A Reader on Reading

Finally, society places in Pinocchio’s way a number of characters who are to serve him as moral guides, as Virgils in his exploration of the infernal circles of this world. The Cricket, whom Pinocchio squashes against the wall in an early chapter but who miraculously survives to assist him much later on in the book; the Blue Fairy who first appears as to Pinocchio as a Little Girl with Blue Hair in a series of nightmarish encounters; the Tuna, a stoic philosopher who tells Pinocchio, after they have been swallowed by the Shark, to “accept the situation, and wait for the Shark to digest us both.” But all these “teachers” abandon Pinocchio to his own suffering, unwilling to keep him company in his moments of darkness and loss. None of them instructs Pinocchio on how to reflect about his own condition, none encourages him to find out what he means by his wish of “becoming a boy.” As if reciting from school textbooks without eliciting personal readings, these magisterial figures are merely interested in the academic semblance of instruction in which the attribution of roles — teacher versus student—is meant to suffice for “learning” to take place. As teachers, they are useless, because they believe themselves accountable only to society, not to the student.

In spite of all these constraints — diversion, derision, abandonment — Pinocchio manages to climb the first two steps of society’s learning ladder: learning the alphabet and learning to read the surface of a text. There he stops. Books then become neutral places in which to exercise this learned code in order to extract a conventional moral at the end. School has prepared him to read propaganda.

Because Pinocchio has not learned to read in depth, to enter a book and explore it to its sometimes unreachable limits, he will always ignore the fact that his own adventures have deep literary roots. His life (he doesn’t know this) is actually a literary life, a composite of ancient stories in which he might one day (when he truly learns to read) recognize his own biography. And this is true for every fully fledged reader. The Adventures of Pinocchio echo a multitude of literary voices. It is a book about a father’s quest for a son and a son’s quest for a father (a subplot of the Odyssey that Joyce would later discover); about the search for oneself, as in the physical metamorphosis of Apuleius’s hero in The Golden Ass and the psychological metamorphosis of Prince Hal in Henry IV; about sacrifice and redemption, as taught in the stories about the Virgin Mary and in the sagas of Ariosto; about archetypal rites of passage, as in the fairy tales of Perrault (which Collodi translated) and in the earthy commedia dell’arte; about voyages into the unknown, as in the chronicles of the sixteenth-century explorers and in Dante. Since Pinocchio does not see books as sources of revelation, books do not reflect back to him his own experience. Vladimir Nabokov, teaching his students how to read Kafka, pointed out to them that the insect into which Gregor Samsa is transformed is in fact a winged beetle, an insect that carries wings under its armored back, and that if Gregor had only discovered them, he would have been able to escape. And then Nabokov added, “Many a Dick and a Jane grow up like Gregor, unaware that they too have wings and can fly.”

Of this, Pinocchio as well would remain unaware if he happened upon The Metamorphosis. All Pinocchio can do, after he learns to read, is parrot the textbook speech. He assimilates the words on the page but does not digest them: the books do not become truly his because he is still, at the end of his adventures, incapable of applying them to his experience of himself and of the world. Learning the alphabet leads him in the final chapter to be born into a human identity and to look upon the puppet he was with amused satisfaction. But in a volume Collodi never wrote, Pinocchio must still confront society with an imaginative language which books could have taught him through memory, association, intuition, imitation. Beyond the last page, Pinocchio is finally ready to learn to read.