Fantastic, Spirits, Pseudo-Science and Risorgimento in Nineteenth-Century Italian Narrative: The Case of Tarchetti's A Dead Man's Bone

Linda Garosi

doi:10.13189/lls.2020.080307

Abstract

This paper aims to study the Italian ghost story entitled A Dead Man's Bone, included in Tarchetti's Fantastic Tales (1869) to illustrate, by means of this specific case, both the way and the purpose of the reception of the Gothic and Fantastic in Italian narrative. For this reason, it is necessary to frame the textual analysis within the historical and cultural coordinates of the post-Unification years, in order to, first of all, clarify the fact that the operation ought to be evaluated in a specific ideological and compositional context rather than from a thematic point of view. In this regard, the study of A Dead Man's Bone intends to highlight that the most relevant outcomes of Tarchetti's rewriting of a ghost story by Théophile Gautier have to be appreciated as the opening for new experiments in narrative forms which root in a rapidly changing situation and, nurtured by the disillusionment of the post-unification years. Moreover, the author's use of codes and conventions of a specific subgenre of modern Fantastic, such as the ghost story, is also related with his direct involvement in pseudoscientific movements as Mesmerism and Spiritism. It goes without saying that the author's effort to innovate narrative forms is meant to convey a personal interpretation of the present by means of a new kind of realism in art.

Highlights

Introduction issued in1869 by the Milanese publishing house Treves as Fantastic Tales (Racconti fantastici) [1], have been considered the first example of Fantastic in Italian narrative tradition; Vincenzo Moretti [2] points out that: “Prima della pubblicazione dei Racconti fantastici tarchettiani è arduo trovare nella letteratura italiana dell’Ottocento quei temi definiti dal Todorov tipici del genere fantastique: la metamorfosi, il pandeterminismo, la doppia personalità, il reciproco passaggio dalla materia allo spirito, le mistioni di tempi e di spazi lontani, le perversioni sessuali fino al vampirismo e alla necrofilia” (p. 17)
In the very introduction to his translation of Fantastic Tales, Lawrence Venuti [4] underlines that Tarchetti “was the first practitioner of the Gothic tale in Italy, and most of his Fantastic narratives are based on specific texts by writers like Hoffmann, Poe, Nerval, Gautier, and Erckmann-Chatrian” (p. 9)
Lo Castro [17] explains that Scapigliati writers pretended to overcome the contraposition between two irreconcilable levels of reality, the field of science and that of art, and they tried to find a narrative mode that, by connecting them, aimed at forging a new concept of realism and a gnoseological dimension in art: “forte è in alcuni autori, che più di altri lo hanno praticato, la tendenza a servirsene in un orizzonte teorico di discussione della scienza (Tarchetti e Capuana soprattutto [...])

Summary

Introduction

Introduction issued in1869 by the Milanese publishing house Treves as Fantastic Tales (Racconti fantastici) [1], have been considered the first example of Fantastic in Italian narrative tradition; Vincenzo Moretti [2] points out that: “Prima della pubblicazione dei Racconti fantastici tarchettiani è arduo trovare nella letteratura italiana dell’Ottocento quei temi definiti dal Todorov tipici del genere fantastique: la metamorfosi, il pandeterminismo, la doppia personalità, il reciproco passaggio dalla materia allo spirito, le mistioni di tempi e di spazi lontani, le perversioni sessuali fino al vampirismo e alla necrofilia” (p. 17). Spirits, Pseudo-Science and Risorgimento in Nineteenth-Century Italian Narrative: The Case of Tarchetti's A Dead Man's Bone twilight of European Romanticis3.

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