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158 The Translator’s Invisibilitypopular in France as well, that the men who write them enjoyevery civil right and public admiration, and belong for the mostpart to the periodical press [whereas] the circulation of everypolitical text opposed to the principles of the government, butconsistent with those of humanity and progress, is immediatelyobstructed.(Tarchetti 1967, II:534–5)Tarchetti’s experiments with the fantastic can be seen as anintervention into this cultural situation: they were developed to resolvethe crisis he diagnosed in Italian fictional discourse, the inadequacy ofrealism to serve a democratic cultural politics. The fantastic answeredTarchetti’s call for a fiction to represent that “marvelous world” of“sensations” which he saw as a remedy for hierarchical social relationsand his own social isolation; the freeing of subjectivity in fantasticdiscourse was a freedom from subjection. Because, in Tarchetti’s view,realism dominated Italian fiction to no politically progressive end, hisintervention took the form of writing in a foreign genre opposed torealism, the Gothic tale. Tarchetti’s effort to write against theManzonian grain in fact projected a revision of the history of fiction, inwhich the novel didn’t originate in Europe, but in “I’ oriente da cui sidiffuse dapprima la civiltà per tutto il mondo”/“the Orient, fromwhich civilization spread through all the world” (Tarchetti 1967,II:524). The prototype of the novel became, not epic or any form ofrealist discourse, but fantasy, and not the Bible or the Iliad, but TheArabian Nights:I Persiani e gli Arabi attinsero dalla varietà della loro vita nomade,e dalla loro vergine natura, e dal loro cielo infuocato le primenarrazioni romanzesche, onde le leggi e le abitudini di comunanzasociale e domestica degli Arabi ci sono note e famigliari da grantempo, e Strabone si doleva che l’amore del meraviglioso rendesseincerte le stone di queste nazioni.The Persians and the Arabs drew from the variety of their nomadlife, and from their virgin nature, and from their burning sky thefirst novelistic narratives, hence the laws and customs of the Arabs’social and domestic community have been well-known and familiarto us for a long time, and Strabo lamented that love for themarvelous rendered uncertain the histories of these nations.(ibid.)