Pinocchio

THE UNIVERSAL PARABLE OF MAN’S DESTINY

Pinocchio is the most widely read book after the Koran and the Bible. The reason is that, hidden under the surface of a nursery story, there lies the biggest and most daring mystical text of all world literature disguised as a fable.  Behind its ironic and easy-going tones and its didacticisms, the puppet is actually the dark and pitiless parable of man’s initiatory trip from puppet, prey to its instincts, to a real man endowed with will. Pinocchio is the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by strings of casualness, negative emotions and the unhappiness of an inescapable fate.

Although universal literature, from Aristofane to Beckett, is full of great novelists, perhaps
there has never been one as intelligent, ironic or secluded as Carlo Lorenzini, better known by the pen name of Collodi.

Born in Florence in 1826, Lorenzini, an ordinary journalist and writer, one day found out a cruel and terrible truth: men are bio-chemical marionettes; humanity is made up of millions of puppets driven by invisible threads.

The awful secret

The tale of Pinocchio’s adventures belongs to the art of mysteries: the art of revealing by concealing. The secret which has been under the noses of  millions throughout the world for more than a century is awful. Pinocchio is the mirror image of a bio-chemical puppet which has become human at the end of his journey to redemption. We are reluctant to recognize ourselves in the grotesque image of Collodi’s character, we loathe the idea of identifying ourselves with a speaking piece of wood, apparently alive and endowed with free will, but in actual fact driven by external forces and terrible invisible strings. In the mirror we can see Pinocchio’s image, but just like Narcissus we refuse to recognize ourselves in that imagined reflection, in the woodenness of his being, in his chronic and incurable deceit or his disloyalty.

The Ending of the Fable
Knowing how violent men can be against whoever had to reveal them some unpleasant truths, he decided to relate his discovery under the disguise of fable. That’s how a writer, who is actually one of the most scholarly anthropologists of our nature and human ethnology, has been handed down to posterity as an author of nursery stories.

To an intelligent and deeper reading, Pinocchio’s story reveals itself to be the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by strings of casualness, negative emotions and the unhappiness of an inescapable fate.

In the beginning Collodi gave his story a tragic ending by having Pinocchio hanged from a tree. However the public did not like this, so he was forced to change it, by having the puppet become a boy. With any other kind of ending, Pinocchio would not have had the popularity it enjoys today. It would have been lost a long time ago.

Of course, we cannot say whether the author liked the revised ending or not. But we like it like this, because we have to believe that also our own fable can end well and that we too can change from puppets into real men.

From Puppets to Men
We are unwilling to identify with Pinocchio because the truth is difficult to accept. For sure if Pinocchio is a puppet then we are men. But if this puppet is the cruel metaphor, the ferociously ironic caricature of the ordinary mankind, then we have to conclude with Lorenzini that humanity is still at the down of consciousness, at the beginning of its initiatory journey from puppets to human beings, and men are larvae encased in their pods, waiting to break out and evolve.

One day it will be to Lorenzini’s credit that he found a pleasant way to show usa that we are incurable liars and we share with Pinocchio his toughness and untruthful nature, along with his irresponsibility. Pinocchio’s mental features coincide with the psychological stigmata of the sapiens species and are the very roots of all our misfortunes.

A riddle to solve

There is an air of mystery about Pinocchio’s story, a riddle we would like to solve. Why did a writer such as Carlo Lorenzini, who throughout his carrier never rose above a level of an ordinary writer, suddenly produce an immortal story, an objective tale and a world-class masterpiece that has the unfathomable depth of a page of Koran, or of a New Testament parable? How is it possible that this fable is the vehicle of a universal message and can be considered the mirror of all mankind? Why didn’t he sign it with his real name, like his other works, instead of choosing to use a nom de plume, a pen name?

There’s an explanation, or better still an hypothesis, that the text is both inspired and the result of a brainwave. The Adventures of Pinocchio, the most widely read children’s book which has been translated throughout the world, in the guise of a children’s tale, conceals the greatest and most daring mystical text of all world literature.

Carlo Lorenzini, alias Collodi, didn’t feel up to signing a story that was not his. The Adventures of Pinocchio is one of those books that are written in Heaven. It had just to be transcribed and brought to the earth.

The Pinocchios of Politics and Media News

There are other elements in the story that constantly draw a parallel, an analogical connection between Pinocchio’s adventures and our life.  Pinocchio always has a thousand good intentions, he sets out with a kind of touching naivety, but then, he always diverts from his course so as to follow the easiest route, namely to lie whilst hoping to get off scot-free. He gets so used to lying that he is no longer able to see the difference between true and false, right and wrong.

We’re like this. Official reports and media news are full of good intentions and are as unreal as Pinocchio’s. Decade after decade, we’ve heard world leaders making false plans, promising great things about brotherhood and voicing concerns for the unfortunate, poor, starving and oppressed of the world. They are like the puppet on his first day at school.

The animal that lies

Pinocchio’s story reveals our weaknesses and our hypocrisy, which are still hidden even from ourselves, so used are we to the dynamics of falsehood. We tell lies to everyone around us but even worse than that, we lie to ourselves, every minute of every hour of every day of our life, climbing up castles of prejudices and illusions. Collodi’s invention of Pinocchio’s nose, brings an embarrassing discovery to our notice, he reveals our most disturbing psychological feature: the tendency to lie, first to ourselves, and then to others.

This is the point: we can get away scot-free with others, but we shall never be able to escape unscathed when confronted with our own conscience; this is a part of us that reads our inner self, and we are aware of it, so for us, there is no peace, no rest, just endless torment.

The cornerstone of research carried out by the Department of Sociology in the ESE London is the study of the individual and the very root of his lying.

Falsehood is a permanent state of man’s being, in which we all have been “educated” throughout our life. Man is a liar and above all he lies to himself. Poverty, war and sickness, which are part of the world’s events, are only the consequence of an inner struggle created by our lying that has enveloped us since birth. To leave the lie means to observe it in ourselves and consequently to eradicate it.