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INTERTEXTUAL PLAY WITH PINOCCHIO IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN`S LITERATURE Sandra L. Beckett web | Адаптацията като стратегия... Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio is one of the great classics of children’s literature. Although 1981 marked Pinocchio’s one hundredth birthday, the puppet is alive and well and thriving in contemporary children’s literature, not only in Italy, but around the world. An article published by Italo Calvino in the Unesco Courier to mark the centennial was fittingly titled “Pinocchio, the Evergreen Centenarian” (11). Calvino insists on the “fertilizing power” of Pinocchio, which influences all Italian writers, “whether consciously or (more often than not) unconsciously”. These intertextual seeds are planted in their childhood since “Pinocchio is the first book which they all come to after (if not before) learning the alphabet” (12). If Italian children are exposed to Collodi’s work almost before they can walk, that is certainly not the case in the rest of the world. Few children of any age (or few adults for that matter) carry Collodi’s integral novel in their literary baggage. Yet Pinocchio has an uncontested place in the canon of Western children’s literature and is considered part of the literary heritage of all children. For the most part, it is not the puppet conceived by Collodi that dominates the collective imagination, but the Disney image from the 1940 animated film adaptation, which has become the “original” version for most young people. Like Little Red Riding Hood or Alice, Pinocchio continues to inspire countless retellings around the globe. Intertextual play with Pinocchio is a widespread phenomenon in children’s literature because authors can assume that their young audience is familiar with some version of the story, albeit often an adulterated one, and will read the new work in relationship to it. This is the assumption made by Gianni Rodari when he alludes to the “other” Pinocchio in his poem “L’altro Pinocchio”. Pinocchio has inspired some of the finest illustrators in the world. The Bulgarian illustrator, Iassen Ghíuselev, who won the Illustrators of the Year Award at the Bologna Book Fair in 1994 for his striking interpretation of The Adventures of Pinocchio, is no exception when he admits that Collodi’s story remains a favourite among the many books he has illustrated. The vast range of the visual interpretations is remarkable; it has been rendered in every medium imaginable, from simple line drawings to exquisite oils. Sakura Fujita illustrates the tale for young children in multi-media collage. Roberto Innocenti’s powerful paintings, with their distinctive detailed style, daring perspectives and earthy palette, offer a hauntingly realistic rendition that re-creates Collodi’s tale in the animated street life of nineteenth-century Italy. In vivid-coloured grease pencil, Lorenzo Mattotti emphasizes the magical, fantastic aspect of Collodi’s work and creates an atmosphere reminiscent of the commedia dell’arte. Many illustrators of Collodi’s tale offer highly original interpretations, but the scope of this paper does not allow us to explore these visual retellings. Pinocchio is an unmistakable intertextual referent for readers of all ages, and direct and indirect references to the story pervade Western literature. The young adult novel Pinocchio’s Sister, about a girl and the pretty wooden doll in her ventriloquist father’s famous vaudeville act, does not even mention Pinocchio other than the direct paratextual reference in the title. Some allusions to the tale are strictly pictorial, as in the case of Mitsumasa Anno’s wordless picture book Tabi no ehon II (Anno’s Italy), which gives the puppet and Geppetto a place of honour in this vast iconic representation of Italian culture. Pictorial allusions to Pinocchio are common in picture books that use the technique of bricolage to blend together several fairy tales in what Rodari calls an “insalata di favole” (Grammar 38-39). The self-willed puppet finds his way into La terrible bande à Charly P. (The terrible band of Charly P.), the story of a rebellious rock band composed of five of Perrault’s most famous fairy-tale characters and managed by his authoritarian great-great-great-grandson. He is the one large figure that stands out in the audience, cheering them on and waving a definiant fist. In Feliz Cumpleaños Caperucita Roja! (Happy Birthday, Little Red Riding Hood!), the Pinocchio allusion is textual as well as pictorial, because his name appears on the list of storybook characters Little Red Riding Hood is inviting to her birthday, while his image (that of a very young Pinocchio) is depicted, with the other fictional figures, in a huge thought bubble. In some picture-book retellings, Pinocchio becomes the protagonist of an entirely different story. One particularly original appropriation of the puppet is found in Fünfter sein (Fifth), a moving depiction of the anxiety and fear of the unknown that pervades a doctor’s waiting room. With remarkable simplicity and sobriety, the author and illustrator create a poignant atmosphere of anxiety and apprehension that readers share with the characters. A simple change of perspective in the final illustration