It is universal in that it can mix or fuse poetry and prose, the imaginative and the critical, reflective and spontaneous modes, the lofty and the lowly. All together, irony can be taken to describe awareness and self-reflexiveness in art and artist, the inclusive play of disparates and seeming contradictions, the supreme freedom and control of the artist's inventiveness and his own inventions. Both the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm, had a firm grasp on the technicality and concreteness of art. Friedrich's dithyrambic discourse, his cockiness and his shifts in terminology, must be understood, and he deserves to be evaluated as an essentially coherent and responsible critic and theoretician. Our appreciation of Don Quixote would be disastrously diminished if we had to view the novel as farce or burlesque or through the crudities of near-contemporary translations, imitations, and adaptations.
Great art can be parodistic and honorably so.
We all must, of course, have avowed purposes for what we do and writers of fiction in their own real lives have motives or purposes for writing which we may or may not know. But in great works of fiction the finished work transcends the preliminary or practical or polemical purpose and becomes something either greater or different or both. 4 True, Riquer shows that the libros were under censorious attacks right through the 16th century and indicates that Cervantes was following suit. The question is, how did he have the genius to beat a dead horse into life. There are of course many instances of these elements in Don Quixote .