Words and Worlds

by Alison Lurie

  Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see.

  At the end of Pinocchio, the hero and his father come across the Fox and the Cat, who once pretended to be blind and lame. Now the Cat is really blind and the Fox sick and almost hairless, and they have become beggars.

  “Oh, Pinocchio,” the Fox cried in a tearful voice. “Give us some alms, we beg of you! We are old, tired, and sick.”

  “Sick,” repeated the Cat.

  “If you are poor, you deserve it! Remember the old proverb which says: Stolen money never bears fruit.”

  And though the Fox and the Cat beg for mercy, all they get from Pinocchio is two more proverbs, after which Pinocchio and Geppetto “calmly went on their way.’” This ending may strike us as harsh, but it is also closer to the pattern of the classic European folk tale, in which villains seldom reform and do not need to be forgiven.

  At one point in Tom Sawyer, Tom runs away from home to Jackson’s Island in the Mississippi, where he and his friends Huck and Joe can enjoy themselves without interference from adults. They fish, smoke, and pretend to be pirates. But both Tom and Joe are troubled by thoughts of the families they have left behind. They are away only a few days, however, and when they become homesick and return to Hannibal, they are greeted as heroes. The moral seems to be that you can skip school, have a wonderful time camping out, worry and frighten your relatives, and get away with it. When Pinocchio leaves home, on the other hand, he encounters a series of dangers and enemies. A giant snake blocks his path, and when he enters a field to steal grapes, he is caught in a mantrap by a farmer, who uses him as a watchdog to guard his chicken coop.

  Pinocchio also travels with other boys to a kind of children’s paradise called Funland, where there is no school and “the days go by in play and good times from morning till night.” But his holiday lasts far longer than Tom’s. He lives in Funland for five months without tiring of it or missing Geppetto. Unlike Tom, he is not troubled by his conscience, or by thoughts of anyone from his former life. Then, as the Talking Cricket has predicted, Pinocchio and his best friend Lampwick gradually turn into jackasses. The first sign of this is that he wakes up one morning with ass’s ears. His reaction is violent: “He began to cry, to scream, to knock his head against the wall, but the more he shrieked, the longer and more hairy grew his ears.”

  When he discovers that the same thing has happened to Lampwick, they begin to laugh, but soon they are fully transformed and can only bray. Then they, with all their comrades, are taken to market and sold by the wicked wagon driver who has lured them to Funland in order to make a profit on their inevitable transformation. Pinocchio goes first to a circus, where he is forced to perform tricks, and is beaten and starved; when he becomes lame, he is sold to a dealer in hides who tries to drown him in order to peddle his skin.

  These events are both a metaphor and a warning, one that Collodi reinforces by remarking that “by virtue of playing all the time and never studying, those poor gullible boys turned into so many donkeys.” The harsh moral (as true today as it was in Collodi’s time) is that poor boys who quit school and hang about doing nothing, playing and enjoying themselves, are likely to end up as exploited and overworked laborers—or possibly dead.

  Pinocchio’s metamorphoses are frightening, but thematically interesting. During the book he moves from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, rising gradually within each class. His name, which in Tuscany at the time meant “pine nut” or “pine seed”—the contemporary term is pignolo—associates him with a plant. He begins life as a featureless stick of firewood (possibly pine wood), which is then transformed into a wooden puppet. Next he moves through animal identities (watchdog and donkey), and finally achieves full human status. Metaphorically, it is the same progression that we see in children, who start out as more or less inert matter, then become ignorant if lovable bundles of need and greed, with short attention spans and a wish to explore the world without regard for its dangers. Like animals, they resist confinement, live in the present, and continually seek food and amusement.

  Apart from this possible parallel, why did Collodi chose a marionette for his hero instead of just a naughty boy? Possibly because in the theater what scholars call “performing objects”—puppets, marionettes, automatons, shadow figures, animated props—have advantages denied to human actors. Actors are never the same as the parts they play, and however skilled they may be, we are always aware that there is a real person beneath the disguise. Performing objects, on the other hand, can appear as pure representations of some individual type or character. (For this reason, the British stage designer Gordon Craig once expressed the hope that in the future all actors would be replaced by puppets.)

  Pinocchio has sometimes been seen, especially by readers who think first of the Disney version, as a classic fairy tale. If so, it is a tale of a special type. In most fairy stories with a male protagonist, the young hero leaves his original family, has adventures, and ends up marrying a princess and starting a new family. Folklorists refer to such tales as Stories of Adolescence. Pinocchio, by contrast, is what is called a Story of Childhood, like “Jack and the Beanstalk” or “Hansel and Gretel.” Here the hero does not start a new family; instead he ends up back home with a beloved and loving parent. The same pattern occurs in another well-known Italian children’s classic, Dino Buzzati’s The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, where the central relationship is also between a father and a son, and one important motive behind King Leander’s invasion is to find his lost child, Tony. (Interestingly, when Tony is discovered, he is working for humans as an entertainer—a kind of puppet.)

