Alive and Well But Not Unscathed: A Reply to Susan R. Gannon's "Pinocchio at 100"

As Susan R. Gannon points out in the Winter 1981-82 issue of ChLA Quarterly, we are in the midst of the centennial celebration of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio. Although Ms. Gannon offers perceptive insights into the book's aesthetic successes, especially its mythic overtones, she nevertheless falls victim to two common critical misconceptions about the novel. The paramount fallacies of Pinocchio criticism are as follows: (1) "Pinocchio has emerged relatively unscathed" (Ms. Gannon's words), and (2) the book is a literary success in spite of glaring defects in the form of inconsistencies and archetectonic sloppiness. In fact, Collodi's masterpiece has been ruthlessly tortured by a parade of meddlesome adaptors and publishers. Furthermore, though there are some anomalies of plot, Pinocchio is a classic work of epic fantasy—not a lucky stab in the dark but a well crafted epic journey in the tradition of Homer, Vergil and Dante.

Pinocchio survives by the force of its greatness despite the ill-spent efforts of errant revisionists. Since 1892 (the year of the first English edition) hundreds of versions have appeared, the vast majority unfaithful in significant ways to the original. Professor Richard Wunderlich and I present an overview of this sad publication history in "The Desecration of Pinocchio in the United States," a paper originally presented at the 1981 ChLA conference in Minneapolis and recently revised and printed in The Horn Book.¹ As part of our research, we conducted a survey of 364 liberal arts college students to see whose image of Pinocchio—Collodi's or his adaptors'—is most alive in readers' minds. We found that Collodi's imprint is weak indeed. One example is the students' memories of the sea monster il pescecane. On a multiple choice question only 2% of the sample correctly identified the creature as "dogfish" or "shark," 29% selected "I don't know," and an overwhelming 69% chose "whale," having swallowed the alteration of Bufano (1929), Frank (1939) and, of course, Disney (1939-40). Though literally a "dogfish," Collodi's monster is a giant shark whose massive viciousness is a physical and psychological terror that only a true hero would dare challenge. Whales are big, to be sure, but Collodi and Peter Benchley know an evocative image when they see one. Some publishers have gone so far as to print illustrations that render the dogfish benign. One of my favorites is the giant goldfish that appears in several editions from the late 1920's. Overall, then, Pinocchio's act of heroism has been trivialized by mistranslations and misrepresentations; moreover, this trivialization has affected the novel's public image. The list of editions featuring omissions, retellings and mistellings is nearly endless.

Most critics of Pinocchio recognize the book's aesthetic successes. Unfortunately, Ms. Gannon pays too much attention to Roger Sale's negative comments about the novel and fails to cite the very positive view of Glauco Cambon, who regards Pinocchio as one of the three pieces of Italian literature that has "most tangibly affected the imagination of the Italian people,"² Ms. Gannon does not fully subscribe to Mr. Sale's assertion that Collodi offers a "very weak" story, but she does describe the texture of the book as a "puzzle" and sees it as at once "masterful improvisation" and "saccharine, or heavy-handed." She gets closer to the truth when she considers the novel's mythic motifs. Mr. Cambon and Fr. Heisig (whom Ms. Gannon does cite) are sensitive to Collodi's awareness that he is writing a myth. Indeed, he writes in a mythic tradition that includes the Odyssey, Aeneid and Divine Comedy. The fact that he does so does not preclude his writing for children, just as the fact that he writes for children does not prevent his speaking to adults with allusive erudition.

Pinocchio's mythic fabric features a number of major threads, one of the most important of which is the theme of the death and rebirth of the hero. Pinocchio's search for self-actualization is comic and haphazard because he is a...