A
contemporary archetype, the long-nosed Pinocchio is the
stuff of high literary culture—and global popularity. What
gives the puppet such staying power? Some very human tensions.
Once upon a time there was…‘A king,’
my little readers will say right away. No, children, you
are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.”
Thus begins The Adventures of Pinocchio, starring
a long-nosed puppet who has been one of the world’s most
immediately recognizable characters since his creation more
than a century ago by a Tuscan writer, Carlo Lorenzini,
known as Collodi.
The latest references to Pinocchio are
to be found in what seems at first a rather unlikely place,
a film by Steven Spielberg. The film is A.I.: Artificial
Intelligence (2001), based on Stanley Kubrick’s project,
cut short by Kubrick’s death, in which a robot with emotions
longs to become a real boy. In an essentially negative review,
New Yorker film critic David Denby wrote about
A.I.: “The story is based explicitly in Pinocchio,
but it gives us a queasy feeling from the beginning. Have
the filmmakers forgotten that Pinocchio is a scamp? He’s
disobedient and lazy, he lies, he has a nose that rather
famously gets longer. Pinocchio wants to be a real person
because he’s tired of being knocked around as a puppet.
He is redeemed by love for his wood-carver ‘father’ just
at the very end of the tale.”
I would wager that this fairly simplistic
reading of Pinocchio is based more on memories
of Walt Disney’s 1940 film version than on the original
tale, published first in serial form and then as a book
in 1883. In Collodi’s complex story, there are many stimuli
for “queasy feelings,” as well as for other diverse emotional
and intellectual responses, which careful readers, including
prominent Italian and American authors, have experienced
and used in order to shape Pinocchios of their own. Was
the original Pinocchio merely a “scamp” who was simply “redeemed”
by his putative father? Did he wish to be a real boy only
because “he was tired of being knocked around as a puppet”?
I don’t think so, nor do the many writers and filmmakers
who have been inspired by the world’s most persistent puppet.
The story of Pinocchio has not
only entertained generations of children around the world—according
to several sources, it is outsold worldwide only by the
Bible—it has also provided fuel for many Italian and other
writers of adult fiction and has been the inspiration for
cinematic references that are instantly recognizable more
than 100 years since Collodi first created the puppet. A
contemporary archetype, the long-nosed, not quite human
boy figure has entered into global popular culture (how
many countless Pinocchio puppets, toys, statues, cartoons,
references in ads, and so on must there now exist?), as
well as into high literary culture, most visibly in his
homeland but also in the United States and all over the
world.
Although
he created one of the most famous sets of fathers
and children, Carlo Lorenzini was a lifelong bachelor. Born
in Florence
in 1826, he chose to take the pen name Collodi, which is
the name of his mother’s native town near Pescia in Tuscany.
Collodi came of age as a writer in the so-called decennio
di preparazione, the “Decade of Preparation” from 1850
to 1860 when Italy
was moving toward unification. Like many of his generation,
he was a participant in the 1848–49 battles for Italian
national independence and unity, and throughout the 1850s
he was active as a journalist, writing under a variety of
names and on many topics, including politics and music.
One of his first books, published in 1856 when he was 30
years old, is a kind of curious tourist guide, one of the
first examples of a literary work dedicated to train travel—Italy’s
first train, a short trip from Naples to Portici, opened
in 1839—called Un romanzo in vapore: da Firenze e Livorno
(A novel in steam: from Florence to Leghorn). In 1857
he began a vast work about Florentine social life that he
called I misteri di Firenze (The mysteries of Florence)
in homage to a popular book by the French writer Eugène
Sue called Les Mystères de Paris (a work that fascinated
Umberto Eco, who wrote an important semiotic analysis of
it). When Italy
became a unified nation in 1861 Collodi began work as an
administrative officer in the new government, but he continued
to write fiction, publishing a translation of Charles Perrault’s
Mother Goose Tales and several successful pedagogical
books that recount the adventures of little boys named Giannettino
and Minuzzolo.
