“What’s a donkey wheel?”
“It’s that wooden contraption, which draws up water from the cistern, so I can water my vegetables.”
“I’ll try.”
“All right, then, pull me up a hundred buckets of water, and I’ll give you a glass of milk in exchange.”
“Okay.”
Giangio led the puppet to the garden and showed him how to turn the wheel. Pinocchio went to work at once. By the time he had finished pulling up the hundred buckets he was dripping with sweat from head to toe. Never in his life had he worked so hard.
“Up to now,” said the farmer, “this work was done by my donkey, but that poor creature has come to the end of his days.”
“Will you take me to see him?” Pinocchio asked.
“Gladly.”
As soon as Pinocchio entered the stall, he saw a donkey stretched out on the straw, worn out from hunger and overwork. When Pinocchio had given him a long, hard look, he said to himself, uneasily, “But I know this donkey! I’ve seen that face before!”
And leaning down toward the donkey, Pinocchio asked him, in asinine dialect, “Who are you?”
Hearing this question, the donkey opened his dying eyes and answered in the same dialect, “I’m La-amp-wi-ick.”
Then he closed his eyes and passed away.
“Oh, poor Lampwick!” said Pinocchio softly, and picking up a handful of straw, he wiped away a tear that was rolling down his cheek.
“You’re so worked up about a donkey that didn’t cost you a cent?” said the farmer. “How should I feel, after paying good money for him?”
“I can explain: he was a friend of mine.”
“A friend?”
“A classmate of mine!”
“What?!” shouted Giangio, bursting into laughter. “What?! You had jackasses for classmates? I can imagine what a fine education you got!”
The puppet, mortified by these words, did not reply. He took his glass of warm milk and went back to the Cricket’s hut.
From that day on, for the next five months, he continued getting up every morning, before dawn, so that he could turn the donkey wheel and earn that glass of milk, which was doing so much to improve his daddy’s poor health. Nor was this all he did: in his spare time, he learned to weave baskets out of reeds, and by carefully managing the money he made from selling the baskets he was able to cover their daily expenses. On top of that, he built an elegant wheelchair all by himself so that he could take his daddy out for strolls and fresh air when the weather was nice.
And in the evenings, he practiced reading and writing. In a nearby village, he had paid a few cents for a big book, which was missing its title page and index, and that’s how he practiced his reading. As for writing, he used a sharpened twig for a pen, and lacking both inkwell and ink, he dipped the twig into a little bottle full of blackberry and cherry juice.
Indeed, because of his resolve to do his best and to work hard to get ahead, he not only succeeded in making his daddy’s life comfortable but he also managed to save up forty nickels to buy himself a new outfit.
One morning he said to his father, “I’m going to the nearby market, to buy myself a jacket, a cap, and a pair of shoes. When I come home,” he added with a laugh, “I’ll be so well dressed that you’ll mistake me for a rich gentleman.”
After leaving the house, he began running happily. Suddenly, he heard someone call his name, and when he turned he saw a pretty snail peeking out from the hedge.
“Don’t you recognize me?” asked the Snail.
“You do look familiar.”
“Don’t you remember the Snail who worked as a maid for the Fairy with Sky-Blue Hair? Don’t you recall that night when I came downstairs to give you some light and found you with your foot stuck in the front door?”
“I recall everything,” shouted Pinocchio. “Tell me at once, pretty Snail: Where did you last see my good Fairy? What is she doing? Has she forgiven me? Does she still remember me? Does she still love me? Is she very far away? Could I go see her?”
To all these questions, asked in a rush and without pausing for breath, the Snail replied with her usual cool, “My dear Pinocchio! The poor Fairy is bedridden in a poorhouse!”
“A poorhouse?”
“Unfortunately. Having suffered a thousand hardships, she is gravely ill and can no longer afford to buy herself even a crust of bread.”
“Really? Oh! Such grief you have brought me! Oh, poor Fairy! poor Fairy! If I had a million dollars, I’d run to give it all to her. But I only have forty nickels. Here they are—I was just going to buy myself a new outfit. Take them, Snail, and carry them at once to my good Fairy.”
“And your new outfit?”
“What do I care about a new outfit? I’d sell even these rags I’m wearing if it would help her! Go, Snail, and hurry up! And come back here in two days’ time—I hope I can give you a little more money then. Up to now I’ve been working to take care of my daddy; from now on, I’ll work five extra hours per day to take care of my mother, too. Goodbye, Snail, and I’ll expect you in two days.”
The Snail, contrary to her custom, began running like a lizard beneath the fierce August sun.
When Pinocchio returned home, his father asked him, “Where’s your new outfit?”
“I couldn’t find one that fit me well. Oh well! I’ll buy one another time.”
