I’ve been focusing on Italian literature now for many
months, so Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (more precisely The Adventures of
Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet, 1883) perhaps should not have offered
many surprises. Instead, it hit me like a slap in the face. Never before, not
even in Roberto Saviano’s books about the scourge of the Camorra or Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s accounts of vicious street kids, had the darker side of Italian
literature revealed itself so penetratingly. Pinocchio seemed to shed an
illuminating – though not particularly sunny – light on what had otherwise impressed
me as a national literature of unusual expressiveness, playfulness, imagination,
intimacy, magnanimity, and attention to beauty. One need only think of the
generous, attentive narrators of Ariosto’s “Orlando furioso” or Manzoni’s The
Betrothed, and even when authors turn their attention to the terrible
vicissitudes of life - Verga, for instance, or Belli, or Sciascia - there’s often
a comic element that buoys one above life’s wretchedness.
In Pinocchio, however, while some of those sunnier
elements and comedy are there, particularly in the expressiveness and play of
imagination, the tone starts dark, and the challenges to which the puppet,
dreaming of becoming “a real boy,” is put are beyond grim and perhaps even
beyond Grimm. Early on, Pinocchio, falling asleep with his feet propped up by
the fire, has his feet burned off. Not long after, accosted by a fox and a cat
intent on robbing him, he is lynched on an oak tree. And this scene, coming
after only 15 of the 36 chapters that make up Collodi’s book, would have been
the end of the story had not the readers of the initial, serialized tales of Pinocchio
clamored for more and had not Pinocchio, calling to his father like Christ
during his execution, been
resurrected for more. A note: once one starts down the path paved by Collodi’s
religious allusions, one runs the danger of hopping onto runaway metaphors
barreling towards going off the rails.
Translator Nicholas Perella’s 79 page essay on Pinocchio
included in the bilingual edition I read is thorough to the point of making it nearly
impossible for me to say anything about the book that he hasn’t already
observed. I’ll just note one aspect upon which Perella only lightly touches - a
few potent, fluid dichotomies in the story - which may help explain the book’s
enduring popularity as well as some of its attraction for an adult reader
looking for an essentially weird reading experience.
First among these, of course, is Pinocchio himself, an
amalgam of wood and human spirit (those wanting a ride on a runaway religious
metaphor may board now). Born from a father who forms the puppet from a block
of organic material much like the Biblical god forming Adam (one wonders if that god was as surprised as Geppetto at
the material’s sudden animation), Pinocchio is, throughout the book - or until
at the end he discards his wooden frame and ascends into boyhood - a curious
composite human-puppet, flesh that is at the same time not flesh, object that is
at the same time human, a shape shifter of sorts. Repeatedly he suffers
violence visited upon his wooden/human body; repeatedly he pulls himself back
together or has help doing it. Collodi’s enjoyment in playing with this
material is evident.
Even more fluid a dichotomy is that between life and
death. In chapter 15, that final chapter of Collodi’s initial serial, just
before Pinocchio dies from hanging, he encounters for the first time the
character we’ll later know as The Blue Fairy, described as “a beautiful Little
Girl with blue hair and a face as white as a wax image who, with eyes closed
and hands crossed over her breast, without moving her lips at all, [says] in a
voice that seemed to come from the world beyond: ‘There is nobody in this
house. They are all dead,’” then adds, “’I am dead, too.’” Pinocchio is a
fantasy with multiple instances of resurrection, in which death, despite the
horror associated with it, is ever mutable into new life. Even a giant serpent
Pinocchio encounters is alive, then apparently dead, then alive, then (a nice
comic element) really dead – from laughing so much that his heart bursts.
A third interesting dichotomy is that between the moralizing
thrust of the book – its insistence on obedience – and the delight readers (young
readers especially) may find in Pinocchio’s repeated rejection of authority. If
ostensibly the book is aimed at inculcating in children a respect for rules and
toeing the line, the subtext is clear: little of interest may happen in life if
one doesn’t transgress from time to time. I’m speculating, but children may love the
book in part because it allows them to go off on fantasies of disobedience
under the guise of being instructed to do just the opposite.
I’ll add one last thing: in addition to Pinocchio’s fascinating
darker aspects, the book contains some marvelously imaginative passages that
make it a rewarding reading experience in general and a rewarding Italian reading experience in
particular. There are many examples of the former – rabbit pallbearers, a
thousand woodpeckers who peck Pinocchio’s nose back to a manageable size, a
coach “the color of air…padded with canary feathers, and lined on the inside
with whipped cream and ladyfingers in custard,” drawn by a hundred pairs of
white mice and driven by a poodle. One favorite passage that strikes me as
particularly Italian is Pinocchio’s fantasy, in chapter 19, of what he’ll do
when the gold pieces he has planted in the Field of Miracles come up as
coin-laden trees:
Oh, what a wealthy gentlemen I’d
become then! I’d get myself a beautiful palace, a thousand little wooden horses
and a thousand stables to play with, a cellar full of rosolio cordials and
alkermes liqueurs, and a library chock-full of candied fruit, pies, panettoni, almond cakes, and rolled wafers
filled with whipped cream.
All those baked and candied marvels! One is transported into
a pasticceria. And a child dreaming of
alcoholic cordials? Darkness be damned; how can one not want to be in Italy after reading this?
Many thanks to Amanda of the Simpler Pastimes blog
for organizing the Pinocchio read-along.
