The novel of all novels, Don Quixote of La Mancha (Part 1), appeared in 1605 and was a huge hit. Miguel de Cervantes, who was a collector of back taxes and thus a cog in the wheel of the lumbering Spanish bureaucratic state, had finally made it as a writer. He had tried the theater, poetry, and even a pastoral novel, but by 1605 he hadn’t published anything in twenty years and was well on his way to literary oblivion. Ironically, his success grew out of an outdated, though still popular, genre: the chivalric romance. An easy target for satire by Cervantes’s time, the books of chivalry were filled with astonishing occurrences, enchantments, romance, and interwoven stories, all for the glory of adventure and love. Cervantes transforms this material by using enchantment as a disruptor in order to produce not only seeming wonderment but also the delusions, forms of self-deception, and projections of desire that are the other face of enchantment. Interruptions and disturbances suspend and startle narrative and characters alike, placing them (and us) in a clouded petri dish of unpredictability.
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