Letters
…getting pleasure from reading
the obituaries…
Going to bat
for Pinocchio
I was astounded by the negative reactions (“Letters,”
February/03) to Rebecca West’s “The
Real Life Adventures of Pinocchio” (December/02).
From my point of view, the article was perceptive and
engaging.
Joseph Oakes
Chicago
Rebecca West comments: My
article is a very condensed version of a longer essay
footnoted to indicate its critical sources. The reading
of Disney’s Stromboli as an offensively stereotypical
representation of a Jewish gypsy that so displeased Dr.
Brunemeier (“Letters,”
February/03) is not due to my “own stereotypical
thinking,” but is a view (with which I agree) expressed
in several pieces of criticism. Robin Allan’s Walt
Disney and Europe (Indiana University Press, 1999),
for example, notes: “The ethnic reference with its
implicit anti-Semitism cannot be ignored.... The Jewishness
is marked in facial expression and in conventional views
of character; Stromboli is obsessed with wealth.”
Critic Richard Schickel is further mentioned as the first
to have brought this charge of anti-Semitism in his work
on Disney. Cartoon stereotypes are no less disturbing
than other forms of religious or ethnic slurs. And as
for the “unwarranted and silly” feminist reading,
which highlights the issue of the male appropriation of
female procreativity, I was emphasizing the way in which
the Kubrick-Spielberg film A.I., which is deeply indebted
to Collodi’s Pinocchio, brings to the fore
this enduring topic—a topic with which many mid-
to late-19th-century works of literature grappled, including
Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein. I
regret that Dr. Brunemeier does not believe that a study
of books and films that takes into account gender issues
is a valid critical approach. Many male and female scholars
are not motivated by “grievance mongering”
but rather believe in the human and ethical import of
analyzing such cultural products as, among other things,
expressions of attitudes that both reflect and influence
lived life, in which gender and ethnicity play fundamental
roles.
Alt Ermal calls the article “a
great example of the in-depth analysis of nothing that
is produced by the self-important pompous parasites that
fill the halls of academia.” Whew! Is exploring
the complexities of an enduring and influential classic
that continues to have a remarkable afterlife in literature,
film, and popular culture the “analysis of nothing”?
If so, I gladly join the ranks of Benedetto Croce, Italo
Calvino, Umberto Eco, Robert Coover, AM’65, and
numerous others who believe that Collodi’s work
is far from “just another standard example”
of anything. And while I can say “there’s
no place like home” in much less than six pages,
I have spent my 30-year career as a teacher and literary
scholar avoiding such oversimplifications, not because
of a sense of “self-importance” but because
I love and respect literature and seek to serve its rich
intricacies and deep marvels of expression and form in
my teaching and critical writing. How sad that Alt Ermal
thinks that Collodi’s amazing book can be reduced
to a tool-kit plot and a simplistic message that make
of Pinocchio and The Wizard of Oz, as
well as countless other children’s and adult works
of art, nothing more than the same old story. I agree
that the basic plots are few; I do not agree that literature
can be reduced to them.
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