I held a novel in my hands, and in a little while I was tempted to reconcile myself [to men]; I shall not say how different they appeared to me from those I encountered in histories, I shall not note the marvelous world that opened to me at a glance: in {153} the novel I knew man free, in history I knew man subjected to man.
Discourse produces concrete social effects; the novel can alter subjectivity and motor social change, even for a literary bohemian like Tarchetti, whose scapigliato refusal to conform to the canons of bourgeois respectability situated him in the margins of Italian society. For the novel to have this social function, however, it would seem that realism must be rejected: a realist discourse like history can represent social life only as an “odyssey,” a wandering, an atomization in which agents victimize one another; the novel can contribute to a social homecoming, the reconstruction of a collective, only by representing a “marvelous world” wherein hierarchical social relations are resolved.
Tarchetti’s distinction between the freedom of the novel and the subjection of history at first appears a romantic retreat from society to culture, a transcendental aesthetic realm where the subject can regain its self-possession, its autonomy, although at the expense of a withdrawal from political engagement.[2] Tarchetti does in fact revert to romantic expressive theory at various points in the essay, validating an individualistic program of authorial self-expression, transparent discourse, illusionistic response: he favors writers whose
vita intima […] rimane in un’armonia così perfetta colle loro opere, che il lettore non è tentato di dire a se stesso: la mia commozione è intempestiva, quell’uomo scriveva per ragionamento; buttiamo il libro che non nacque che dall’ingegno.
inner life […] remains in such perfect harmony with their works, that the reader is not tempted to say to himself: my emotion is inappropriate, that man wrote to argue a position; we toss away any book that issues only from ingenuity.
At other points, however, Tarchetti views the novel not as a window onto the author, “le onde trasparenti di quei laghi che nella loro calma lasciano scorgere il letto che le contiene” / “the transparent waves of those lakes which in their calmness allow a glimpse of the bed containing them” (ibid.), but rather as a historically specific “forma di {154} letteratura” / “form of literature” (ibid.:522), a genre of literary discourse with a social significance that exceeds authorial psychology:
L’Italia composta di tanti piccoli stati, diversi tutti per leggi, per usi, per dialetto, per abitudini sociali, e direi quasi per suolo, doveva creare dei grandi e svariatissimi romanzi.
Italy, composed of many small states, with entirely different laws, customs, dialects, social practices, and I dare say, soils, should create great and extremely varied novels.
And when Tarchetti describes the value of a long tradition in the novel, he assumes that fictional discourse can never be free of social determinations:
Se il romanzo fosse così antico quanto la storia, e avesse avuto in tutti i tempi e in tutte le nazioni quella popolarità di cui ora fruisce in Europa, quante tenebre sarebbero diradate, quanta luce sarebbe fatta sopra molti punti ignorati, sopra le arti, le costumanze, le leggi e le abitudini e la vita domestica di molti popoli, cui la storia non si riferisce che per i rapporti politici con altri popoli. Quale felicità, quale esuberanza di vita morale nel rivivere in un passato così remoto, quanti insegnamenti per l’età presente, quale sviluppo nelle nostre facoltà immaginative, e direi quasi quante illusioni nella potenza della nostra fede e delle nostre memorie, e quale rassegnazione maggiore nel nostro destino! S’egli è vero che l’umanità progredisca lentamente, ma in modo sicura, e che nulla possa arrestare e far retrocedere il genio nel suo cammino, i nostri posteri, fra migliaia di anni, vivranno moralmente della nostra vita attuale: le lettere avranno raggiunto per essi quello scopo sublime e generale, che è di moltiplicare ed accrescere ed invigorire nello spirito quelle mille ed infinite sensazioni per le quali si manifesta il sentimento gigantesco della vita.
If the novel were as ancient as history, and at all times and in all nations had the popularity which it now enjoys in Europe, how many shadows would have been cleared away, how much light would have been cast on many neglected points, on the arts, the customs, the laws and habits and domestic life of many countries whose history refers only to political relations with other countries. What happiness there would be, what exuberance of {155} moral life in reliving such a remote past, what lessons for the present age, what development of our imaginative faculties, and I dare say how many illusions in the power of our faith and our memories, and what greater resignation to our fate! If it is true that humanity progresses slowly, but steadily, and that nothing can stop or drive genius backward in its path, our posterity, in thousands of years, will live our current moral life: for them letters will have reached that sublime and general goal, which is to multiply and increase and invigorate in the spirit the thousands and infinite sensations by which the gigantic sentiment of life is manifested.
The beginning of this remarkably discontinuous passage has Tarchetti optimistically treating fictional discourse as a liberating source of knowledge and utopian imagining, assuming a liberal humanism in which the novel restores to subjectivity its freedom and unity (“development of our imaginative faculties”). Yet Tarchetti’s sudden reference to “illusions” sceptically revises this view: the novel now becomes a source of collective mystifications (“illusions in the power of our faith and our memories”) and imaginary compensations for frustrated desire (“greater resignation to our fate”), whereby the passage shifts to the assumption that subjectivity is always situated in transindividual conditions of which it can never be fully conscious or free. In the end, the “progresses” of “humanity” seem measured not by a liberal model of social life which guarantees personal identity and autonomy, but a democratic collective characterized by subjective difference and cultural heterogeneity (“the gigantic sentiment of life”). Hence, the “letters” which represent and sustain this democracy aim “to multiply and increase and invigorate in the spirit […] thousands and infinite sensations.” The kind of fictional discourse suggested by this aim seems less a panoramic representation of social groups which adheres to the unities of realism, than a social delirium which proliferates psychological states and confounds temporal and spatial coordinates, representing that “marvelous world” where the reader is freed from social isolation.
In evaluating the current situation of the Italian novel, Tarchetti’s constant theme is the moral and political failure of realism. He laments Italy’s lack of a strong tradition in the novel {156} in contrast to other countries. Amid much praise for English, American, German and French writers, Manzoni is degraded as second-rate:
Non vi ha luogo a dubitare che I promessi sposi sieno finora il migliore romanzo italiano, ma non occorre dimostrare come esso non sia che un mediocre romanzo in confronto dei capolavori delle altre nazioni.
There is no room to doubt that I promessi sposi has so far been the best Italian novel, but it is unnecessary to demonstrate that it is a mediocre novel compared to the masterpieces of other nations.
[2]
Williams 1958: Chap. 2 has clarified this point. My argument concerning Tarchetti’s cultural politics implicitly takes issue with Carsaniga:
In their loathing for everything bourgeois, the
Such comments tend to make the naive equation between realism and reality, failing to take into account the ideological determinations of literary form.