Pinocchio (19 page)

PINOCCHIO
AND CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Pinocchio
is considered a book for children: a common enough genre today but a relatively new one in Collodi's time. Children's literature was an innovation in nineteenth-century Italy (and elsewhere). In fact, in Italian culture a strict division between adult and children's literature was for centuries quite an alien idea. Oral folk traditions and a strong classical education were very much a part of shared experience (the latter at least by those upper-class Italians privileged enough to have a formal education), and both young and adult Italians shared narratives that drew heavily on these sources.

The almost universal Catholicism of Italians also acquainted children with the biblical events and figures that play such a formative role in Italian literature and theater. And because of the strength of the oral tradition, Italians were accustomed to the pleasures of a simple “good story” and unashamed of their enthusiasm for engaging and humorous tales, even if fairly simplistic ones. It was not until the nineteenth century, as nation building came to the fore and the formation of Italian citizens with shared values became a burning issue, that books written primarily or exclusively for children proliferated, acknowledging differences between the two readerships.

Pinocchio
is a case in point. It relies heavily on the Tuscan novella or short-story tradition to which Boccaccio's
Decameron
belongs, and also on classical sources, such as Homer and Dante. As the critic Glauco Cambon wrote: “Storytelling is a folk art in the Tuscan countryside, and has been for centuries….
Pinocchio
's relentless variety of narrative incident, its alertness to social types, its tongue-in-cheek wisdom are of a piece with that illustrious tradition.”
[1]
Cambon also highlights the importance of the
Odyssey
, the
Aeneid
, and the
Divine Comedy
to the structure and style of
Pinocchio
and concludes: “In a place like Italy, the cultural background would insure a deep response to this aspect of Collodi's myth, and guarantee its authenticity.” From its initial publication, up to today, the puppet's tale has been read and enjoyed by audiences of children and adults, which find different pleasures in it.

In 2002, the contemporary Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni, whose humor emerges in great part out of the Tuscan tradition of the novella, especially out of the
beffa
, or trickster-story, as well as out of a very personal sort of bricolage of popular and high-cultural references, filmed a version of
Pinocchio
, starring himself as the puppet. In an interview with the founding editor of
La Repubblica
, Eugenio Scalfari, Benigni spoke with ecstatic enthusiasm about the project that had been a dream of his for many years. He did not read Collodi's tale until he was twenty years old, he says, nor could his parents read it to him when he was a child because they were illiterate Tuscan peasants. But as a child Benigni was aware of the existence of the puppet nonetheless, because his mother would warn him that if he told lies his nose would grow like Pinocchio's and then Dante Alighieri would put him in Hell: “Until one day in the piazza I saw a statue of Dante and with that nose that one finds there, I thought that he was Pinocchio. Later I found a sentence in Dante that says: ‘Truly I have been a wooden boat without direction, tossed about by painful poverty.' What could be more like Pinocchio than that?!”
[2]
With this humorous anecdote, Benigni makes clear just how strong a connection he perceives between the high-cultural reference par excellence—Dante—and Collodi's more humble but no less culturally important figure. The actor-director also comments on “how many beautiful things this puppet has caused to be written,” mentioning the philosopher Benedetto Croce (who wrote that Pinocchio's essence is the “the wood of humanity”), Italo Calvino, Antonio Gramsci, writer-critic Pietro Citati, the Marxist critic Alberto Asor Rosa, and Giorgio Manganelli (whom he calls “the funniest Pinocchiologist”). Benigni's joy in working on his film version of the tale comes through very strongly in this interview as well as in all of the numerous other interviews and articles that appeared before the film's release—though the film, unfortunately, did not match his high aspirations, and soon faded from sight.

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.)