The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Dissidence 155
moral life in reliving such a remote past, what lessons for the
present age, what development of our imaginative faculties, and
I dare say how many illusions in the power of our faith and our
memories, and what greater resignation to our fate! If it is true
that humanity progresses slowly, but steadily, and that nothing
can stop or drive genius backward in its path, our posterity, in
thousands of years, will live our current moral life: for them
letters will have reached that sublime and general goal, which is
to multiply and increase and invigorate in the spirit the thousands
and infinite sensations by which the gigantic sentiment of life is
manifested.
(ibid.:523–4)
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