Pinocchio and the Problem of Children's Literature

In my naughty moments I'd like to shock some of my colleagues (especially Italian) with the following baited question: Which three books have most tangibly affected the imagination of the Italian people? Leaving the Gospel aside, here is my answer: Dante's Divine Comedy, Manzoni's The Betrothed,¹ and Collodi's Pinocchio. I can see the frowns, the bewildered smiles, the sudden freezing of features, and I can hear the half-repressed outbursts ("I'd always known you for an unscholarly buffoon!" "Who in the world gave you your professorship?" etc.) In some cases, members of the Benevolent Association of Academic Patrolmen might pat me on the shoulder with a "Bravo! that's really funny! But now let's get down to serious business."

It is part of a critic's serious business to challenge hardened views and contribute to revisions of literary perspective, even by unorthodox means if need be. I cannot help reminding myself of it when I confront the still prevalent solemnity of the Italian academic scene. My immediate reason for putting literary under-dog Carlo Collodi, saeculo Lorenzini, in the formidable company of his fellow Tuscan Dante Alighieri and of the half-Tuscanized Lombard, Alessandro Manzoni, is the impact he had on idiomatic speech. Just as several pithy lines of the Divine Comedy became bywords;² just as The Betrothed contributed proverbs like "La ragione e il torto non si dividono mai con un taglio cosi netto etc. . . " (Right and wrong cannot ever be so sharply divided . . . ), class names like la Perpetua for a parson's maid, graphic similes like "i polli di Renzo" (Renzo's chickens, for a tight situation in which constrained people harass each other), just so Pinocchio has enriched the language since its first printing in 1880, as witness the fact that everybody in Italy will understand you right away if you refer to a pair of unsavory schemers with the Collodian label "il Gatto e la Volpe" (the Cat and the Fox). Nor is this the only instant reference to be gleaned from the book which earned the loving attention of a scholar like Paul Hazard.³ Characters like Master Cherry or Master Geppetto, those lovable craftsmen, Fireeater the puppeteer, the Talking Cricket and Lamp Wick the naughty boy have escorted Pinocchio himself into the pantheon of popular myths, where, way beyond ethnic boundaries, he enjoys the company of Alice, Red Riding Hood, Gulliver, and the Cowardly Lion.

Granting some difference in literary sophistication between Jonathan Swift, say, and Frank Baum, I see no reason to immune professional authors of children's literature in a subliterary limbo. If the intentional audience contributes to the making of a work of art, and if the work itself—at least when words are its medium—can be seen as an open-ended transaction between author and audience rather than as an exclusively self-contained object, we should consider children's books as valid literature in their own right, provided the requirements of formal function (style and structure) are met. It does not follow that all successful literary works are children's literature (who would ever think of reading The Red and the Black, The Ambassadors, or Nana to an audience of children?) It also does not follow that children's books are always literature; Alice in Wonderland certainly is, and so is Pinocchio, because each handles its language in the neatest way to create a mythical configuration that appeals to imaginative readers of any age, not just to those in their nonage—though the latter were the intentional audience to begin with. By contrast, any of us can think of number-less children's books that stand to those two as the dime novel stands to The Scarlet Letter. Whether the addressee of a book is conceived as child or adult, the problem remains the same as far as enduring value is concerned: many are the called, few the elect. A related problem is the hierarchy of value within the genre; there are "minor" and "major" works, good and better poems, and Shakespeare is obviously greater than Herrick...