THE IMPOSSIBLE KNIGHT: CERVANTES AND INVENTION OF MODERN IRONY

He was fifty-seven, missing the use of one hand, recently released from a Seville jail over an accounting discrepancy, excommunicated years earlier for confiscating a cathedral's wheat, and known in Madrid, when he was known at all, as a man who had once written an unsuccessful pastoral novel. He had spent five years as a slave in Algiers and attempted escape four times without ever explaining why he was not executed for it. Then Miguel de Cervantes wrote a joke about a country gentleman who read too many adventure stories and went out to fight for a woman who did not exist. The joke escaped. It is still running. This book argues that Cervantes built something nobody had built before: an irony with no floor. Socrates was ironic on his way somewhere. Satirists mock from behind a standard they are careful to keep visible. Cervantes hands the reader a mad old man and refuses, for nine hundred pages, to say whether we are watching a fool or the last honest person in Spain. He then compounds the offense by attributing the whole book to an Arab historian he tells us is a liar. Here is the veteran who wrote it, alive and in debt. Here are the characters as the people they are: a squire negotiating his salary, a duchess entertaining herself with a lunatic, a housekeeper burning a library for the good of the household. And here is the machine itself, still turning, four centuries later, in an age that hands each of us a personal library of romances and dares us to charge at something. >Keywords: Cervantes, Don Quixote, irony, literary history, Spanish Golden Age, the novel, self-deception