Reading Themes 

The Real Pinocchio
by Lucy Rollin

We bounce up an unpaved, two-rut road, dust flying, grateful that our Italian friend is doing the driving. We park near a field and begin climbing an ancient street of large cobblestones, threading our way between stone cottages, until we emerge near a small church on the edge of a hill and gaze out over a valley ringed with olive groves shimmering in the quiet sunshine. No cars, no city noise, no people in sight, only the green Tuscan hills, a brilliant expanse of sky, and the sounds of breeze and birds. This is old Collodi, the medieval village which was briefly, in the mid nineteenth century, the home of the boy Carlo Lorenzini. Later, as a professional journalist, he would take its name as his own when he wrote for children.
          Collodi’s mother had been born here, and here Carlo, her oldest, was sent to live with his grandparents because his parents were too poor to support him and his nine brothers and sisters. He was apparently an undisciplined boy, but he grew into a busy, passionately political man who fought in two wars for Italian independence, worked as a civil servant and director of a Florentine theater, and produced not only essays and satiric sketches but translations of French fairy tales and a series of textbooks for Italian children. When, in 1881, the editor of a weekly children’s magazine asked Collodi for a series of stories, he was ready. Pinocchio, the Tale of a Puppet, was an immediate hit with young readers and their parents, who loved its suspense and humor. Collodi originally planned to end the series with the fifteenth installment, which left the unfortunate puppet hanging on a tree. There was such an outcry from subscribers that he had to resume Pinocchio’s adventures for another year. In 1883, the episodes were collected into a book, also a great success, though not for Collodi himself in those days of poor copyright protection. He died in 1890, leaving his publisher to rake in the profits from all the reprints and translations—an ironic end for a man who fought so hard for the poor and disadvantaged of his country and who, with his puppet, gave the world an Italian legacy.
          Luigi Barzini, in his best-selling 1965 study The Italians, believed that Italian life, under its brilliant, vivacious surface, was bitter, disenchanted, and melancholy. Its love of spectacle diverted attention from the four “evil spirits” which surrounded every Italian child at birth: poverty, ignorance, injustice, and fear. Barzini was speaking of the mid-twentieth century, but Collodi’s Pinocchio is a perfect example of this potent mixture. His tale emerged from a life which knew poverty, injustice, and spectacle first-hand. Readers who come to Collodi’s Pinocchio knowing only Disney’s version are in for some surprises.
          Collodi’s series of thirty-six episodes rattles along at a good clip, rather like one of the old movie serials of the 1940s, each ending with a cliffhanger and each including a recap of the last one. The puppet himself is hardly the sweet little boy Disney’s animators created. While he is still a chunk of wood, he attacks and insults Master Cherry, his original owner, and Geppetto, his new father. As soon as his face is carved, the nose grows to an alarming length. As soon as the mouth is created, it laughs rudely and puts out its tongue. As soon as the puppet has legs, it runs away. Disobedience, it seems, is bred in the wood.
          What we  would today interpret as violence, abounds in Collodi’s tale: Pinocchio’s feet are burned off; he is hanged, sent to prison, caught in an animal trap, changed into a donkey, thrown into the sea with the purpose of drowning him, and swallowed by a shark (an old, asthmatic shark—quite a change from Disney’s whale). In the third chapter, Pinocchio reacts to the talking cricket’s warnings by smashing him with a hammer: “he stuck, flattened against the wall, stiff and lifeless.” Pinocchio is not the least bit remorseful. (The cricket occasionally returns later in other guises but he is never a cozy Jiminy Cricket.) Trickery, death, crime, cruelty, poverty, hunger, and injustice alternate randomly with humor, amazing good fortune, and kindness. Although Collodi does seem to have a general moral purpose in telling his tale, it wells up from his unconscious like a dream, with a dream’s fearsome mystery and unexpected wit. Like the puppet himself, and unlike Disney’s carefully managed version, it seems constantly to elude control.
          This improvisational quality springs directly from Collodi’s theater experience in Florence. There, he would have experienced some version of Commedia dell’arte, which originated in Italy and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had spread across Europe as the comedy of the people. Arte here does not mean “art” in the effete way we now think of it, but “skill” or “professionalism.” Traveling troupes of players would arrive in a community, collect local color and gossip, and incorporate them into standard scenarios of Harlequin, Columbine, the Doctor, the Captain, and other stock characters marked by their costumes, masks, regional dialects, and exaggerated gestures. Performances were outdoors in the town square on a makeshift stage wagon, where, for a few pennies, the locals could enjoy hilarious slapstick comedy. Several sequences in Collodi’s Pinocchio especially recall stock Commedia situations: the meal at the inn of the Red Crayfish, where the Fox and Cat could hardly touch a bite but gobble up huge quantities of food; the discussion among the three doctors in Chapter sixteen of whether or not Pinocchio is dead; and the opening scene between Master Cherry and Geppetto, with its fist-fights, its rapid-fire insults back and forth, and Master Cherry’s wig stuck in Geppetto’s teeth: “Their accounts being thus squared, they shook hands and swore to remain good friends for the rest of their lives.”
          Disney’s version of the Blue Fairy resembles Jean Harlow, in her slinky dress and blond curls, batting her long eyelashes at Jiminy Cricket. Collodi had something quite different in mind. The girl with the blue hair, who at crucial times steps in to save and admonish the errant puppet, must surely be a representation of the Virgin Mary, her classic blue veil changed, as if from a child’s impression, into flowing blue hair. In Pinocchio, she grows from a child, a little sister, into a woman—a mother figure, just as the image of the Virgin, for Catholic children, shifts from child to adolescent to young woman to suffering mother, as they need her image to reflect different stages of their lives. The most recent film version of this Tale, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), also shifts Collodi’s story toward a search for the mother; and Robert Coover’s amazing postmodern version of the tale, his 1991 novel Pinocchio in Venice (Simon & Schuster), closes on a strange scene of the old man Pinocchio’s reunion with his Mamma, the Blue Fairy. Collodi’s tale remains a search for the father, while the mother arrives when she is needed.
          Disney created one of his loveliest songs for his Pinocchio. “When You Wish Upon a Star,” so sweetly sung by Jiminy Cricket over the opening credits, became Disney’s theme. His aim was to make wishes come true (or at least a couple of wishes, anyway: for profit and for clean family entertainment). The song “I’m Wishing” featured early in his movie Snow White, and other songs in the Disney canon, repeat this theme constantly: those who are “good,” and who sincerely desire something, need only to wish to receive. And here is the most fundamental difference between Disney’s Pinocchio and Collodi’s: Collodi would have said that such an idea was the veriest hogwash and dangerous to boot.
          A child of severe poverty and first-hand observer of the injustices in the world, Collodi knew that wishing got you nothing. In fact, it could get you worse than nothing, as when Pinocchio plants his gold pieces in the ground, expecting them to grow into trees full of gold pieces, and the Fox and Cat steal them. Gullibility, laziness, and ignorance keep Pinocchio in his puppet state—someone else always “pulling his strings.” And fighting the corruption around him will take more than wishing. Throughout the tale, Collodi comments on the need for honesty, diligence, good sense, and education if one is to make a difference to himself and the world, and the comments are often ironic. Someone asks Pinocchio Geppetto’s trade: “That of a poor man,” he replies. After Pinocchio has spent four months in jail for being robbed, he has the opportunity for a pardon, but his jailer says, “No, not you . . . because you do not belong to the fortunate class.”
          “I beg your pardon,” says Pinocchio, “I am also a criminal..”
          The jailer replies, “In that case, you are perfectly right,” bows to him respectfully, and opens the door for him.
          In Chapter 24, at his lowest, hungriest hour, he finds he is ashamed to beg, and we hear Collodi’s voice directly:

