Why in the wood of a puppet? Because I believe that it is there that one must rummage in order to understand the mystery of the success of the story of Pinocchio. “A childish trifle”, was how Collodi described it, Collodi who in 1881 was an established journalist and an author of educational stories for children. He accompanied the first pages of the story by writing to the editor-in-chief of the Giornale dei Ragazzi, Guido Biagi: “Do with it what you like, but if you print it, pay me well for it, so as to give me the wish to carry on with it”. Even after the book edition, Collodi attached no importance whatever to his own writing.

Today the story of Pinocchio is one of the classics of children’s literature; it has been translated into 260 languages and dialects, has inspired works of art of every kind, and is known and loved throughout the world. In Germany alone it has outstripped Alice in Wonderland, which had reached that country forty years earlier, by 45 editions to 33.

When something of this sort happens, when a work takes on universal value, it is because it carries universal themes, much as is the case with the motifs present in the great religions and in the myths. But how can this come about for a work that has a dated air, that resounds with the Tuscan provinces of the nineteenth century and that, above all, holds up as a model of growth the figure of a proper little boy, a figure frankly outmoded today?

I have worked around a single hypothesis: that the story imagined by Collodi contains archetypal motifs which, arranged in a certain sequence, determine its universal value.

In certain cases, as sometimes happens in dreams, the imagination brings back images that do not come from the experience of the Ego, but from a more endopsychic substratum, from what Jung calls the Collective Unconscious.

Surfacing from this substratum common to all human beings, the images arrange themselves according to prefigured schemes, in sequence, so as to constitute a story.

It is as though psychic contents, already existing but not yet thinkable, took on a form in the image. Thus archetypal contents relating to the working of the psyche itself become objectified, constituting those motifs that we then find again in the history of the Sacred and in the stories of Myth.

For the images of an imagining to belong to this case, however, they must be comparable to those of already existing Myths, that is, they must present themselves within the same context of meaning.

In favour of the hypothesis that the story of Pinocchio came into being through a mechanism of this kind, there are two facts.

Collodi’s biographers seem to agree that the writing of the work came about by chance, that the images composing it, that is, surfaced without any willed purpose.

Unfortunately, the absence of an autobiography by Collodi allows neither a sure confirmation nor any accounting for the matter.

Moreover, the loss of the original manuscript permits nothing but interpretative hypotheses about the text. Of the original, two sheets relating to the ending survive, from which one sees that the text was originally more extensive.

A further confirmation of the hypothesis that the imagining welled up through a thought of a symbolic and mythological kind, and that for this reason it carries universal motifs, lies in the fact that a short time earlier Collodi had been the translator of Perrault’s fairy tales, such as Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard: he had therefore long grappled with the modes of symbolic and mythological thought from which certain fairy tales come.

Nothing rules out that all at once the impulse came to him to dash off a story, with no aim other than to express something. Rather as happened to Alfieri, who in his Autobiography recounts an experience of the kind.

In short, as Tabucchi said in 1981, “this is the work of genius of a writer who knew nothing of his own genius.”

The story of Pinocchio divides into three moments:

It begins with a piece of wood from which a puppet is fashioned. From this, after a series of adventures, a little boy originates. (It seems the word proper was added by the Publisher. Collodi declared that he had never written any such thing.)

Three moments, then, in which three different characters move. What is it that gives them continuity? An element left unspoken yet present throughout the whole story, indeed, the true protagonist, if the story is read by the criterion of Jungian Analytical Psychology.

This element is the vitality that animates the three characters, the Zoé, to put it in the ancient manner, that force which animates man. It is perhaps its presence, set out in symbolic terms in the text, that makes the story current, for the reason of this force is a still-unsolved mystery, a meaning that the mind of man has not yet grasped.

I shall now try to illustrate this reading-hypothesis, with one premise: I shall touch on a few points and leave aside points and characters that are very important. This for reasons of time, and for other reasons that I shall mention further on.

The story opens with a piece of wood, a simple piece of wood which, as Manganelli says in Pinocchio, un testo parallelo, is not simple at all.

First of all it “turns up” in the workshop of a carpenter, Master Cherry, and it differs from the other pieces in the woodpile destined to feed the fire in the hearths, in that it is animate, that is, it has Voice and Movement.

The human psyche proceeds by analogy: it projects a content of its own outward, and this content, now that it has been objectified, draws man’s attention, exerting an effect of archetypal fascination.

On a far-off day the principle of vitality inherent in the psyche itself became objectified, among other things, in the tree, which has a base closely connected to the Earth, a body constituted by the trunk, and a crown that reaches up toward the sky.

This happened in every civilization, and the Tree became Sacred and contained a Spirit.

The great Mother Tree generated the Spirit, her son. Rather as Phisis, Nature, generated Phitòn, the shoot, and transmitted the Force to him; rather as the Lady Brimò, the Force, who at Eleusis each year generated Brimòs, her son, an ear of wheat.

