MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 4

 In my essay MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3 I made this statement:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important to a given author's creative priorities, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

In this essay I established that, although I specified that the category of fantasy stories I call "magical fantasy stories" are not intrinsically better than other metaphenomenal fictions, they are better with respect to one literary goal. That goal consists of transporting the readers of our various post-industrial cultures back into worlds where magic is the primary instrumentality through which the denizens of said worlds understand existence. I explicated this idea with the formulations of Mircea Eliade, with some caveats that I didn't think Eliade was always very clear about his distinctions between "the sacred" and "the profane." Having lodged that complaint, I thought I ought to try to be equally clear about how "far" magical fantasy stories can get from our profane world.

The answer is that they can never escape the shadow of the profane entirely, at least partly because they're being written by authors who have lived in profane worlds. But more than that, there's often a "domain of impurity" within the fantasy-worlds that calls the magical domain into question.

For instance, few fantasy-tales take place at the real "beginning times," when God has (or the gods have) just made the world. One of the few exceptions that comes to mind is C.L. Moore's 1940 short story "Fruit of Knowledge," which relates the story of the Garden of Eden from the POV of Adam's first wife Lilith. But it's far more frequent for the magical-fantasy author to set his stories in a world where humankind has acquired some level of advancement short of what we call "the industrial age." And as soon as humankind attains such a level, a certain amount of life's profane nature assumes its own domain within even worlds where magic rules.

The simplest form of profanity is one in which everyone in the world is aware that magic exists or has existed, but individuals believe that for various reasons that the power of magic cannot affect them. Clark Ashton Smith often created characters living in utterly magical worlds who nevertheless had some blindness on that matter. In the masterful "Voyage of King Euvoran," the monarch witnesses a mage challenge his power, and then foolishly pursues the wizard for vengeance, leading to his undoing. In many ways, such stories parallel the dynamics of the modern-day supernatural story, in which, say, unbelievers trespass on a mummy's tomb and suffer a magical revenge.

Sometimes magical fantasy narratives include characters who are either of a materialistic bent or take actions that have the effect of post-industrial materialism. THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE, set in medieval Russia, depicts a village of people who are overtly Christians but who still covertly observe the old pagan ways of propitiating the spirits of houses and forests. A fanatical Christian monk enters the village and belabors the citizens until they put aside their pagan practices-- which brings about a major conflict for the heroine to cope with.

There also may be an inbuilt sense that the world of magical phenomena is doomed to be superseded by a profane one. Every "fall of Camelot" story implies that ordinary history will take over once the wonders of Arthurian Britain are no more. Patently, J.R.R. Tolkien followed the same pattern at the end of LORD OF THE RINGS, by implying that "The Time of Men" will succeed the era in which Men mingle with Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits. 

A. Merritt's SHIP OF ISHTAR provides a variation on the above theme. Modern archeologist John Kenton, despite knowing that Babylon has long been superseded by more mundane historical cultures, plunges into a cosmos where the Babylonian gods still exist-- though they rule a very limited cynosure, limited to one island and the titular Ship of Ishtar. The author never explains how this sub-cosmos comes into being, but one may fairly assume the deities created the world, probably so that they could continue to enjoy mortal worship.

All of the forces that countervail against the total efficacy of magic and the sacred within a "secondary universe" can be viewed as "agents of the profane," and thus of the author's awareness that he or she exists in a time when magic has been diminished if not extirpated. Because all such authors have themselves have lived in cultures where magic and the sacred are continually called into question, that may be a prime reason as to why most magical fantasies take place in worlds with a medieval, but pre-industrial, level of advancement. A qualified exception may be made for stories patterned after rural folktales. PINOCCHIO probably takes place in post-industrial times, based on a very tiny number of internal references. But the novel remains steadfastly in a rural, small-town universe, never letting the reader see any phenomenon that suggests the heavy industry that existed in the 19th century. Further, the author reinforces the sense of a folktale universe by showing humanoid animals who can talk and wear clothes, as well as numinous entities not strictly allied with any established religion.

 

THE READING RHEUM: PINOCCHIO (1883)

I can't prove it, but even though Carlo Collodi's PINOCCHIO rates as one of the most often-translated fantasies in the world, I suspect that not that many people in the U.S. have read it. I base this only on my long hours of bookstore-hauntings. Granted, I rarely if ever checked the children's fantasy sections, but I hardly ever saw used copies, even though it's a public domain work and anyone can issue a redaction. But I just don't think Americans, usually raised on the Disney version, are as likely to check out Collodi's prose original, in contrast to the many people who do read Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum.

