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160 The Translator’s Invisibilitymore than a misrepresentation of its social situation, especially inthe case of the Eastern prototypes of the genre. It is worth notingthat Tarchetti in effect reiterated this view at the end of his brieftale, “La fortuna di capitano Gubart” (“Captain Gubart’sFortune”), published the same year as his essay on the novel. Afterdemonstrating the arbitrariness of class distinctions by relatinghow a poor street musician is mistakenly awarded a royal militarycommission, the narrator concluded: “Questo fatto comunqueabbia una decisa analogia con quelli famosi delle novelle arabe, èincontrastabilmente vero e conosciuto”/“This incident, despite itsdecided resemblance to those famous ones of the Arabian tales, isindisputably true and well-known” (Tarchetti 1967, I:79). Thisreference to The Arabian Nights seems designed to satirize Italiansocial relations as fantastic and therefore irrational, but it can makethis satiric point only by assuming the irrationality of Easternculture and by distinguishing Tarchetti’s narrative as “true.”Tarchetti sought to enlist foreign fantastic texts in the democraticcultural politics he conducted in Italy, but his Orientalism wasimplicated in the key binary opposition by which Europesubordinated, and justified its colonization of, the same foreigncountries whose texts he considered politically useful.Given the diverse linguistic, cultural, and ideological materialsthat constituted Tarchetti’s project, it can be seen as what GillesDeleuze and Félix Guattari call a minor utilization of a majorlanguage:Even when it is unique a language remains a mixture, aschizophrenic mélange, a Harlequin costume in which verydifferent functions of language and distinct centers of power areplayed out, blurring what can be said and what can’t be said; onefunction will be played off against the other, all the degrees ofterritoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out.Even when major, a language is open to an intensive utilization thatmakes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matterhow slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolutedeterritorialization.(Deleuze and Guattari 1986:26)The major language that Tarchetti confronted was the Tuscandialect of Italian, the linguistic standard for Italian literature sincethe Renaissance. In 1840, after more than a decade of research into