Pinocchio (20 page)

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:

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:

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:

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.

The choice to focus on the Blue Fairy as lost lover and mother is, I think, responsible in great part for the intensity of the book, which never strays for long from being an allegory of life as a voyage from maternal matrix or womb to dissolution or tomb. And the Blue Fairy, as in Manganelli's reading of her, is a powerfully protean figure, sometimes a silly, gum-chewing, big-breasted American girl named Bluebell, sometimes the lovely ethereal presence of the little girl with blue hair, sometimes a terrifying inhuman monster. All of her guises come together in her final meeting with Pinocchio who, on the verge of death, finally understands their bond as monsters, as beings excluded from full human existence, he as a piece of wood at heart, she as the lack that women have represented through the ages. It is a wonderful book, made even more enjoyable by a knowledge of the original tale's complexities that are animated once more in this thoroughly postmodern
Pinocchio
.

PINOCCHIO
IN FILM

I mentioned Roberto Benigni's 2002 movie of
Pinocchio
earlier, but Benigni is only one of many filmmakers who have wanted to bring Collodi's tale to the screen, including Federico Fellini and Francis Ford Coppola. Neither ever did, although Fellini's final film,
The Voice of the Moon
, starring Benigni, has overt allusions to the puppet's story. Other directors did make their versions of
Pinocchio
, whether in animation, with live actors, or a mix of the two, and there are at least fourteen English-language films based on the tale, not to mention the Italian, French, Russian, German, Japanese, and many other versions for the big screen and for television. Japanese anime cartoons owe a particular debt to
Pinocchio
, for Astroboy, one of the most popular figures of the genre, is based on the Italian puppet. Although Collodi did not provide a detailed description either of the appearance of his characters or of the settings, from its birth in serial form the tale has stimulated an extraordinarily rich illustrative tradition that in turn has nourished numerous cinematographic representations.

In the English-speaking world at least, no filmmaker so far approaches the achievement of Walt Disney, who in 1940 released the animated version of
Pinocchio
that has continued for more than sixty years to condition our collective knowledge of and response to the puppet. Critics are in agreement about the technical splendors of the film, but it did not enjoy a strongly positive reception when it was first released, and there are still very differing readings of it today. The cover of the sixtieth anniversary edition of the video tells us that it is Disney's “immortal masterpiece” and quotes
TV
Guide
's assessment of it as “arguably the greatest animated feature of all time!” Disney's 1937
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
had already achieved a huge advancement in animation; Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called it the greatest film ever made, for it showed that cartoons could represent any visuals a director might conceive of, thus creating a vast new realm of cinematic creativity and freedom.
Pinocchio
, along with
Fantasia
, built on the achievements of
Snow White
and the collaboration of hundreds of artists and technicians brought together in a kind of “collective creative epiphany,” to use Chicago film critic Roger Ebert's words. Ebert provides good information about the specific technical innovations of Disney's film: for one, the breaking of the frame, by means of which it is implied that there is space outside the screen, a technique of “regular” live-action films not used in animation until Disney's people made it possible. Thus in the exciting sequence in which Pinocchio and Geppetto are expelled by the whale Monstro's sneeze, then drawn back in, and then again expelled, there is a palpable sense of the presence of the whale offscreen to the right.
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Audiences are probably much more taken with the wonderful score, the strikingly humanlike characters (with perfectly chosen voices), and the allusions to recognizable types from high as well as popular culture than with the film's technical innovations, which they may or may not notice. As for its music, we remember that the film won Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, the unforgettable “When You Wish Upon a Star.” And, as for characters, by paring down the large cast of characters in the original book to a few well-drawn (in all senses of the word) good and bad types—the kindly Geppetto; the adorable innocent Pinocchio; the all-American hayseed Jiminy Cricket; the luscious Blue Fairy; Geppetto's darling, very humanized pet cat Figaro and flirty pet fish Cleo; pitted against the rapacious fox Honest John; the gross puppet master Stromboli; the sadistic Dickensian Foulfellow; the terrifying whale Monstro—Disney offers a genuine morality tale in which Good triumphs over Evil, according to the fairly saccharine code expressed primarily by the Blue Fairy: “Prove yourself brave, useful and truthful”; “A body who won't be good may just as well be made of wood”; “Give a bad boy enough room and he'll soon make a jackass of himself”; “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are”; and so on. It may be that children continue to enjoy the film because, as Ebert states, “all children want to become real and doubt they can,” so that they identify strongly with Pinocchio's wish to become a real boy.