Pinocchio was written in the
final phase of Collodi’s career, the decade before he died
in 1890. Although he was well respected during his lifetime
as an Italian writer and social commentator, his fame didn’t
really begin to grow until Pinocchio was first
translated into English in 1892 and then in a widely read
Everyman’s edition of 1911. In Italy
his fortunes were bolstered by the powerful philosopher-critic
Benedetto Croce, who discovered Pinocchio and praised
it. There is now a “Collodi industry” in academic culture
that mirrors the popular-culture production of toys, movies,
and such, and each year scholars worldwide produce hundreds
of books and articles devoted to Collodi, most of which
have to do with Pinocchio.
Collodi lived in a complex period of
Italian history, when there was both a great push for unification
and much ambivalence about what unity would bring to a country
deeply tied to local tradition, style, life, and customs.
The writer lived in a reality of a unified nation, a unification
that he, who was a republican against the monarchs, had
supported with true ambivalence. Collodi’s beloved hometown,
Florence, was
the first capital of the newly formed nation, and Collodi
disliked intensely the effect it had on the place that for
him had been “a great big house in which all of the inhabitants
knew one another very well.” He liked the closed, comfortable,
domestic quality of the pre-capital Florence.
Attracted to order, discipline, structured educational practices,
he also dabbled in the occult and in mesmerism, and he was
attracted to the inherent disorder of life and things. After
Italian unification, there were many programs initiated
with the goal of making the Italian people; in the famous
phrase of Massimo d’Azeglio: “We have made Italy,
now we need to make the Italian.” But in spite of his interest
in pedagogical writing, Collodi was suspicious of these
efforts to create the ideal Italian citizen, seeing many
of them as a threat to individuality and personal freedom,
in which he very much believed. The clashes within Collodi
between freedom and disorder and, on the other side, structure
and unity, find expression in his story of Pinocchio, which
is possible to read both as a tale of transgression and
of the necessity for conformity.
Children’s literature
was a relatively new genre in Collodi’s time. The
idea of such a genre was really unknown until the mid-1800s,
when children became identified as a particular class of
being. Pinocchio is, however, a book for both children
and adults. Pinocchio can be read as a kind of
fairy tale, but it can also be read as belonging to a very
Tuscan tradition. The Tuscan tradition of the novella,
or short story, goes back to Boccaccio’s Decameron
and also to classical sources such as Homer and Dante—not
to speak of the Bible. The critic Glauco Cambon has written,
“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.” Cambon also highlights the importance of the
Odyssey, the Aeneid, and The Divine
Comedy to Pinocchio’s structure and style,
and he 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.”
Indeed, from its very first publication, the tale has been
read and enjoyed by children and adults, both of whom find
different pleasures in it.
Written and published serially, much
as Charles Dickens’s fiction was published, the book we
now think of as a unified tale was published in two distinct
parts over a three-year period. The first part, “La storia
di un burattino” (The story of a puppet), was published
over several months in 1881 in the Giornale per i bambini,
a popular children’s magazine. The first 15 chapters of
the unified book are made up of these pieces, and in the
last of them Pinocchio is hanged. Collodi killed off his
character, evidently with no plans of resurrecting him.
But the editor of the Giornale pleaded with him
to continue the popular story, and so in 1882 and 1883 Collodi
published piecemeal the second part, “Le avventure di Pinocchio,”
which became chapters 16 to 36 of the book. There was a
further continuation of Pinocchio—hardly known
to anyone outside Italy—another
serialized story called “Pipì o lo scimmottino color di
rosa” (Pipì the little pink monkey), published in the same
children’s magazine from 1883 to 1885. In this Collodi story
the protagonist is a wealthy, obedient, very good little
boy named Alfredo who seems to be Pinocchio transformed
into a boy. But Alfredo is boring as can be; it’s not a
good book; and it’s not the good little Alfredo that we
remember, but rather the naughty, willful Pinocchio.
