Dreams in Blog - PINOCCHIO: The universal parable of man's destiny

19/Aug/2009

PINOCCHIO: The universal parable of man's destiny

Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910) - the first illustrator (1883) of Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino - colored by Daniel DONNA

It is time for the world to reflect on Pinocchio's fable and discover it as  the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by invisible external strings.

A mystical text disguised as a fable
 
PINOCCHIO:
THE UNIVERSAL PARABLE
OF MAN’S DESTINY
By  Stefano E. D’Anna

Behind its ironic and easy-going tones and its didacticisms, the puppet is actually the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by strings of casualness, negative emotions and the unhappiness of an inescapable fate. Hidden under the surface of this fable, there lies the biggest and boldest mystical text of all world literature: man’s initiatory trip from puppet, prey to its instincts, to a real man endowed with will. As a matter of fact, Pinocchio is the most widely read book after the Bible and the Koran.

A mystical text disguised as a fable

Although universal literature, from Aristofane to Beckett, is full of great novelists, perhaps there has never been one as intelligent, ironic or secluded as Carlo Lorenzini, alias Collodi. It is true. We are a touchy and violent species. Over the centuries, whoever had to reveal some unpleasant truths or break some deeply-rooted prejudices, had to take some timely precautions. When Copernicus, for instance, wrote the “De Revolutionibus” in which he exposed his revolutionary discovery he took two precautions: a) he dedicated his work to the Pope, b) as a security measure, he published his book after his death! Lorenzini also had to disguise the most terrible secret as a fable and pass for an author of nursery stories rather than one of the most scholarly anthropologists of our nature and human ethnology. One day a wiser, more aware mankind will recognize him as the man who knew how to pleasantly show us the cruel and terrible truth: humanity is made up of millions of puppets; we are bio-chemical marionettes, driven by invisible threads; we are incurable liars. Above all, he will be appreciated because he told us the truth and made us laugh at the misfortunes of the poor puppet, without having his book condemned at the stake. We are incapable of seeing how Pinocchio’s toughness and untruthful nature, along with his irresponsibility are the psychological stigmata of the sapiens species and the very roots of all our misfortunes. The abandonment of his puppet dress and his transformation into a child is not a melancholic passage to normality or a cruel flight from the spell of childhood with its unbounded vitality.



Moon-men, Sun-men

What a misunderstanding! In actual fact, Collodi presents us with the horror of a puppet-like sub-human “moon-man” who is influenced by everyone and everything. They are zombies who, through misadventure, sorrow, antagonism and disappointment, will one day enter a real humanity, “sun-men” who are proactive, responsible and shine in their own light.
By paraphrasing Caligula's words to his ministers - by analogy - we could say: if Pinocchio is a puppet then we are men. But if Pinocchio is a man, then we are still men with a primitive conscious - larvae encased in their pods, waiting to break out and evolve.



A riddle to solve

There is an air of mystery about Pinocchio’s story, a riddle we would like to solve. Why did a writer such as Carlo Lorenzini, who throughout his carrier never rose above a Thouar or a Dazzi, suddenly produce an immortal story, an objective tale and a world-class masterpiece that had the unfathomable depth of an evangelical parable. How is it possible that a fable hastily cobbled together, perhaps reluctantly, with no clear plan, by a man who was probably defeated by personal and political disappointments could be considered an echo of a universal message and the mirror of all mankind? It’s a worrying thought. Why didn’t he sign it with his real name, like his other works, instead of choosing to use a “nom de plume”?

Wood shavings of our soul

These two questions can be made into one, in that there’s an explanation or better still an hypothesis that answers both of them. The hypothesis is that the text is both inspired and the result of a brainwave. The adventures of Pinocchio, the most widely read children’s book which has been translated throughout the world, in the guise of a children’s tale, conceals the greatest and most daring mystical text of all world literature.
In actual fact what we see in Pinocchio are the wood shavings of our lost soul. This explains why when we read Pinocchio the text appears to be real while the author remains an unnecessary hypothesis. His existence is superfluous like in the Old Testament and the Gospels. There’re holy books, but not holy authors. Carlo Lorenzini didn’t feel like signing a universal story, that was written in Heaven, it only had to be written down.




