The Translator’s Invisibility

The beginning of this remarkably discontinuous passage has Tarchetti optimistically treating fictional discourse as a liberating source of knowledge and utopian imagining, assuming a liberal humanism in which the novel restores to subjectivity its freedom and unity (“development of our imaginative faculties”). Yet Tarchetti’s sudden reference to “illusions” sceptically revises this view: the novel now becomes a source of collective mystifications (“illusions in the power of our faith and our memories”) and imaginary compensations for frustrated desire (“greater resignation to our fate”), whereby the passage shifts to the assumption that subjectivity is always situated in transindividual conditions of which it can never be fully conscious or free. In the end, the “progresses” of “humanity” seem measured not by a liberal model of social life which guarantees personal identity and autonomy, but a democratic collective characterized by subjective difference and cultural heterogeneity (“the gigantic sentiment of life”). Hence, the “letters” which represent and sustain this democracy aim “to multiply and increase and invigorate in the spirit […] thousands and infinite sensations.” The kind of fictional discourse suggested by this aim seems less a panoramic representation of social groups which adheres to the unities of realism, than a social delirium which proliferates psychological states and confounds temporal and spatial coordinates, representing that “marvelous world” where the reader is freed from social isolation.

In evaluating the current situation of the Italian novel, Tarchetti’s constant theme is the moral and political failure of realism. He laments Italy’s lack of a strong tradition in the novel {156} in contrast to other countries. Amid much praise for English, American, German and French writers, Manzoni is degraded as second-rate:

Non vi ha luogo a dubitare che I promessi sposi sieno finora il migliore romanzo italiano, ma non occorre dimostrare come esso non sia che un mediocre romanzo in confronto dei capolavori delle altre nazioni.

There is no room to doubt that I promessi sposi has so far been the best Italian novel, but it is unnecessary to demonstrate that it is a mediocre novel compared to the masterpieces of other nations.

(Tarchetti 1967, II:528)

Tarchetti repeats a list of defects in Manzoni’s novel and attributes them to its realist discourse: