No, children, you are wrong. - Pinocchio lives

Just one more Pinocchio post, I think.  So many people have been reading the book, saying what I might want to say.  Seraillon put up most of that and more a few minutes ago.  Simpler Pastimes is collecting other readers.

Pinocchio begins:

Once upon a time, there was…

“A king!” my little readers will say right away.

No, children, you are wrong.  Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.  (Ch. 1, ellipses in original)

One rhetorical side of the novel is summarized perfectly with “No, children, you are wrong.”  This is the most directly didactic book I have read in decades.

“My boy,” said the Fairy, “people who talk that way always end up in jail or in the poorhouse…  Idleness is a horrible disease, and it has to be cured early, in childhood; otherwise, when we are grown-up, we never get over it.”  (Ch. 25)

And there is a lot more like that.  Pinocchio at this point in the book is already an ex-con, having already been in jail for a four month stretch, although not because of his idleness but rather the capriciousness and inattention of the gorilla judge.  I need someone who knows Italy better than I do to write a piece about the social satire in Pinocchio.

The Fairy, who is a mother figure for Pinocchio and an analogue for the Virgin Mary, Dante’s Beatrice, and who knows what else, enforces her moral teachings by pretending to be dead, to the extent of building a false grave for Pinocchio to weep over (Ch. 23), and threatening Pinocchio with death, going so far as this:

At that very moment the door of the room opened wide and in came four rabbits as black as ink, carrying a small coffin on their shoulders.

“What do you want form me?” cried Pinocchio, sitting up straight in terror.

“We have come to get you,” replied the biggest rabbit.  (Ch. 17)

So Pinocchio drinks his medicine.  Maybe the weirdest part of the book is the Pinocchio’s constant shifting between wood and flesh depending on Collodi’s immediate needs, a “a curious composite human-puppet, flesh that is at the same time not flesh, object that is at the same time human,” as seraillon says.

The continual shifts in state affects everything in the novel – characters who are alive then dead then alive again, landscapes that shift, transformations into animals:

So Pinocchio, losing all patience, grasped the door knocker angrily, intending to give a bang that would deafen everyone in the building; but the knocker, which was mad of iron, suddenly became a live eel that wriggled out of his hands and disappeared into the small stream of water going down the middle of the street.  (Ch. 29)

The entire chapter, which includes puppet nudity, a talking dog, and a maid who is a giant snail, is one of the purest pieces of dream writing in a novel full of dream-stuff.  Wonderful chapter.

It is just the nature of fiction, but everything that is interesting in Pinocchio’s world is brought to the front and everything uninteresting (jail, school) is skipped in a couple of words.  So all of the ethical movement in the novel supports Pinocchio’s rebellions.  Seraillon again: “little of interest may happen in life if one doesn’t transgress from time to time.”  Obey and there is no novel, no Pinocchio.

Thanks to Simpler Pastimes for taking my suggestion to feature Pinocchio in her children’s literature event.

The death of Pinocchio

The Adventures of Pinocchio first appeared in 1881 as a serial in an Italian magazine for children.  The story ends with the murder by hanging of the puppet Pinocchio:

“Oh, dear father!... if only you were here!”

And he had no breath to say anything else.  He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched out his legs, and, after giving a great shudder, he remained there as though frozen stiff.

THE END  (ellipses in original)

Pinocchio must be among the most cruel books I have ever read.  I did not remember it as so cruel, but it must be close to forty years since I last read it.  I still have that book.  The anonymous translator has “gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible,” which is not much softer.

What is softer, though, is the presence of the next page, and of the rest of the book, and the absence of “THE END.”  Young readers, after appointments with their child psychiatrists, demanded that  Carlo Collodi continue Pinocchio’s adventures, resurrecting him (and in the process two other dead characters) for a time, so that now the above passage is merely the end of Chapter 15.  Although he suffers at least two more symbolic deaths, Pinocchio is not murdered for good until twenty-two chapters later, at the end of the novel as we know it.

“There he is over there,” answered Gepetto; and he pointed to a large puppet propped against a chair, its head turned to one side, its arms dangling, and its legs crossed and folded in the middle so that it was a wonder that it stood up at all.

Pinocchio turned and looked at it; and after he had looked at it for a while, he said to himself with a great deal of satisfaction:

“How funny I was when I was a puppet!  And how glad I am now that I’ve become a proper boy!”