Indeed Collodi’s original contains few
positive, educational, pedagogical, or moral elements—especially
in the first part, which is made up mostly of negative adventures,
Pinocchio getting himself into trouble. There are no lessons
drawn from these experiences. Only in the second part is
the idea that Pinocchio wants to be a boy introduced, and
this introduction occurs just ten chapters before the book
ends; it doesn’t dominate the story. Instead we have the
sense that Pinocchio for the most part is perfectly happy
to be a puppet. There’s a narrative reason for this: negative
adventures—danger and so on—are much more fun to write and
to read than are a series of moral lessons.
Pinocchio’s
long nose and his predilection for lying are not at all
highlighted in Collodi’s original episodic tale. Pinocchio
does have a long nose, but he is made with a long
nose, born with a long nose. The emphasis that
we remember so well from Disney’s version of the drastically
growing nose is not there, nor is there much emphasis on
the fact that Pinocchio lies. He does all sorts of things,
but they are seen as typical children’s pecadillos: he loafs,
he’s disobedient, he skips school.
A significant addition to the book’s
second half is the figure of the Blue Fairy, a civilizing
female influence on the unruly puppet who had, until her
appearance, lived in an entirely masculine world. The puppet’s
“birth” is accomplished without any maternal involvement,
but his “rebirth” as a real boy takes place under the sign
of the mother, as if Collodi somehow realized that a motherless
creation is inevitably monstrous (à la Frankenstein) and
doomed to exclusion from the human family. The Blue Fairy
is an extremely interesting character, moving from a little
girl who is dying to a grown-up who appears at times to
be a sister, a love interest, and a mother. She is a complicated
figure: she’s mean to Pinocchio, she punishes Pinocchio,
and of course she disappears at story’s end. She has a role,
a function, but she doesn’t stay. There is no push for a
happy family ending. Some Italian critics, however, have
found a family of sorts in Pinocchio, reading the
book as a Christological allegory: the Blue Fairy is a Virgin
Mary, since blue is the Virgin’s iconographic color; Geppetto
is the nickname for Giuseppe, or Joseph; and the little
puppet, the son of a carpenter, must die in order to be
reborn as a transfigured being.
The Blue Fairy is not the only disquieting
figure. Pinocchio himself (itself?) is mysterious from the
word go. He is in a piece of wood. He is not carved
into a puppet who then begins to talk. The piece of
wood talks, before it has taken on form, an event that
links the tale with various traditions of myth, especially
Celtic myth—of talking trees, of creatures that hide in
material, waiting to emerge magically. In fact Pinocchio
has a failed father, the man who first decides to carve
the mysterious piece of wood. However, he wanted to carve
it into a table leg. This pragmatic carver is nicknamed
Ciliegia, or Cherry, because he has a very big red nose—he’s
a drinker. (Collodi’s interest in the nose as a sign of
character is apparent: in A Novel in Steam, he
was already meditating on the nose: “I would rather like
it if physiologists could tell me which sympathetic nerves
exist between the heart and the nose and how it comes to
pass that the seat of affections and passions finds itself
in direct correspondence with that fleshy protuberance,
of infinitely variable form and size, which divides the
surface of the human face into two more or less equal sections!”
Clearly, Collodi had a fascination with the nose—a fascination
that has given Freudian critics great delight.)
Cherry, however, is unsuccessful in his
carving because the little piece of wood begins to cry out,
“Don’t hit me so hard! Stop! You’re tickling my belly!”
Frightened, Cherry decides to give it to his friend Geppetto,
who decides that he will make a puppet. However, his reason
for making a puppet is not Disney’s reason. He doesn’t want
a little son figure. He wants the puppet to earn his living.
Geppetto’s primary problem is poverty, dire poverty. He
says, “I will make a puppet who can dance, and fence, and
make daredevil leaps, and then we shall travel the world,
seeking our wine and bread.” He names his little puppet
“Pinocchio”—a Tuscan variant on pignolo, or pinenut.