The awful secret

Benedetto Croce once wrote that “the wood which Pinocchio is carved in is that of mankind”. Out of all the fables ever written, Pinocchio is perhaps the most comprehensive and the most painfully truthful. It comfortably belongs to the “black fable” genre of Orwell and its ruthlessness is only be equalled by “Animal Farm”. It’s the transparent filter of a humanity cast adrift, that lives in fear and ignorance of its own identity. The tale of Pinocchio’s adventures belongs to the art of mysteries: the art of revealing by concealing. The secret which has been under the noses of millions throughout the world for more than a century is awful. Pinocchio is the mirror image of a bio-chemical puppet which has become man as we know him to be. We are reluctant to recognise ourselves in the grotesque image of Collodi’s character, we loathe the idea of identifying ourselves with a speaking piece of wood, apparently alive, but in actual fact driven by external forces and terrible invisible strings. In the mirror we can see Pinocchio’s image, the embarrassing appendix of an informant, but just like Narcissus we refuse to recognise ourselves in that imagined reflection - we cannot see the woodenness of his being, his chronic and incurable deceit or his disloyalty.



The snare

Who knows if Collodi, wherever he may be, is laughing or crying at the millions of readers, the countless generations of children around the world who are rocked to sleep by the enchanted words and images of his fable, without even knowing its real nature: a dark and pitiless parable of the human condition. However from the very beginning, the storyteller Collodi, warns us that a snare awaits us and that we will uncover the deception only when it is too late - once we have crossed the threshold of the promised fairy-tale world that opens with the fateful words: “once upon a time…”
It is as if Lorenzini was compelled to warn us against his own deception, bound to an unlikely deontology, that takes us back to Cat and the Fox.
Once we’ve crossed the threshold of the nursery tale, the tacit agreement with the reader is immediately upset and we find ourselves in the presence of a gruesome fable, with its ruthless and sublime irony. Reading it, the book opens up a threatening, splendid and ephemeral world that begins with a disturbing absence. There is not a King. The place of the King figure has been taken by the mass which is a joyfully plebeian crowd. The eternal dialectics between mass and individual, between destination and destiny, emerge and this tears our world apart.



The victim is always guilty

Pinocchio is any piece of wood that belongs to the pile. It is stuff that is destined to be destroyed and burnt, but it also longs to live. In this transformation the antagonists, represented by the Cat and the Fox have a providential, religious, ideological and theological nature.
The world is a mirror. Through its events and in its symbolic language that are made up of circumstances and meetings, it constantly gives out signals, clues and indications. If Pinocchio ( the ordinary human being ) could read them , he would not be so busy sabotaging his own being, he would not make the wrong choice at the crossroads of life and neither would he reject experience, in specious collaboration with error and misunderstanding.
The Cat, cruel and simple and the Fox, ironic and savage are two poetic criminal figures. The characters in Pinocchio’s world are nothing other than projections of our imagination, figures that thanks to our strong belief in them, have ended up by haunting our world. The Cat and the Fox stand out more than all the others, with their physical deformities, a symbol of a putrid conscience that is disguised with cunning.

A strict deontology compels them to warn the victim with a thousand signals, contradictions and slips. In short they can rob someone who is determined to be robbed. This is why, one day, in all the law courts of an advanced humanity, we shall read in very large letters: “the victim is always guilty”.

The gospel according to Pinocchio

The initial idea, the suspicion that this story conceals a parable of human destiny, a gospel, a timeless Bible is reinforced and gains ground bit by bit as we continue to read. Mastro Ciliegia, a carpenter, is the first character to appear. The father figure is called Geppetto, a nickname for Giuseppe. Geppetto is not a carpenter but he has tools to cut wood. It is more than a coincidence. As we continue we discover the story has an inexhaustible number of symbols, riddles and allegories, and that under the wrinkled and tough exterior, the most famous puppet conceals the man in search of himself. What a conjurer and an illusionist Lorenzini-Collodi is to conceal the truth under everyone’s nose. Pinocchio is born from a carpenter called Giuseppe or Geppetto. On top of this, he has a yellow wig on his head, that looks like a poor and hot “polenta”, it is true, but it is also similar to the golden colour of an aureole. Therefore… why did we not understand that… Pinocchio is… is…
Any piece of wood, a man of the crowd, the real KING-individual, becomes real. The magical project of our advancement is encapsulated in that fable like a gospel about the transformation of a puppet into a real man, of a being without will driven by strings of fortuity and mechanisation, into a free man who is the master of his destiny.