That evening, instead of working until ten, Pinocchio worked halfway through the night, and instead of making eight wicker baskets, he made sixteen.
Then he went to bed and slept. And in his sleep he thought he saw the Fairy in a dream. Beautiful and smiling, she gave him a kiss and said, “Bravo, Pinocchio! Because of your good heart, I forgive you every mischievous thing you’ve ever done. Children who dotingly look after parents who are poor or sick always deserve great praise and great love, even if they can’t be considered models of obedience and good behavior. Be good from now on and you’ll be happy.”
At this point the dream ended, and Pinocchio woke with wide eyes.
Now imagine his amazement, readers, when upon waking he realized that he was no longer a wooden puppet, but rather a boy like other boys. He looked around, and instead of the usual straw walls of their hut, he saw a lovely little room furnished and decorated with a simplicity that was almost elegant. Jumping out of bed, he found a fine new suit of clothes laid out for him, along with a new cap and a pair of leather boots that made him look pretty as a picture.
As soon as he was dressed, he naturally thrust his hands into his pockets, and there he found a little ivory coin purse, on which was written these words: The Fairy with Sky-Blue Hair returns to her dear Pinocchio his forty nickels and thanks him very much for his good heart. But when he opened the coin purse, instead of forty nickels, he found forty shining gold pieces, all fresh from the mint.
At this point he went to look in the mirror, and he thought he was someone else. No longer did he see the usual reflection of a wooden marionette; instead he saw the sprightly and intelligent image of a handsome boy with brown hair, blue eyes, and an expression so happy you’d have thought it was his birthday.
Amid all these marvels coming one right after the other, Pinocchio no longer knew whether he was awake or just dreaming with his eyes open.
“And my daddy—where is he?” Pinocchio suddenly yelled. Rushing into the next room, he found old Geppetto: healthy and spry and in good spirits, as in times past. Having already resumed his wood-carving trade, he was at work designing a beautiful picture frame, richly adorned with leaves and flowers and the little heads of various animals.
“I’m curious, dear Daddy. How do you explain all this sudden change?” Pinocchio asked, throwing his arms around him and kissing him.
“This sudden change in our house is all thanks to you,” said Geppetto.
“Thanks to me?”
“Yes, because when children who were once naughty become nice, their whole families change and become happier.”
??
?And the old wooden Pinocchio—where is he now?”
“Over there,” replied Geppetto, pointing to a big puppet that was propped against a chair, its head lolling to one side, its arms dangling and its legs crossed and bent at the knees. From the looks of it, it would take a miracle to make it stand upright.
Pinocchio turned to see it. And after staring at it for a little while, he said to himself, with enormous satisfaction, “How funny I was, when I was a puppet! And how happy I am now that I’ve become a proper little boy!”
THE END
AFTERWORD
The Persistent Puppet
THE VALUE OF PINOCCHIO
“Once upon a time, there was … ‘A king!’ my little readers will say at once. No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.” Thus begins The Adventures of Pinocchio, starring a long-nosed puppet who is one of the world’s most immediately recognizable characters since his creation more than a century ago by the Tuscan writer Carlo Lorenzini, known as Collodi.
One of the most remarkable things about Pinocchio, the character as much as Collodi’s book, is the protean afterlife he enjoys to this day. In 2001, for example, he made what might seem an unlikely appearance in a Steven Spielberg film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, based on a project of Stanley Kubrick’s that was cut short by Kubrick’s death. In A.I. a robot with emotions longs to become a real boy, and in a largely unsympathetic review in The New Yorker, film critic David Denby wrote:
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.
Denby’s reading of Pinocchio is simplistic, and I would wager that it is based more on memories of Disney’s version than on the original tale, published first in serial form and then as a book in 1883. In Collodi’s more 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 person only because “he was tired of being knocked around as a puppet”? I think not, nor do the many writers and filmmakers who have been inspired by the world’s most persistent puppet.
What I’d like to do in this afterword is initially to detail the intricacies of Collodi’s story, which is far from a simple children’s tale about a “scamp”; then I’ll consider several reworkings of Collodi in contemporary fiction and film that find in the story a rich fund of themes, motifs, and images for exploring such still highly pertinent issues as the limits between the human and the non- (or post-) human, the toll of reaching responsible maturity and how education contributes to it, the allure of transgression both for individuals and for society, and the ways in which inherited attitudes toward paternal and maternal roles continue to shape our concept of humanness. 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 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 literary high culture, most visibly in his homeland but also in the United States and elsewhere.
