![]() To tell you in confidence, I have no wish to learn it is much more amusing to run after butterflies, or to climb trees and to take young birds out of their nests.” Contra Rousseau, Collodi thinks that a young boy who does not undergo a traditional education will get only naughtier and will “grow up a perfect donkey” (as the cricket warns-and prophesizes-Pinocchio does indeed later become a donkey). ![]() When the wise hundred-year-old cricket asks Pinocchio why he wants to run away from home, Pinocchio tells him: “I shall be sent to school and shall be made to study either by love or by force. Collodi seems to have had Rousseau in mind. He behaves, in short, like a fairly typical two-year-old when the two-year-old is misbehaving. In fact he’s badly behaved even before he’s created: while still a stick of wood, he starts a fight between Geppetto and his owner, and once he is a marionette he immediately wreaks all kinds of havoc: he insults Geppetto as soon as he has a mouth, laughs at him, runs away from him, etc. When I was a boy I was made distinctly uncomfortable by, and even tried not to think about, the Walt Disney movie “Pinocchio.”īut in Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio” (serialized in 1881-1883)-the original text for the Walt Disney adaptation-Pinocchio, unlike Rousseau’s ideal of the child, is created naughty. This piece is drawn from “Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love,” out from FSG on February 3rd.
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