The Translator’s Invisibility

The fantastic undermines the transcendental subject in realist discourse by creating an uncertainty about the metaphysical status of the narrative. Often this uncertainty is provoked by using the formal conventions of realism to represent a fantastic disorder of time, space, and character and thereby to suspend the reader between two discursive registers, the mimetic and the marvelous. Confronted with the fantastic, the reader experiences what Tzvetan Todorov calls a “hesitation” between natural and supernatural explanations: “The fantastic […] lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion” (Todorov 1975:41; cf. Jackson 1981:26–37). The unified consciousness of realism is thus split between opposing alternatives, intelligibility gives way to doubt, and the reader is released from the ideological positioning in the text, invited to perceive that “the common opinion” of reality encodes moral values and serves political interests, that subjectivity is not transcendental but determinate, a site of confused meanings, ideological contradictions, social conflicts. The fantastic explodes the formal conventions of realism in order to reveal their individualistic assumptions; but by introducing an epistemological confusion, a fantastic narrative can also interrogate the ideological positions it puts to work, expose their concealment of various relations of domination, and encourage thinking about social change. In the fantastic, Hélène Cixous observes, “the subject flounders in the exploded multiplicity of its states, shattering the homogeneity of the ego of unawareness, spreading out in every possible direction, into every possible contradiction, transegoistically”; and it is this discursive strategy that distinguishes nineteenth-century writers like Hoffmann as opponents of “logocentrism, idealism, theologism, all the props of {152} society, the scaffolding of political and subjective economy, the pillars of society” (Cixous 1974:389).

Tarchetti’s thinking on the relations between fictional discourse and ideology can be glimpsed in an essay from the very start of his career, “Idee minime sul romanzo” (“Minimum Ideas on the Novel”), published in the periodical Rivista minima on 31 October 1865. This early statement shows him slipping uneasily between various positions, advocating different kinds of fictional discourse, assuming different concepts of subjectivity, imagining different forms of social organization. He initially asserts a realist view of the novel, likening it to history:

Dalle prime confidenze, dalle prime rivelazioni che gli uomini fecero agli uomini, dal primo affetto, dal primo dolore, dalla prima speranza, nacque il romanzo che è la storia del cuore umano e della famiglia, come la storia propriamente detta è il romanzo della società e della vita pubblica.

From the first confidences, from the first revelations men make to men, from the first emotion, the first pain, the first hope, is born the novel, which is the history of the human heart and the family, just as history is properly called the novel of society and public life.

(Tarchetti 1967, II:523)

But then Tarchetti proceeds to argue for the priority of fictional over historical representation by putting the truth-effect of realism into question, characterizing the novel as an imaginary resolution to social contradictions, a genre that fictively compensates for the “terribile odissea di delitti” (“terrible odyssey of crimes”) in history and makes possible a renewal of social life: