PINOCCHIO AND “SERIOUS” FICTION
Collodi’s tale of Pinocchio may have fairy-tale-like qualities that tie it to the genre of children’s literature, but many of its elements are more allied to the tradition of adult, “serious” prose fiction. Its main personages, for example, have rather bad characters, unlike the unerringly good heroes and heroines of fairy tales. Pinocchio is transgressive and selfish for most of the tale; Geppetto is very hot-tempered; Ciliega (Master Cherry) drinks much too much; and the Blue Fairy (the “Fairy with Sky-Blue Hair” in Geoffrey Brock’s translation) is quite hard-hearted and often does not display much affection for the puppet. Moreover, the tale is set in a provincial Tuscany that was quite recognizable to readers when it first appeared, a world full of everyday problems, not the least of which was getting enough to eat.
Yet, as Calvino noted, Pinocchio is “a model of narration, wherein each theme is presented and returns with exemplary rhythm and precision, every episode has a function and a necessity in the general design of the action, each character has a visible clarity and a linguistic specificity”; in this sense the tale follows a fundamental narrative prototype of the fairy tale and folktale, as defined by Vladimir Propp. The dynamism of the action as it unfolds horizontally is much more important than deep psychological or extensive descriptive elements; the story itself is the thing, in short. In Pinocchio, as in many fairy tales, it is the overcoming of obstacles that pushes the tale forward, until the hero is rewarded with the happy ending.
In order to understand better the qualities that make of the puppet’s tale something much more complex than a story of goodness and obedience rewarded, however, it is first important to keep in mind that the book we now think of as a unified tale was in fact published serially under two titles over a three-year period. “The Story of a Puppet” was published over several months of 1881 in the Giornale per i bambini, a very popular children’s magazine.
The first fifteen chapters of the unified book are made up of these pieces, and in the last of them Pinocchio is hanged and dies. Collodi killed off his character evidently with no intent of resurrecting him, but the editor of the Giornale per i bambini pleaded with him to continue the very popular story, so in 1882 and into 1883 Collodi published piecemeal “The Adventures of Pinocchio” which became chapters 16 to 36 of the book.
There was further continuation of a sort in another serialized story called “Pipì o lo scimmottino color di rosa” (Pipi or the little pink monkey), which Collodi published in the same children’s magazine from 1883 to 1885, and in which there is a wealthy, obedient little boy named Alfredo, who seems to be the boy Pinocchio became after his transformation from wooden puppet to human being. It is not the good Alfredo who has been remembered and whose story has been endlessly retold, however, but rather the naughty willful Pinocchio who gets himself into one bad fix after another. In fact, in the first published section of the book, “The Story of a Puppet,” there are scarcely any positive and educational elements, and the tale is more subversive than pedagogically correct. Only in “The Adventures of Pinocchio” does the puppet decide that he wants to become a “good boy,” and this in chapter 25, closer to the end than the beginning of the tale. We all know that mischief and wrongdoing are much better spurs to dynamic narrative invention than stolid goodness, so it is not surprising that Collodi delays the puppet’s conversion to goodness for much of his tale, in the service of what Calvino, in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, calls the exemplary narrative qualities of “lightness” and “rapidity.” The ethical quality of the story that has been much emphasized in its afterlife in popular culture, especially in the spectacular highlighting, by means of the growing nose, of the dangers of telling lies, is much less evident in Collodi’s episodic creation, in which lying is just one of Pinocchio’s many peccadilloes that include the common childhood “sins” of disobedience, loafing, and skipping school.
THE BLUE FAIRY AND THE FANTASTIC
One of the most significant additions to the second half of the book is the figure of the Blue Fairy, a civilizing female influence on the unruly puppet who, until her appearance, lives in an entirely masculine world of dog-eat-dog street smarts, macho bravado, and dangerous trials and tribulations. The puppet’s “birth” is accomplished without any maternal involvement, but his “rebirth” and eventual elevation to full human status take place under the sign of the mother, as if Collodi realized that a motherless creation is inevitably monstrous (à la Frankenstein) and doomed to exclusion from the human family.
Nicolas J. Perella, in his very rich “An Essay on Pinocchio,”[3] discusses some of the complexities of the Blue Fairy, who first appears as a moribund little girl, a kind of sister to the puppet, and later, reborn, as a grown-up, a kind of young mother. Perella sees her as having a “social bearing that lies somewhere between a lady of the middle class and a woman of the rural popular class.” Her essentially bourgeois status is in decided contrast to the poverty-stricken status of Pinocchio’s “father,” Geppetto, who is preoccupied with the “reality of hunger and a struggle to survive,” and their socioeconomic differences, according to Perella, mean that they could never live together as one happy family. And indeed the Italians of Collodi’s time were deeply divided along economic and class lines.
Perella also notes that usually in the fairy-tale tradition the mother or stepmother is the “crueler parent,” while the fairy godmother is kind, but that the Blue Fairy, as an “internalized mother imago,” is both benevolent and cruel, thus “blending the two concepts.” There are many mysterious, even mythic aspects to this ambiguous figure, including her blue hair, her ability to metamorphose, and her associations with death, and these aspects are among those that tend to fascinate some of the writers who have done their own versions of the tale. To use Mary Russo’s phrase, the Blue Fairy is a “female grotesque,” a being at once fascinating and repellent.[4]
Given the dominant cultural referents in Italy, critics there have often associated her with the Virgin, who is traditionally depicted with a blue mantle, and have even read Pinocchio as a Christological allegory, since Pinocchio is the son of a carpenter whose name derives from Giuseppe or Joseph, and must die as a puppet in order to be reborn as a transfigured being. But, mother, sister, fairy godmother, or stand-in for the Virgin Mary, the Blue Fairy is a disquietingly rare female figure in a tale in which, as Perella writes, “the patriarchal family stands as an island of security in an egotistical, aggressively hostile world”—a patriarchal family, I might add, that is fairly much all patriarchy and much less colored by the maternal than traditional families of the time would have been.
The Blue Fairy is not the only disquieting element in the puppet’s tale. Pinocchio himself (or itself?) is mysterious from the beginning—first a piece of wood, but a very special piece of wood in that it speaks even before it is transformed into a puppet. The old carpenter Master Antonio, a tippler nicknamed Master Cherry (Ciliegia) “on account of the tip of his nose, which was shiny and purple like a ripe cherry,” intends to turn the piece of wood into a table leg.
Master Cherry is stopped from cutting into the piece of wood by “una vocina sottile sottile” (a little high-pitched voice) that pleads: “Don’t hit me too hard!” Ciliegia thinks he is imagining the voice, and, although he is fearful, continues to manhandle the piece of wood very roughly, stopping only when, as he is planing the wood, the voice says, “Stop it! You’re tickling my tummy!” Then the old man is so frightened that “the tip of his nose … turned bright blue with fright.” Violence, threatened mutilation, and chilling fear permeate this rousing first chapter —just the stuff to hook young readers, and lots of fun for adult readers, too, who may be thinking that Master Cherry has definitely had one too many.
Ciliegia is only too happy to give his friend Geppetto the frightening piece of talking wood, and Geppetto, who had already declared his intention of carving a puppet “who can dance and fence, and do flips” (his goal is to travel the
world with this puppet in order to earn his living), takes the wood home and begins to carve out his little future source of income. He names the puppet Pinocchio, which means “pine nut,” and comments ironically that he once knew an entire family of Pinocchios who all did well for themselves, to wit, “the richest one was a beggar.” Thus is the theme of hunger and of the constant search for enough food to survive introduced into the tale.
The mysterious preexistence of Pinocchio, a sheer potentiality hidden in a piece of wood and waiting to be liberated into form, brings mythic elements into the story. As critic Rodolfo Tommasi has noted,[5] in his reading of the symbolic and allegorical qualities of the tale, Collodi certainly would have been aware of Celtic and Nordic myths of talking trees that had been incorporated already into the French and Italian fairy-tale traditions in writers such as Charles Perrault and Luigi Capuana; moreover, Dante had provided a striking example of such magical vegetation in his Inferno, in the circle of the suicides who must suffer eternal pains as gnarled, speaking bushes and trees.
As Tommasi also notes, Geppetto’s home is just the right sort of place between the real and the fantastic for such a birth to occur, since it is a humble abode with real, broken-down, meager furnishings but embellished with a painted fire and a painted kettle steaming away on the back wall. It is a liminal space, betwixt and between reality and fantasy, a “limen” or threshold on one side of which is potentiality and on the other, actualization. Pinocchio’s potential existence, expressed in the little voice coming out of the unformed material, emerges in the form given by his creator, just as the formless soul is housed in the shape of a human body. (Dante’s disquisition on the relation of the soul and the body in canto 25 of the Purgatorio may have some relevance here.)
As the tale proceeds, more eerie elements are introduced: many gothic night scenes; Pinocchio’s hanging; the funereal images that surround the dying little girl with blue hair. Yet the eeriness is balanced by the recognizably everyday characters and the open, cordial, and “grandfatherly” tone of the narrator’s voice, who recounts the amazing events in a very concrete and agile Florentine prose. The cordiality and sprightliness of the book’s tone, the vivacious dynamism of the narration that carries Pinocchio ever onward through varied adventures, and the very ancient and recognizable themes of the voyage as initiation into maturity, the overcoming of hardships, and the search for a mother’s love: all of these positive elements account for the book’s mainstream appeal.
REWRITING PINOCCHIO
Pinocchio’s narrative verve and its darker and more transgressive qualities have appealed to numerous contemporary writers, among them, such prominent Italian authors as Gianni Celati, Umberto Eco, and Giorgio Manganelli, as well as the American writer Robert Coover. Filmmakers have also been attracted to the tale, and none so successfully as Walt Disney, whose 1940 animated version I shall consider in some detail. Before turning to Disney’s film, however, I want to look at contemporary rewritings of Pinocchio. In the 1960s, when Italian realist and neorealist modes of narrative had exhausted their innovative potential and had become fixed in a mainstream type of linear narration and standardized style, experimental writers were looking for new and different models for the creation of prose fiction. An example of such experimental fiction is Gianni Celati’s Le avventure di Guizzardi (The Adventures of Guizzardi), published in 1973, which of course echoes Collodi’s title. The similarity does not end there. Celati admired the picaresque and transgressive qualities of the puppet’s adventures, and his book, although not at all an explicit rewriting of Collodi, also recounts the mostly negative adventures of young Guizzardi, who is kicked out of his home by his frustrated parents because of his unwillingness to work and settle down. The novel is highly episodic, as is Collodi’s tale, and it is filled with menacing characters who use and abuse Guizzardi time and again.
The choice of a children’s book as implicit model was very significant, for it indicated a move away from high-cultural models toward popular forms, a sort of return to storytelling as contrasted to the more dominant trend of realist novels that had come to define Italian prose fiction by the 1970s. Celati may also have been indirectly inspired by Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, which was written shortly after the end of World War II, and which looked to Collodi’s tale not only for the name of the boy protagonist, Pin, but also for the book’s fairy-tale-like, picaresque plot structure. Both Calvino and Celati, who ended up becoming close friends and sometime collaborators, often emulated the structural and thematic elements to be found in the tale tradition, whether written or oral, and Collodi’s tale was a prime example of that tradition.
Already before the publication in 1973 of Celati’s wonderfully inventive, Pinocchio-like tale, however, another Italian writer had revealed his fascination with Pinocchio in two articles that appeared in the newspaper L’Espresso in 1968 and 1970. Giorgio Manganelli, who died in 1990, was one of contemporary Italy’s most original writers. Deep into Jungian psychological models, a translator of Poe, the author of numerous books of extraordinary rhetorical complexity and thematic intensity (favorite themes include death, anguish, and the dangers of love), and an expert critic of baroque literature and of so-called minor writers of England and Italy, Manganelli was fascinated by the puppet-child whose story held deep mythic and psychological resonance for him. He collected Pinocchio figures, and when I interviewed him in the mid-1980s at his apartment in Rome, I was amazed to see that his study was completely filled with large and small statues of the puppet.
