A Reader on Reading

The marquis de Sade is wrong: the ideal reader is always in danger. The ideal reader is a novel’s main character.

Paul Valéry: “A literary ideal: finally to know not to fill the page with anything except ‘the reader.’ ”

The ideal reader is someone the writer would not mind spending an evening with, over a glass of wine.

An ideal reader should not be confused with a virtual reader.

Writers are never their own ideal reader.

Literature depends, not on ideal readers, but merely on good enough readers.

How Pinocchio Learned to Read

“So do I,” the White Queen whispered. And I’ll tell you a

secret—I can read words of one letter! Isn’t that grand?

However, don’t be discouraged. You’ll come to it in time.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 9

I READ CARLO COLLODI’S Adventures of Pinocchio for the first time many years ago in Buenos Aires, when I was eight or nine, in a vague Spanish translation with Enrico Mazzanti’s original black-and-white drawings. I saw the Disney film some time later and was annoyed to find a multitude of changes: the asthmatic Shark that swallowed Geppetto had become Monstro the Whale; the Cricket, instead of disappearing and reappearing, had been given the name Jiminy and kept pursuing Pinocchio with good advice; grumpy Geppetto had turned into a nice old man with a goldfish called Cleo and a cat called Figaro. And many of the most memorable episodes were missing. Nowhere, for instance, did Disney portray Pinocchio (as Collodi did in what was for me the most nightmarish scene in the book) witnessing his own death when, after he refuses to take his medicine, four rabbits “as black as ink” come to carry him off in a small black coffin. In its original version, Pinocchio’s passage from wood to flesh and blood was for me as thrilling a quest as that of Alice for a way out of Wonderland or of Odysseus for his beloved Ithaca. Except the ending: when, on the final pages, Pinocchio is rewarded by becoming “a handsome boy with chestnut brown hair and light blue eyes,” I cheered and yet felt strangely unsatisfied.

I didn’t know it then, but I think I loved The Adventures of Pinocchio because they are adventures in learning. The puppet’s saga is that of a citizen’s education, the ancient paradox of someone who wants to enter common human society while trying to find out at the same time who he really is, how he appears not in the eyes of others but in his own. Pinocchio wants to be “a real boy” but not just any boy, not an obedient little version of the ideal citizen. Pinocchio wants to be whoever he really is under the painted wood. Unfortunately (because Collodi stopped Pinocchio’s education short of this epiphany), he never quite succeeds. Pinocchio becomes a good little boy who has learned to read, but Pinocchio never becomes a reader.

From the beginning, Collodi sets up a conflict between Pinocchio the Rebel and the society of which he wants to be a part. Even before Pinocchio is carved into a puppet, he proves himself a rebellious piece of wood. He doesn’t believe in “being seen and not heard” (the nineteenth-century motto for children) and provokes a quarrel between Geppetto and his neighbor (yet another scene deleted by Disney). He then throws a tantrum when he finds that there is nothing to eat but a few pears, and when he falls asleep by the fire and burns off both his feet, he expects Geppetto (society’s representative) to carve him new ones. Hungry and crippled, Pinocchio the Rebel does not resign himself to remaining unfed or handicapped in a society that should provide him with food and health care. But Pinocchio is also aware that his demands from society must be reciprocated. And so, having received food and new feet, he says to Geppetto, “To pay you back for all you’ve done for me, I’ll start school right away.”

In Collodi’s society, school is the beginning place for proving oneself responsible. School is the training ground for becoming someone able to “pay back” society’s concerned care. This is how Pinocchio sums it up: “Today, at school, I’ll learn how to read right away, tomorrow I’ll learn how to write, and the day after tomorrow I’ll learn arithmetic. Then with my skill I’ll make lots of money, and with the first money that I get in my pocket I’ll buy my father a beautiful woolen jacket. But what am I talking about, wool? I’ll get him one all of silver and gold, with diamond buttons. And the poor man really deserves it, because, after all, in order to buy me books and have me educated he’s left in short sleeves … in the middle of winter!” Because in order to buy a spelling book for Pinocchio (essential for attending school) Geppetto has sold his only jacket. Geppetto is a poor man, but in Collodi’s society, education requires sacrifice.

The first step, then, to becoming a citizen is to learn to read. But what does this mean, “to learn to read”? Several things.