Huon de Bordeaux has always sat uncomfortably within literary history, especially categories of genre. Composed f.1260,1 Huon is a relatively late epic, but it remains in the classic chanson de geste form of assonanced decasyllabic laisses throughout, and both begins and ends in the recognizable Carolingian universe with problems at court: traitors lure the heir to the throne into attempting to ambush the hero, Huon, whom they envy. The prince is then unwittingly killed by Huon. As punishment, Huon is sent to the East and the text now becomes a magical mystery tour, showing elements associated with romance, folklore, pilgrimage literature, the crusade cycle of epics, and even Exodus,2 before finally returning to the court of Charlemagne. Because of this long central section, there have always been doubts as to whether Huon can be called a 'real' chanson de geste. Though the text names itself a 'chanson' (lines 2, 10792),3 it is never integrated into a cycle with other epics, its fellow travellers in the codices being continuations specifically written for it.4 It remains a work apart. Hence there has been a long tradition of coming up with new labels for it. The first modern editor of Huon, Francois Guess ard, already displayed uncertainties: he considered it anomalous because it emerged at a time when chansons de geste were in decline and poemes d'aventure were growing in popularity.5 He therefore called it a text 'd'un genre mixte'.6 Since then, Huon has generally been termed a chanson de geste, but always with a caveat: it is, variously, a late attempt to renew a dying genre;7 or a chanson de geste that 'give [s] itself over to the charm of the merveilleux'? a 'burlesque' work;9 a 'chanson anhistorique';10 or, finally, a 'chanson d'aventure'.11 It is said to incorporate alien material into an epic framework;12 and to display the 'archetypes of romance'.13 Most recently, criticism has returned to the position espoused in the first place by Guessard, with Keith Busby declaring the text 'hybrid' because it traverses medieval genres in the figure of the magical dwarf Auberon, son of Julius Caesar (who, the text tells us, held Armenia, Austria, Hungary, and Constantinople) and of Morgan, Arthur's half-sister (lines 16-26). For Busby, Auberon's history 'anchors the poem in both the classical and Arthurian traditions as well as in an early Austro-Hungarian empire and Byzantium',14 meaning that the text belongs to all three of the matieres into which the medieval author Jehan Bodel divided literature: this is, at one and the same time, the matiere de Bretagne, the mauere de France, and the mauere de Rome.x15None of these varying appellations, however, addresses the question of why it is useful to stick generic labels on the text at all, or why genres might exist and evolve. Often the evolution of the chanson de geste has itself been cast in a negative light: late epics are degraded degenerates.16 Overall, genre has tended to be a restrictive concept, marking the membership or exclusion of texts from particular 'clubs' (they're either in or out). Even the label 'hybrid' simply reifies the two categories whose mixing it denotes. My thinking on this last point draws inspiration from Derrida 's 'La Loi du genre',17 and throughout, I shall take my cue from him, particularly for the idea that genre is a law, a code regulating gender, class, and other relations within the text's ideological system, as well as one defining the relationship between text, author, and reader. Yet whilst previous texts of the same genre provide a pattern that can be followed, it can, for Derrida, just as well be ignored or flouted. Thus genre is a law that is there to be disobeyed as much as to be obeyed. Even when texts do adopt a model, they display their participation in a genre, rather than their belonging to it. In Derrida 's words:un texte ne saurait appartenir a aucun genre. Tout texte participe d'un ou plusieurs genres, il y a toujours du genre et des genres mais cette participation n'est jamais une appartenance. …