SOURCE: Seaboyer, Judith. “Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice: An Anatomy of a Talking Book.” In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, edited by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff, pp. 237–55. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

[In the following essay, Seaboyer locates Pinocchio in Venice within a tradition of literary works about Venice and examines the novel's intertextual references and philosophical discourse, including allusions to Dante Alighieri, James Joyce, and Carlo Collodi, as they relate to the theme of metamorphosis, Menippean satire, and the Bakhtinian concept of carnival.]

Given the evidence in this volume for the long-standing fascination of Venice for the anglophone imagination, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice (1991) is one of a flood of Venice novels written in English and published in the 1990s. Even before the English Renaissance, when Thomas Nashe invented a visit for The Unfortunate Traveller and Shakespeare staged The Merchant of Venice and Othello, Venice had come to serve as a trope for an urbanised, civilised perfection whose underside was a seductive—and conveniently foreign—sink for greed, lust, and deceit.¹ It was with the rise of Romanticism, however, that it truly became a key symbolic landscape for English literature. The attraction of the Other persisted, but by the end of the eighteenth century, its status as a world trading power no more than a memory and a thousand years of independence at an end, Venice became the perfect stage and the perfect metaphor for Romantic loss, and for the horror of moral failure. For similar if sometimes more self-righteous reasons it continued to be important for the Victorians—Ruskin, for example, saw in the fall of this island republic a warning for England, grown fat on the spoils of empire—but after the turn of century, while it didn't cease altogether, literary production waned. It seemed as though, as Henry James had noted, with a self-consciously disingenuous rhetorical flourish, there was “nothing more to be said on the subject.”²

By 1902 James had published his last Venice fiction and his last Venice essay and, after 1907, he ceased even to visit. The contemporary account continued to be produced and to find a wide readership—neither Mary McCarthy's nor Jan (James) Morris's, for example, have ever been out of print—and Pound and Anthony Hecht contributed to the tradition of Venice poetry in English. What I find intriguing, though, is that in the first eighty years of the century fewer than twenty Venice fictions seem to have been published, and while they include The Wings of the Dove (1902) and Frederick Rolfe's decadent masterpiece The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1909, pub. 1934), most of them are much less substantial than these.³

As we approach the millennium, however, there has been a remarkable increase in the production of Venice fiction. Ten novels were published in the eighties alone and, by my count, three dozen from 1990 to 1998.⁴ Some of the new writing is genre fiction—detective, historical, gothic, romance, and various combinations of these⁵—trading, sometimes to very good effect, on Venice's historical reputation for duplicity and secrecy and its ongoing popularity as a tourist and honeymoon destination. But well over half of it may be classified as literary fiction. Novelists like Ian McEwan (The Comfort of Strangers 1981), Barry Unsworth (Stone Virgin 1985), Michèle Roberts (The Book of Mrs Noah 1987), Jeanette Winterson (The Passion 1987), Robert Coover (Pinocchio in Venice 1991), Maggie Gee (Where Are the Snows (1991), Harold Brodkey (Profane Friendship 1994), Rod Jones (Night Pictures 1997), Caryl Phillips (The Nature of Blood 1997), and Louis Begley (Mistler's Exit 1998), are drawn to Venice for much the same reasons as their “popular” counterparts, but their writing is also part of a tradition of writing about Venice that is linked to a broader literary continuum that interprets and shapes culture by reading and writing cities. Pinocchio in Venice is paradigmatic in that it is an overt response to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and at the same time it is an overtly postmodernist response to James Joyce's quintessential modernist city novel, Ulysses. Joyce's Dublin is not a modernist space, and Coover's Venice is not a postmodernist one: each city is something of a cultural and technological backwater. But standing waters can be rich, and Joyce sees in his city, as Coover sees in Venice, a historical matrix in which the traces of a cultural past, present, and future are held in synchronous, kaleidoscopic suspension. Joyce reworks three thousand years of Western literary history within his Dublin world in little, on a single June day in 1904. Coover constructs a similar linguistic teatro del mondo in fin-de-millénaire Venice, during the four days leading up to martedì grasso, the highpoint of carnival, and this essay will consider the renovatory effects of that construction in terms of literature and contemporary literary theory.

