Come One, Come All: Luigi Malerba's Diffuse Fictions

A strict division between adult and children's literature is basically alien to Italian culture. For centuries oral folk traditions and a strong classical education were very much part and parcel of shared experience by those Italians privileged enough to have an education, and young and mature Italian readers shared narratives and poetry that drew heavily on these sources. The almost universally shared Catholic Church also acquainted children with certain kinds of devotional literature and gave them a familiarity with Biblical events and figures and with ritual that often inform Italian lay literature. Conversely, because of the strength of the oral tradition, adults were accustomed to the pleasures of the "good story" and unashamed of their enthusiasm for rousing and humorous tales, as the popularity of early collections of tales like Boccaccio's and those of chivalric literature attests.¹ It was not until the nineteenth century that books written primarily or exclusively for children proliferated, acknowledging certain differences between the two readerships.

The emergence of the category of children's literature in the nine-teenth century is not, of course, confined to Italy. In the Western world generally, as the notion of the child changed and as children's particular needs and status were addressed through educational reforms, so too did books reflect this new perspective. In Italian letters, however, even the most didactic "child-oriented" children's literature continued to assume a familiarity with classical and Church history, with complex narrative techniques, and with sophisticated language, blurring the borderline between adult and children's texts. To give but one example: Pinocchio, that best-known of modern Italian children's books, relies heavily on both the Tuscan novella or short-story tradition to which Boccaccio belongs, and on classical sources, Homeric, Dantesque, and other. As Glauco Cambon writes: "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. . ." (53). Further, Cambon points out 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" (57-58). Readers contemporaneous to Collodi (late nineteenth-century), young and old alike, would have had a natural ear for many of these sophisticated resonances, and would nonetheless have been collectively susceptible (as we continue to be today) to the sheer energy and verve of the puppet's adventures.²

The twentieth century has seen certain profound changes in Italian society—the standardization of Italian, the reduction of dialect use, new educational emphases, the modernization of the Church—changes that have erased a good deal of shared awareness of folk traditions, classical culture, and religious ritual. But it is still true that Italian literature continues to reflect a blurring between adult and children's books, and between "serious" or highbrow and instructive and/or entertaining literature. This is not to deny that there is a tremendous amount of Italian children's (and adult) literature that is the equivalent of "junk food." This material—comics, badly illustrated and mindless stories, "toy" books, and so on—is, however, quite often non-indigenous, translated from American sources such as Disney cartoons, or based on non-Italian characters like Alice or Peter Pan. At the 23rd International Children's Book Fair held recently in Bologna, there were, for example, Italian versions of Alice, Peter Pan, and Little Women perfumed, respectively, with strawberry, banana, and apple scents.³ But the good children's literature being written by Italian writers often reflects a conception of literature that, like Pinocchio, belies a strict separation between adults and children, and between art and instruction/entertainment.

There are two ways in which this blurring of adult/children, art/instruction borderlines most obviously manifests itself in contemporary Italian literature. First, many serious and acclaimed writers of adult fiction have also written for children. Second, many fictions, ostensibly for...