California Italian Studies

This paper shows how in Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881) and in its subsequent rewritings by Carmelo Bene and Luigi Malerba, futurity is coded into indiscipline. In Collodi’s version, Pinocchio appears as an insatiable machine guided by the pleasure principle defying the ideals of hard work ethic and obedience of the Post-Risorgimento period. Here Pinocchio reflects the open contradiction between the rhetorical fullness of the national project, with its ethic of sacrifice and deferral of satisfaction, and the economic lack of the masses--what Marcuse called Lebensnot--that, through the affirmation of an immediate exigency for fulfillment, project the vision of a different society. The social character of this imagery shifts in the twentieth century as the industrialization of the country establishes the basis for a modern affluent society. Carlo Bene’s play Pinocchio (1961) and Luigi Malerba’s Pinocchio con gli stivali (1977) bear testimony to a different kind of unruliness in which negation replaces affirmation. In both works, Pinocchio’s indiscipline articulates a radical denial that defies the freezing of the social dimension into the fix coordinates of over-consumption and mechanization of individuals that characterized Italian modernization.