Within the name itself is the message that food is extremely
important in this peasant world. In fact the theme of hunger
and of looking for something to eat dominates Pinocchio.
It’s a book about a poverty-stricken, peasant rural class,
looking for food, looking for sustenance.
There are many eerie elements in Collodi’s
book: Gothic night scenes, Pinocchio’s hanging; funereal
images surrounding the dying little girl with blue hair.
However, Pinocchio never becomes a truly scary
Gothic tale simply because of its lively narrative tone,
a grandfatherly, vernacular Tuscan that carries Pinocchio
ever onward through his varied adventures. Combined with
the ancient, recognizable themes of Pinocchio’s journeys—initiation
into maturity, the overcoming of hardships, and the search
for a mother’s love—the result is a book with mainstream
appeal.
Over the past half
century Pinocchio’s narrative verve and
its darker, more transgressive qualities have appealed to
numerous contemporary writers. Unfortunately most of the
works by Italian authors have not been translated in this
country. But readers may be familiar with Italo Calvino’s
first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The
path to the nest of spiders, 1947), the story of a little
boy’s view of the Italian resistance. The protagonist’s
name is Pin—obviously, a shortened form of Pinocchio, and
the novel is structured very much like The Adventures
of Pinocchio. In fact Calvino has said that Pinocchio
is one of his all-time favorite books; by that, he doesn’t
mean children’s books, he means all books.
A wonderful little volume called Povero
Pinocchio! (Poor Pinocchio!) is made up of linguistic
games that Umberto Eco created for his students at the University
of Bologna. One
game, “Poor Pinocchio!” was to rewrite an episode from the
tale using only words that began with the letter P. Eco’s
goal was to improve his students’ vocabulary: to do the
assignment obviously requires using a dictionary. But he
loved the results so much that he took all of the student
pieces and put them together into a complete Pinocchio.
Here are the story’s final lines in English: “Paradoxical!
Possible? Puppet, primate? Proteoform pest, perennial Peter
Pan, proverbial parable practically psychoanalytical!”
Another variation on the Pinocchio theme
comes from the American writer Robert Coover, AM’65. In
1991 Coover—a postmodern, experimental prose writer who
teaches at Brown
University—published
a novel called Pinocchio in Venice.
In it Pinocchio is a very old emeritus professor at an American
university, going back to Venice
to complete his magnum opus, a tribute to the Blue Fairy
entitled Mamma. There he gets into every single
fix that he got into as a puppet, as a boy, as he slowly
disintegrates into sawdust. Coover’s Blue Fairy is as protean
as Collodi’s original. She appears as a gum-chewing, big-breasted,
bubble-headed college student named Bluebell who wears blue
angora sweaters, as the classic Blue Fairy, and as a true,
physical monster. It’s only at the very end of the book
that she, in all of her guises, and Pinocchio are reunited,
as he finally understands their bond as monsters, excluded
from full human existence—he as a piece of wood at heart,
she as the lack that women have represented through the
ages.
Many
filmmakers 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,
La voce della luna (The voice of the moon), starring
Roberto Benigni, has overt allusions to the puppet’s story.
However, hundreds of film and television versions have been
made in every culture imaginable: Italian, French, Russian,
German, Japanese, African, and so on. Even Japanese anime
cartoons owe a partial debt to Pinocchio: the popular character
AstroBoy is based on the puppet. The latest cinematic reincarnation
has already occurred in Italy
and will occur in the U.S.
on Christmas Day: the premiere of Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio.
Benigni, the comic actor who wrote and directed Life
is Beautiful (1997), is a native Tuscan who has been
working on his film version for years; in fact, he says
he has been preparing to do such a film all his life.
Although it opened in Italy
to mixed reviews, one effect of its opening has been a frenzy
of Pinocchio presence. A recent article in the New York
Times reported that Rome has been overrun by Pinocchio—everywhere
you look, every toy store, every department store, has Pinocchio
statues, posters, and books. A young woman has written her
feminine version, Pinocchia; there’s also been
a theatrical presentation called Pinocchia. Political
parties are even using the omnipresent puppet. The National
Alliance, Italy’s rightist party, has plastered posters
all over Rome
with a picture of Pinocchio and accusing the left party
of lying. So, great film or not, Benigni’s offering has
stimulated once more the great interest in Pinocchio.