completely dissipates the fear and tension, as readers look past the last patient into the mysterious room, where a doctor smiles reassuringly in front of shelves of toy parts that include a couple of shiny, new, red Pinocchio noses. Gianni Rodari has returned over and over to Collodi’s masterpiece in his fiction as well as his theoretical writings. La filastrocca di Pinocchio (The nursery rhyme of Pinocchio) tells Collodi’s story in comic-strip format with four-line rhyming captions. It offers a “faithful translation” of Pinocchio rather than a reinterpretation, according to the preface, which describes it as “a tribute” to Collodi and “an invitation” to read the original work. In fact, Rodari’s catchy nursery rhymes and Verdini’s cartoon-style images cast the story in a new light, although it is not a free adaptation in the manner of Salvador Bartolozzi’s popular 1920s Spanish comic series Pinocho contra (against) Chapete, which pits a noble, idealistic Pinocchio against his evil enemy Chapete. Rodari’s later texts devoted to the famous wooden puppet were all playful, highly original reworkings. The protagonist’s legendary nose is the subject of a short nonsense poem, “Il naso di Pinocchio” (Pinocchio’s nose), in a collection of nursery rhymes. In six short rhyming lines, the poet humorously presents the “surprising case” of “a nose that can hear,” Pinocchio’s “spy-nose” that begins to grow as soon as it hears a lie (55). Rodari’s posthumous collection Il secondo libro delle filastrocche (The second book of nursery rhymes) also contains a poem about Pinocchio, as if a collection of Italian children’s poetry would be incomplete without at least one poem inspired by the nation’s most famous cultural icon. However, the eponymous hero of “L’altro Pinocchio” is, as the title suggests, “another” Pinocchio, who is even more of a liar than his relative (86). The poem takes a different slant on the motif of Pinocchio’s nose, comically turning it into a kind of natural resource. The “1 million lies” a day that the other Pinocchio tells are not enough because “his business is lies”: he constantly chops off his nose to sell the wood (86). Rodari’s poems are examples of the strategy he calls the “privileging of a motif” in The Grammar of Fantasy (37), where he uses Pinocchio as an example: If among all the motifs present in Pinocchio, we privilege the motif of the nose that grows longer with each lie, we can easily produce a new fairy tale in which Pinocchio intentionally lies in order to obtain heaps of wood to barter and sell. He becomes rich, and a monument is then erected in his honour during his lifetime. Made of wood, of course (37). That is precisely the storyline Rodari would develop two years later in a short story titled “Pinocchio il furbo” (That clever Pinocchio). Like the protagonist of “L’altro Pinocchio”, whom he resembles strikingly, the eponymous hero of “Pinocchio il furbo” is not the Pinocchio readers know, but “another” (14). An element of the paratext, titled “directions for use”, clearly establishes that the author expects his readers to participate actively in the creative process. Like all the stories, “Pinocchio il furbo” proposes three epilogues from which readers are either to choose the one they prefer or to reject them all and invent their own. Tomi di Paola’s drawing illustrates the first ending, in which the townspeople acclaim the wealthy entrepreneur with cries of “Long live Pinocchio!” (24). The gentle social criticism that underlies the playful humour of Rodari’s retelling is indicated by the author’s own rejection of the first ending, which he pronounces “disappointing” and “unjust” because the shrewd protagonist doesn’t deserve to be “celebrated as a benefactor”. For this particular story, Rodari refuses to make a definitive choice, hesitating between the other two epilogues. In the “witty,” self-reflexive second epilogue (113), Pinocchio, who has never read a book in his life, thinks the statement: “Carlo Collodi is the author of the adventures of Pinocchio”, is just another of the lies his ill-treated advisor has invented for him, and for the first time in his life tells the truth, with the result that all the lie-produced wood turns to sawdust (18). The third epilogue is a “nasty” variation on the second (113). This retelling of Pinocchio prevents readers from being mere cultural consumers, inviting them to participate in the writer’s game. One of the fairy-tale games Rodari develops in The Grammar of Fantasy is that of sequels, since fairy tales always leave “the possibility of an ‘after’.” He uses the many sequels of Pinocchio to justify his argument (36). As he often does, the author draws illustrations from his own work with children, in this case a sequel invented by a group of fifth-graders, based on the “fantastic binominal [...] ‘Pinocchio-hidden treasure’.”(37), in which Pinocchio sets out in search of the shark, because, the day he becomes a real boy, Geppetto suddenly remembers seeing a hidden treasure in its belly. The children’s introduction of the popular treasure-hunt archetype into their version of Pinocchio is not an arbitrary choice, according to Rodari, who explains it in light of the Field of Miracles episode: “it reinstates the hero after he failed to reap a treasure when he was still a puppet” (37).