In 1978, Manganelli wrote a book called Pinocchio: Un libro parallelo (Pinocchio: A Parallel Book). At once a retelling of and a commentary on Collodi’s tale, the book draws out the symbolic, allegorical, and enigmatic qualities of the tale and concentrates much attention on the mysterious figure of the Blue Fairy, who is a bringer of both life and death: a seductive and dangerous female presence who is tied to the puppet as another being on the margins between the real and the unreal, power and abjection, conformity and transgression.
In his essays, Manganelli writes of Pinocchio as representative of the ancient figure of the “trickster,” who is present in many cultural traditions. He is solitary and must carry the weight of his transgressive role without being one with the society that assigns him that role. Manganelli further points out that the puppet’s flight from home is also a journey toward something, and that “something” is his death as puppet trickster and rebirth as integrated human boy. Manganelli comments:
Killed by good actions, Pinocchio awakens as [in Collodi’s words] “a boy like all others.” … That casual phrase touches the infantile dilemma: to accept both difference and uniqueness of self, or to lose both. Pinocchio gives up his uniqueness as a puppet; as a human he will have a name but he will be anonymous. As a puppet he was deformed, lacking in some sense, but let’s not forget that his “deformity” was also a condition of freedom.
There is no other twentieth-century Italian author who has meditated upon Pinocchio’s meaning as deeply as Manganelli, nor are there many other modern authors who are as strongly on the side of difference, anomaly and uniqueness against the stifling and often death-dealing effects of conformity.
Then there is Eco’s “Povero Pinocchio!,” which in fact was written by students in one of his seminars at the University of Bologna and re-elaborated by him. In this class, Eco had his students do a number of exercises in the form of linguistic games. The Pinocchio exercise was to write a summary of the tale in ten lines using only words beginning with the letter P. Eco was so pleased with the results that he put together a number of the students’ inventions into a longer piece. It is impossible, of course, to translate such a thing well, so I only give my attempt at translating a few excerpts into English:
Povero papà (Peppe), palesemente provato/penuria, prende prestito polveroso pezzo/pino poi, perfettamente preparatolo/progetta/prefabbricarne pagliaccetto
Poor papa Peppe, primarily penurially pinched, p
icks paltry pine piece perfectly prepared, projects puppet prefabrication
The point of the exercise was to help students improve their vocabularies, but it also turned out to be a wonderful implicit commentary on the meaning of Pinocchio. With their suitable initial letter, the words “poverty” and “penury” are rightly highlighted in the students’ versions; also, the deus ex machina function of the Blue Fairy is emphasized in phrases like “provvidenziale pulzella” (providential poppet), and the final lines are particularly witty:
Paradossale! Possibile? Pupazzo prima, primate poi? Proteiforme pargoletto, perenne Peter Pan, proverbiale parabola pressoché psicoanalitica!
Paradoxical! Possible? Puppet, primate? Proteoform pest, perennial Peter Pan, proverbial parable practically psychoanalytical!
Pinocchio was one of the few stories that Eco could count on being known by all of his students, and his use of it shows how deeply it has penetrated into the collective consciousness of Italians, even if, as is so often the case with classics, many admitted to not ever having read the original book in its entirety.
My last few comments regarding written versions of Pinocchio have to do with a fascinating novel by American writer Robert Coover entitled Pinocchio in Venice, which was published in 1991. Coover, who has won many accolades for his original, often experimental fiction, is the author of the well-known collection of stories Pricksongs and Descants and several other novels and story collections. Pinocchio in Venice is not only a postmodern tour de force but it also reveals Coover’s very deep knowledge of the original Italian tale, and of other aspects of Italian culture such as the Commedia dell’Arte, the history of Venice, and especially the Venetian carnival tradition. A very old emeritus professor from an American university returns to his native Venice in order to finish his magnum opus, a tribute to the Blue Fairy entitled Mamma. The aged Pinocchio relives all of his dangerous adventures as he slowly turns back into a wooden puppet. The book is raucous and bawdy, like a Commedia dell’Arte performance, but it is also a philosophical meditation in fictional form on what it means to be human.