Like Roberto Benigni’s film, Walt Disney’s
animated version of Collodi’s tale received mixed reviews.
But it was universally hailed as being amazing in its technical
innovation. Film critic Roger Ebert, X’70, has described
several groundbreaking techniques in Pinocchio,
including breaking the frame, by means of which it is implied
that there is a world outside the screen. This common technique
of live-action film had never been done in animation until
Disney. One scene in which you see this very clearly is
when the whale is sneezing out Pinocchio and Geppetto. All
we see are Pinocchio and Geppetto being sneezed out and
then sucked back, sneezed out and sucked back. But there
is the palpable sense that the monstrous creature is right
at the edge of the frame, just beyond our sight. Another
innovation that Ebert notes is the use of the “multiplane
camera,” a Disney invention that allowed drawings in three
dimensions. The camera seems to pass through foreground
drawings on its way into the frame, creating a sense of
depth. This technique is seen in the opening aerial shot
of Pinocchio’s village, passing through several levels of
drawings, taking us deeper into the village, until we arrive
at the closeup of the interior of Geppetto’s cottage.
Disney’s work is an odd and sometimes
disturbing combination of American and European elements.
The character of Jiminy Cricket, a kind of insect Will Rogers,
is perhaps the most important American note. But the settings
are very European, although they look more like a Bavarian
village than an Italian village, and many of the characters
are Old World, Commedia dell’Arte
types. One of the most disturbing Old World
characterizations is that of the greedy puppetmaster Stromboli.
In the book he is simply a gruff Italian man. But in the
Disney film, he is clearly a Jewish gypsy. His accent is
Italian, but from an anti-Semitic perspective, Stromboli’s
gross facial features and his long black beard are recognizably
Jewish, as is his tremendous love for money. It has been
suggested that Stromboli is “a burlesque
of a Hollywood boss,” that Disney
hated a lot of the Hollywood establishment.
Although some of Disney’s closest colleagues were Jewish
and insisted that they were unaware of any prejudice on
his part, Stromboli does disturb
a viewer today, for it is impossible to ignore the anti-Semitic
implications of his characterization. And it is all the
more disturbing when one thinks of the period in which the
film was made.
The Blue Fairy is also disturbing or
“queasy making,” though much less deeply so. The complexity
of the book’s character is gone. Disney’s Blue Fairy is
a bimbo, something like a 1930s starlet. There’s nothing
mysterious—or maternal—about her. She flits in and out of
the film and mouths a lot of simplistic, moralistic stuff,
but she has no real function. Her single goal is to get
Pinocchio to be a good, obedient boy, back in the warm protection
of Geppetto’s fatherly space where mothers are simply not
needed.
It is nonetheless a great movie, wonderful
to watch, and it is a film with an allegory of itself imbedded
in it: it is an animated film in which the main
character is precisely a nonhuman who is animated,
thus becoming a simulated “human.” There are several scenes
in Geppetto’s workshop in which the little wooden toys that
he has made—the clock, the toys, the moveable puppets—are
all turned on. In this pre-film world, little carved mechanical
figures are made to move just as drawn figures will be made
to move on the screen. To me this is a symbol of the tremendous
love for animation that went into the film, a collective
effort when the world of animation was just opening up.
In these scenes without any narrative function, Disney and
his team of artists were revealing something of the fascination
that animation exercises perhaps as much on its creators
as on those who enjoy the fruits of their labors.
However, there is a dark side to this
urge to create life (even if only simulated life). While
Geppetto is the version in bono of the artist as
benevolent God, delighting in his “son,” Stromboli
is the version in malo, the evil puppetmaster God who creates
the illusion of life for personal gain and glory. The ancient
theme of the dangers of hubristic creativity hovers around
this film, but there is also the sheer joy of creation that
seeks to animate lifeless things and to endow all objects
and animals with such “human” qualities as the capacity
to love and to live with conscious pleasure and direction.
