Errant Text: Sefarad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina

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Notes

[1] Indeed, Sefarad is indebted to Negra espalda del tiempo in more ways than one, although this debt is not acknowledged by Muñoz Molina.

[2] All subsequent references are to this edition of Sefarad, unless otherwise indicated.

[3] Sefarad is made up of 17 unnumbered and interrelated chapters or narratives, although the contents page of the first edition by Alfaguara lists only 16, omitting the section entitled ‘Narva’ (pp. 465–493). This has been corrected in the Suma de Letras edition (Muñoz Molina 2002).

[4] Curiously, in the subsequent edition by Suma de Letras and without any explanation, this chapter has been renamed ‘Valdemún’ (Muñoz Molina 2002).

[5] For a summary of these and the other main features of the creative imagination see Grohmann (2002, pp. 90–93).

[6] The accounts of the creative imagination I have based my survey on are the following: Aristotle (1965), Armstrong (1946), Benet (1973), Chapman (1973), Ehrenzweig (1967), Falk (1971), Freud (1976), Furlong (1961), Gardner (1982), Jung (1997), Kant (1924), Kerrane (1971), Kundera (1988), Lamarque (1996), Leavis (1950), Longinus (1965), Ribot (1906), Richards (1962), Riddell (1971), Schiller (1962), Starobinski (1970), Stevens (1942), Wellek and Warren (1956), Wilbanks (1968), and Wilson (1983).

[7] ‘Y si un lector se preguntara qué diablos se le está contando o hacia dónde se encamina este texto, sólo cabría contestar, me temo, que se limita a recorrer su trayecto y se encamina hacia su final por tanto, lo mismo, por lo demás, que cuanto atraviesa o se da en el mundo’ (Marías 1998, p. 348).

[8] Many of the protagonists are fleeing Jews or Jews on trains to concentration camps. Jewishness becomes a potentially universal characteristic, because, like Hans Meyer/Jean Améry who ‘comprendió que era judío … porque otros decretaron que lo era’ (p. 457), you too can discover that ‘aunque no lo parezcas ni lo hayas pensado ni deseado nunca eres un judío’ (p. 459).

[9] This idea is strongly reminiscent of the ‘great chain of being’ that Lovejoy traced back to Aristotle (Lovejoy 1966; see also Grohmann 2002, pp. 268–270 for a brief survey of this idea).