Under Pinocchio’s Skin: The Uncanny Woodenness of a Permanent Body

Abstract

ABSTRACT Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio has undergone an extraordinary number of manipulations, showing the great malleability of a text whose protean capacity echoes that of its main character. I analyse Pinocchio from a psychoanalytical standpoint, considering the Unheimlich – uncanny – as a pivotal stylistic element of the story and exploring its function in Collodi’s critique of the Risorgimento’s prescriptive moral code. The uncanny pertains to a class of frightening experiences that lead back to what is known and has been removed by repression. In this light, Pinocchio emerges as a tale deprived of any morally successful teleology: instead of engendering a new bourgeois life, the transformation of the puppet into a ‘bambino perbene’ exposes the contradictory phenomenology of this metamorphosis, subtly announcing Pinocchio’s radical death. Pinocchio’s dead wooden body reveals the ineffectiveness of the moral-teleological project of the Risorgimento, which renounces its inability to restrain those unsettling forces that destabilise it from within.