Errant Text: Sefarad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina

Sefarad (Muñoz Molina 2001) forms part of an emerging strand of what could be termed errant writing, together with one or two other narratives of a similar nature, such as Javier Marı́as’s Negra espalda del tiempo (1998), the first of this kind to be published in Spain in recent years. What I understand by ‘errant’ is, in essence, not distinct from the dictionary definitions: both wandering or travelling and straying or deviating from the (supposed) right course or accepted standards (in these two definitions is reflected the twofold etymological origin of the word: the Latin iter, journey, and errare, to err). So, I take the adjective ‘errant’, applied to writing, as approximately synonymous with ‘digressive’ in a sense broader than the latter’s strictly rhetorical dimension. More specifically, Sefarad is a deviant narrative: it is an arabesque that weaves together biographical, autobiographical, and travel writing, memoir and fiction, stories and fragments of lives and journeys into an ultimately interconnected tapestry. This is achieved in great part through a highly digressive style; the intricate, imaginative, and subtly interconnected fabric is the result of digressive narrative. Its digressiveness, however, is not limited to style. Four principal, interrelated and overlapping levels of errancy can be discerned: (a) the digressive style, (b) the generic errancy, (c) the errant processes of the creative imagination (enacted, thematized, and theorized in the narrative), and (d) the ‘plotlessness’, errant protagonists, and myriad storylines. Sefarad is thus a ‘travelling text’ in more ways than one, involving longdistance mental as well as actual travel that regularly produces vertigo in the mind of the narrator(s), as well as in that of the readers. It is this textual travel, i.e. the four main associated levels of errancy, that I will discuss in more detail in the present essay.