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This thesis is the first systematic study of the Pinocchio myth and examines how it has been used and reinterpreted in different retellings across different ...
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central to the myth of Pinocchio, is missing from both texts, suggesting an alternative reading of the original text and exposing the ways the myth has been used to perpetuate consumerist values.
This thesis is dedicated to all the dreamers, changemakers and fighters whose only weapon is their art.
This thesis has been the most intellectually challenging project I have undertaken, but also the richest experience in reading and examining Literature critically. I am very grateful to have been able to do this in the intellectually stimulating environment of University College London and in particular in the School of Languages, Culture and Society.
First of all I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Florian Mussgnug and Dr Katia Pizzi, for the ongoing support, encouragement and insightful supervision of this thesis. Many thanks also to Prof Theo Hermans and Prof Timothy Mathews for the friendly advice throughout my studies at UCL. I also want to thank Els Braeken and Lia Kahn-Zajtmann for their kindness and support. I am grateful to all members of staff and PhD peers at UCL with whom I had discussions that helped me to develop my research and in particular Prof Michael Berkowitz, Dr Dorota Goluch, Dr Lior Libman, Marlies Prinzl, Dr Tsila Ratner, Belinda É. Samari and Prof Sacha Stern. Special thanks to Dr Eleanor Chiari, Dr Catherine Keen and Laura Mason for the valuable support during the final stages of my PhD. I also want to thank all colleagues at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, and in the Italian and the Dutch Departments for the moral support.
I would like to thank Prof Robert Coover for the fascinating conversations that helped me better understand his work for the purpose of this thesis.
I owe many thanks to all my friends and in particular Andromachi Katsarou, Christina Lazoura, Margarita Nazou and Lila Pavlerou for the ongoing love and support throughout the years. I also want to thank my neighbours and friends Kyoko Yanagawa, Max Edwards, Jennifer Tomomitsu, Leah Rasmussen, Kenwyn House and their cat Tao-Tao for all the inspiring and relaxing time we have spent together.
My love for literature has been almost instinctive since I was a child and I am grateful that I had great teachers and mentors to nourish and nurture this love. To those I owe great thanks, for they are the beacons that shone in my life: Konstantina Griva, my first English teacher, Evangelia Malliarou, my teacher of literature at secondary school, who not only taught us how to read the great Homeric epics but also the Modern Greek classics. Georgia Aleiferi at the Classical High School of Anavryta initiated me in the pleasures of depth text analysis by studying Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Rex. I was lucky to study English Literature in the rich academic environment of the University of Athens. Out of all members of staff I owe special thanks to Dr Christina Dokou, who has been a friend and mentor throughout the years and the first to instil in me the love for Comparative Literature.
My exposure to music has contributed greatly to my comparative approach and for this I owe special thanks to my choir conductor at the Athens National Conservatory, Spyros Klapsis, as well as to my piano teacher, Igor Taraschansky, who opened up new ways for my appreciation of music and art.
Above all I owe great thanks to my parents, Stratos and Maria Panteli, for encouraging me to follow my dreams and for supporting me throughout, both emotionally and financially. Moreover, my mother’s artistic nature and my father’s storytelling skills triggered my imagination, unlocked my creativity and cultivated very early on my appreciation and love for storytelling. I am ever so grateful to my sister, Alexandra Panteli, for her love and belief in me, which has given me immense power to deal with difficulties. Last but not least, I would like to thank my partner, Dr Gerald Kössl, for his continuous support and for sharing this challenging and rewarding experience with me.
This thesis will be a study of postmodern and posthuman retellings of the Pinocchio myth from the 1980s until today. I will first address a set of parameters to define the context of this study and explain the choices of the case studies I will analyse, including my definition of the Pinocchio myth.
Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino is one of the most famous texts in the world.^1 Its popularity played a very significant role in the formation of the Pinocchio myth, as I explain further on. Daniela Marcheschi refers to the book’s popularity both with regard to the size of the audience the book reached, and in relation to the impact it had on authors all over the world:
[...]il capolavoro la cui grazia e forza non solo hanno tanto colpito da farne il libro più letto e venduto nel mondo, dopo la Bibbia e il Corano, ma anche animato la fantasia, mosso lo stile e la creatività di molti altri autori italiani e stranieri, che, con il burattino Pinocchio, hanno ripetutamente sentito il bisogno di misurarsi.^2
Twenty years after Marcheschi’s statement, the book remains ‘il libro non religioso più tradotto al mondo’, according to Massimo Rollino.^3 The popularity of Collodi’s novel has contributed largely to the creation and distribution of the Pinocchio myth through numerous adaptations and retellings. The most significant adaptation with regard to popularity was
(^1) Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino (Firenze: Felice Paggi, 18832 ). Daniela Marcheschi, ‘Introduzione’ in Daniela Marcheschi, ed., Carlo Collodi, Opere (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1995 ), p. XI. ‘…the masterpiece whose grace and strength not only have managed to make it the most read and sold book in the world, after the Bible and the Koran, but they have also animated the imagination and influenced the style and creativity of many other authors, both Italian and foreign, who have repeatedly felt the need to measure themselves 3 against the puppet Pinocchio.’ [my translation]. Massimo Rollino, ‘Presentazione’ in Pinocchio Svelato: i luoghi, il bestiario e le curiosità nella favola del Collodi , Giuseppe Garbarino (Florence: AB Edizioni, 2014), p. 5. ‘the most translated non-religious book in the world’ [my translation].
hopes for humanity’s technological progress. Posthumanism is a term that has been used in various contexts and can include different theoretical approaches, as I will explain in detail in the first chapter. My approach will refer to transhumanism, which as Nick Bostrom emphasises, ‘embraces technological progress while strongly defending human rights and individual choice’.^9 I will demonstrate how the desire for humanity perpetuates the Pinocchio myth by resonating transhumanist ideas of self-enhancement and how science fiction films provide ideal showcases for portraying the perpetuation of the Pinocchio myth.
In an attempt to identify what all science fiction films have visually in common, cinema and media theorist Vivian Sobchack concludes that
the visual connection between all SF films lies in the consistent and repetitious use not of specific images, but of types of images which function in the same way from film to film to create an imaginatively realized world which is always removed from the world we know or know of. The visual surface of all SF film presents us with a confrontation between and mixture of those images to which we respond as “alien” and those we know to be familiar.^10
Sobchack points out that unlike film genres such as the western or gangster film, science fiction film's iconography has no constant with regard to its references. She gives the example of the railway as it appears in western films and how it contains a common topos: having the same historical references and invoking specific emotions across all films of the genre. She goes on to explain how the spaceship or the robot cannot function similarly in the science fiction film, since they have been used for entirely different settings and ideological references, either as negative or positive symbols, or even as entirely neutral and unimportant in the film’s plot. However, what I
(^9) Nick Bostrom, ‘In Defense of Posthuman Dignity’, Bioethics , 19.3 (2005), 203. (^10) Vivian Carol Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film , 2nd enl. ed. (New Brunswick, N.J. & London: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 87.
consider vitally important in the science fiction film genre is that such iconographic references invoke in the viewer’s memory all the previous moral debates that were raised regarding technological progress and technophobia in earlier films. This thus defines their own position in the debate, even when their choice is an unwillingness to express a direct opinion by using these symbols in a neutral way, merely as films props. Katherine Hayles considers ‘the locus classicus for reframing transhumanist questions to be science fiction and speculative fiction’.^11 In science fiction film, it is precisely through visual references such as aliens, spaceships, robots, androids, etc., that different filmmakers choose how to show their political and ideological tendencies. These visual references stand for the battlefield where the battles between technophilia and technophobia take place. Moreover, one more visual connection between science fiction films and technological progress (and therefore indirectly to transhumanism too) is the consistent use of special effects: ‘the genre’s reliance on special effects is itself an enactment of science fiction’s thematic concern with technology’.^12
Chapter 2 will look at the Pinocchio myth from a very different perspective. My case studies will be two metafictional novels, both belonging to the genre of postmodernist fiction: Jerome Charyn’s Pinocchio’s Nose (1983)^13 and Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice (1991).^14 Both novels deconstruct as much the Pinocchio myth and the original text, as the process of writing itself. The case studies in this chapter span chronologically about the same time as those of the first. In this case, however, the Pinocchio myth is not perpetuated, but dissected. The first two chapters therefore function as a chronological bifurcation, with each path following a different theoretical direction. While science fiction films are very successful at portraying popular
(^11) N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Wrestling with Transhumanism’, in H+ Transhumanism and its Critics , ed. by Gregory R. Hansell, and William Grassie (Philadelphia: Metanexus, 2011), p.
