BETWEEN LEDGER AND LAUGHTER: REALISM AND IRONY IN CERVANTES, DEFOE, AND FIELDING
ALM No.91, July 2026
ESSAYS
“The novel is a mongrel amongst thoroughbreds.” (Terry Eagleton)
“The magic curtain is torn again.” (Milan Kundera)
The modern novel, so often described as England’s original contribution to world literature, actually has its origins elsewhere – a dusty village of La Mancha, “the name of which I have no desire to call to mind.” Perhaps Cervantes’s monumental “proto-novel” Don Quixote (1605, 1615) stands at the crossroads of illusion and disenchantment, written at the moment when Spain’s imperial ambitions were collapsing into debt and decline. His fiction, by parodying the exhausted codes of chivalric romance, exposes the crumbling authority of old aristocratic ideals – kings, courts, and creeds – and the slow emergence of bourgeois modernity, discovering in their ruins the aesthetic gravity of the ordinary, and with it, the event of making the everyday newly visible and newly significant – simultaneously absurd and profound, wilfully ridiculous in its reduction of knights to windmill-fighters, yet devastatingly earnest in its claim that this reduction is where meaning now lives. What begins as mockery ends up reinventing the art of storytelling. At this point, a new kind of narrative consciousness emerges, one capable of deliberately mistaking its own invention for truth. With this move, Cervantes laid the groundwork for the metafictional self-awareness which would become a defining trait of the modern novel. The same gesture anticipates what Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, would later recognise as the decisive revolution in Western literature: the attempt to represent reality itself in all its contingent, quotidian and often undignified complexities.
Early novelists, beginning with Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, inherited this fruitful contradiction and transformed it into formal strategy, converting it into the novel’s operating logic, its mischievous way of thinking through prose. This contradiction becomes not only instrumental but constitutive, the form’s DNA and its generative principle. For all their fascination with the real, they could hardly have anticipated how unruly their offspring would become. Having learned self-awareness from Cervantes, fiction in Defoe and Fielding seems to sober up, trading the fever of illusion for the discipline of empirical observation. From Cervantes’s incandescent hall of mirrors, it steps into unforgiving daylight, finding not knights, giants and innkeepers but merchants, parsons and apprentices – citizens of a new moral universe. If Cervantes first taught fiction to see itself, Defoe and Fielding taught it to look outward – to the marketplace, the parish, the shipwreck and the social contract. The visionary self-reflection of Don Quixote gives way to Robinson Crusoe’s meticulous documentary curiosity and the comic dissection of Joseph Andrews’s social pretension. The novel, once a playful game of illusion, begins to resemble an unavoidable method for rendering the real, gradually hardening into a recognizable protocol for plausibility.
What complicates and enriches this picture is that the story of Don Quixote is also the story of its own theft. The Quixote is not one book but two: Part I appeared in 1605, and Part II ten years later, and its division became a drama in literary history. Between these dates lies an act of literary piracy that would prove productively scandalous. In 1614, a spurious continuation of the first volume appeared under the pseudonym of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. This opportunistic imitation so infuriated Cervantes that he wove its brazen existence into his own authentic Part II: within the narrative, his characters encounter readers who have perused the fake Quixote, debated its merits, and dismissed its falsehoods. Part of the surprise is that Cervantes, with amused indignation, reclaims his authorship by mocking the pretender within the fiction itself. With the novel reflecting upon its own textuality, Cervantes sets in motion a lineage of self-aware narrative forms that stretches from Fielding’s narratorial irony through Austen’s moral psychology, Dickens’s phantasmagoric anatomies of London, and Eliot’s sympathetic mapping of provincial consciousness to the psychological excavations of high modernism, the ontological games of postmodernism, the resurgent documentary and autofictional modes of the late twentieth century, and the digitally inflected hyper-realism of our own moment.
It is within this long genealogy of representation – from Cervantes’s self-questioning fiction to the evolving strategies of realism, modernism, and beyond – that Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) take their pivotal place in the development of the novel. If Cervantes unsettles the old romance and invents a new narrative consciousness, it is Defoe and Fielding who, in the English tradition, begin to systematise that consciousness into the forms and techniques we now recognise as the modern novel. Their openings, in particular, crystallise the twin impulses that would shape the genre for centuries: the drive toward empirical realism and the counter-drive toward ironic self-awareness.