Colloid himself intervenes in his fictive world when the Blue Fairy desperately solicits his aid with the runaway puppet. The protagonist’s escape threatens to ruin the book Collodi was just about to finish, and the author is concerned only with what he will tell his readers and his editor. A humorous twist at the end of Malerba’s story turns the sequel into a kind of unedited in media res episode. Malerba suggests tongue-in-cheek that Collodi has excised this embarrassing adventure from his version of Pinocchio. On the King’s orders, Pinocchio is put into the sack to be hauled back to the exact spot in chapter thirty-six from which he had escaped and the theatrical version ends with the puppet’s muffled protest that he doesn’t want to become “a good little boy” (60). During his exile in Argentina, Alejandro Casona wrote two sequels in the form of children’s plays. Pinocho y Blancaflor was staged in Buenos Aires in 1940, but, like the sequel El hijo de Pinocho (Pinocchio’s son), it remained unpublished in Spain until 1983. Although the protagonist of Pinocho y Blancaflor is the famous wooden puppet, that is about the extent of its indebtedness to Collodi. Pinocchio’s adventure is no longer an apprentissage in the Bildungsroman tradition, but a kind of heroic quest, in which the protagonist sets off to rescue the Infanta Blancaflor (whose name evokes the heroine of the famous medieval romance Flores y Blancaflor) from pirates. The play has the conventional happy ending in which Pinocchio marries the Princess and inherits half the kingdom. When Pinocchio is appropriated by the science fiction genre, he is generally cast in the role of a robot in a futuristic world. P3K: Pinocchio 3000 is a very recent film about a super-robot with a P3K processor, who is tricked into becoming involved in a devious scheme to turn all children into robots, but eventually becomes a real boy thanks to the holographic fairy Cyberina. In the foreword of the 1980s comic Pinocchio Super-Robot, Max Bunker explains that a close re-reading of Collodi’s work as an adult showed him that what he had been brought up to believe was a story for youth could be “transcribed in modern language” for a more mature audience, resulting in this “fairy tale for grown-ups” that nonetheless appeals to a cross-audience. This Italian sci-fi re-version is rendered in a comic-book style that transforms the protagonist into a superhero. The comic begins with the ritualistic incipit: “Once upon a time...” but immediately disorients the reader by continuing: “there was an abandoned piece of sheet metal among a pile of garbage in the suburbs of a metropolis”. An entrepreneurial modern Geppetto turns the sheet metal into a little robot in the hope of patenting and selling it to a big company. Daniel Mativat’s novel Ram, le robot (Ram the Robot) has been categorized in the science-fiction subgenre of “the technological fairy tale” (Le Brun 70). Although the author sets his “fantastical version” of Collodi’s masterpiece (7) in a futuristic world on the star Sirius, he is quite faithful to the general plot of the original. Électro/Geppetto is the repairman who keeps the planet’s robots functioning. Mativat’s use of technology is limited and his robot is not very sophisticated. Because of his limited program, Ram, unlike most children on Sirius, has to go to school. School is to be the civilizing influence that will turn him into “the finest copy” of a little boy (14). However, school has the same aversion for the Siriusian robot as for the Tuscan puppet. In spite of the wise resolutions with which the robot programs himself, such as “Ram will become a good little boy!” (26), he deliberately deletes the programs of his school diskettes and replaces them with video games. Like Ram and Électro, the other characters undergo a fitting transformation, for example, the Good Fairy is replaced by Ram’s “lucky star” Stella (38) and the Talking Cricket by a computer chip. Astrophysics provide Mativat with a poetic substitution for the gigantic shark: Ram and his father are sucked into a black hole. Episodes from Collodi’s work are cleverly adapted to the new setting. The episode of the puppet theatre is replaced by a scene in an antique store full of old-fashioned robots, including former film stars such as R2D2 and C3P0, as well as precious automats by Vaucanson. Like his predecessor, Ram is the victim of two villains, space pirates who leave him to be recycled with junk metal. Pinocchio’s peregrinations are turned into a “spаcial odyssey” (99). Just as Pinocchio lets himself be lured to the “Land of Toys” by his friend Candle-Wick, Ram ignores the chip’s warning and accompanies the cosmos-trotting hoodlum Asinus to Ludus, the aptly named “planet of play” (66). The chip’s warning that Asinus is, as his name suggests, an “ass” (65) falls on deaf ears. Rather than turning into donkeys, the delinquent children are recycled into road signs to remind others of the rules of the road along the interstellar highways. As in the pre-text, Ram courageously and selflessly saves his father, but the circumstances are quite different. In a makeshift rocket constructed from scrap pieces, some bearing the inscriptions “NASA” and “CCCP,” they escape from the black hole. The moral of Ram, le robot is essentially the same as that of Pinocchio: Ram becomes a real little boy because he proves he has a heart.
