This piece is drawn from “Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love,” out from FSG on February 3rd.
When I was a boy I was made distinctly uncomfortable by, and even tried not to think about, the Walt Disney movie “Pinocchio.”
But in Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio” (serialized in 1881-1883)—the original text for the Walt Disney adaptation—Pinocchio, unlike Rousseau’s ideal of the child, is created naughty. In fact he’s badly behaved even before he’s created: while still a stick of wood, he starts a fight between Geppetto and his owner, and once he is a marionette he immediately wreaks all kinds of havoc: he insults Geppetto as soon as he has a mouth, laughs at him, runs away from him, etc. He behaves, in short, like a fairly typical two-year-old when the two-year-old is misbehaving. Collodi seems to have had Rousseau in mind. When the wise hundred-year-old cricket asks Pinocchio why he wants to run away from home, Pinocchio tells him: “I shall be sent to school and shall be made to study either by love or by force. To tell you in confidence, I have no wish to learn; it is much more amusing to run after butterflies, or to climb trees and to take young birds out of their nests.” Contra Rousseau, Collodi thinks that a young boy who does not undergo a traditional education will get only naughtier and will “grow up a perfect donkey” (as the cricket warns—and prophesizes—Pinocchio does indeed later become a donkey).
The first real lie in the story is not told by Pinocchio, who does, however, repeat various fanciful inaccuracies almost as soon as he can speak, but by Geppetto, who sells his coat in order to buy Pinocchio a schoolbook and lies to the boy, telling him that he sold it “Because I found it too hot.” (This is a classic example of a paternalistic lie told with good intentions, of which both a Buddhist and perhaps even Plato would have approved.) Interestingly, Pinocchio understands what his maker has really done, “and unable to restrain the impulse of his good heart he sprang up, and throwing his arms around Geppetto’s neck he began kissing him again and again.” So Pinocchio does have a good heart and a subtle enough intelligence to understand that though Geppetto has lied to Pinocchio, he has done so out of kindness; it’s simply that Pinocchio likes to misbehave, and he hasn’t learned the ways of the world yet. When the fox and the cat come along, he is easily led into temptation.
Because Geppetto’s lie is such a common one, before we continue Pinocchio’s story, it is worth bringing to mind Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s notion of the living truth. Bonhoeffer argues that it is naive and misleading, perhaps even dangerous to suppose that the literal truth always or even typically conveys what we mean when we talk about telling the truth. Of course we often tell a straightforward lie, and for morally blameworthy reasons. But we also often make statements that are not literally true—that are in fact literal lies—while conveying a deeper truth that an honest statement of the facts could not communicate. So, for example, if Geppetto told Pinocchio, “I sold my coat in order to buy you a schoolbook,” he would be speaking the literal truth, but his meaning might well be (or be understood by Pinocchio as) “Look what sacrifices I make for you!” By telling Pinocchio that he sold his coat because it was too hot—a lie—he communicates to Pinocchio something like “My coat doesn’t really matter to me, and your schoolbook does, and I don’t want you to feel bad about the fact that I sold my coat.” This is a very nice example of what Bonhoeffer means by the living truth, the more important meanings in communication that may not, and sometimes cannot, be conveyed by strict reportage. So many of the stories we tell our children are of this kind—Santa Claus is the obvious example—and we should ask ourselves, as parents and also as lovers: How many stories might my child, or my boyfriend, or my partner, or my mom be telling me, not in order to mislead me but rather to tell me something that, if said outright, might be misunderstood or cause me harm?
Pinocchio does not tell his first real lie—the first lie that is identified by Collodi as a lie, and the occasion for the growth of Pinocchio’s already enormous nose—until after he has been tricked by the fox and the cat, and he’s learned that telling the truth (in this case, about the gold coins he has) may get him into trouble. He is telling a fairy his story of how the cat and the fox stole one of his gold coins and how he fell into the hands of assassins when she asks him: “ ‘And the four pieces—where have you put them?’ ‘I have lost them!’ said Pinocchio, but he was telling a lie, for he had them in his pocket.”
A not unreasonable lie, given that earlier his honesty had led him to be cheated. Nevertheless, every time he lies, his nose grows—this time, two fingers longer—and then he tells two more lies in quick succession, while the fairy laughs at him and poor Pinocchio, “getting quite confused,” finds himself with such a long nose that he can’t even run from the house to hide his shame; his nose has grown to such an enormous size that it won’t fit through the door.
