The Persistent Puppet
Lionel WIJESIRI
“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 puppet who is
one of the world’s most immediately recognisable characters since his
creation more than 125 years ago by the Tuscan writer Carlo Lorenzini,
known as Collodi.
Pinocchio is everyone’s favourite. Wide-eyed and long-nosed, his
fixed bemused smile suggests he is not too sure of his much publicised
desire to become a ‘real boy’ - he seems to beg you to take him with
you. And many do.
What is it about this simple story that has caught our fancy?
The book itself starts out somewhat differently, with the carpenter
discovering a block of wood in his workshop that talked, laughed and
cried like a child.
According to psychiatrist Gaylin, this beginning is simpler, yet
ultimately more sophisticated: a metaphor for a parent who is given a
newborn with potential within, but still hidden
The underlying theme of Pinocchio’s desire and attempts to ‘become
human’ replicate every human being’s journey.
He has to learn to hear the voice of conscience and ignore outward
distractions, which are symbolised in the story, by the character,
Cricket.
On his journey, Pinocchio learns his limitations. There are moments
of helplessness - he sleeps too near a fire and his feet, being wooden,
get burnt. He learns the value of work when he turns into a donkey and
must work like one.
 His nose, which grows uncontrollably whenever he tells a lie, teaches
him the power of lying as well as its painful consequences.
The environment acts on him as much as he acts on the environment,
and the exchange slowly provides him with the cues to becoming truly
human.
The blue fairy plays a very special role in Pinocchio’s life. The
fairy tells him that it is people who grow; puppets never grow, they are
born as puppets, live as puppets and die as puppets.
Pinocchio continues to do good and bad, because he becomes human, not
a saint, but (thanks to the fairy) his newly developed capacity for love
and empathy, and above all, hope, is what finally makes him real.
Pinocchio draws from classical sources, such as Homer and Dante, but,
more significantly, it is part of the Tuscan short-story tradition whose
genesis as 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.”
Collodi originally had not intended the novel as children’s
literature; the ending was unhappy and allegorically dealt with serious
themes. In the original, serialised version, Pinocchio dies a gruesome
death - hanged for his innumerable faults, at the end of Chapter 15.
At the request of his editor, Collodi added chapters 16-36, in which
the “Blue Fairy” (as the Disney version names her) rescues Pinocchio and
eventually transforms him into a real boy, making the story suitable for
children.
In the second half of the book, the maternal figure of the Blue Fairy
is the dominant character, versus the paternal figure of Geppetto, in
the first part.
Collodi, who died in 1890, was respected during his lifetime as a
talented writer and social commentator, but his fame did not begin to
grow until after Pinocchio was translated into English, for the first
time in 1892, but, in particular, with the widely-read Everyman’s
Library edition of 1911. Several of the book’s concepts have become
commonplace, particularly the long nose for liars. The Tuscan male name
“Pinocchio” means “pine nut” and “kernel”.
Maybe, one would say that the ‘Adventures of Pinocchio’ is a story
about an animated puppet, talking crickets, boys that turn into mules
and other assorted fairy tale-like devices that would be familiar to a
reader of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ or ‘Brothers Grimm’.
However Pinocchio is not a traditional fairy-tale world, containing
as it does the hard realities of the need for food, shelter and other
basic measures of daily life, even the setting of the story is the very
real Tuscan area of
 Italy. It was a unique literary melding of genres
for its time.
Pinocchio, in addition to being a children’s tale, is a novel of
education, with values expressed through allegory. There are many ways
of viewing these allegories. One is that they mirror the values of the
middle class of the 19th century, in particular, that of Italy, as it
became a nation state.
For example, not following the schemes of the fox and cat (i.e. the
thieving noble class), but, instead, honestly working for money, and
obtaining an education, so that one is not treated like an ass (the mule
working class).
There are at least 14 English-language films based on the story, not
to mention the Italian, French, Russian, German, Japanese, and many
other versions for the big screen and for television.
The story is also translated into 80 different languages. Pinocchio
has lived on, both in popular culture and in literary and filmic
versions of the tale.
The beloved story of Pinocchio has not only entertained generations
of children around the world (it is topped in worldwide sales only by
the Bible); it has also provided fuel for many Italian (and other)
writers of adult fiction.
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 literary high culture, most visibly in his
homeland but also in the United States and elsewhere. |
