Words and Worlds by Alison Lurie

Author:Alison Lurie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2019-03-05T02:28:46+00:00

a middle-aged man—

but time, gender, self are laws

waived by his gold fan.

A pearl-diver, a benevolent ghost, and a dancing dragon; that sounds about right. Bon voyage! I miss you all terribly.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The Good Bad Boy: Pinocchio

Today many people think they know all about Pinocchio. They believe that he is a wooden marionette who becomes a human boy; that he was swallowed by a huge fish; and that whenever he told lies his nose grew longer. (As a result of this last occurrence, for over a hundred years politicians have been caricatured with a lengthened nose when they prevaricate in public—especially Richard Nixon, who already had a kind of Pinocchio nose.)

These people are right, but often only in a very limited way. They know Pinocchio only from the sentimentalized and simplified Disney cartoon, or the condensed versions of his story that are thought more suitable for children. The original novel by Carlo Collodi, which today survives mainly in scholarly editions, is much longer, far more complex and interesting, and also much darker. The critic Glauco Cambon has called it one of the three most influential works in Italian literature (the others, he claims, are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Manzoni’s The Betrothed). For him, and those who know the real version, The Adventures of Pinocchio is not an amusing, light-hearted fantasy, but a serious fable about art and life. It is a story about growing up—and it is also, in essential ways, a story about growing up poor and Italian.

Carlo Collodi, whose real name was Carlo Lorenzi, was born in Florence in 1826, the first of ten children of household servants. When he did well in the local school, his parents’ employer paid for his further education in the hope that he would become a priest. This did not happen. Instead, after graduation Lorenzi went to work for a bookseller, and eventually became a liberal journalist, skeptical of both education and the church. In Pinocchio, school is something that all boys dread, and religion is hardly mentioned.

Originally Pinocchio was published as a serial in the newspaper Il gionale per i bambini (The paper for children). It appeared in eight parts between July and October of 1881, and then in eleven more installments from February 1882 to January 1883. The form of the story was that of a picaresque novel, in which, perhaps because of the pressures of time, some of the chapters are more original and/or better integrated into the story than others. Several of these episodes—for example those in which Pinocchio meets a giant serpent, is caught in a trap and made to serve as a watchdog, rides on the back of a pigeon, and is mistaken for a fish by a monstrous green-haired fisherman—are often left out of the condensed English-language versions.

The Disney film omits even more of the story, and changes it drastically. Geppetto, Pinocchio’s foster father, appears to be a prosperous toy maker, and the town where he lives looks Swiss or Bavarian: his workshop is full of music boxes and cuckoo clocks.

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