No sooner has Pinocchio learned to stand on newly-crafted legs, than he slips out the front door and runs away. He moves spontaneously, pre-reflectively. He stares, laughs and pokes his tongue out, he pulls hair, kicks, and runs away. He refuses to dwell in the master’s studio, preferring instead to wander in the university of life. Pinocchio is transformed through various embodied and symbolic states: ordinary log, disabled—feet burned by the brazier, marionette, employed as a guard dog, mistaken for a crab, donkey, fetus—inside the belly of the great shark, and finally, magically transformed into a real boy.
Paolo Pellecchia succinctly connects The Adventures of Pinocchio to “Collodi’s critique of the Risorgimento’s prescriptive moral code.”1 Drawing on Foucault’s concept of Biopower in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977), Pellecchia contends that Pinocchio’s mischievous and unruly behaviour is not simply the expression of an infantile narcissism, but rather the intuitive rejection of “the symbolic, continuous, and resolute re-inscriptions of an ultimately violent post-unitary pedagogical programme.”2 Pinocchio’s self-attunement, through his embodied transformation and instrumental misappropriation of his body, mirrors the way medical discourse subjects patients bodies to normative clinical expectations. Just as Pinocchio reads and resists the many inscriptions made upon his ever-changing body as contrary to his self-conception of being a real boy, diagnoses and treatment protocols medicalize and categorise the subject in ways that are alien to the patient’s subjective conception of self. Pinocchio’s vital acts of disobedience signify his refusal to be absorbed by the categorising gaze, the good/bad boy inscription of the political and religious moral code. Still, as Linda Martin Alcoff contends, it is problematic for Pinocchio to argue that he is not the body which others perceive, even if he identifies to the contrary3. Pinocchio’s various ailments: his burned feet, the nose that grows, his raging fever, are readable as medical texts, alerting the clinician to experiences that the patient has not yet absorbed into his own subjective life-story. As Geppetto tells his young son, Carlo, in the beginning of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, “[l]ies are found out immediately … because they are like long noses, visible to all but the teller of the lie.”4
Pinocchio must learn to negotiate the intricate relation between his embodied experience and an emerging life-story. While the development of a core narrative life-story is important to one’s existential being and sense of belonging, it can also lead to profound disruption in the face of life-altering events, such as terminal illness or severe disability. Medical humanities scholars, like Ronald Dworkin, Arthur Frank and Rita Charon, describe how serious illness dissolves patients of the ability to hold on to or communicate a story of self-continuity. Frank proffers:
It is no small thing to realize you are becoming ill, to suffer that illness and risk of death, to be dying or to have returned to the living and be starting to live over again with the knowledge of your own mortality. It is no small thing to have your body rearranged. … Critical illness takes travelers to the margins of human experience.5
Employing Dworkin and Frank’s conceptual language, Pinocchio’s ongoing metamorphoses and near-death experiences make a “wreckage” of his narrative certainty that he is a real boy.6 Pinocchio’s response to the misalignment between his narrative self-conception, his body, and how others perceive and mistreat him, mirrors what Eric Marcus and Rita Charon describe in treatment-resistant patients, as expressed attitudes of suspicion, resigned futility, lack of self-motivation, an abdication of responsibility, and hostility toward caregivers.7
In Chapter 17, Pinocchio, “wracked by a raging fever,” refuses to take the bitter medicine prescribed by the Blue Fairy.8 He undermines treatment by selectively accepting the sugar ball while refusing the medicine, and offers a series of shifting excuses: it’s bitter; the pillow bugs him, the half open door to the room bugs him.9 Pinocchio abdicates responsibility to the Blue Fairy to save him, while remaining hostile and uncooperative. In an act of desperate futility and self-sabotage, he adamantly declares, “I’d rather die than drink that nasty medicine.”10
The medicine-refusal episode anticipates contemporary debates about patient autonomy, treatment-resistance, informed consent, and medical paternalism. The Blue Fairy’s perseverance and sure-handedness mirrors clinical practice, whereby clinicians graduate from moderate narrative engagement to more coercive measures. The Fairy’s frustration in trying to help is palpable, while Pinocchio continues to obstinately resist the very care he needs. The Blue Fairy begins with the promise of healing his illness: “Drink it, and in a few days you’ll be well.”11 She follows with honest and gentle persuasion: “It’s bitter, but it’ll be good for you.”;12 incentivization: “I’ll give you a sugar ball, to take away the taste;”13 education about consequences: “Your illness is serious;”14 thereapeutic coercion via adverse prediction: “The fever will carry you off to the next world in a matter of hours;”15 and finally, she employs the ultimate disciplinary scare tactic, at which point, four black rabbits enter carrying a little coffin on their shoulders and Pinocchio relents and accepts the medicine.16
