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Dissidence 155moral life in reliving such a remote past, what lessons for thepresent age, what development of our imaginative faculties, andI dare say how many illusions in the power of our faith and ourmemories, and what greater resignation to our fate! If it is truethat humanity progresses slowly, but steadily, and that nothingcan stop or drive genius backward in its path, our posterity, inthousands of years, will live our current moral life: for themletters will have reached that sublime and general goal, which isto multiply and increase and invigorate in the spirit the thousandsand infinite sensations by which the gigantic sentiment of life ismanifested.(ibid.:523–4)The beginning of this remarkably discontinuous passage hasTarchetti optimistically treating fictional discourse as a liberatingsource of knowledge and utopian imagining, assuming a liberalhumanism in which the novel restores to subjectivity its freedomand unity (“development of our imaginative faculties”). YetTarchetti’s sudden reference to “illusions” sceptically revises thisview: the novel now becomes a source of collective mystifications(“illusions in the power of our faith and our memories”) andimaginary compensations for frustrated desire (“greaterresignation to our fate”), whereby the passage shifts to theassumption that subjectivity is always situated in transindividualconditions of which it can never be fully conscious or free. In theend, the “progresses” of “humanity” seem measured not by aliberal model of social life which guarantees personal identity andautonomy, but a democratic collective characterized by subjectivedifference and cultural heterogeneity (“the gigantic sentiment oflife”). Hence, the “letters” which represent and sustain thisdemocracy aim “to multiply and increase and invigorate in thespirit […] thousands and infinite sensations.” The kind of fictionaldiscourse suggested by this aim seems less a panoramicrepresentation of social groups which adheres to the unities ofrealism, than a social delirium which proliferates psychologicalstates and confounds temporal and spatial coordinates,representing that “marvelous world” where the reader is freedfrom social isolation.In evaluating the current situation of the Italian novel,Tarchetti’s constant theme is the moral and political failure ofrealism. He laments Italy’s lack of a strong tradition in the novel