venuti

Dissidence 159Tarchetti’s Orientalist literary history clarifies the political agendain his use of the fantastic, but simultaneously discloses anideological contradiction which runs counter to that agenda. Thepassage shows him actively rewriting his cultural materials so as totransform the Orient into a vehicle for his democratic social vision.Whereas the Arabian tales actually offer glimpses of despoticmonarchies, and the geographer Strabo describes the nomadic Arabsas “a tribe of brigands and shepherds” who are less “civilised” thanthe Syrians because their “government” is not as well “organised”(Strabo 1930:VII, 233, 255), Tarchetti drew on Rousseau’s notion ofnatural human innocence and perceived only a utopian“comunanza,” a community or fellowship, close to “virgin nature”and not corrupted by the hierarchical social organization of Europe.Tarchetti also represented the Orient as exotic and phantasmagorical(“their burning sky,” “love for the marvelous”), setting his conceptof fiction apart from the realist discourse that dominated Italy byidentifying with its other, the fantastic. Both these representations ofthe Orient, however, are clearly Eurocentric: they aim to make Persiaand Arabia perform a European function, the regeneration of Italianfiction and society, and they never escape the racist oppositionbetween Western rationality and Eastern irrationality. Tarchetti’sliterary history assumed the range of meanings which, as EdwardSaid has observed, were typical of romantic representations of theOrient: “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure,intense energy” (Said 1978:118).This racial ideology, obviously in conflict with Tarchetti’sdemocratic politics, becomes more explicitly damaging to hisproject in his closing reference to Strabo, which abruptly reversesthe logic of his argument. Tarchetti initially treated Arabiannarratives as a mirror of the Arabian social order, a reliablerepresentation of its “laws and customs,” but he concluded inapparent agreement with Strabo’s complaint that these texts reflectlittle more than an overheated imagination. Tarchetti’s typicallyromantic Orientalism seems to result in an uncritical acceptance ofStrabo’s equation of the East with “love for the marvelous.” YetStrabo’s point that the “histories” of Eastern countries lack a firmbasis in reality renders “uncertain,” not only Arabian narratives,but the democratic images that Tarchetti found in them,questioning his earlier treatment of the novel as figuring a“marvelous world” without social hierarchies. Tarchetti’s citationof Strabo suggests that the utopian world of the novel may be no