Defoe, with his journalistic empiricism and Protestant sobriety, constructed a world whose texture is that of fact itself. His opening – “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York…” – replaces the epic invocation of the Muse with the self-authenticating declaration of a private citizen. Crusoe immediately situates himself amid dates, locations, paternal advice, and thwarted ambitions; the novel begins as a logbook of a life, anchored in the belief that truth resides in verifiable circumstances. Before a ship is wrecked or a footprint discovered, the reader has already entered a universe governed by the “plain style” of documentary truth.
Fielding, by contrast, steps onto the page with a knowing grin, as if he is already in on the joke before the story has even begun: “It is as trite but true Observation, that Examples work more forcibly on the Mind than Precepts…” – the mock-Augustan alliterative pomp of that capital “O” is itself a parody of moral treatises. His narrator does not pretend to inhabit the empirical world; he presides over it, like a benevolent magistrate delivering a sermon that’s half-homily, half-comedic performance – a role Fielding knew rather well from his years at the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in Covent Garden.
If Defoe’s realism is grounded in the Enlightenment faith in fact, labour, and providence, Fielding’s irony exposes those same certainties to sceptical laughter. One invents the empirical self – industrious, self-auditing, buoyed by providence and practical reason; the other invents the moralising, digressive, winking narrator who cunningly knows he is telling a tale that is as much about the telling as about the tale. In this sense, both extend the Auerbachian project of mimesis along diverging paths: Defoe dignifies the commonplace, whereas Fielding reveals the artifice through which the commonplace acquires meaning.
For Auerbach, mimesis is never simple, more a question of what language does to reality than what reality does to language; for Terry Eagleton, realism is a strategy rather than a mirror. Defoe and Fielding make these assumptions clear at the moment the novel is learning to crawl. Between them, Robinson Crusoe and Joseph Andrews lay bare the form’s original split personality: part document, part deception; part realism, part send-up. In their hands, the novel discovers that it can both reflect the world and mock its own reflections. That discovery has never left it. Even today, when machines can mimic narrative with unnerving fluency, the novel remains the form most suspicious of the very reality it labours to represent. These tensions between fact and fiction, transparency and irony become strikingly visible in the openings of both novels.
The Two Beginnings: Fact in Defoe, Irony in Fielding
Robinson Crusoe and Joseph Andrews, separated by barely two decades, seem to belong to entirely different epistemological universes. Defoe’s narrator writes as though God himself were keeping the minutes of a well-ordered household; Fielding’s as though he had joined the Spectator club and perfected the art of the urbane smirk. Each in their own way is making a wager about what counts as “truth” in narrative – and in Defoe’s case, quite literally so, since he understood earlier than most that stories could turn a tidy profit – whether the world should be represented through the transparency of fact or the opacity of irony.
Defoe’s Crusoe famously begins not with action or reflection but with the bureaucratic tidiness of a birth certificate: “I was born in the year 1632….” The sentence is almost comically plain, the verbal equivalent of ticking boxes in a seventeenth-century census form. Yet, from this very plainness arises what Ian Watt, in his seminal study The Rise of the Novel, called “formal realism”, the conviction that truth inheres in the verifiable detail. Crusoe’s world is not “invented” so much as “recorded”; Defoe writes as though the novel were a form of accountancy. It is the kind of writing that presumes the world can be balanced like a ledger – which is why Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne’s outrageously experimental and chronologically dishevelled novel (published serially between 1759 and 1767) feels like its necessary antidote. If Defoe believes in the steady accumulation of facts, Sterne becomes lost in the glorious impossibility of ever getting a story told. Tristram’s refusal to proceed in a straight line reads as a standing joke, turning the very idea of factual sequence into a comic impossibility – or, as Eagleton once put it, like “the novel discovering that narrative order is itself a kind of polite fiction.” Indeed, Crusoe’s later inventories of tools, goats, and grains all have the ardour of a merchant reckoning the audits of his soul. Auerbach may have found in him the perfect bourgeois heir to the Biblical servant who tills his allotted field. Almost imperceptibly, the dignity of the everyday is transmuted into something else entirely – a language devoted exclusively to survival, a prose shaped by the relentless logic of practical necessity.
But this empiricism has a comic pathos. Defoe’s realism, so grounded in the concrete, inadvertently exposes the limits of a world conceived as measurable data. Crusoe can quantify everything except the void that surrounds him. When he thanks Providence for delivering him to solitude, one senses that he is performing an internal probe rather than prayer. And the same prose that gives the illusion of mastery also registers its blatant absence. In Lukács’s phrase, Crusoe, as both the protagonist and narrator, is “transcendentally homeless”: a man who mistakes the bureaucratic clarity of an inventory page for the far more intricate ambiguities of the world beyond it. It is worth noting that Defoe does not always write ostensibly transparent narrators. His Moll Flanders (1722), narrated by a woman who nonetheless adopts some of the masculine discursive habits of her creator – turning the life of theft, imprisonment, and reinvention into a case study on how identity itself becomes a survival strategy. The gendered voice and authorial ventriloquism become part of Defoe’s realism: another small cue that the “plain style” is never quite as innocent as it looks.
