Pinocchio, Puppets, and Modernity

The Mechanical Body

Katia Pizzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781032569673
• eBook ISBN: 9781136620492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study assesses the significance of Pinocchio in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in addition to his status as the creature of a nineteenth century traversed by a cultural enthusiasm for dummies, puppets, and marionettes. This collection identifies him as a figure characterized by a 'fluid identity, ' informed with transition, difference, joie de vivre, otherness, displacement, and metamorphosis, making Pinocchio a truly modern, indeed postmodern and posthuman, cultural icon. Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity explores this crucial and as yet little visited field, reassessing Pinocchio's genealogy and progeny, as well as illuminating both the wider context and more specific cultural manifestations of the mechanical-human interface in the domains of theatre, the fine arts, literature, radio, and even virtual reality coherently with the digital metamorphosis of our times.

The wide-ranging scope of this exploration encompasses Italian, French, and English literature, dummies and marionettes in modernist and contemporary theatre, the fairytale tradition, and traditional and contemporary painting, as well as the older and newer media of radio, television, cinema, and the Internet. The diverse, comparative, and multimedia focus of this original discussion testifies to the enduring transcultural legacy of Pinocchio. Eminently sellable as a traditional cultural icon, Pinocchio is equally impactful and relevant for a globalized, multicultural, and virtual society, from Collodi to Disney and beyond.

Katia Pizzi is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has published volumes on cultural identities, including A City in Search of an Author (2001) and The Cultural Identities of European Cities (2010), and on children's literature and illustration.

Chapter One
Carlo Collodi and the Rhythmical Body

Between Giuseppe Mazzini and George Sand

Jean Perrot

The purpose of this Chapter is to show the complex artistic, cultural and political relationships which prevailed in Florence when Carlo Collodi was preparing to write The Adventures of Pinocchio, and to point out the bonds that linked the author of one of the world masterpieces in children’s literature to two of the most eminent writers and moral ‘guides’ of the period. Our aim is to provide a few additional hints at what still remains ‘Pinocchio’s secret’, grounded in Carlo Collodi’s political vision of life. Special interest will be granted to the influence of the French caricaturists on the Florentine (and Italian?) conception of human personality. But our main concern will be to underline one feature which has been left out by critics at large: Collodi’s transposition of the moral issues implied by the social relationships of the labour world into the field of children’s literature.

Introduction. Criticism and Child’s Play: Riddles as Keys to the Writer’s Workshop

The critic’s part always implies some measure of risk: that of being too close or too far from one’s object of study and of boring one’s audience through an overweening accumulation of scholarly information. Our partiality is for a kind of criticism that tries to share through play the child’s lightness of mood and fantasy, an issue particularly acute when dealing with one of the most appealingly national tall tales that still remains a children’s classic.

And so we will start by proposing three enigmas to our reader’s sagacity: is not the number three the golden key to fantasy in fairy tales? The first enigma deals with the description which Giannettino gives of Florence in the first part of Carlo Collodi’s Il viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino (Johnny’s Journey Through Italy). This educational book, addressed to the children of the young Italian State proclaimed in 1861, was published in 1880, one year before the first version in fifteen Chapters of The Adventures of Pinocchio entitled La storia di un burattino (The Story of a Puppet). In it, Giannettino, the main character who acts as a sort of Cicerone to the boy Pompilio who he met on a train to Bologna, speaks about the Uffizi art gallery in Florence and acknowledges the greatness of this collection: ‘one of the most famous in the whole world for the wonderful harvest it provides of master-pieces in painting, sculpture, cast iron’.¹

