“I’m sending you this childish thing, do whatever you want with it. But if you publish, give me good money so I want to continue,” he pleaded. carlo collodi to your friends Guido Biagi, children’s editorial director Giornale per Bambini. The childhood in question was Storia di un burattino. [Historia de una marioneta]is an adventure story starring Pinocchio, a wooden boy built by a humble carpenter named Gepetto. Despite his love and devotion to his creation, the man fell victim to the fickle and capricious behavior of the wooden boy who burned his feet in a brazier, killed a locust trying to counsel him, or sold his schoolbooks at a discount. . to attend a circus show.
Despite Collodi’s initial distrust of his work, success was almost instantaneous when the story was published in Giornale per Bambini in 1881. So much so that the author had to improvise on the fly and radically change the already published ending, which required the resurrection of Pinocchio, who died at the hands of the Fox and the Cat, who hung him from an oak branch.
“Good news: Mr. C. Collodi has informed us that his friend Pinocchio is still alive and can tell us more wonderful things about him. Ferdinando Martini, editor of the Giornale per Bambini, wrote in its December 1881 issue, “It was natural: a wooden object like a doll, Pinocchio, has hard bones and it is not so easy to send it to the afterlife.” later, in 1883, and the story is now complete, Felice Paggi publishing house collected all the deliveries in a book that no longer bears the old title Storia di un Burattino but passes with it to posterity: Pinocchio.
“Pinocchio is more than a story, it’s a modern legend. Myths are born as stories, but thanks to their semantic flexibility and evocative power, they quickly become part of popular culture and are incorporated into the collective unconscious. In doing so, the author or the person who first told them is lost in the enormity of his creation. And hundreds of new versions emerge. Millions of people know that all this comes from a novel published at the end of the 19th century by a Florentine named Carlo Collodi, not knowing that Pinocchio is a wooden puppet whose nose grows when he lies and eventually turns into a flesh and blood boy. explains author and university professor Pablo Maurette, in his latest book Why We Believe Stories (Intellectual Key, 2021).
literary and metaphorical journey
Currently, Pinocchio is the third most translated book in history after the Bible and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. More than a century after its emergence, it is a fact that proves that this wooden puppet’s history remains valid and continues to attract new readers.
I think Pinocchio continues to fascinate us for two reasons. On the one hand, its structure is ancient and corresponds to the essence of a narrative. Pinocchio describes a journey, both literal and figurative, that stretches from the lowest to the highest of human nature. There are trials that the hero must overcome, there is a supernatural dimension, there are forces of good and evil discussing the hero’s destiny, and there is finally a constitutive transformation, a spiritual metamorphosis. Also drawing attention to the modern nature of the myth, Maurette is the Odyssey, the Golden Donkey, the Divine Comedy,” he explains. “As if that weren’t enough, the protagonist is a child, and the pre-modern sensibility was not concerned with childhood. The child was considered inferior to a human being, and childhood was discovered only in the 19th century thanks to writers such as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and Lewis Carroll. In this sense, we are fascinated by Pinocchio because we accept him as the constitutive element of our cultural identity».
In addition to the anthropologist Joseph Campbell’s outline of The Hero’s Way and this new anxiety about childhood, another appeal of the work is its ability to delve into some of the most controversial human behaviors, such as lying.
“Lying is a complex and creative cognitive process of using language or other communicative resources to create a false reality in another’s mind. While there are animals that resort to a more primitive and unintentional form of lying, such as deception or hypocrisy, humans are the only animals that lie so sophisticated and deliberately,” explains psychologist Violeta Alcocer, between different species. lies, according to the evolutionary moment in which the subject applying it is. “At first, the lie appears as a game as a way of testing the use of communication to explore its impact on others and to draw attention to themselves. Common to boys and girls ages 2 to 4, ‘my father or mother is an astronaut who is part of the process of separating reality from fantasy. ‘ statements like this are in the middle of reality and fantasy.
According to Collodi’s text, Pinocchio has its origins in a piece of wood whose main feature is to cry and laugh. One of the characters, stunned by this strange event, Cherry Master decides to give it to his friend Gepetto, and he creates Pinocchio, who was born as an adult child, by carving him. Therefore, when the protagonist uses lies throughout the story, he does so not to explore the boundaries between reality and fantasy, but to consciously gain some benefit or avoid punishment, ignoring that his attitude provokes, for example, Gepetto’s ending. prison.
lie and trust
“The lie destroys one of the pillars of social connection and the benefits derived from it: trust. In this context, lying isolates us and makes it difficult to form deep bonds between people,” explains Alcocer, emphasizing the validity of Collodi’s text when it comes to communicating the harmful effects of lying among young readers. “Classical fables, especially in this case tales that deal with universal themes such as lies, are always relevant. In a society like today’s society, where lies are ubiquitous, both in their most complex form (such as fake news) and in their simplest form (such as filters on social networks), Pinocchio’s ‘s story can invite reflection from both children and adults.
In any case, and despite the historical significance of the lie, what is fascinating about Collodi’s work is that it goes far beyond Aesop’s tale of the false shepherd. “Pinocchio is much more than all that. In fact, what makes it a modern myth is that it allows for a fairly wide variety of readings and interpretations. From Marxism – Pinocchio as a journey from alienation to liberation and Pinocchio as an epiphanic manifestation of surplus value – three dialectical moments can be read from psychoanalysis – Pinocchio as an incarnated superego, Hegelian dialectic – the puppet Pinocchio becomes independent from his father and opens up to the world, flesh and blood Pinocchio, who was a boy and returned with his father, but it could also be an adventure novel or a religious allegory”, explains Pablo Maurette, “even Giorgio Agamben wrote a wonderful book on Pinocchio in which he gave an esoteric reading of the work. In short, the creation of Carlo Collodi is vast and multitudinous».
From Jiminy Cricket to ‘lie to me Pinocchio’: myth reinterpreted
In 1940, Walt Disney tried to repeat the success of Snow White, but mainly during World War II. However, over time, Disney’s Pinocchio became the canonical adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s work.
Although there were many changes aimed at softening the harshness of the original story, Disney managed to create a recurring iconography in later versions. “It is largely thanks to Disney that the myth of Pinocchio gained universal recognition. Thousands of subsequent versions, including the newest, would perhaps have been unthinkable without this precedent. Matteo Garrone’s disturbing, beautiful, sad, dark and light film is in a way a response to Disney’s, and the same goes for Guillermo del Toro’s film,” comments Pablo Maurette.
The story of Pinocchio is so versatile that throughout its almost one and a half century history, it has not had great difficulties in adapting to popular taste, political changes, technological developments and capitalist logic. Although in the final version by Del Toro, Pinocchio confronts Benito Mussolini himself, Italian fascism in the 1930s had already appealed to the wooden boy to criticize communism. The USSR presented Pinocchio as a proletarian hero, and in the case of Spain, the Calleja publishing house created new adventures in which the boy was presented as a kind of childish Quixote, combining Cervantine idealism with the novel.
Also, Pinocchio has owned a theme park in Tuscany since 1956, is a ubiquitous figure in any Italian gift shop, has been the mascot of the 1980 European Cup and has inspired all sorts of artifacts. From photonovels to ballets, including radio dramas, telefilms, video games and comics, the work by French artist Winshluss in which Jiminy Cricket plays a cockroach stands out; Gepetto, a weapons manufacturer, and Pinocchio, a robot immersed in a globalized, brutal and totalitarian world. “Pinocchio gives everything. Drama, comedy, horror. There are even porn versions of the myth that Pinocchio lies inside and what grows isn’t exactly his nose,” Maurette concludes.