Dusting my bookshelves is the job that takes me an incredibly long time and has less to do with the number of books, and more to do with the fact that many books just beg to be dipped into right then.Today the book that has me fascinated all over again is an old copy with yellowing pages that I am afraid are going to turn crumbly very soon - Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pincchio”.
I think, as I read the slightly ponderous language of the original, of how I watched the film Pinocchio, with the madly energized Roberto Benigni some weeks ago with a young friend. “It’s so different from the one we have on DVD,” she grumbled, referring to the made-nice Disney version, as we walked out of the darkness of the theatre.
I feel a bit guilty for wanting her see the version that is somewhat closer to the original, and that has darker patches, much like life.
As far back as in 1881, Carlo Lorenzini, a then well-known children’s writer, began to serialize in a magazine for children La Storia di un burattine, The Story of a Puppet, under the name C. Collodi. Later it came out as a book in 1883 and has been translated into eighty-seven languages. I read that there have been around four hundred television versions, and even many doctoral dissertations on the wooden puppet.
In Florence, walking through a magical, almost other-worldly street lined with shops selling puppets, the shopkeepers will tell you that among the most popular with buyers is the Pinocchio puppet. Wide-eyed, long-nosed, with a fixed bemused smile that seems to suggest he is not too sure of his much publicized desire to become a ‘real boy’, he also seems to ask: “Take me with you,” and many do. Over a hundred years after he was ‘created’, Pinocchio’s dream of being needed, of belonging, of being ‘real’, comes true - again and again.
I have often wondered how this old story has caught and held our attention over all this time. Maybe it has to do with the fact that wooden body or not, this is in large part the story of all of us.
Let’s go to the start of the story: if it is the Disney version which most of us are familiar with, the story begins with a lonely carpenter Geppetto, desperately wanting a child and carving out a wooden puppet-child for himself. The book itself starts out somewhat differently with the carpenter discovering a block of wood in his workshop that talked, laughed and cried like a child, shifting it as one commentator said “ … from a Disney fantasy of the human creation of life, to the everyday miracle that is represented by human development.”
Margaret Blount, an authority on children’s literature, writing of this story indicates that Pinocchio “… falls from grace with the monotonous regularity of most humans…” and how the implicit allegory is that it takes a long, long time to really ‘grow up’.
To become truly human, his lessons include learning to hear the voice of conscience – in the story this voice is that of the character ‘Cricket’ - and to learn to appreciate the joys of giving more than the thrill of constantly receiving.
It does not take too much intellectual analysis to identify that these are our lessons too.
Staring out as a self-centered brat, along his journey Pinocchio creates the situations that eventually cause him to lean Life’s lessons. Most of all he learns – through a nose that grows and grows when he tells a lie – about both, the power of lying, as well as its pain and consequences. The environment filled with all kinds of interesting characters – some drawn as good bad, some as bad, some as hard-to-tell-which-kind - acts on him as much as he acts on the environment, and the exchange slowly provides him with the cues to becoming truly human.
Inspite of sounding painfully preachy, specially to readers today, the Fairy with the Blue Hair plays a very special role. Mostly she teaches Pinocchio about love in its many forms, but it is the way she turns up in his life – actually her changing aspects and what they mean – that is a key creative device of this story.
The wooden one first meets Fairy when Assassins are pursuing him. He sees a house in the distance, runs to it and knocks wildly in fear. A window opens and he sees Fairy first as a Beautiful Child, somewhat unreal, with blue hair and a face as white as a waxen image. At this stage, she shuts the window and the assassins capture him. Her role is not that of rescuer here; she lets him go into this part of his learning, lets him handle it himself.
There are parts of the book a movie can never go to, as the scene that pokes fun at the medical profession, where the Fairy arranges for “the three most famous doctors in the neighborhood” – a Crow, an Owl and a Talking Cricket. If you find a copy of the book, the chapter entitled (and no, I do not make this up!) “The Lovely Blue-Haired Child Saves the Marionette; she Puts him in Bed and Calls Three Doctors to See whether he is Alive or Dead,” is a must-read.
All through the story the image of Fairy changes with each reappearance – even turning up once as a “fine goat with blue hair”. She later takes on a more maternal role, and acts particularly tough when it comes to his lying. Though she seems to forgive all, she still has to get him to learn that being loved is only one part of loving.
About the idea of “change” in the story – Pinocchio wonders why Fairy changes so much, from encounter to encounter as it were, but he never changes. Fairy tells him that it is only people who grow; marionettes, or puppets never grow, they are born as puppets, live as puppets, die as puppets.
But in one particularly poignant moment later in the story, the puppet recognizes Fairy in spite of her very unfamiliar appearance. When she wants to know how, he says, “It was my great affection for you that told me.” Pinocchio too is changing, as we begin to see.
It is, in the story, Pinocchio’s acquisition of ‘good heart’ that brings about his transformation. Pinocchio continues to do good and bad, because he becomes human, not a saint, but his newly developed capacities for love and empathy, and above all, hope, is what makes him finally real.
May we all find ways to become 'truly human'.
Marguerite Theophil
Uniqueness and commonality
Stories simultaneously celebrate what is unique about us
and provide bridges to what is common among us.
~ Lucinda Flodin & Dennis Frederick
