Pinocchio essay, absolute and perfect book
Carlo Collodi translated Perrault’s stories before writing his masterpiece, The Adventures of Pinocchio. For Giorgio Agamben, it is not a fairy tale, nor a novel or a fable, but a unique hybridization of these three genres. Basically, it is the Book, the absolute and perfect book, the one for which Agamben more or less consciously searched for his whole life, which he finally holds in his hands and from which the list “growing joy”as we see him today, commenting on the incidents and accidents of the famous puppet, who tells us at the very end: “How funny I was when I was a doll! And how happy I am that I became a real little boy. “WITHexcept that the last page of the book contains a puzzle. Because, in fact, the doll did not turn into a little boy, but remained leaning on the chair – like a child tired of playing, that is, who would start from the beginning?
The absolute heart of the book, when pinocchio travels all night riding a little talking donkey, is to go to “toy country”which is a country unlike any other in the world, “where the holidays start on January 1 and end on December 31”… This is the country “anarchist Collodi”, with his Pinocchio who constantly runs away through the fields, who swims in the sea, who says that he was not born to work, who thinks that history is just boring mythology and for whom the word God does not exist. Collodi defined the account of original sin in Genesis as “this famous little farce in one act: a woman, a husband and… a snake”!