The series of lies Pinocchio tells is instructive. He tells the first lie because he’s worried about losing his three remaining gold pieces. His second lie is told to back up his first lie: the fairy asks him where he lost his gold pieces, and he has to provide an explanation (Walter Scott’s familiar “Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practise to deceive!”). But the fairy is practicing the “broken cookie jar” style of interrogation (itself inherently deceptive, because it feigns honest ignorance and curiosity) in order to expose Pinocchio’s lies. So, knowing that he’s lying to her and that he is likely to continue to lie, she pursues: “If you have lost them in the wood near here … we will look for them, and we shall find them: because everything that is lost in that wood is always found.” It is at this point that Pinocchio loses all composure and tells a still-clumsier lie: “I didn’t lose the four gold pieces, I swallowed them inadvertently while I was drinking your medicine.” In a familiar, rarely effective technique of argument, scrambling to extricate himself from the lies he has told, Pinocchio tries to put the blame back on the fairy. The fairy then “allowed the puppet to cry and to roar for a good half hour over his nose … This she did to give him a severe lesson, and to correct him of the disgraceful fault of telling lies—the most disgraceful fault that a boy can have.”
Whether or not Collodi is tongue in cheek here is hard to say: the fairy is quick to forgive Pinocchio, and despite Pinocchio’s historical reputation, the rest of the book is much less concerned with Pinocchio’s lying than it is with other kinds of naughtiness he engages in. Collodi also, here agreeing with Rousseau, tells a lot of stories to illustrate how commonly adults mislead children into misbehaviors that the children otherwise might not have pursued. Moreover, the story is told by a writer of fiction, who is making veiled, often sarcastic observations about the politics of late-nineteenth-century Italy; perhaps Collodi is an advocate for truth in one way, but in another way, he is clearly someone who understands the subtleties of communication and the necessity for pretense, irony, and disguise.
One quick, delightful example of Collodi’s trickery: Pinocchio asks the fairy how she knew that he was lying. The fairy replies: “Lies, my dear boy, are found out immediately, because they are of two sorts. There are lies that have short legs, and lies that have long noses. Your lie, as it happens, is one of those that have a long nose.”
This is an interesting distinction, one worth remembering. Lies that have short legs are those that carry you a little distance but cannot outrun the truth. The truthful consequences always catch up with someone who tells a lie with short legs. Lies that have long noses are those that are obvious to everyone except the person who told the lie, lies that make the liar look ridiculous. In either case, according to our often-deceitful fairy, lies are bad because they result in bad consequences for the liar. And this conclusion of the fairy is noteworthy, because the vast majority of arguments against lying are made because lies are, so this line goes, unfair or harmful to the people who believe the liar. But it can also be—as another Italian, Machiavelli, advises—that lies should be avoided because they produce negative consequences for the liar. This is Aesop’s argument as well, and much of what Aristotle says against lying also comes down to the idea that lies are harmful mostly to the teller of lies.
When at last Pinocchio is transformed into a real boy by the fairy, it is not because he’s learned the value of honesty, but as the fairy says to him in his dreams, “To reward you for your good heart … Boys who minister tenderly to their parents, and assist them in their misery and infirmities, are deserving of great praise and affection, even if they cannot be cited as examples of obedience and good behavior. Try and do better in the future and you will be happy.” So it is really for his good intentions that he is rewarded, and Pinocchio’s few lies—and many misdeeds—were, though consistently misguided, never malicious. Pinocchio himself doesn’t learn the lesson. Thinking about his life as a puppet, “he said to himself with great complacency: ‘How ridiculous I was when I was a puppet! And how glad I am that I have become a well-behaved little boy!’ ” Here we know Collodi is laughing at his character: Pinocchio hasn’t learned to be a well-behaved little boy—the fairy’s told him so—and he’s congratulating himself not with the resolution to be a better boy but with the “great complacency” of a job well done. The lesson, if there is one, is about trying one’s best to be a good boy—the story was serialized in a children’s magazine—and to please one’s parents.
Before reading Collodi, when I was familiar only with Walt Disney’s version of the story, I had the idea that the moral of Pinocchio’s story was “The truth sets you free”: as long as you are lying, you are dancing on the strings of others, but once you are brave enough to speak your mind—rather than worry about what others would have you say and do—you can be authentic; you can be a real boy. I still think there is some merit to this view, and I imagine it must be part of what Disney had in mind. But the reason I prefer Collodi’s original, much longer version of the story is that he appears to moralize but in fact lets his hero behave very much as we expect a typical little boy will. Pinocchio is naughty, he lies, he breaks (well-intentioned, sincerely meant) promises, he gets into all sorts of difficulties—through hastiness, inexperience, and misjudgment. (Sound familiar?) But he is nevertheless a hero in the end, he is goodhearted, he loves Geppetto, and the fairy nobly gives him his just reward, which is, after all, just to be an ordinary boy.