Marcus and Charon suggest that narcissistic and infantile patients, like Pinocchio, may resist treatment because it offends their “narcissistic grandiosity … [and] anxious neediness.”17 There is, however, more to Pinocchio’s subterfuge than mere lies, false bravado, or the futile abdication of responsibility. Moving beyond the clinician’s focus on Pinocchio’s illness history and drawing upon a deeper understanding of his life-story reveals his ruse as an attempt to assert control over yet another situation in which he feels powerless. Though he ultimately complies and takes his medicine, his act of defiance reveals the gap between institutional power over his body and his intuitive, yet naive, perception of his own subjective agency and resilience. Uncovering the patient’s life-story realigns the relation between patient and clinician, while also helping the patient to absorb the experience of illness into an ongoing journey narrative. Marcus and Charon propose:
Eliciting [the treatment-resistant] story provides crucial information to both the caregiver and the patient. It may help integrate aspects of self-experience and illness experience that have not been conscious. The elicitation of this story in treatment may be the first time the patient is aware of the full effects of the illness on themselves, on their behavior, on their caregivers, and on their lives.18
Indeed, for Pinocchio, each near-death experience brings about a rebirth, which in turn prompts a narrativised (re)attunement between lived experience and life-story. Crucially, what Frank describes as “the repair work of the wreck[age],” is not an attempt to overcome the interruption of illness and restore a previous state of being (moral, healthy), but rather to rise above categorisation and integrate the critical experience into an ongoing life-story19.
Reading The Adventures alongside theories of resistant subjectivity (Althusser, Foucault, Hall) offers insights into patient resistance to medical interpellation. Stuart Hall [LINK] highlights how the two-way operation of subjectification proposed by Foucault means that “[p]eople are not irrevocably and indelibly inscribed with the ideas that they ought to think; the politics that they ought to have are not, as it were, already imprinted in their sociological genes.”20 In this light, medical treatment protocols and moral codes are not irrefutably guaranteed by the perceived hierarchical relationships between patient and medical clinician, child and parent, citizen and the state. Through his audacity to resist subjectification to the prescriptive moral code of the Risorgimento, that is, by refusing normative expectations of the good boy / good patient, Pinocchio demonstrates a resolute and vital commitment to fulfilling his potential-for-being a Puer Aeternus (eternal child).21
Works Cited
Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press. 2006.
Collodi, Carlo. The Adventures of Pinocchio. Translated by John Hooper and Anna Kraczyna, Penguin, 2021 [1883].
Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard, Cornell University Press, 1977.
Frank, Arthur, W. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
—. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago University Press, 1995. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo14674212.html
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, performances by Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, and Gregory Mann, Netflix, 2022, netflix.com.
Hall, Stuart. “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post‐structuralist Debates.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 2, no. 2, 1985, pp. 91-114. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15295038509360070
Marcus, Eric R., and Rita Charon. Narrative Medicine and the Treatment-Resistant Patient.” Psychiatric Nonadherence: A Solutions-Based Approach, edited by Victor Fornari, and Ida Dancyger, Springer, 2019, pp. 129-142.
Pellecchia, Paolo. “Under Pinocchio’s Skin: The Uncanny Woodenness of a Permanent Body.” Italian Studies, vol. 77, no. 3, 2022, pp. 284-297.
1 Pellecchia, Paolo. “Under Pinocchio’s Skin: The Uncanny Woodenness of a Permanent Body.” Italian Studies, vol. 77, no. 3, 2022, 285.
2 Pellecchia, 139.
3 Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press. 2006.
4 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. 2022, (02.38-02.48).
5 Frank, Arthur, W. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Houghton Mifflin, 1991, 54.
6 Frank, Arthur K. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago University Press, 1995, 54.
7 Marcus, Eric R., and Rita Charon. Narrative Medicine and the Treatment-Resistant Patient.” 2019, 133.
8 Collodi, Carlo. The Adventures of Pinocchio. Translated by John Hooper and Anna Kraczyna, Penguin, 2021, 17.
9 Collodi, 55-56.
10 Collodi, 56.
11 Collodi, 55.
12 Collodi, 55.
13 Collodi, 55.
14 Collodi, 56.
15 Collodi, 56.
16 Collodi, 57.
17 Marcus and Charon, 133.
18 Marcus and Charon, 133
19 The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. 54.
20 Hall, Stuart. “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post‐structuralist Debates.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 2, no. 2, 1985, 96.
21 Pellecchia, 287.
