Pinocchio: The first hundred years

Literary anniversaries are occasions for re-evaluation as well as celebration, and since 1981 brought the hundredth anniversary of Pinocchio's first appearance in print, it is time to take another look at Carlo Lorenzini's classic story about the puppet who wanted to be a real boy. Lorenzini, a hard-up Tuscan journalist who wrote under the name Collodi (the name of the village where his mother had been born), submitted La storia di un burratino to a weekly paper for children called Giornale per i bambini in 1881. He extended and developed his tale in further episodes, and in 1883 a complete version of The Adventures of Pinocchio was published; it was a great success in Italy and quickly became an international favorite.

Some of the reasons for this success seem obvious enough. Collodi's style is delightful, and much of its earthiness and pungent wit survive translation quite well. The story also lends itself wonderfully to illustration. The brilliant, disturbing pictures of Attilio Mussino perhaps complement Collodi's story best; they constitute a subtle reading —even, perhaps, a critique —of the text they illustrate.¹ But Pinocchio has emerged relatively unscathed even from the pastel attentions of the Disney organization. The undeniable mythic appeal of the story's basic premise is probably a crucial factor in its universal popularity, but equally important, I think, is the vivid personality of the central character. From the moment he speaks from the heart of Master Cherry's block of wood, Pinocchio is an original —spontaneous, unpredictable, springing to life as though from some urgent inner necessity.

Illus. above and on p. 44 by Attilio Mussino from The Adventures of Pinocchio (Macmillan, NY: 1st pub. 1925; reissued 1969.)

The story in which Pinocchio comes to life is not without its flaws, of course. Collodi's book works toward a combination of aesthetic, mimetic, and illustrative effects which are often at cross purposes. His satiric indictment of a corrupt society and his painful picture of the psychological tensions in the parent-child relationship are strangely at odds with the overt message of the book. And the mythic symbolism of the fairy tale plot undercuts both the moral pessimism of the satire and Collodi's relentless insistence on docility and obedience. The very texture of the book is a puzzle. Much of the time it has the verve and spontaneity of a masterful improvisation, but now and again it becomes repetitious, saccharine , or heavy-handed.

Roger Sale recently pointed out the repetitiveness of what he thinks Collodi's "awfully weak" story, terming it "a thin tissue of inevitable scrapes, inevitable rescues and inevitable sermons."² Sale suspects that the impulse which motivated Collodi to "spin out the story to 36 episodes" was "the desire to capitalize on something popular and profitable."³ Collodi's writing formula was simple:" in every episode Pinocchio will get into trouble from being willful or impetuous, and in most there will be a sermon about obeying elders and going to school."⁴ Serial publication, as studies in the nineteenth century novel have suggested, does tend to lead to repetition, parallelism of incident and character, and a reliance on literary formula and traditional motifs. And it is true that The Adventures of Pinocchio relies heavily on such devices. But it also embodies an appealing and familiar over-all pattern: the hero goes forth to seek his fortune, encounters unforeseen perils, undergoes metamorphosis and trials, descends into dark and dangerous nether regions, and emerges one of the twice-born, ready to ascend to a higher plane of being and to achieve his heart's desire.

On the aesthetic level, the book appeals to the mythic imagination. For one critic, Pinocchio is the "archetype of the motherless child," and his adventures constitute "a quest for that which can transform a man from within, heal his divided self, and restore him to a state of primordial wholeness."⁵ Another critic has interpreted Pinocchio's progress from block of wood, to puppet, to free human being as a parable of the Jungian process of individuation...