The appropriation of foreign texts was a crucial component of Tarchetti’s dissident cultural politics. He was the first practitioner of the Gothic tale in Italy, and most of his fantastic narratives are based on specific texts by writers like E.T.A.Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Gérard Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and the collaboration of Éimile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian (Mariani 1967; Rossi 1959). Tarchetti adapted fantastic motifs, reproduced scenes, translated, even plagiarized—yet each discursive practice served the political function of interrogating ideologies and addressing hierarchical social relations in Italy. His fantastic narratives mobilized foreign texts to question the hegemony of realist discourse in Italian fiction, and yet this mobilization, insofar as it entailed transforming foreign texts to function in a different {150} cultural formation, simultaneously critiqued them from a different ideological standpoint. Tarchetti’s Gothic tales were foreignizing in their appropriation of foreign texts that deviated from Italian cultural values, initiating a reformation of the Italian literary canon that admitted fictional discourses other than realism, whether domestic or foreign. For the English-language translator who would implement a foreignizing method under the regime of fluency Tarchetti’s practices show how translation can revise domestic cultural values by casting strategically chosen foreign texts in the dominant language, the standard dialect.
Tarchetti’s first foreignizing move was his decision to appropriate the fantastic, a foreign discourse opposed to the bourgeois realism that prevailed in Italian fiction. The fantastic proves to be subversive of bourgeois ideology because it negates the formal conventions of realism and the individualistic concept of subjectivity on which they rest. The realist representation of chronological time, three-dimensional space, and personal identity is based on an empiricist epistemology that privileges a single, perceiving subject: the key assumption is that human consciousness is the origin of meaning, knowledge, and action, transcending discursive and ideological determinations (Watt 1957). The unity of time and space in realism points to a unified consciousness, usually a narrator or character taken to be authorial, and this subject-position establishes intelligibility in the narrative, making a specific meaning seem real or true, repressing the fact that it is an illusory effect of discourse, and thus suturing the reading consciousness into an ideological position, an interested ensemble of values, beliefs, and social representations. The trutheffect of realism, the illusion of transparency whereby language disappears and the world or the author seems present, shows that the form itself reproduces the transcendental concept of subjectivity in bourgeois individualism: as Catherine Belsey indicates,
Through the presentation of an intelligible history which effaces its own status as discourse, classic realism proposes a model in which author and reader are subjects who are the source of shared meanings, the origin of which is mysteriously extra-discursive. […] {151} This model of intersubjective understanding, of shared understanding of a text which re-presents the world, is the guarantee not only of the truth of the text but of the reader’s existence as an autonomous and knowing subject in a world of knowing subjects. In this way, classic realism constitutes an ideological practice in addressing itself to readers as subjects, interpellating them in order that they freely accept their subjectivity and their subjection.
The fantastic undermines the transcendental subject in realist discourse by creating an uncertainty about the metaphysical status of the narrative. Often this uncertainty is provoked by using the formal conventions of realism to represent a fantastic disorder of time, space, and character and thereby to suspend the reader between two discursive registers, the mimetic and the marvelous. Confronted with the fantastic, the reader experiences what Tzvetan Todorov calls a “hesitation” between natural and supernatural explanations: “The fantastic […] lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion” (Todorov 1975:41; cf. Jackson 1981:26–37). The unified consciousness of realism is thus split between opposing alternatives, intelligibility gives way to doubt, and the reader is released from the ideological positioning in the text, invited to perceive that “the common opinion” of reality encodes moral values and serves political interests, that subjectivity is not transcendental but determinate, a site of confused meanings, ideological contradictions, social conflicts. The fantastic explodes the formal conventions of realism in order to reveal their individualistic assumptions; but by introducing an epistemological confusion, a fantastic narrative can also interrogate the ideological positions it puts to work, expose their concealment of various relations of domination, and encourage thinking about social change. In the fantastic, Hélène Cixous observes, “the subject flounders in the exploded multiplicity of its states, shattering the homogeneity of the ego of unawareness, spreading out in every possible direction, into every possible contradiction, transegoistically”; and it is this discursive strategy that distinguishes nineteenth-century writers like Hoffmann as opponents of “logocentrism, idealism, theologism, all the props of {152} society, the scaffolding of political and subjective economy, the pillars of society” (Cixous 1974:389).
Tarchetti’s thinking on the relations between fictional discourse and ideology can be glimpsed in an essay from the very start of his career, “Idee minime sul romanzo” (“Minimum Ideas on the Novel”), published in the periodical Rivista minima on 31 October 1865. This early statement shows him slipping uneasily between various positions, advocating different kinds of fictional discourse, assuming different concepts of subjectivity, imagining different forms of social organization. He initially asserts a realist view of the novel, likening it to history:
Dalle prime confidenze, dalle prime rivelazioni che gli uomini fecero agli uomini, dal primo affetto, dal primo dolore, dalla prima speranza, nacque il romanzo che è la storia del cuore umano e della famiglia, come la storia propriamente detta è il romanzo della società e della vita pubblica.
From the first confidences, from the first revelations men make to men, from the first emotion, the first pain, the first hope, is born the novel, which is the history of the human heart and the family, just as history is properly called the novel of society and public life.
But then Tarchetti proceeds to argue for the priority of fictional over historical representation by putting the truth-effect of realism into question, characterizing the novel as an imaginary resolution to social contradictions, a genre that fictively compensates for the “terribile odissea di delitti” (“terrible odyssey of crimes”) in history and makes possible a renewal of social life:
ebbi tra le mani un romanzo, e per poco io fui tentato di riconciliarmi [agli uomini]; non dirò quanto mi apparissero diversi da quelli conosciuti nelle storie, non accennerò a quel mondo meraviglioso che mi si aperse allo sguardo: nel romanzo conobbi l’uomo libero, nella storia aveva conosciuto l’uomo sottoposto all’uomo.