  In folktales the young hero or heroine is often aided by a supernatural figure: a dwarf, a talking animal, a wise woman, or a fairy godmother. In Pinocchio this role is played by the Blue Fairy, whose most distinctive feature is the color of her hair. Blue or green hair is a traditional attribute of supernatural beings; sometimes good or neutral, like the Green Man and Green Children of British folklore, and at other times evil like Bluebeard. In Pinocchio the Blue Fairy appears in many guises. At first she is a white-faced little girl who declares that she is dead, but she soon proves able to save Pinocchio from near-death, summoning three doctors to cure him. When they part, she claims to be his older sister. Next she appears as a young working woman who takes Pinocchio home, feeds him cauliflower and cake, and declares that she will be his Mama. Later he sees her as a little she-goat with indigo hair, on a rock in the middle of the sea. Finally, at the end of the story, she appears in a dream as a beautiful fairy who changes him into a real boy.

  Collodi, however, seems to refuse the idea that Pinocchio is a romantic fairy tale at the very start of his book.

  Once upon a time, there was …

  “A king!” my little readers will say right away. “No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

  It wasn’t expensive wood, just the ordinary kind that we take from a woodpile in the winter and put in the stove …”

  In other words, his story will be grounded not in a world of high-flown fantasy but in the harsh economic realities of working-class life in Italy in the late nineteenth century. It is a place of constant, grinding poverty, eased only by love and self-sacrifice. Pinocchio begins life as a rebellious, inconsiderate, self-centered little boy who disobeys adults and disregards rules, always with dangerous results. Instead of going to school, for instance, he sells the schoolbook Geppetto has bought him and buys a ticket to the puppet theater. There he is entrapped by the terrifying Puppet-Master and nearly burned alive on a kitchen fire.

  Willingness to work and sacrifice himself for others is Pinocchio’s eventual salvation. At the theater he escapes death when he impulsively offers himself as a substitute for another doomed puppet, briefly touching the Puppet-Ma
ster’s heart. His final transformation is the result of his willingness to work long hours at an exhausting job to earn money for his ailing foster father, Geppetto, and then for his supernatural mother, the Blue Fairy.

  In the Disney film it is inexperience and bad advice rather than selfishness and disobedience that get Pinocchio into trouble. He is led to the puppet theater by two villains, the Cat and the Fox, who—in a very Hollywood touch—promise him fame and money in a song whose refrain is “It’s great to be a celebrity.” Of course, in Disney’s hands Pinocchio did become a kind of celebrity; he also, in the film version, becomes prosperous. In the original novel this does not happen: Pinocchio merely manages, through hard work, to support his foster father—though in the end the Blue Fairy does transform their shabby room into a comfortable cottage and give him forty golden coins. But the important thing is that he becomes “a proper boy,” un ragazzino per bene” which in Italian, as the critic Ann Lawson Lucas points out, has a double meaning: Pinocchio is now both a real boy and a good boy.

  Will Pinocchio remain a good boy? And, if he does, will readers continue to care about him? The book is thirty-six chapters long, and only in the last two does he consistently behave well. Delinquency and rebellion are more interesting and more fun to read about than moral perfection. As the critic Lois Kuznets says, “Pinocchio is loved the better for his misdemeanors.” In this, he may remind us of other Good Bad Boy heroes, both in fiction and in real life. It is perhaps an especially popular type in Italy, where a grown man with a warm heart, a love of escapades, and impatience with social rules and restrictions is often seen as charming and seductive. If someone like this appears truly (though sometimes only temporarily) sorry for his transgressions, he may be forgiven again and again by his friends and relatives, as repentant sinners are by the Catholic Church.

  Pinocchio is an Italian story in several other ways. It is full of Northern Italian landscapes and dishes, such as the red mullet with tomato sauce and tripe à la Parmesan that the Fox and the Cat dine on at the hero’s expense. It also embodies the traditional Italian belief that the family is of central importance. You can have a good time with your friends, but you can only really trust your kin. Good parents will sacrifice themselves for their children without a murmur, as Geppetto does when there is nothing to eat in the house but three pears, and he allows Pinocchio thoughtlessly and greedily to devour them all. (This episode, like many others, was eliminated from the Disney film.) Good children will also sacrifice themselves for their parents in a real crisis, as Pinocchio does when he and his father, like Jonah in the Bible, escape from the belly of the Great Shark, and he carries Geppetto out of the sea on his back.

  Some critics have noted other parallels between Pinocchio and Christian legend. They have remarked that the hero is the foster son of a carpenter, and that he dies and is resurrected at least three times. (In one of these deaths, he is hung on a tree.) They have also suggested that the Blue Fairy is a version of the Virgin, who in art often wears a blue robe—though Mary’s robe is usually sky-blue, while Collodi describes the Fairy’s hair as indigo.

