Tarchetti repeats a list of defects in Manzoni’s novel and attributes them to its realist discourse:
in quanto all’accusa mossagli da taluno, che in quel libro via sia poco cuore, che quell’eterno episodio (quantunque bellissimo) della monaca, nuoccia più che altro al romanzo, e desti nel lettore tanto interesse senza appagarlo, che quel Don Abbondio si faccia piu disprezzare per la sua viltà che amare per l’amenità del suo carattere, che quel Renzo e quella Lucia sieno due amanti terribilmente apati e freddi, giova in parte osservare che il Manzoni volle dipingere gli uomini quali sono, non quali dovrebbero essere, e in ciò fu scrittore profondo e accurato.
As for the charge moved by someone, that the book contains little heart, that the eternal episode of the nun (although very beautiful) damages the novel more than anything else, and arouses in the reader such interest as is not satisfied, that Don Abbondio becomes more disparaged for his cowardice than loved for the agreeableness of his character, that Renzo and Lucia are two terribly apathetic and cold lovers, it is worth in part observing that Manzoni wanted to paint men as they are, not as they should be, and in that he was a profound and accurate writer.
Tarchetti’s laconic defense comes off weakly against his detailed statement of the charge, and realism appears very unattractive indeed: it is incapable of representing extreme emotional states and contains ideological contradictions in its representation of the priest Don {157} Abbondio which are symptomatic of its Christian conservatism and bourgeois sentimentality.
Tarchetti recognizes that the canonization of I promessi sposi and the numerous translations of contemporary French novels made realism the dominant fictional discourse in Italy, but he concludes that Italian culture is suffering from a “decadenza” (“decadence”) partly maintained by the translation patterns of Italian publishers (Tarchetti 1967, II:535). He argues that the French novels
che vengono tradotti e pubblicati dai nostri editori, sono generalmente tali libri che godono di nessuna o pochissima reputazione in Francia [e] tranne alcune poche eccezioni, la loro speculazione si è tuttor rivolta alla diffusione di romanzi osceni. which are translated and issued by our publishers, are generally such books as enjoy no or little reputation in France [and] with very few exceptions, their investment is always aimed at the circulation of obscene novels.
Tarchetti singles out French novelists like the prolific Charles-Paul de Kock (1794–1871), whose sentimental, titillating realism enjoyed enormous popularity in Italy. Italian translations of over sixty novels by de Kock were published between 1840 and 1865, bearing titles like La moglie, il marito e l’amante (The Wife, The Husband and The Lover, 1853) and Il cornuto (The Cuckold, 1854); some of these novels appeared in different translations a few years apart from various publishers, showing that the Italian publishing industry was scrambling to exploit de Kock’s marketability (Costa and Vigini 1991). Tarchetti was most concerned about the social and political implications of these cultural developments, which he finally brands retrograde:
Non si voglia dimenticare che l’Italia, unica al mondo, possiede una guida per le case di tolleranza, che i nostri romanzi licenziosi sono riprodotti e popolari anche in Francia, che gli uomini che li scrissero godono di tutti i diritti civili e dell’ammirazione pubblica, e che apparatengono in gran parte alla stampa periodica [mentre] ogni scritto politico awerso ai principi del governo, ma conforme a quelli dell’umanità e del progresso, è tosto impedito nella sua diffusione.
It must not be forgotten that Italy, unique in the world, possesses a guide to brothels, that our licentious novels are reproduced and {158} popular in France as well, that the men who write them enjoy every civil right and public admiration, and belong for the most part to the periodical press [whereas] the circulation of every political text opposed to the principles of the government, but consistent with those of humanity and progress, is immediately obstructed.
Tarchetti’s experiments with the fantastic can be seen as an intervention into this cultural situation: they were developed to resolve the crisis he diagnosed in Italian fictional discourse, the inadequacy of realism to serve a democratic cultural politics. The fantastic answered Tarchetti’s call for a fiction to represent that “marvelous world” of “sensations” which he saw as a remedy for hierarchical social relations and his own social isolation; the freeing of subjectivity in fantastic discourse was a freedom from subjection. Because, in Tarchetti’s view, realism dominated Italian fiction to no politically progressive end, his intervention took the form of writing in a foreign genre opposed to realism, the Gothic tale. Tarchetti’s effort to write against the Manzonian grain in fact projected a revision of the history of fiction, in which the novel didn’t originate in Europe, but in “I’ oriente da cui si diffuse dapprima la civiltà per tutto il mondo” / “the Orient, from which civilization spread through all the world” (Tarchetti 1967, II:524). The prototype of the novel became, not epic or any form of realist discourse, but fantasy, and not the Bible or the Iliad, but The Arabian Nights:
I Persiani e gli Arabi attinsero dalla varietà della loro vita nomade, e dalla loro vergine natura, e dal loro cielo infuocato le prime narrazioni romanzesche, onde le leggi e le abitudini di comunanza sociale e domestica degli Arabi ci sono note e famigliari da gran tempo, e Strabone si doleva che l’amore del meraviglioso rendesse incerte le stone di queste nazioni.
The Persians and the Arabs drew from the variety of their nomad life, and from their virgin nature, and from their burning sky the first novelistic narratives, hence the laws and customs of the Arabs’ social and domestic community have been well-known and familiar to us for a long time, and Strabo lamented that love for the marvelous rendered uncertain the histories of these nations.
{159} Tarchetti’s Orientalist literary history clarifies the political agenda in his use of the fantastic, but simultaneously discloses an ideological contradiction which runs counter to that agenda. The passage shows him actively rewriting his cultural materials so as to transform the Orient into a vehicle for his democratic social vision. Whereas the Arabian tales actually offer glimpses of despotic monarchies, and the geographer Strabo describes the nomadic Arabs as “a tribe of brigands and shepherds” who are less “civilised” than the Syrians because their “government” is not as well “organised” (Strabo 1930:VII, 233, 255), Tarchetti drew on Rousseau’s notion of natural 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 concept of fiction apart from the realist discourse that dominated Italy by identifying with its other, the fantastic. Both these representations of the Orient, however, are clearly Eurocentric: they aim to make Persia and Arabia perform a European function, the regeneration of Italian fiction and society, and they never escape the racist opposition between Western rationality and Eastern irrationality. Tarchetti’s literary history assumed the range of meanings which, as Edward Said has observed, were typical of romantic representations of the Orient: “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy” (Said 1978:118).