The birth of Pinocchio

Pinocchio is a fairy-tale character, like other magical figures, he comes into the world in one of those dark periods, into one of those infernal circles. Like Jesus Christ, who comes into the world in a shed looked after by animal warmth, Pinocchio is born into misery, surrounded by misfortune, “on a bad night in winter” ( my old book of Pinocchio, an edition of 1958, says: “a hellishly bad night”) amid thunder and lightening. So we have another clue that shows that the fable, in the guise of a popular picaresque story, is actually an initiatory journey, that begins with our coming into the world, into this “valley of tears”. The symbolism is just too obvious. In our societies, so-called civil societies, life begins according to one of the most brutal rituals.



Welcome to hell

Childbirth is painful, we are welcomed by the operating theatre’s blinding lights, by the doctors’ excited voices and by our mother’s screams, then we are spanked and put down on a cold surface, so we can say that from the very beginning everything appears as though we were truly “welcomed to hell”. It does not take much for the child to accept the discipline of the masters of misfortune or the instructions that will convince him that he has arrived on a dark planet where you are born to die and you live to suffer. In a world that is a “valley of tears”. In fact, our first sensation on being born is that of a terrible fear of suffocating, of being overwhelmed and dying. From then on everything that appears familiar to us has this sweetish taste of fear.

The imprinting of pain

This is how we - who for nine months of growth ( but in actual fact for an age) have been aquatic creatures, kings of a universe that is lukewarm, dimly-lighted, silent and liquid - meet fear as our first feeling and from that moment on, like the imprinting of a goose, we follow her as if she were our real procreator. Fear and pain soon limit the possibilities in a man’s life; an unreal hypnotic space, in which a man feels safe as if between the huge walls of a bunker that is half refuge and half prison.
The whole life of an ordinary man seems to be controlled by this first moment, by the experience of that liquid fire that he has felt enter his lungs in that terrifying passage from aquatic being to an air-breathing creature.
Like the salmon that goes against the river’s current to return to where it was it was born, we have a long journey to make to overcome the trauma created at our birth and make our way home again in search of a lost paradise.


The Pinocchios of Johannesburg

There are other elements in the story that constantly draw a parallel, there is an analogical connection between Pinocchio’s adventures and our life. Pinocchio always has a thousand good intentions, he sets out with a kind of touching naivety, but then, he always diverts from his course so as to follow the easiest route, namely to lie whilst hoping to get off scot-free. He gets so used to lying that he is no longer able to see the difference between true and false, right and wrong. We’re like this. Official reports and media news are full of good intentions and are as unreal as Pinocchio’s. We’ve heard world leaders say these things, decade after decade, from Rio to Johannesburg. They are like the puppet on his first day at school, making false plans/promises about brotherhood and voicing concerns for the unfortunate, poor, starving and oppressed of the world.



The animal that lies

Pinocchio’s story reveals our weaknesses and our hypocrisy, which are still hidden even from ourselves, so used are we to the dynamics of falsehood. We tell lies to everyone around us because we think about our own personal interest. However, even worse than that, we lie to ourselves, every minute of every hour of every day of our life, climbing up castles of prejudices and illusions. Collodi’s invention of Pinocchio’s nose, brings an embarrassing discovery to our notice, he reveals our most disturbing psychological feature: the tendency to lie, first to ourselves, and then to others.
This is the point: we can get away scot-free with others, but we shall never be able to escape unscathed when confronted with our own conscience; this is a part of us that reads our inner self, and we are aware of it, so for us, there is no peace, no rest, just endless torment.
The cornerstone of research carried out by The European School of Economics, of which the Department of Sociology is a part, is the study of the individual and the discipline of self-observation or the study of ourselves.
The central element of this work is the study of lying.
Falsehood is a permanent state of the being, in which man has been “educated” throughout his life.
Man is a liar and only lies to himself. Poverty, war and sickness, which are part of the world’s events, are only the consequence of an inner struggle created by our lying that has enveloped us since birth, and the execution of a precise and monotonous script that we’ve brilliantly interpreted. The lie has become flesh. To leave the lie means to observe it and consequently to eradicate it.
I would like to thank all the students of the European School of Economics, who have “reread ” “The Adventures of Pinocchio” with me and have contributed by giving deeper interpretations of this never ending story. Among the many works I have chosen:



