When the Exception Is the Rule

Cervantes’s Don Quixote is commonly accorded a foundational role in the history of the novel. Yet this inaugural gesture casts a paradoxical shadow on subsequent novels, inasmuch as it rebukes as aberrant the pleasure of indulging in novel-reading. Don Quixote brands later novels as quixotic in their generic hybridity, which can be traced to Don Quixote itself. It both is and is not a novel, setting the precedent for the novel as a genre endlessly in quest of exceptions to itself as genre—or, in the commercial context in which it has thrived, as generic. This chapter consolidates a torrent of pronouncements and observations on Don Quixote by scholars and writers which, taken collectively, reveal a kind of choral unanimity in the bewitchment to which they attest.