Even as it sets up a system to satisfy these basic requirements and establish a compulsory education system, society offers Pinocchio distractions from that system, temptations of entertainment without thought and without effort. First in the shape of the Fox and the Cat, who tell Pinocchio that school has left them blind and lame, then in the creation of Funland, which Pinocchio’s friend Lampwick describes in these alluring words: “There are no schools there; there are no teachers there; there are no books there…. Now that’s the sort of place that appeals to me! That’s how all civilized countries should be!” Books, quite rightly, are associated in Lampwick’s mind with difficulty, and difficulty (in Pinocchio’s world as in our own) has acquired a negative sense which it did not always have. The Latin expression “per ardua ad astra,” “through difficulties we reach the stars,” is almost incomprehensible for Pinocchio (as for us) since everything is expected to be obtainable with the least possible expenditure.
But society does not encourage this necessary search for difficulty, this increase in experience. Once Pinocchio has suffered his first misadventures and accepted school and become a good student, the other boys begin to attack him for being what we would today call “a nerd” and laugh at him for “paying attention to the teacher.” “You talk like a printed book!” they tell him. Language can allow the speaker to remain on the surface of thought, mouthing dogmatic slogans and commonplaces in black and white, transmitting messages rather than meaning, placing the epistemological weight on the listener (as in “you know what I mean?”). Or it can attempt to re-create an experience, give shape to an idea, explore in depth and not only on the surface the intuition of a revelation. For the other boys, this distinction is invisible. For them, the fact that Pinocchio speaks “like a printed book” is enough to label him an outsider, a traitor, a recluse in his ivory tower.
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.
Pinocchio’s superficial reading experience is exactly the opposite of that of another wandering hero (or heroine). In Alice’s world, language is restored to its essential rich ambiguity and any word (according to Humpty Dumpty) can be made to say what its speaker wishes it to say. Though Alice refuses such arbitrary assumptions (“But ‘glory’ does not mean ‘a well-rounded argument,” she tells him), this free-for-all epistemology is the norm in Alice’s world. While in Pinocchio’s world the meaning of a printed story is unambiguous, in Alice’s world the meaning of “Jabberwocky,” for instance, depends on the will of its reader. (It may be useful to recall here that Collodi was writing at a time when the Italian language was being set down officially for the first time, from a choice among numerous dialects, while Lewis Carroll’s English had long been “fixed” and could be opened and questioned in relative safety.)
When I speak of “learning to read” (in the fullest sense I mentioned earlier), I mean something that lies between these two styles or philosophies. Pinocchio responds to the strictures of scholasticism, which, up to the sixteenth century, was the official learning method in Europe. In the scholastic classroom, the student was meant to read as tradition dictated, according to fixed commentaries accepted as the authorities. Humpty Dumpty’s method is an exaggeration of the humanist interpretations, a revolutionary viewpoint according to which every reader must engage with the text on his or her own terms. Umberto Eco usefully limited this freedom by noting that “the limits of interpretation coincide with the limits of common sense;” to which, of course, Humpty Dumpty might reply that what is common sense to him may not be common sense to Eco. But for most readers, the notion of “common sense” retains a certain shared clarity that must suffice. “Learning to read” is then to acquire the means to appropriate a text (as Humpty Dumpty does) and also to partake of the appropriations of others (as Pinocchio’s teacher might have suggested). In this ambiguous field between possession and recognition, between the identity imposed by others and the identity discovered by oneself, lies, I believe, the act of reading.