To be sure, even though Carroll and Baum's works are often episodic, Collodi's tops them in that regard. Installments of the puppet boy's adventures originally appeared in newspapers, and Wiki asserts that Collodi kept the story going due to popular demand. so I don't know how that affected the unabridged version I read. But though it would be fun to see a film adaptation that reproduced all of Collodi's inventive sequences, I can well understand why Disney and other adapters chose a more linear approach.

I had already read commentary to the effect that prose-Pinocchio was much more mischievous than the Disney version, causing much more grief to his creator Gepetto. He has a lot of vices that child-readers could certainly recognize in themselves or in peers: he's lazy, selfish, and picky about what he eats. Yet in the book the idea that Pinocchio can become a real boy if he mends his ways isn't introduced until over two-thirds of the book is done. The positive effect of removing this "carrot" is that Pinocchio's misdeeds are more like those of ordinary kids, who don't undergo any physical transformations simply for doing the right thing.

Another major difference is that no supernatural entity brings Pinocchio to life; Gepetto simply happens to construct a boy-puppet out of wood that's already sentient when he carves it. There's no explanation as to why the wood was sentient, it's just a given-- and early in the book, Pinocchio meets other sentient puppets who immediately recognize Pinocchio, though none of them have ever physically met. Back in my 2017 review of a Neil Gaiman SWAMP THING story, I joked that Pinocchio could have been one of Gaiman's "puppet elementals." Yet I didn't guess that other puppets in the Collodi work were just alive as Pinocchio is, thanks to some unspecified fairy-tale magic. By the way, the names of two puppets, Harlequin and Punchinello, are the only conspicuous story-elements that provide any historical context to Collodi's timeless-seeming Italian setting. Since Harlequin was the later-conceived of the two, PINOCCHIO must take place any time after the 16th century. It may have been intended to take place in Collodi's own time-frame, though Collodi never depicts anything that suggests the rise of 19th-century technology.

Gepetto is the only character who's pretty much the same as he is in Disney; a lovable schmuck. He does end up inside a huge sea-monster, albeit a Giant Shark rather than a whale, and Pinocchio's rescue of his father from the beast's belly isn't crucial to his salvation as in Disney. This Pinocchio kills his advice-giving cricket, but the unnamed bug seems to be able to come back to life when he pleases. The Fox and the Cat start off as con artists, but Collodi's schemers are more murderous. They don the masks of robbers seeking to rip off the puppet-boy's money, and the only reason they don't slay their victim is because they hang him by the neck, which isn't enough to kill a puppet. Candlewick, the boy who lures Pinocchio to Playland, not only remains permanently donkey-ified, he dies after Pinocchio returns to normal. The puppet-master "Fire-Eater" is nothing like the tyrannical Stromboli, and the macabre Green Fisherman has only been adapted to film three times.

But the most fascinating original is the one on whom Disney based the Blue Fairy. In Disney she's a distant, celestial character who brings Pinocchio to life and only appears in his life a couple of times thereafter. In Collodi, she's generally called something along the lines of "the Blue-Haired Fairy," which for convenience I''ll abbreviate to "BHF." BHF is not in Pinocchio's life at the onset, but once she makes his acquaintance-- almost certainly not by coincidence-- she more or less dogs his heels, watching him with maternal omniscience as the puppet continually strays from the path.

Pinocchio first encounters one incarnation of BHF when he's fleeing the masked robbers. He sees a strange house and begs sanctuary. A blue-haired child comes to the door but won't admit him, claiming she's expecting to perish soon. After the robbers leave Pinocchio strung up, BHF finally takes action and has her minions succor him, though her initial reluctance to act begs the notion that she wants him to suffer and learn from the experience. The next time Pinocchio disobeys her, and then returns to the house, he finds a grave that claims the BHF child "died of sorrow on being deserted by her little brother Pinocchio." Of course this is just a ruse to instill guilt in the bad puppet's soul. The next time the BHF appears, she's a blue-haired adult, and she volunteers to become Pinocchio's mother in the absence of his father. Whereas Gepetto never successfully disciplines the puppet, the BHF is a true "punishing mother." However, she renders punishment only in an indirect fashion, to make Pinocchio's humiliations the direct result of his transgressions. It may not be coincidence that Pinocchio finally earns his boyhood not from rescuing Gepetto or keeping the old man healthy, but from showing charity to BHF, after one of her servants falsely tells the puppet that BHF is sick and dying. 

Despite the novel's loosely contemporary setting and its episodic structure, Collodi's PINOCCHIO deserves to be better known for its insights into human psychology-- not just of the "child" variety -- and for its freewheeling creativity.