Who wants to keep me a puppet? Pinocchio’s tale as a metaphor of developmental processes

ABSTRACT

Pinocchio is one of the most widely read pieces of children’s literature, and has been translated into 200 languages. It has evoked metaphors of childhood’s condition, early description of autism, disruptive behavior, moral development, or even hyperactivity. Less attention has been paid to the aspects of transgenerational relationships, the child’s development trajectory, and their inherent ambivalence, though these are all very relevant in the novel. I use Dialogical Self theory to analyze Pinocchio’s trajectory, tension, ambivalences, and meaning-making. The puppet/boy metaphor displays positive and negative aspects of development that should be critically considered in developmental and educational psychology and should be taken as complementary in educational practices.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Kevin Carriere, Bonnie Nardi, and Michael Cole for their careful reading, which helped me to develop some of the concepts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the text, I use the term “cord,” instead of the everyday “string,” to indicate the puppets’ laces. The linguistic choice is based on the excellent essay by Dan Latimer (2004), which discusses the humanist background of Collodi, and connects Plato’s concept of “golden cord” in moral philosophy with Apuleius’s Latin novel The Golden Ass and with The Adventures of Pinocchio. As some of my argumentations largely build on Latimer (2004), I keep the word “cord” in order to preserve the polysemy of the concept.

2. Bakhtin defines the chronotope as: “We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. […] it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). […] The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time. The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 84–85). In psychology, the term means that any Self-position is voiced in a specific spatio-temporal set of coordinates. In the case of Pinocchio, the puppet and the boy are never present at the same time in the discourse.

3. The term “responsivity” – or sometimes “addressivity” (Bakhtin, 1990) – expresses a fundamental concept in dialogism. Put simply, every utterance voiced by an agent is addressed to a (real or imaginative) interlocutor and responds to a social and relational solicitation in an infinite ongoing dialogue. In other words, any dialogical process takes a stance before a dialogical prompt.

4. Systematically describing all of them would require too much space in the present description. However, this could be a future development of this work.

5. I use “educational system” in a broad way, meaning not only schooling and other organized institutions, but all the culturally organized activities that generate a process of enculturation/socialization according to local values and norms of those in power (in this case, adults).