COLLODI: HIS WORKS AND HIS ITALY
Few intimate details are known about the life of Pinocchio’s creator, the lifelong bachelor Carlo Lorenzini, who was born in Florence on November 24, 1826, and who chose to take the pen name Collodi, the name of his mother’s native town near Pescia in Tuscany. Collodi came of age as a writer in the “decennio di preparazione,” the decade from 1850 to 1860, when Italy was moving toward unification. We do know that he, like many of his generation, was a participant in the 1848–49 battles for Italian national independence and unity, and that throughout the 1850s he was very active as a journalist, writing under a variety of names and on many topics, including politics and music.
Collodi lived in a complex period of Italian history when there was a great push toward national unity but much ambivalence about what such unity would mean to a country deeply tied to local traditions, dialects, and customs. The writer lived the new reality of a unified nation—a unification that he, a Republican against the Monarchists, had ostensibly supported—with true ambivalence. His beloved hometown, Florence, was the first capital of the newly formed nation for five years, for example, and Collodi disliked intensely the effect it had on a place that for him had previously been like “a great big house in which all the inhabitants knew one another.” He was attracted by order, discipline, and structured educational practices, but he was also fascinated by the occult, mesmerism, and the inherent disorder of things.
There were many programs initiated after unification with the goal of “making the Italian people Italian,” that is, of giving them a sense of national identity in addition to their regional allegiances. A national system of compulsory education was one of the most debated issues of the post-unification era, for example. Before writing The Adventures of Pinocchio, Collodi had published some very successful pedagogical books that recounted the lives of the good little boys Giannettino and Minuzzolo, but he was basically suspicious of any programs that codified conformity, seeing them as a threat to individuality and personal freedom. The clash between collective conformity and individual creativity finds expression in his tale of the puppet, which can be read as a story about both the need to conform and the appeal of transgressive freedom.
PINOCCHIO AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Pinocchio is considered a book for children: a common enough genre today but a relatively new one in Collodi’s time. Children’s literature was an innovation in nineteenth-century Italy (and elsewhere). In fact, in Italian culture a strict division between adult and children’s literature was for centuries quite an alien idea. Oral folk traditions and a strong classical education were very much a part of shared experience (the latter at least by those upper-class Italians privileged enough to have a formal education), and both young and adult Italians shared narratives that drew heavily on these sources.
The almost universal Catholicism of Italians also acquainted children with the biblical events and figures that play such a formative role in Italian literature and theater. And because of the strength of the oral tradition, Italians were accustomed to the pleasures of a simple “good story” and unashamed of their enthusiasm for engaging and humorous tales, even if fairly simplistic ones. It was not until the nineteenth century, as nation building came to the fore and the formation of Italian citizens with shared values became a burning issue, that books written primarily or exclusively for children proliferated, acknowledging differences between the two readerships.
Pinocchio is a case in point. It relies heavily on the Tuscan novella or short-story tradition to which Boccaccio’s Decameron belongs, and also on classical sources, such as Homer and Dante. As the critic 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.”[1] Cambon also highlights the importance of the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy to the structure and style of Pinocchio and 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.” From its initial publication, up to today, the puppet’s tale has been read and enjoyed by audiences of children and adults, which find different pleasures in it.
In 2002, the contemporary Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni, whose humor emerges in great part out of the Tuscan tradition of the novella, especially out of the beffa, or trickster-story, as well as out of a very personal sort of bricolage of popular and high-cultural references, filmed a version of Pinocchio, starring himself as the puppet. In an interview with the founding editor of La Repubblica, Eugenio Scalfari, Benigni spoke with ecstatic enthusiasm about the project that had been a dream of his for many years. He did not read Collodi’s tale until he was twenty years old, he says, nor could his parents read it to him when he was a child because they were illiterate Tuscan peasants. But as a child Benigni was aware of the existence of the puppet nonetheless, because his mother would warn him that if he told lies his nose would grow like Pinocchio’s and then Dante Alighieri would put him in Hell: “Until one day in the piazza I saw a statue of Dante and with that nose that one finds there, I thought that he was Pinocchio. Later I found a sentence in Dante that says: ‘Truly I have been a wooden boat without direction, tossed about by painful poverty.’ What could be more like Pinocchio than that?!”[2] With this humorous anecdote, Benigni makes clear just how strong a connection he perceives between the high-cultural reference par excellence—Dante—and Collodi’s more humble but no less culturally important figure. The actor-director also comments on “how many beautiful things this puppet has caused to be written,” mentioning the philosopher Benedetto Croce (who wrote that Pinocchio’s essence is the “the wood of humanity”), Italo Calvino, Antonio Gramsci, writer-critic Pietro Citati, the Marxist critic Alberto Asor Rosa, and Giorgio Manganelli (whom he calls “the funniest Pinocchiologist”). Benigni’s joy in working on his film version of the tale comes through very strongly in this interview as well as in all of the numerous other interviews and articles that appeared before the film’s release—though the film, unfortunately, did not match his high aspirations, and soon faded from sight.