Collodi was not responsible for Enrico Mazzanti’s illustration, which in this case – in most cases – amplifies the disquiet of the scene.

In fictional terms, Pinocchio was, as a puppet, alive.  His vitality, the odd sense of existence Collodi creates for him, this is why Pinocchio survives.  The dancing, badly behaved puppet, the corpse propped against that chair, was real.  I have just spent two hundred pages watching him dance around.  That soulless, satisfied creature sneering at the puppet is, fictionally, a total fake.

Ethically, the case is the same.  The puppet behaved like a real boy, lying and having fun and making mistakes, unlike the proper boy, an imaginary creation of didactic fiction.

Poor Pinocchio.

I read and am quoting the Nicolas J. Perella critical edition from 1986, which has facing-page Italian, the original illustrations, a book-length introduction, and some disconcertingly technical footnotes – “This gli, etymologically related to the fully stressed egli, which is used in the same way, is an enclitic subject pronoun (neuter-masculine, third person singular)…” (p. 475) – in other words, the perfect edition.

Now every heart is glad, and far and wide / Rises once more the rumour / of work as it once did - when Italian literature acquired an Italy

I have switched to the J. G. Nichols translation of Leopardi.  The title is from Canto XXIV, “The Calm after the Storm.”  I have finally gotten to the point where there is a united Italy.  And Italian literature expands.

Giovanni Verga – I want to revisit and read more of his stories of hard times in Sicily, like those in Little Novels of Sicily (1883), and I also want to try at least one of his novels, either The House by the Medlar Tree (1881) or Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) or both.

Luigi Pirandello was also from Sicily.  The major plays for which he is best known are from the 1920s and 1930s, too late for me – as  usual I want to choke off my reading somewhere around World War I – but The Late Mattia Pascal, a novel, is early, from 1904.  Somebody will have to tell me what else is especially good.  I like the sound of Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1915).  Pirandello is the first Nobelist I will mention in this post.

Grazia Deledda (she’s the second) is Sardinian.  I would likely enjoy her novels just for their unusual setting, but I assume they have more to offer than that.  After the Divorce (1902) and Elias Portulu (1903) are in my local library, which is encouraging.  Deledda is another reason my attention had turned to Italy.

Matilde Serao is associated with Rome and Naples – I’m back on the boot – where she was a journalist and novelist.  The fairly recent short story collection Unmarried Women looks most promising to me, but there are a large number of novels in English published a hundred years ago.  Ford Madox Ford, whose taste is eccentric but who seems to have read everything, recommends Conquest of Rome, Desire of Life, and In the Country of Jesus (see The March of Literature. p. 859).  Unlikely, but life is full of surprises.

I think of Italo Svevo as a 20th century writer because of Zeno’s Conscience (1923), but his first two novels, A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898), are much earlier.  I have read the latter but remember nothing more than that I thought it was pretty good.  I would appreciate advice on the former.  Svevo at this point was not actually in Italy, since Trieste was part of Austria.  Another marginal region raising its voice.

Back to Tuscany, the old center of Italy, to remind anyone interested of the Pinocchio (1883) readalong at Simpler Pastimes scheduled for later this month.  Just 200 pages, including illustrations, written for tiny little children.  So easy to join in.

The poets are more of a problem.  20th century Italian poetry strikes me as very strong – Italian fiction, too – but the period before the war is either weaker or poorly represented in English.

The great figure is Giosuè Carducci (Nobel #3), but even in Italian he seems to have lost some of his status, as if squeezed between the great 20th century poets and Leopardi.  The 1994 Selected Poems shows off Carducci well.  It includes his long ode Hymn to Satan (1865), which is not what the title suggests.  One of Carducci’s major collections, The Barbarian Odes (1877-89), is also available in English, but it is one of the worst translations I have ever come across.

A number of poets began publishing during or just after the war.  I hope to read Dino Campana, who wrote just one wild visionary book, Orphic Songs (1914), then, sadly, spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.  I have my eye on Umberto Saba, too.  Move the cutoff just a bit later and lots of interesting writers pop up.

Look how efficient I was today.  Tomorrow I will end with the hard cases.  If you have advice on Gabrielle D’Annunzio or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, let’s save it for a day – I do want it.  Then I will browse through some books I won’t read and take a glance at the 20th century.

Five days for all of this.  In my defense, it is an exciting literature.  Even in the 19th century, exciting.