Irene Licia Melloni - ESE Genova

Pinocchio is the story of an esoteric life of an initiatory completion which clearly evokes that jewel of the late Roman period, Apuleio’s “Metamorphosis“ where the individual, starting from the most inert and decaying matter, comes through difficulties, tests and suffering of every kind to finally experience catharsis and recognition of his dignity and redeeming destiny.
The metaphysical-eschatological interpretation of the fable that originates from the old myth (Iside and Osiride, Attis and Cibele) and is then modified by the Judaic-Christian tradition ( Job and the whale, the resurrection of Lazarus and the story of Jesus), shows us how faith (Geppetto), wisdom (the speaking cricket and the blue fair), the experience through evil (the Cat and the Fox, and the Fire-eater), the knowledge of the ephemeral pleasure of the world (the Toyland), the fraternal and filial pietas (Lucignolo and again Geppetto), death ( passing through the whale’s miasmatic stomach) and in the end takes the weak and sinful man, formerly a puppet that is prey to its own instincts, to the recognition of faith and life. This is where Pinocchio’s journey ends, the puppet and the man in search of himself, and due to the many ups and downs, he becomes conscious and this is an eternal metaphor for Man’s journey through Life.



Pinocchio: a universal parable of human nature - Valeria Basso - ESE New York

I was a child when I first read Pinocchio, and I did not like it, what is more: it upset me. The happy ending where the puppet becomes a boy didn’t even soothe my anxieties. The images of this piece of wood and its adventures, were too vivid and remained etched in my memory for years afterwards like a nightmare. In my opinion Fellini himself would have wanted to make his movie interpretation of the story appear like a nightmare. As far as I know, Pinocchio is not one of the most popular fables amongst children. And amongst the adults? I read it again a short time ago and the feeling I had as a child doesn’t seem to have gone away. Even other adults who read it are often crossed by a shadow. Nevertheless Pinocchio, the most widely read book and translated throughout the world, is considered a point of reference and fascination. How is it possible? Why do we feel drawn to the story of the puppet, even though it scares us a little at the same time? The answer is because human nature, as complicated as it is, is bewitched by itself; we are all a little narcissistic and egocentric, we like to look at ourselves in the mirror and see our reflection even when we are unaware of what we are looking at? Because we deceive and we are deceived like Pinocchio, we fall to earth and run away with him, we live by our wits and by subterfuge and our life is full of whims and lies, just like our hero.
There is an invisible but inseparable thread that connects us to the puppet. We too are often at the mercy of the waves, in danger of being swallowed by the jaws of a shark, though we often put ourselves in that position. A man’s life is continually spent in the vague search of a bit of serenity and clarity, peppered with false moves and failed attempts to return to the correct path. The puppet, apparently without strings, is whimsical, stubborn (he is made of a hard wood) insecure, arrogant, unwilling and a liar: often his attitude, his lies and his stubbornness irritates us and gets on our nerves; at those moments we even hope something bad might happen to him. But then, suddenly, when Pinocchio is in danger we feel sorry for him, and we subject ourselves to all kinds of torment until he is safe. Why? Why can we never condemn him deep down? Because, like him, we are weathervanes battered by the wind, and if we sentenced the puppet with a guilty verdict it would be like throwing ourselves into an abyss. What we cannot stand in others, is just the unconscious reflex of what we cannot stand in our own, but self-love tells us that it is easier to unload our accusations on to someone else whilst all the time believing ourselves to be perfect.
Pinocchio too, always professes himself to be a “very very good and wise fellow”. Pinocchio has to struggle to free the good boy buried inside him. What he has to do is go on a journey of redemption: as a matter of fact, the moment he comes alive in the hands of Geppetto, he starts to play his nasty tricks that soon put him to flight. This is the moment of separation, of falling into temptation (he seems to see Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden): Pinocchio loses his innocence and exchanges it for a double-edged weapon of falsehood (again like Adam and Eve). From then on, Pinocchio starts his journey along the slippery road that leads to perdition…
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, Pinocchio is always arm in arm with death: along the way there is always someone who dies or is on the verge of dying. Death is such a recurrent theme in the fable, that it almost becomes an obsession though it is made less dramatic by Collodi’s sarcastic quips. An unusual fixation for a nursery tale… We are unwilling to identify with Pinocchio because the truth is difficult to accept. However, whether we like it or not, our unconscious is attracted by him. Whether it is hate or love, condemnation or pity that moves us, his story does not leave us indifferent. And it is precisely this we have to analyse without letting it slip through our fingers. Because there lies the secret about who we are.
Pinocchio would not be able to extricate himself from his condition and complete his journey to redemption, if the superior influences of the Fair and the Cricket had not watched over him - though they pay a dear price for their protection. However it is also true that he is not saved by means of deus ex machine. It would be a disappointing solution. Pinocchio makes it because of his own merits, taking all the time he needs to open his eyes and prove his new self; we also have to know that we can make it on our own, that life is not decided by fate and that we are our destiny.
In the beginning Collodi gave his story a tragic ending by having Pinocchio hanged from a tree. However the public did not like this, so he was forced to change it, by having the puppet become a boy. With any other kind of ending, Pinocchio would not have had the popularity it enjoys today. It would have been lost a long time ago. Of course, we cannot say whether the author liked the revised ending or not. But we like it like this, because we have to believe that also our own fable can end well and that we too can change from puppets into real men.