textual aspects of the previous chapters. This time posthumanism is combined with postmodernism and, moreover, the cricket character in Winshluss is an author with writer’s block. The thematic elements of each chapter are connected and even though each chapter has case studies in a different medium, they are all both theoretically and thematically interrelated, as I will show further on.
The concept of becoming will be explored throughout the thesis and challenged in the last two chapters. By becoming I refer to the ontological quest of the individual towards changing themself, whether this reflects a desire or aspiration, as in Chapters 1 and 2, or it functions in contrast with being, as in Chapter 3, all the while within the frame of the Pinocchio myth. This will be further explored through the autobiographical references of both authors in Chapter 2, and also through the references to the process of writing in both Chapters 2 and 3.
The theories I use as methodological tools in my analysis will approach the concept of becoming from different angles. One such theory will be that of posthumanism. In Chapter 1, I will define the particular framework of posthumanist theory I will be working with. All three chapters relate to the posthuman, whether it is in relation to technological advancement and human enhancement, as in Chapter 1, or in relation to body politics, as in Chapter 2, or with regard to both, as in Chapter 3.
Psychoanalysis will be another theoretical approach used throughout this thesis. More specifically, Freudian psychoanalysis as a tool of literary analysis is particularly relevant. The authors of most texts (and especially those of Chapter 2) are very aware of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and they use it either playfully or subversively. For example, even though Charyn’s main protagonist is portrayed in a way that invites Freudian analysis and interpretation, while he simultaneously tries to cure himself by using psychoanalysis, his condition is worsened. Such types of ‘inside jokes’ within the text are also found in Coover’s novel. Both authors are aware that
Freud’s theory, applied in literary and film analysis, had become widely popularised and in their consistent style of self-referential fiction, they refer to it in an interchangeably earnest and humoristic way, quite unlike the approach of the first chapter’s case studies. The popularity of Freudian psychoanalysis in literary theory is particularly relevant to this study, as it is can be related to the popularity of myths and how they are used. My focus therefore will not be on the latest developments in psychoanalytic studies, but on the way its popularised form is applied in my case studies. Another way to point this out will be by using a model of Freud’s definition of the human psyche in the structure of my chapters. More specifically, the division of the psyche to id, ego and super-ego, according to Freud, will be applied in all three chapters in order to emphasise the effect of the different constituents of the Pinocchio myth in relation to the thematic focus of each chapter.^17
Chapter 1 will focus on Pinocchio and his desire for humanity. This will reflect the ego, the part of the psyche that tries to balance its lower instincts and the societal demands it is exposed to in order to belong and feel stabilised. The thematic focus of Chapter 2 will be on the Blue Fairy. As will be explained in detail, the Fairy’s role will challenge the function of the id, as the Fairy is the one who activates Pinocchio’s desire to become something different to his initial impulses and instincts, which were oriented to the desire for a carefree life full of pleasures. The id corresponds to the pleasure principle and this is what the Fairy tries successfully to control. The battle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle will be further explored in Chapter 3, which focuses thematically on the Talking Cricket. It represents the super-ego, as in Collodi’s novel and throughout the different Pinocchio retellings, the Talking Cricket has been used to represent Pinocchio’s conscience. In Freudian terms, the conscience corresponds to the super-ego, as it is the part of the psyche that has internalised the rules
(^17) Based on: Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 19 (1923-1925). The ego and the id and other works , James Strachey, ed. & trans. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961).
passionately discussed by politicians, writers, and socially engaged citizens’.^20 As she argues further, the clear language of the Tuscan dialect that most Italians could understand, together with the middle class values that were promoted at that time, were some of the reasons that Pinocchio was turned into a symbol of the Italian national character.