Fielding’s novle opens not with biography, but with reflection; instead of a man stating his birth, we meet a narrator announcing his thesis. “It is as trite but true Observation…”. The first paragraph spirals outward into moral digression, syntactic play, and a lightly self-mocking parade of wisdom, as though the narrator were warming up for a performance he both enjoys and gently ironizes. The tale to come is framed not simply as an account of events, but as a demonstration of how accounts themselves can shift, wander, and nod to the reader. Where Defoe constructs a narrator who strives to efface himself, Fielding invents one who delights in flaunting his presence: talkative, digressive, slightly self-delighted, and ever so gently unreliable.
Umberto Eco’s notion of “double coding” is especially apt here, for Fielding’s prose operates on two frequencies at once: the literal and the ludic. The reader is invited to admire Joseph’s virtue, certainly, but also to chuckle at the performance of admiration itself. In Fielding, moral discourse is always shadowed by its own theatricality – a text addressed, as Eco would put it, simultaneously to the naïve reader who takes the lesson at face value and the sophisticated reader who recognises the lesson as a performance. The narrator’s gently parodied Augustan gravitas conceals a comic elasticity in its craft, a willingness to let irony slip into ethical argument. In Bakhtin’s sense, Joseph Andrews is already a polyphonic novel alive with the clash of idioms – sermonic, satirical, colloquial – whose very dissonance becomes the sound of emerging modernity.
If Defoe persuades the reader to believe in the solidity of facts, Fielding faintly leads us to doubt the believers. Crusoe’s faith in experience reflects the rising capitalist conviction that the self is a self-made enterprise; Fielding’s irony makes clear that such selfhood is a rhetorical performance before it is anything else, sustained by tone, timing, and linguistic poise. Defoe’s prose aspires to the transparency of clear glass; Fielding delights in the subtle refractions of crafted optics. Where one leans toward the solitary struggle for subsistence, the other showcases the bustling and morally degenerate spectacle of society. Both, however, share a deep ambivalence regarding their own representational powers. For Defoe, language is a technology of mastery; for Fielding, a device forever poised to betray its speaker with comic slippage.
It is tempting – and perhaps not entirely wrong – to see in this contrast the two genetic strands of the English novel: the realist and the ironic, the moral and the comic, the Protestant and the theatrical. If Defoe hands down his sensibility to the chroniclers of interior moral life (Richardson, Austen, George Eliot), Fielding’s wit flows toward the high ironists of the tradition (Sterne, Thackeray, Joyce). Together they chart the oscillation that Eagleton, with his customary dry precision, calls “the novel’s unresolved tension between the ethics of truth and the pleasures of the lie.” The form never quite decides whether it wants to redeem our souls or simply to amuse them.
In this sense, both Defoe and Fielding remain unmistakably present in contemporary narratives. The documentary impulse of Crusoe survives in the autofictions of our own century – those painstaking chronicles of breakfast, trauma, therapy, and ambient neurosis that promise “nothing invented”, as if the absence of imagination were a new form of moral hygiene. Fielding’s comic irony, meanwhile, resurfaces in the self-aware narrators of postmodernism and, more diffusely, in today’s screen culture, where moral instruction tends arrive wearing a smirk. If Crusoe built the first desert-island case study, Fielding drafted the earliest blueprint for the mockumentary. One might almost say the modern novel emerged somewhere between a balance sheet and a burst of laughter.
Elton Uliana (born 1966, Porto Alegre) is a Brazilian writer, literary critic, and translator based in London. He is the co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL), where he is also a guest lecturer on Translation Theory. His work has been published in multiple anthologies, including Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (UCL Press, 2024), Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (HarperCollins, 2023) and Oxford Anthology of Translation (Oxford Press, 2022). His work is also featured in other specialised journals, including Art in Translation (Routledge), Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, West Branch, and Tablet. Uliana was part of the judging panel for the 2023 PEN America Translation Prize. Uliana received the 2026 English PEN Presents: Brazil award, a grant supporting his translation of Carla Bessa’s Jabuti Prize–winning Vultures.
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