñoz Molina follows a similar principle to Cervantes in constructing his narrative perspective: ‘De la misma manera que Cervantes en la literatura o Velázquez en la pintura tienen una presencia más o menos evidente o velada en sus propias obras, según los casos, aquí Muñoz Molina participa de un procedimiento ficcional equivalente y más sutil, pues ni siquiera acompaña su nombre a estas experiencias narradas aquí sobre la vida de un escritor’ (S, 705, n. 933).

11. See, most recently, for example, Salmon Rushdie’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel Quichotte, which reimagines the story of Don Quixote as Indian American man who travels across the United States in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he is obsessed. Rushdie’s novel thus suggests that daytime television is to twenty-first-century American society what chivalric romance novels were to Golden Age Spain. See Rushdie (2019).

12. The imagery of threads here also recalls other artistic media and their capacity for duality and reinvention in chapters XXV and XXVI of the second part of Cervantes’s novel, which takes place in an inn where Ginés de Pasamonte’s puppet show performs the story of a knight who sets off to rescue his wife from foreign lands. Having been freed from a chain gang by Quixote in the novel’s first volume, Pasamonte has reinvented himself as the pupeteer Maese Pedro, another imitator, a teller of tales, in order to avoid recapture. Pasamonte’s life, as Robbins notes, is one of narrative and performance, of truth and imitation, like that of Don Quixote himself. See Robbins (2022, 161–162) and de Moya and Valenzuela (2016).

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Ian Ellison

Ian Ellison is currently a Postdoctoral Stipendiary Researcher at the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Leeds and was previously a DAAD PRIME Postdoctoral Fellow at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and the University of Kent. His first book Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.