The myths relating to the Sacred Tree and to its power are a common heritage in which the concept of the Zoé as the Force of the Sacred is expressed.

This holds for the Oracular oak of Dodona as for the ash of Odin among the Scandinavians, or for the Qian mù of the Chinese, another sacred tree.

In Japan the tree that contains the force is the cherry, and the sword of the Samurai, the warrior, cannot be forged except upon the burning embers of the cherry, whose force it takes on.

The simple piece of animate wood carries within itself the sense of the Spirit of the Tree, the motif, that is, that contains the Zoé-Force of the Mother Tree from which it comes and of which it represents a pars pro toto.

Let us see what force is at issue: it is a dynamic principle, since it gives voice and movement, but at the same time it opposes becoming, the piece of wood does not want to change its form. It protests when Master Cherry means to make a table-leg of it, and it lashes out against Geppetto’s shrivelled shins and insults him, calling him “Polendina”, on hearing that he means to turn it into a puppet. Strangely, the wood does not protest when it is flung violently against the wall by Master Cherry.

Now, the wood that is animate, yet wants to remain in its bark and unhewn, is identifiable as a symbol, because, like every symbol, it contains two opposites, in this case stasis and becoming.

“There is no consciousness without a differentiation of opposites”, says Jung, and the story of this force that animates the wood, in the tale, as in the timelessness of myth, seems to proceed toward the underlining and differentiation of opposites.

In the piece of wood’s opposition to the change of form, in the hint of a will toward stasis, toward remaining in the natural state, ideally attached to the world of Mother Tree from which it is nonetheless detached, there echoes the nostalgia that myth expresses through the memory of the Golden Age, of Eden with its delights, of the Blessed Cradle in which the consciousness of man moves at its beginnings, wrapped in the symbiotic embrace. There, in that ideal place, in a condition of unproblematic omnipotence, where, that is, every potential is also power, there is nothing to ask for, because everything is given, and there is no decision to be taken.

To the static principle of the force, however, is opposed the dynamic principle of its own animation. As happens with the Psyche: to the Unconscious as Mater Materia is opposed the dynamic energy of the Self; the Inertia of the Earth comprehends the life that unfolds within it and from it.

The dynamic principle that animates the piece of wood also marks its destiny: as it is, it can neither go into the fire nor take root and vegetate; it must take on a form that allows its energy to express itself.

Rather as Hillman points out: Eden ended and life began.

From the piece of wood Geppetto fashions the puppet: out of the naturalistic form of the piece of wood emerges the anthropomorphic form of the puppet, whose name is Pinocchio. Rendered in the categories of the sacred, the motif of the birth of a vegetation god from the Mother Tree is very widespread.

At Knossos, the bezel of a Minoan ring depicts a youthful god emerging from the Tree. Dionysos Endendros, Dionysus who is in the tree, was one of the epicleses of the God, whose statue, according to a legend reported by Otto, was found in the trunk of a plane tree broken by the wind.

The initial hypothesis, that Collodi’s Imagination gave form to archetypal contents and developed them in a mythopoetic mode, seems at this point to take shape: in the course of what may be called psycho-history, religious and mythological motifs have not only represented the idea of the force, but have gradually underlined the dangerousness of its excess and, with this, the necessity and the manner of its modulation.

At the outset of the force, excess is represented. The Titans driven back into Tartarus because endowed with destructive power; Gilgamesh, who in the Mesopotamian epic is tempered by the presence of Enkidu; the excess of Achilles, which we render as the wrath that “brought countless woes upon the Achaeans”; among the gods, Odin, Poseidon, and then figures such as the Curetes, the Cabeiri and so on, in the personification of the natural phenomena to which they are connected, thunder, the storm, the tempest wind.

Everything recalls the excess of the force, its unbridled dynamism.

Once his legs are made and he has learned to walk, Pinocchio breaks into an unbridled run through the village.

“He went off in leaps like a hare, and, beating his wooden feet on the paving of the street, he made a din like twenty pairs of peasants’ clogs.”

Movement and noise. Dionysus Eriboas, the Thundering One, the very one who drives to the frenzy of the Baccheuein, the madness of the Bacchantes who move in a frenzied throng over the mountains, bringing bloody death.

But here we are speaking of Pinocchio, a cheerful puppet, and it is well to associate with him less violent images of noise and movement. There is a curious parallel to his running, imagined by Homer.

It is in the Hymn to Pan, that half-kid who is God of Nature and who gives his name to Panic, that condition of tangled emotions, felt but not thought, which are able to oppress body and soul, paralysing them.

Homer’s Pan, goat-footed, lover of clamour, shaggy, roams about on every side, “…leading on with a swift beat of feet, loud-voiced.”

I was speaking of opposites present in a symbolic image. To excess is opposed the sense of the limit, of the necessity of modulating excess.

Pinocchio now meets two limits to his unruliness

An external one is given by the Carabineer who seizes him by the nose, in token that the civilization of every age cannot admit egocentric omnipotences.

