Collected Prose

“I should have thought of this before I made him. Now it’s too late.” At this point, like any newborn baby, Pinocchio is pure will, libidinous need without consciousness. Very rapidly, over the next few pages, Gepetto teaches his son to walk, the Marionette experiences hunger and accidentally burns his feet off—which his father rebuilds for him. The next day Gepetto sells his coat to buy Pinocchio an A-B-C book for school (“Pinocchio understood … and, unable to restrain his tears, he jumped on his father’s neck and kissed him over and over”), and then, for more than two hundred pages, they do not see each other again. The rest of the book tells the story of Pinocchio’s search for his father—and Gepetto’s search for his son. At some point, Pinocchio realizes that he wants to become a real boy. But it also becomes clear that this will not happen until he is reunited with his father. Adventures, misadventures, detours, new resolves, struggles, happenstance, progress, setbacks, and through it all, the gradual dawning of conscience. The superiority of the Collodi original to the Disney adaptation lies in its reluctance to make the inner motivations of the story explicit. They remain intact, in a pre-conscious, dream-like form, whereas in Disney these things are expressed—which sentimentalizes them, and therefore trivializes them. In Disney, Gepetto prays for a son; in Collodi, he simply makes him. The physical act of shaping the puppet (from a piece of wood that talks, that is alive , which mirrors Michaelangelo’s notion of sculpture: the figure is already there in the material; the artist merely hews away at the excess matter until the true form is revealed, implying that Pinocchio’s being precedes his body: his task throughout the book is to find it, in other words to find himself, which means that this is a story of becoming rather than of birth), this act of shaping the puppet is enough to convey the idea of the prayer, and surely it is more powerful for remaining silent. Likewise with Pinocchio’s efforts to attain real boyhood. In Disney, he is commanded by the Blue Fairy to be “brave, truthful, and unselfish,” as though there were an easy formula for taking hold of the self. In Collodi, there are no directives. Pinocchio simply blunders about, simply lives, and little by little comes to an awareness of what he can become. The only improvement Disney makes on the story, and this is perhaps arguable, comes at the end, in the episode of the escape from the Terrible Shark (Monstro the Whale). In Collodi, the Shark’s mouth is open (he suffers from asthma and heart disease), and to organize the escape Pinocchio needs no more than courage. “Then, my dear Father, there is no time to lose. We must escape.”
    “Escape! How?”
    “We can run out of the Shark’s mouth and dive into the sea.”
    “You speak well, but I cannot swim, my dear Pinocchio.”
    “Why should that matter? You can climb on my shoulders and I, who am a fine swimmer, will carry you safely to shore.”
    “Dreams, my boy!” answered Gepetto, shaking his head and smiling sadly. “Do you think it possible for a Marionette, a yard high, to have the strength to carry me on his shoulders and swim?”
    “Try it and see! And in any case, if it is written that we must die, we shall at least die together.” Not adding another word, Pinocchio took the candle in his hand and going ahead to light the way, he said to his father: “Follow me and have no fear.”
    In Disney, however, Pinocchio needs resourcefulness as well. The whale’s mouth is shut, and when it opens, it is only to let water in, not out. Pinocchio cleverly decides to build a fire inside the whale—which induces Monstro to sneeze, thereby launching the puppet and his father into the sea. But more is lost with this flourish than gained. For the crucial image of the story is eliminated: Pinocchio swimming through the desolate water, nearly sinking under the weight of Gepetto’s body, making his way through the gray-blue night (page 296 of the American edition), with the moon shining above them, a benign smile on its face, and the huge open mouth of the shark behind them. The father on his son’s back: the image evoked here is so clearly that of Aeneas bearing Anchises on his back from the ruins of Troy that each time A. reads the story aloud to his son, he cannot help seeing (for it is not thinking, really, so quickly do these things happen in his mind)