. . . his father had always preached to him that no one had the right to beg except the aged and the infirm. The really poor in this world, deserving of compassion and assistance, are only those who from age or sickness are no longer able to earn their own bread with the labour of their hands. It is the duty of everyone else to work; and if they will not work, so much the worse for them if they suffer from hunger.

          Yet beg Pinocchio does, rather unsuccessfully, and then has to be tricked into working for his food by the latest incarnation of the Blue Fairy. Only at the very end of the story does Pinocchio, after months of effort, discover the mundane virtues of daily labor, diligence, and caring for another, and only then does he become human. This outcome, I believe, is the reason Collodi’s tale is one of the most frequently translated books in the world, in virtually all languages and cultures. It is a message probably more important to adults than to children, like that of the classic fairy tales Collodi admired: life is hard and confusing, and the best we can hope for is to stay the course with dignity and compassion. This is a long way from Disney’s superficial, wishes-come-true message.
          After bumping down the rough road leaving old Collodi, we stop in new Collodi—an unremarkable modern village tucked into the bottom of the hill, that looks as if it has seen better days. But nearby is Pinocchio & Suo Parco—Pinocchio Park, a place for children to experience Pinocchio’s adventures. A real organ grinder welcomes us into the park, and we retrace Pinocchio’s journey among various representational metal sculptures spread out in a lovely green landscape. We pass through the legs of a huge soldier holding up his hands, around the serpent in the road, among the four rabbits carrying a coffin, in front of the Blue Fairy’s little house, and into the mouth of the shark, where we can make out Geppetto sitting far in the back. Then, instead of being eaten, we have a snack at the Inn of the Red Crayfish. The most affecting moment is coming upon the representation of Pinocchio as part donkey. Standing all alone in a little clearing, looking slightly embarrassed, he seems to plead for sympathy and understanding. As we exit, we pass a statue of the Blue Fairy looking down with affection at the boy Pinocchio. The largest in the park, the statue soars into the sky, representing Pinocchio’s transformation, Collodi’s triumph, and the immortality of the strange tale of a puppet who finally discovers what life is about.

Recommended Editions:
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, illustrated by Roberto Innocenti, translated by E. Harden.  Knopf, 1988. Beautifully illustrated by an Italian artist from the Tuscan region.

The Authentic Story of Pinocchio of Tuscany translated by M.L. Rosenthal, illustrated by Roberto Ciabani, Crystal Publications, 2002.

Lucy Rollin is professor of English at Clemson University, where she teaches children’s literature. She visited old Collodi and Pinocchio Park in March 1997.