The illustrator Nikolaus Heidelbach depicts the birth of Pinocchio in a series of six striking pictures at the bottom of a double spread: the puppet gradually emerges from the shrinking log until he stands staring down at the plump belly that gives his torso the comical shape of a peanut. From the cheerful figure that skips smilingly across the cover to the pitiful figure that hangs from the tree, the expressive wooden face of Heidelbach’s Pinocchio captures the wide gammit of emotions experienced by the little puppet. Nöstlinger considers her Pinocchio a “real child” whose feelings are clearly portrayed (Koppe 16). Although he still has a quick temper, the new Pinocchio is not mischievous. Like any child, Pinocchio makes mistakes because he is still learning the ways of the world. From the beginning, Pinocchio is portrayed as an innocent child who is misunderstood and mistreated by adults. The puppet can’t understand, for example, why his father creates a scandal by shouting at him in public when all he wanted to do was try out his new legs. Pinocchio only gradually loses patience with the Talking Cricket’s annoying, never-ending litany of “Woe betide...”; he doesn’t mean to kill him and doesn’t even seem to know he has. As the narrator explains, Pinocchio’s experience of death is even less than his experience with life. Horrified to learn from the Blue Fairy that a puppet can never grow up, Pinocchio indulges in a long diatribe about the difficulty of being a child: children are ordered about, preached at, scolded, and spanked, with no means of self-defence. Nöstlinger’s Pinocchio becomes a kind of spokesperson for children’s rights. The responsibility adults incur when they have children is clearly articulated by the starving puppet, abandoned by his imprisoned father: “If you carve yourself a child, you should know that that child will grow hungry!” (26). Nöstlinger’s controversial Der neue Pinocchio sparked a great deal of discussion as to whether or not a classic should be tinkered with. However, the Austrian writer is certainly not the only author who has dared to rework Collodi’s classic. Since its publication, the popular tale has been reinterpreted according to the sociocultural and literary preoccupations of the time. Pinocchio’s story has been recycled in every literary genre, as well as in all areas of high and low culture, including all the mass media of our technological age. I would like to borrow my closing line from Rodari’s “Pinocchio il furbo”: “Long live Pinocchio!”
WORKS CITED Ada 2002: Ada, Alma Flor and F. Isabel Campoy. ¡Feliz cumpleaños, Caperucita Roja! Miami, FL: Alfaguara, 2002. Published in English as Happy Birthday, Little Red Riding Hood. Miami, FL: Alfaguara, 2002. Anno 1980: Anno, Mitsumasa. Tabi no ehon II. Tokyo: Fukuinkan, 1978. Published in English as Anno’s Italy. New York: Collins Publishers, 1980. Bartolozzi 1926: Bartolozzi, Salvador. Pinocho se hace pelicano. Madrid: Editorial Sturnino Calleja, 1926. Beckett 2002: Beckett, Sandra L. Recycling Red Riding Hood. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bunker 1980-1981: Bunker, Max [Luciano Secchi]. Milan: Editorale Cornu, 1980-1981. Calvino 1982: Calvino, Italo. “Pinocchio, the Evergreen Centenarian”. // Unesco Courier, № 6, 1982, pp. 11-14. Casona 1983: Casona, Alejandro. Tres farsas infantiles. Gijón: Ediciones Noega, 1983. Cherubini 1913: Cherubini, Eugenio. Pinocchio in Africa. Illus. GC Bruno, 6th ed. Firenze: Bemporad, 1913 [1st ed. 1904]. Trans. as Pinocchio in Africa by Angelo Patri. Illus. Charles Copeland. Boston-New York-Chicago-London-Atlanta-Columbus-San Francisco: Ginn and Company, 1911. Collodi 1991: Collodi, Carlo. Pinocchio. Illus. Lorenzo Mattotti. Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Collodi 1994: The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet. Illus. Iassen Ghíuselev. Turin: Ideogramma, 1994. Collodi 1996: The Adventures of Pinocchio. Translation and Introduction by Ann Lawson Lucas. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1996. Collodi 2002: Pinocchio. Illustrated by Gris Grimly. New York: Tor Books, 2002. Fujita 1971: Fujita, Sakura, illus. Pinocchio. Text by Ann Herring. Tokyo: Gakken, 1971. Galangau 1981: Galangau, Vassaoula. Pinocchio au Nouveau Monde. Illus. Anny Le Pollotec. Paris: Éditions GP, 1981. Galangau 1982: Pinocchio au Pôle Nord. Illus. Anny Le Pollotec. Paris: Éditions GP, 1982. Jandl 1997: Jandl, Ernst. Fünfter sein. Illus. Norman Junge. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Verlag, 1997. Koppe 1988: Koppe, Susanne. Darf man Pinocchio verändern? Antworten von Nöstlinger und Heidelbach. // Eselsohr, № 7, May 1988, p. 16. Le Brun 1994: Le Brun, Claire. Il était/sera une fois: Le conte de fées technologique des années 80. // Canadian Children’s Literature, № 74, 1994, pp. 63-74. Le Normand 1981: Le Normand, Véronique. Pinocchio au cirque. Illus. Michel Janvier. Paris: Deux coqs d’or, 1981. Based on Pinocchio: Folge 2, Episode 41: An den Zirkus verkauft. Munich: Apollo Film Wien, 1976. Malerba 1977: Malerba, Luigi. Pinocchio con gli stivali. Roma: Cooperativa Scrittori, 1977. Published in Spanish as Pinocho con botas. Illus. Damián Ortega. Trans. Fabio Morádito. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992. Mativat 1984: Mativat, Daniel. Ram, le robot. Montreal: Héritage, 1984. Nöstlinger 1988: Nöstlinger, Christine. Der neue Pinocchio. Illus. Nikolaus Heidelbach. Weinheim: Belz & Gelberg, 1988. P3K: Pinocchio 3000. CinéGroupe, 2004. Pinocchio 1940: Pinocchio. Dir. Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen. Story by Aurelius Battaglia. Disney Productions, 1940. Re-released in 1984. Pinocchio 1975: Pinocchio va in Svezia. Pinocchio 11. Roma: Spada, 1975. Rodari 1971: Rodari, Gianni. “Pinocchio il furbo.” // Tante storie per giocare. Illus. Tomi di Paola. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971. Rodari 1973: Grammatica della fantasia. Torino: Einaudi, 1973. Translated by Jack Zipes under the title The Grammar of Fantasy. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1996. Rodari 1981: Il naso di Pinocchio. // Filastrocche lunghe e corte. Illus. Emanuele Luzzati. Roma: Riuniti, 1981. Rodari 1985: L’altro Pinocchio. // Il secondo libro delle filastrocche. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1985. Rodari 1974: Rodari, Gianni and Verdini. La filastrocca di Pinocchio. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1974. First published in episodes in the children’s magazine Il Pioniere, 1954-1955. Slepian, Jan. Pinocchio’s Sister. New York: Philomel Books, 1995. Smith 2002: Smith, Lane. Pinocchio the Boy: or Incognito in Collodi. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Tarzia 2003a: Tarzia, Antonio and Elisa Possenti. Pinocchio nel paese dei balocchi. Jaca Book, 2003. Tarzia 2003b: Pinocchio va a scuola. Jaca Book, 2003. Tarzia 2003c: Pinocchio e la fata turchina. Jaca Book, 2003. Zor 1997: Zor, Marion. La terrible bande à Charly P. Illus. Yan Thomas. Paris: Rue du monde, 1997.
ПРЕРАБОТВАЙКИ "ПИНОКИО" ЗА СЪВРЕМЕННА АУДИТОРИЯ Сандра Бекет Резюме
© Sandra L. Beckett This paper is based on some of the research done for a lengthier paper that is forthcoming in Approaches to Teaching Collodi’s Pinocchio and Its Adaptations, edited by Michael Sherberg (New York: MLA). |