The other limit comes from within man himself, and is given by his needs.

For Pinocchio this limit is hunger, which will remain unsatisfied.

He falls asleep resting his feet on the brazier.

That his is still an immature consciousness, that he still represents a spirit connected to mother nature, he has reasserted to the judicious Cricket, saying: “I want to run after butterflies and climb the trees to catch the young birds in their nests.”

The sign of the limit, in Collodi’s Imagination, is reinforced in the sign of the feet which, once burned, will be remade and reattached by Geppetto, about whose role as demiurge there would be much to say.

Now Pinocchio bears the sign of the limit imprinted on his feet, the sign of the dampening of the omnipotence bound to the mere assurance of bodily prowess. The same has befallen the heroes of far weightier epics: see Achilles and his heel, Oedipus with his swollen foot, Jason who proceeds with a single sandal, Heracles who at Lerna has his foot gripped by the crab. In Brahmanic India too the young initiate had to stand upon a stone, resting on a single foot.

But Pinocchio cannot and will not yet understand. He sells off his spelling-book and his good resolutions in order to go to the Puppet Theatre. His force does not yet want culture; it prefers satisfaction on the instant; it moves under the sign of the Nun, immediate time, and does not know how to wait for the Kairòs, the opportune time.

The scene that unfolds in the little theatre serves to reinforce the idea of opposites.

The puppets recognize him and call him brother. Unlike him, they have a master with a terrible name and a terrible appearance: the boundless Big Man with eyes red as lanterns, which recall others of Dantean memory, is called Fire-Eater. Boundless force against the fragility of the Puppets, who are, moreover, dominated by him. Might this be a representation, personified in a Chthonic being such as an archaic Minos or a Polyphemus might be, of the brutality of the instinct which, coming from the hollow abysses where fangs throng, prevails over man and over his feelings? Fire-Eater has the traits of a chthonic masculine, of the Paredros of the negative Great Mother. In favour of his representing a level at which emotion does not yet express itself in feeling but in the manner of a psychomotor discharge, one might cite the shaking of the body in the sneeze with which Fire-Eater expresses his emotion. “Sneeze”, and I quote the Zingarelli, is “a violent expiratory act with a resounding impact of the air against the fauces”.

The theatre scene unfolds under the sign of mirroring, according to the canons of Tragedy: Pinocchio is confronted with the brutal power of Fire-Eater, and the latter with the fear of the weak Pinocchio, whom he would like to burn in order to roast his mutton.

Seeing and mirroring oneself, on their own, are not enough to understand, nor is Teaching enough, as Aristotle says.

For the contemplation of the scene, Theoria, to produce Catharsis, purification, there must be Pathe, the suffering given by compassion and fear.

Fire-Eater’s suffering is given by compassion for Pinocchio, who weeps for himself and for Harlequin. His catharsis is that in the end he sacrifices his supper and gives the puppet five gold pieces to carry to his poor father. This is, in burlesque form, the theme of sacrifice, necessary in myth to change. Fire-Eater, with all that he represents, comes out of it more human.

The Puppet’s suffering is given by the fear of dying burned and by compassion for Harlequin, who risks the same fate in his place.

It is, however, a momentary catharsis, bound to a fleeting sentimentality, the catharsis of a consciousness that holds its attention for a single moment only to return to dreaming regressive projects of omnipotence, against the commitment to come to the aid of his father Geppetto. He does not remember that a moment before he had called upon him with a “papa, help me, I don’t want to die!”.

Under the sign of a failed initiation, Pinocchio meets the Fox and the Cat, who feign injury, the one lame and the other blind. The Telluric Cat eats the Uranian Blackbird that warns Pinocchio of the danger, as if to say that the coerciveness of instinct prevails over the counsel of wisdom.

Attracted by the idea that, with no effort at all, the gold pieces will grow into a tree of wealth, Pinocchio will fall into the trap laid by the two animals.

To the immature Pinocchio no fate other than that of the youthful god is due:

he will end up hanged from the Tree.

A Spirit come from the Tree, he will symbolically return to it; in myth, this is the lot of every young vegetation god: to give back his own sap to the Mother, so that she may enrich herself and regenerate a son who knows how to use the force in a different way.

Pinocchio dangles, hanging from the branch, moved by the wind, like Odin, who says:

“I know that I hung on the wind-tossed tree nine whole nights, wounded by a spear and sacrificed to Odin, myself to myself.”

Collodi wrote the word “end” to his tale at the close of this scene. He took up writing again after some months, at the insistence of the publisher. The little girl with the blue hair, of whom Pinocchio had vainly asked for help, had appeared at the end only to say that she was dead. Perhaps Collodi’s soul had grown weary, and inspiration had begun to draw to its close.

The rest of the story was written on commission, for a deliberate purpose, and so it is symbolically less reliable. Among the other motifs that appear in it, two seem to continue the thread of the primitive story: they concern the symbolism of the death of the little donkey and the return into the belly of the Dog-Fish, with the encounter with the progenitor.