The famous little donkey

Pinocchio, illustration by Charles Folkard

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.
[Translated by Mary Alice Murray, 1892, line illustrations by Charles Folkard, 1911.]
Wordsworth Editions, 1995 (1883).

… The Famous
Little Donkey
Pinocchio,
called
The Star of the Dance,
Will Make His First Appearance …

Chapter 33

Carlo Lorenzini, better known after Tuscan town he grew up in as Carlo Collodi, published Le avventure di Pinocchio. La storia di un burattino (‘The adventures of Pinocchio: the history of a marionette’) in 1883, a scant seven years before his death aged just 63. The very first translation – into English – by Mary Alice Murray appeared within a decade of the original, and it remains the most readily available to this day.

While the outline of the story is well-known from the many, many adaptations – mostly for the screen – it’s always worth reminding ourselves of the original text, even if in translation, to see whether Collodi’s intended vision may not necessarily be what comes to the fore in modern retellings.

And it’s possible that by looking at the context and milieu from which it emerged our appreciation of this Italian fable, while remaining ‘fabulous’ in all senses of the word, will take on a very different hue to that with which we’re familiar, somewhat darker and more moralistic.

Zanni mask (Tom Branwell)

First of all it’s worth considering the appeal of a puppet that somehow comes alive, a puppet that in the author’s first version ceased to exist after being hung from an oak tree. The tendency to imagine an inanimate figure or even a pet as having human thought or movement is not restricted to childhood: it’s expressed through Creation myths and medieval legends, manifested in the passions of iconophiles, model railway enthusiasts and lap dog owners, of admirers of animated movies like Toy Story and of fans of speculative fiction from Frankenstein onwards.

What Lorenzini did was to ally 19th-century popular entertainments – principally the puppet theatre and the commedia dell’arte – with a morality tale emphasising redemption, a genre with a long tradition given impetus by the rise in literacy. Charles Kingsley had achieved something similar with The Water-Babies a couple of decades before, but Lorenzini’s now expanded tale was to achieve greater universal success by reportedly becoming one of the most translated books after the Bible.

So, the story. Who doesn’t know the tale of a living piece of wood that, in due course, the woodcarver Geppetto was to make into a jointed marionette? Incidents like the nose that grows with every lie, the puppet’s transformation into a donkey and finding Geppetto in the belly of a fish, and characters like the Fox and the Cat, the Talking Cricket and the Blue Fairy are all familiar tropes associated with Pinocchio’s story.

And yet there is so much more to Lorenzini’s narrative that may be unfamiliar to most of us after more than a century of adaptation, selective retelling, even repurposing. Who recalls the Snail, the Assassins, the Green Fisherman, the mastiff Alidoro, or even the Serpent? Who remembers how many times Pinocchio repents his wayward behaviour before reverting to the ‘boys will be boys’ excuse?

Amidst all the retellings for new audiences it’s worth remembering some of the contexts from which Pinocchio emerged. The subtitle La Storia di un Burattino reminds us of the puppet theatres that the author would’ve known which often featured characters  from the traditional Commedia dell’arte: in fact Harlequin and Punch – or rather Arlecchino and Pulcinella – are specifically mentioned in the novel as marionettes in the theatre. They belong to the class of  stock figures called zanni, knavish comic characters derived from the name Gianni (‘Johnny’), from which the English word ‘zany’ obviously originates.

In fact Pinocchio himself is a kind of zanni, a mischievous individual whose first appearance – acting like the Gingerbread Man – is completely in the clown tradition. Pinocchio’s clothes – conical hat, ruff and motley vestments – accentuate this role; in addition Zanni wore distinctive masks, most of which indicated a character’s degree of foolishness or duplicity by the length of the nose on the face, a feature displayed of course by the puppet. (Incidentally, Pinocchio doubtless inspired the look, nature and behaviour of Enid Blyton’s Noddy, a doll who lived in Toyland, itself a name equivalent to Paese dei Balòcchi, the Land of Toys or Country of Simpletons to which Pinocchio is later lured.)

Mr Punch and friends

Side by side with the commedia influences there’s iconography from religious and classical traditions. For example the name of Pinocchio’s ‘father’ Geppetto is a familiar form of Giuseppe or Joseph, who in the Bible was Jesus’s foster father or stepdad. The constantly forgiving Fairy with the Turquoise Hair, who appears intermittently as a dead child, a young woman or even a blue-coated goat, must surely allude to the Virgin Mary who’s always depicted with a blue robe. The giant dogfish which swallows Geppetto and then Pinocchio recalls the ‘great fish’ in whose belly Jonah spent three days and nights. And the puppet’s constant immersions in the sea are effectively serial baptisms from which he is reborn.

Meanwhile Pinocchio’s adventures are a kind of Odyssey: like the wily Odysseus the puppet travels to various locations and even encounters a cannibalistic ogre similar to Polyphemus in the Greek epic. But Pinocchio also gets turned into a little donkey: the metamorphosis into an asino – which translates both as donkey and fool or dunce – is a trope which goes back at least to the classical satire called The Golden Ass by Apuleius, one even cited in Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863).

But we come back to Pinocchio himself, and the significance of the name. The usual suggestions are that pinocchio is a dialect word for a pine-nut, or that it’s a combination of Italian nouns for ‘pine’ and ‘eye’. A more recent theory links it with the author’s family connections with the small Tuscan town of San Miniato basso. This settlement was given its name in 1924 but research has suggested that San Miniato was formerly known by a different name: as road signage now declares, it is San Miniato basso, già Pinocchio.

Lorenzini’s skill was in refreshing an oral folktale tradition by combining tropes from fairytales, the Bible, fables, classical epics and tall tales, all the while injecting his narrative with enough farcical humour to take the sting from the underlying didacticism. There’s little doubt that, Pinocchio having survived 140 years since its first outing in 1883, there remain many more years of life left to this perennial history of a marionette.

---

Pinocchio is my read for May for Adam @ RoofBeamReader.com’s #TBRyear10 challenge, and one of my Wyrd &Wonder titles for 2023

@WyrdAndWonder Flying witch artwork by astromoali, magic portal artwork by Tithi Luadthong