Numerous ‘Pinocchiate’ have been written, both as critical analyses and as renarrations of Collodi’s text. Many of these focus on the desire of the puppet to become human and the mystery of his growing nose. However, what Collodi had originally planned to be the story of Pinocchio would have finished in Chapter XV, and until that chapter, the themes of telling lies and the desire to become human had not been yet included. His young readers, however, insisted that the story continue and the magazine’s editor, convinced by the profitable possibilities, asked Collodi to keep writing. Collodi revived the dead Pinocchio and added more episodes to his adventures and thus lying was invented as part of Pinocchio’s naughty and disobedient character. His desire to become a real boy appeared only in Chapter XXV. However, what truly lies in his heart’s desire, often neglected by the retellers and revisionists, is epitomised by the answer he gives to the Talking Cricket early on in the story (in Chapter IV) describing the only trade that is to his liking as ‘[t]hat of eating, drinking, sleeping, having fun, and living the life of a vagabond from morning to night’.^21 It is this desire that clashes all the time with Pinocchio’s efforts to be obedient. Even when he has come very close to being transformed into a real boy (having been good, obedient and attending school) and the Fairy prepares a breakfast party for him and his friends to celebrate his upcoming metamorphosis, he regresses to his pleasure instinct and turns his back on the Fairy and on being human. He escapes to the ‘Paese dei Balocchi’, a land with no school, no teachers and only fun, where he can fulfil his wild dream, the life of a vagabond. This, however, cannot be fulfilled in Collodi’s book. In fact, as Carl Ipsen points out, ‘the 1859 Piedmontese/Italian criminal code allowed for the (^20) Amy Boylan, ‘Carving a National Identity: Collodi, Pinocchio , and Post-Unification Italy’ in Approaches to Teaching Collodi’s Pinocchio and its Adaptations, ed. by Michael Sherberg (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), p.18. 21 Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio , p.109.
institutionalization of child vagabonds’.^22 Therefore Pinocchio’s desire and tendency towards something illegal (i.e. a vagabond life), is used by Collodi as a bad example to educate his young readers and satisfy their middle- class parents. However, he stays ambiguous throughout the story. Because even though Pinocchio and his wild instincts are ‘tamed’ in the end, the amiable puppet has managed to raise doubts in the audience’s minds.
Even though Geppetto pushes Pinocchio towards the right path of school and education, it is very noteworthy that he had similar desires to those of Pinocchio, as he reveals to Mastro Ciliegia early on: ‘I thought of making myself a fine wooden puppet; but a wonderful puppet who can dance, and fence, and make daredevil leaps. I intend to travel around the world with this puppet so as to earn my crust of bread and a glass of wine.”^23 Geppetto, an old unmarried man, is inspired by wanderlust and a desire for adventure (to travel around the world) and this desire brings him the creativity to carve a puppet: this same desire makes him creator and artist at the same time. With this paternal attitude towards his work of art, he carves his desires into his son, as he is carving Pinocchio’s characteristics on that piece of wood.
Desire is a concept that will be further discussed in the following chapters. In Chapter 1, the desire for humanity is applied within the context of the cyborg, using, as examples, posthuman retellings of Pinocchio. In Chapter 2 Pinocchio’s desire to become human will be interpreted and examined as one of the Fairy’s tricks to keep him close to her. Giorgio Manganelli in Pinocchio: un Libro Parallelo , his famous parallel text to Collodi’s original — a unique retelling; a blend of novel and critical analysis — suggests that the Fairy needs Pinocchio as much as he needs her. The Fairy’s nature is dark and ambiguous; she needs Pinocchio’s sacrifice and death in order to be saved from her own death and become the powerful Fata who will then save him in return: ‘…[E]ssa ha bisogno di Pinocchio, non meno che Pinocchio ha
(^22) Carl Ipsen, Italy in the Age of Pinocchio , p. 2. (^23) Ibid ., p.89.
