When the Exception Is the Rule: Don Quixote as Incitement to Literature

Abstract

LIKE ALL CLASSICS, Don Quixote has certain power to incite terminological derangements: perspectivism for Leo Spitzer, extraspection for Americo Castro (28), triangular desire for Rene Girard (52), and heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic discourse for Bakhtin (324). Nor are terms all theoretical; Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin The Idiot is Quixote reborn, and nympholeptic vocabulary of Lolita is decidedly quixotic: Humbert Humbert, a creature of infinite melancholy, with bubble of hot passion [his] loins and super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow [his] subtle spine (17), had been raised on Don Quixote and Les Miserables (10). In most familiar role, Don Quixote has inaugural status, convening novel as dialogue of genres (Fuentes 51), setting a precedent for unprecedented (Reed 92). With it, novel embarks on course as selfconscious genre (Alter), which its essence is to seek Form (Parlej 101). Marthe Robert sees it establishing basic novelistic formula: a compulsory content and an optional form (Origins 32; Roman 63: une forme indeterminee). Responding to this enigmatic duality, Maurice Blanchot finds Don Quixote an extravagance that puts literature on trial (Infinite 388). Leo Bersani takes it as prototype for novelists' ambivalent relation to disrupted desire (66)-a portent that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says gives us over to an infinite murmur (13). In what may amount to same thing, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve called Don Quixote Bible of Humanity (Nabokov 7); Miguel de Unamuno urged mystical approach, in same way that Bible is usually interpreted (Life 3); and William Faulkner claimed that he reread Bible and Don Quixote on yearly basis (Levin, Gates 46). Thus, it is no wonder that Milan Kundera says the novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes (Art 144). And answer they have; Cervantine (or should they be quixotic?) novelists constitute an honor roll: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Diderot, Stendhal, Flaubert, Daudet,