However, he does not mention any specific work to his young friend’s attention. As the visit goes on through the city, with the help of the guidebook provided by his mentor, Dottore Boccadoro, we come across different churches and well-known places and the same lack of precision seems to prevail for a while. Naturally, in the Convent of St Marco, Giannettino brings our attention to the name of ‘the celebrated painter called “Il Beato Angelico”, who painted in the convent marvellous frescoes of Saints and Madonnas’,² and to the portrait of Girolamo Savonarola by Della Porta. Similarly, in the Chapel of Annunziata, the painting La Madonna del sacco (Madonna with the Sack) by Andrea del Sarto calls up Pompilio’s questioning about the reason of this naming along with an enquiry about the painter’s pseudonym. But it is only in the Pitti gallery, ‘as famous in the whole world as that of the Uffizi and even more’,³ that the boy stresses the importance of being told about Madonna della seggiola: ‘Among the so many stupendous masterpieces of this Gallery, keep in mind to be shown Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair’.⁴ And to press the point, the boy adds a reference: ‘To come into possession of such a Madonna—a German Prince once said—I would give half of my states.’⁵ The importance of the painting in Collodi’s opinion seems utterly unquestionable to the watchful critic, remembering that Dottore Boccadoro, before meeting with Pompilio and Numa his preceptor, has submitted Giannettino to a cultural quiz to test his knowledge about the arts in Florence. His first question was: ‘who was the architect of Florence Cathedral?’ and, quite surprisingly, the second one was the following: ‘is Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair in the Pitti or in the Uffizi gallery?’⁶

And now comes our own questioning: to what secret concern can we ascribe the interest for this painting so insistently evinced by Collodi when he prepared to write the first Chapters of The Adventures of Pinocchio? Was it due to a bachelor’s special fascination for a Christian, and specifically Roman Catholic, representation of a young mother, shown with the image of two children that looked like brothers, and who could remind him of that of the young lady he is supposed to have been desperately in love with, even to the point, as Daniela Marcheschi noted, of letting himself go to alcoholism, when, in 1858, he realized that she would never love him?⁷ Was this Madonna already a possible model for Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy? Was Collodi, a true Florentine, in love with the artistic heritage of his town, initiated to its beauty by a painter, his uncle Giuseppe Orzali, who spent hours in the great galleries making copies of the best Italian masterpieces for tourists? Or is there another secret fascination that would finally come out and point to some major factor in the writer’s literary achievement?

These considerations are not mere idle child’s play and are of the highest importance in our demonstration, as one will see, as our second enigma is curiously related to this first one. And it will take less time to formulate it: how can we explain the fact that it was only in 1883 that Collodi disclosed Geppetto’s real profession on the last page of the final version of The Adventures of Pinocchio, begun three years earlier? Indeed, it is only in the end of his adventures that Pinocchio finds his father back at work, as the old man: ‘having immediately resumed his profession as a wood-carver … was now designing a beautiful picture-frame embellished with foliage, flowers, and the heads of various animals’.⁸ Did the profession of wood-carver (‘intagliatore in legno’) mean something special for Collodi? Was there some hidden competition behind the quarrel between Maestro Ciliegia, a simple joiner, and Geppetto, a wood-carver? Our readers will think: is this last remark pointless, or again does this kind of resurrection refer to a particular artistic model that would have served the writer to build the plot of his story? As one may guess, we have an answer in store for this, and it will come out in the course of this Chapter. But, as the Snail (‘Lumaca’)⁹ that keeps Pinocchio waiting at the door of the Fairy’s house implies, there is no need to hurry. More precisely, the answers to the two riddles will coalesce into one major evidence, which is decisive to our argument. But it will be our privilege as critics to provoke our readers’ curiosity a little more. Our last enigma will then be set in even fewer words, and it relates to the very substance of the hero of our story. We know that Pinocchio, a wooden puppet, is rather obdurate, harum-scarum, in a word ‘hare-brained’ in comparison to the anthropomorphized animals, the wily Cat and Fox, he meets. Could we not also suppose that he is sharing the nature of the butterflies he is chasing, as is astutely suggested by Roberto Benigni’s film? That is to say, that he is the very opposite of the Snail: a fantastic being, just like his quicksilver master, Collodi himself, who, as a puppet-shower, has been clever enough to tease his critics and set them wondering about his real artistic aims?

It seems that we have been piling up enigma upon enigma and the task of unraveling our skein of literary intertextual relationships has come. And so to our point with the consideration of this last enigma.

