‘Un hilo tenue de azares triviales’: Quixotic echoes and adaptive imitation in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad

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.