  To some readers, Pinocchio is a sacrificial victim; others have imagined him as a hero of the rebellious working class, whose escapades defy social rules. Psychologists have seen his escape from the Great Shark as a kind of rebirth, and suggested that his expanding nose tells us that lies are virile. Like most great works of children’s literature, Pinocchio lends itself to many and varied interpretations, and it will surely continue to do so in the future.

  The Royal Family of Elephants

  For over seventy years, Babar has been the most famous elephant in the world—and the most controversial. He has been praised as a benevolent monarch, an ideal parent, and a model of family affection, loyalty, justice, good manners, and civilized living. He has also been damned as a sexist, an elitist, a colonialist, and a racist. It has even been proposed that he deserves to be burned alive: see Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl. Clearly, a figure who arouses such intense and conflicting opinions must be more than just the hero of a children’s picture book: he must represent important and sometimes contradictory views of both childhood and society.

  The complexity of King Babar’s world, and some of its contradictions, are partly the result of the fact that his long life has been chronicled by two different biographers. Babar’s history began in Paris in 1931, when the pianist Cécile de Brunhoff invented a bedtime story about a baby elephant for her sons, who were then five and six years old. The next day the boys repeated the tale to their father, the artist Jean de Brunhoff, who was inspired to write it down, expand it, illustrate it, and publish it in 1931 as The Story of Babar. Over the next eight years he wrote six more Babar books which, like the first, became immensely popular. When he died in 1937, at the age of thirty-seven, the series lapsed. But seven years later his eldest son Laurent, then only twenty but already becoming known as an artist, took up the story. Since then Laurent de Brunhoff has produced over thirty books about Babar and his family and friends, and six with other protagonists, of whom the most famous is a gentle and elusive little man called Bonhomme who lives at the top of a pink mountain. (Friends of Laurent de Brunhoff, as well as some readers, have felt that there was a personal connection between Bonhomme and his creator, and de Brunhoff admits that he has “a special feeling” for him.)

  Babar, of course, both is and is not an elephant. Or rather, he is an elephant only in the sense that the characters in Aesop’s and Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables are animals. Essentially all of them stand for human types and have the traits that humans, sometimes arbitrarily, have assigned to them. La Fontaine’s crow, for example, is vain and easily deceived, though real crows are neither conceited nor foolish. As an elephant, Babar is traditionally strong and wise and has a remarkable memory. He is also naturally large and powerful, unlike many animal heroes of children’s picture books, who tend to be smaller than humans. From the start, most original editions of the Babar books have appropriately been supersized, just as Beatrix Potter’s tales of rabbits and mice are very small.

  Babar is not only both animal and human, he is both a child and an adult. His name makes this clear: it combines the French terms for father (papa) and infant (bébé). Babar was the name of a sixteenth-century Indian king; but Laurent de Brunhoff says his father was probably not aware of this when he began the series. Currently, BaBar is also the name given to an electronic testing program used in laboratories.

  One sign of his ambiguous position is that, unlike the other adult elephants in the story, he and his wife, Celeste have very small tusks, even after they marry and become parents. They rule a kingdom, but they also enjoy many childish pleasures, as the British critic Margaret Blount has noted:

  Babar does what most small children would like to do—joins in the adult world on a child’s terms, and gets away with it.... He can wear grown-up clothes, ride up and down in the lift, go fishing, drive a car, marry Celeste and become King of the Jungle all because his real self is hidden behind an animal hide and he is neither child nor adult but a bit of both… .

  Another part of the appeal of the Babar series seems to be that, after the first few books, they are about an ideal happy family in a nearly ideal world. Babar and his family visit distant places and even go to outer space, and sometimes they face trouble or danger; but everything always ends well. Their ideal universe also, very early in the series, becomes timeless. Babar is born, grows up, is educated, marries, becomes king, brings the advantages of civilization to his country, and has three children. After that, time stops. Over fifty years pass, and King Babar and Queen Celeste have a fourth child, but nobody grows any older or dies. Babar’s cousin Arthur remains an adolescent, and the children never reach puberty. As Margaret Blount puts it, Babar exists “in a perpetual, infantile middle age.”

  In classic juvenile literature the protagonist is usually a child who leaves home and family, has adventures, and ret
urns home (Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Where the Wild Things Are). Sometimes there are two or more children (A Wrinkle in Time, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins), and occasionally the hero or heroine ends up with a new and better family (Anne of Green Gables, Harry Potter). In most of the Babar books, however, the family itself is the protagonist. It is an extended three-generational family, in which Babar’s early patroness, the Little Old Lady, and his wise elderly councilor Cornelius, play the part of grandparents. Arthur is the impulsive adolescent cousin, and Zephir the monkey his mischievous friend. Babar goes out into the world alone in the first book, but from then on he is almost always accompanied by family members. Together they go to Paris, to America, on vacation to the seashore or the mountains, on hikes in the country, and to another planet. Sometimes one of the children is the center of the story, but the entire family is almost always present and involved, especially at the inevitable happy ending. In this, of course, the books are closer to the real experience of most of their child readers, which may partly account for their popularity.