Images, Rhythm and Ideology: The Snail, the Cricket and the Butterfly

At the beginning of Collodi’s story, Chapter IV, Pinocchio confides to the Talking Cricket that he hasn’t the slightest desire to study and that, he says, ‘I have more fun chasing after butterflies’.¹⁰ In fact, he will spend a part of his adventures chasing the illusory gratifications of gold and wealth, like the ‘big flightless butterflies’ of the town Sillybillytrap (‘Acchiappa-citrulli’) which ‘could no longer fly, because they had sold their lovely colourful wings’.¹¹ On the other hand, in Chapter XXIX, after knocking at the Fairy’s door, Pinocchio has to wait for the Lumaca, a go-between or screen, to fetch his beautiful blue-haired Godmother, who is sleeping and later supposed to have stayed long in hospital. It takes the slow animal nine hours to get down from the fourth floor to the street. Quite a strenuous job for the young hero, when we learn that for him waiting one hour in the rain means one year! And it is admirable that she had rushed, as the narrator maliciously underlines that she comes down in a sweat.¹²

Education, no doubt, means taming and damping the irrational and wild impulses of the natural child. This is a lesson that had been made popular in fables. More specifically, the picturing of animals as anthropomorphically characterized in the very first part of the nineteenth century received new impulse from Honoré de Balzac’s Scènes de la vie publique et privée des animaux (1840–1842) issued by the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and illustrated with drawings by the French caricaturist J.J. Grandville.¹³ This book was popular and, in 1877, was adapted in English by James Thomson under the title Public and Private Life of Animals. The story “Voyage d’un moineau de Paris à la recherche du meilleur gouvernement” (The Flight of a Parisian Bird in Search of Better Government) included in this volume carried George Sand’s signature: ‘le moineau de Paris’ is a familiar metaphor for the pert and wild Parisian urchin of Montmartre, a character who shares the forwardness and daring of the Florentine ‘birichini’ presented by Collodi in the article “Il ragazzo di strada” (street urchin), reissued in Occhi e nasi (1881; Eyes and Noses).

Another story illustrated by Grandville, Les aventures d’un papillon (The Adventures of a Butterfly), was written by J.-P. Stahl, a pseudonym of Hetzel when he wrote for children. In 1862 Hetzel edited a famous reissue of Charles Perrault’s tales with illustrations by Gustave Doré, which Collodi translated in Racconti delle fate (Fairy Tales) in 1876, along with four tales by Mme d’Aulnoy and two by Mme Leprince de Beaumont. In 1850, Hetzel had also been the editor of George Sand’s children’s story Histoire du véritable Gribouille (translated into English only in 1988 under the title The Mysterious Tale of Gentle Jack and Lord Bumblebee) which we are going to analyse in a moment, for, as we have shown in our book Le secret de Pinocchio (2003; Pinocchio’s Secret), this story stands as a main source for The Adventures of Pinocchio and was illustrated by George Sand’s son Maurice with images clearly inspired by Grandville. Did the French publisher show his Adventures of a Butte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliographical Note
• Note on Translations
• Introduction
• 1. Carlo Collodi and the Rhythmical Body: Between Giuseppe Mazzini and George Sand
• 2. Puppets on a String: The Unnatural History of Human Reproduction
• 3. Workshops of Creation, Filthy and Not: Collodi’s Pinocchio and Shelley’s Frankenstein
• 4. The Manufacture of a Modern Puppet Type: The Anatomy of Alfred Jarry’s Monsieur Ubu and its Significance
• 5. Man is Non-Man: Mannequins, Puppets and Marionettes in the Theatre of Dario Fo
• 6. Unpainting Collodi’s Fireplace
• 7. Pinocchio and the Mechanical Body: Luciano Folgore’s Papers at the Getty Research Institute Library
• 8. The Myth of Pinocchio: Metamorphosis of a Puppet from Collodi’s Pages to the Screen
• 9. The Watchful Mirror: Pinocchio’s Adventures Re-created by Roberto Benigni
• 10. Beyond the Mechanical Body: Digital Pinocchio
• List of Contributors
• Index