Laura Dipterans - ESE Lucca

There are several themes in Collodi’s fable: freedom, family, loneliness, fear, courage, cunning, love, sorrow, fiction, deception… and death which is also a continual theme. Death hovers over the whole story. Pinocchio runs the risk of being burnt, fried, drowned, hanged, starved and even eaten by a whale shark. In Chapter 17 we can even find a symbol of earthly death: the coffin. Despite all the ups and downs everything ends with the puppet becoming a child made of flesh and bones.
Tomorrow is October 11 and so go and see the latest production from Oscar Roberto, enjoy the film with its wonderful show of lights, colours, special effects and scenery… and when you come out why not ask the Fair with deep-blue hair to turn yourselves from Pinocchios into sincere and “benign” children? Enjoy the film!



The king and the puppet - Andrea Franzi - ESE Genova

Pinocchio’s fable conveys a very important concept about the life of the ordinary man; he is up to his neck in a sea that conceals his life from him, there he hides and lies to the world, unaware of how irresponsible he is. The puppet represents the stereotype of man’s daily attempt to sabotage reality, he tries to divert the river of his uncertainties, but is compelled to bend under the unavoidable rush of water that drags him to the end of his journey of self-destruction. Pinocchio cannot hide from the world, he cannot lie in silence, and man for his part, lives out his sad fable with the woody heart of a puppet, dirtied by the terrible destiny of mediocrity that awaits him.



Chiara Pasquali - ESE Bologna

From my point of view, Pinocchio is not a negative character. It is true, he is a liar, but this is because of his desire to live and experience the joys of the world, rather than gain any personal advantage by tricking people. Pinocchio starts off as a piece of wood that has never lived or felt joy. He is thrown into a world he knows nothing about, but everything about it fills him with enthusiasm. Pinocchio can speak as a piece of wood, even before he takes on the semblances of a human in the hands of Geppetto. He is already keen to move before he gets legs and becomes a real human. All this is because Pinocchio wants to live and is eager to throw himself into the world like a real child without a past. Many literary critics have compared his mistakes with those of a child and his story with the end of childhood. Pinocchio encounters a series of tempting symbols (Lucignolo, the Cat and the Fox) who lead him away from the right path, causing him to make mistakes, lie, and to be recalled by his teachers. This situation goes on up until an important event takes place: the sight of the Fair’s grave. Like many stories about great men and great heroes, an impulse comes from inside, from the person’s being that carries Pinocchio aloft and makes him become human. It is true that Pinocchio is saved by the Fair, but in my opinion the Fair is not an external character but Pinocchio’s destiny, she is his future and is the sign of what he was created for. Our character was born to be something better than what we see of him on his first adventures. However to improve, he first has to lie, suffer and pay a moral price for his mistakes. He has to have a difficult past and see the Fair die, and at the same time be free of her so he can become a real human and guide himself.



Milka Platan - ESE Lucca

There are so many puppets in the world and even more donkeys, but Pinocchio is still considered a fable set in a magical world far form reality. Pinocchio’s story, in actual fact, touches the real essence of the human condition. A man’s existence, from birth to death, is very often like that of a puppet who never becomes the man he wants to be. From one futile desire to another, man goes on living as though dozing, which prevents him from opening his eyes and awakening so as to become a real man. The path towards change needs discipline and good will. One has to accept the truth and become aware of our condition as nothing other than a programmed robot, that acts, feels and thinks like all the others. Those who think like the others will share the same destiny as the others.

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