Cervantes himself said, and scores of critics have said after him, that he really meant to destroy the genre of the romance of chivalry; but this is not to be believed for a moment. It is just another literary trick, akin to the device of “the manuscripts of Cid Hamet Benengeli”—just one of the many tricks to which Cervantes had recourse. The balanced and truly cultured brain of Cervantes could not possibly have harbored such a purpose. The book itself belies it. In the first place, Cervantes satirizes not the romances of chivalry alone, but all literary genres without exception. By parody or irony or direct criticism all contemporary literature is condemned, and in particular its most popular forms, the pastoral and the drama.
The chief accusation which Cervantes pretends to bring against the books of chivalry is their improbability. An extraordinary accusation to come from the mouth of him who began with the pastoral improbabilities of the Galatea, filled the Don Quixote itself with improbable tragic and pastoral adventures, composed a chivalric drama after finishing the first part and before beginning the second part of Don Quixote, and at the end of his life reworked, in the Trahajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, the intricate and improbable voyages of the fantastic Byzantine romance.
Cervantes, a man of taste and imagination, knew, as all of us know, that every work of art