The fascinating question of what constitutes
the boundary between humans and non- or post-humans informs
Spielberg’s recent film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
In addition to the film’s explicit references to the tale
of Pinocchio—the human mother reads the puppet’s story to
her robot or “mecha” son, who then decides he wants to be
human and, upon his expulsion from the home, he has a series
of Pinocchio-like negative adventures as he searches for
the Blue Fairy—it is possible to see the film, like Disney’s
Pinocchio, as a self-allegorical work. In Collodi’s
tale, in Disney’s film, and in A.I. the puppet
(or robot) is created by Godlike fathers as a child figure
to serve the needs, material or emotional, of the parent.
Collodi’s Geppetto wants his puppet to help him make a living,
Disney’s Geppetto wants his puppet to give him companionship
and love, and Spielberg’s mecha, David, is created specifically
and uniquely in order to love his human parents unconditionally.
Geppetto is a craftsman, while the mecha’s creator, Dr.
Hobby, is a scientist. Nonetheless, they are, artists or
scientists, all figures of the male creator who appropriates
the procreativity of the maternal realm, as they singlehandedly
“give birth to” their “sons,” effectively excluding women
from their worlds except in highly idealized and symbolic
roles. In A.I. when an associate of the apparently benign
designer of mechas makes what critic J. Hoberman calls “an
obscure moral objection” to Hobby’s creation of “a robot
child with a love that will never end,” Hobby’s reply is,
“Didn’t God create Adam to love him?” Hoberman comments,
“Yes, of course, and look what happened to him.” In fact,
the mecha David is also expelled from Eden
and futilely looks for the fictional Blue Fairy to make
him a “real boy” so that his mother will want him back.
Such elements make the story of Pinocchio
much more than a simplistic lesson in the importance of
obedience and conformity. Human creativity, whether an art,
a craft, or a technology, can yield astounding results,
but the power to bring into being real or simulated versions
of ourselves is fraught with dangers, not the least of which
is the illusion of total control over the creatures we make.
The anomalous, the abject, or the sheer excess of individual
desire—all historically associated with the feminine sphere—cannot
be tamed or repressed merely by admonishments to conform
to the Law of the Father, to be “good little boys.” So,
happily, Pinocchio goes on fleeing his destiny as a “good
boy like all the others,” until, sadly, that destiny catches
up with him. Collodi enlisted the aid of the feminine in
the taming of the puppet, but it is worth remembering that,
at the end of the tale, the Blue Fairy only appears in a
dream to Pinocchio, as the perfect mother he would wish
her to be. What or who in fact she may truly be or truly
desire is known only to her. Similarly, the mecha David
is “reunited” briefly with the mother of his dreams at the
end of A.I., but neither she nor he is real, and
their “perfect day” of mother-son bonding is disturbingly
hollow. Pinocchio’s and David’s “dreams come true,” as Disney’s
Jiminy Cricket so movingly sings, but at what price? Who
put these dreams of perfect goodness and filial bonding
into their heads? In reality, boys’ dreams of idealized
mother-figures might be comforting to them, but the dreams
of their fathers or father-figures who are avid for total
control of their sons can be, if realized, our worst nightmares
come to life.
Rebecca West, professor in Romance
languages & literatures and cinema/media studies, is
also director of the University’s Center for Gender Studies
and the author of Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge
(Harvard University Press, 1981) and Gianni Celati:
The Craft of Everyday Storytelling (University
of Toronto Press,
2000). This article is adapted from her 2002 Humanities
Open House talk, “The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio’s Heirs
in Contemporary Fiction and Film.” The items used as illustrations
are from her collection.
Rebecca
West has developed an online seminar—complete
with a copy of Collodi’s text, video clips,
and more—available free at Fathom.com: 
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