VENETIAN CIVITAS AND MUSEAL DESIRE

The interest Venice holds for urban theorists is instructive. Despite its physical vulnerability and social instability, contemporary urban planners venerate Venice as a lost and longed for model of civitas, a city that grew into its ideal wholeness in response to a community's changing needs and desires, and now rests in perfect, perfected stasis. The material traces of the order of meaning by which the West has constructed itself are preserved here in a kind of time warp, and as edge cities and malls seem to sprawl out of control, flattening before them both history and the landscape which once defined the boundary between city and country, Venice, its feminised body exposed to the world's gaze, promises a meaningful story of the past. This is, of course, only one view, and writers like Coover recognise any such promise of plenitude to be profoundly illusory. He favours instead the second city of fluid meanings and border crossings discovered behind the fixed classical mask. Pinocchio in Venice describes in realistic detail the constructed city, the acknowledged work of art, but is determinedly, deliciously situated in its abject other. Venice is

the last outpost of the self-enclosed Renaissance Urbs … a kind of itchy boundary between everywhere and somewhere, between simultaneity and history, process and stasis, geometry and optics, extension and unity, velocity and object, between product and art,⁶

and, most uncomfortably in these days of industrial pollution and acqua alta, between land and water. Pinocchio's redemption follows the Lion of San Marco's carnivalesque revelation that the city as work of art is a fraud, “a kind of mask the old Queen put on to hide her cankers and pox pits.” Its “true face,” “dark and filthy” but nonetheless beautiful, is worn, of course, on its carnivalesque behind. The traces of this Venice, founded piecemeal by migrations of desperate refugees fleeing a succession of invasions, may still be discerned in the backwaters of Canareggio and Castello, but they are largely masked by the construction of the heroic narrative of a heavenly ordained urban utopia, and what the Lion terms “bloody glorious empire.”⁷

REPETITION AND THE DEATH DRIVE

Pinocchio in Venice is both a retelling of and a sequel to Carlo Collodi's children's story The Adventures of Pinocchio, first published in serial form in 1881–82. At the end of the original story, the wooden puppet has undergone a metamorphosis to become a flesh-and-blood adolescent boy;⁸ at the beginning of Coover's, he's over a century old, and fast reverting to wood. Despite the promise of the conclusion of Collodi's story, Pinocchio's life as “a proper boy” has been a disappointment. Like many young Italians, he left behind village life for the New World, where he anglicised his name to Pinenut, got himself an education, and spent time in Hollywood as an actor and as a scriptwriter. Determined to live up to the Blue Fairy's faith in him, (in other words, driven by filial guilt), he turned his back on Californian hedonism for the cloistered and virtuous life of an academic. This act of second-stage repression ensured his lifelong misery. Now a “world-renowned art historian and critic, social anthropologist, moral philosopher, and theological gadfly”⁹ and professor emeritus at an American East Coast University, he is as comically repressed and self-righteous as the puppet was irrepressibly wicked, and he is as self-deluded as ever. His quest in search of self is not over, and one by one on his journey through the Venetian labyrinth, he will repeat his old puppet mistakes—misjudgements that in his former life had led to a catalogue of trials including death by hanging, death by drowning, metamorphosis into a donkey and, by far the most painful, a series of separations from the Blue Fairy, whose maternal “tough love” included not just disappearing but regularly pretending to have died of grief because of Pinocchio's failure to behave as a dutiful son.

His plane has been diverted to Milan because Marco Polo airport is fogbound, and so he arrives in Venice by train. From the moment he crosses the threshold at Santa Lucia Station, he enters a labyrinthine space of transformation that is a dizzying pastiche of Hades, Saturnalia, mystery cycle, and commedia dell'arte, a wonderfully abject mixture of Dante's Purgatorio, Bloom's Nighttown, Prufrock's fogbound city, and Aschenbach's Venice, and he contains something of each of these travellers.

Collodi's Pinocchio was Tuscan¹⁰ but for the kinds of reasons discussed above Coover leads him “home” not to Florence or Pisa, either of which might have stood in for his unnamed birthplace, but to Venice, a city that has no place in the original story. Pinocchio has been drawn back to his “roots” because he feels Venice holds the key to the completion of his capo lavoro, tellingly named “Mamma.” In keeping with his flair for contemporary confessional criticism, it is to be

a vast autobiographical tapestry in which are woven all the rich, varied strands of his unique personal destiny under the single predominating theme of virtuous love and the lonely ennobling labor that gives it exemplary substance … but the book's conclusion, like rectitude itself in an earlier unhappier time, continues to elude him.¹¹

On another level Pinocchio knows he has come home to die, and the opening pages present a mise-en-abyme that foreshadows the vertiginous nature of Pinocchio in Venice. To complete his oeuvre, Professor Pinenut is entering the body of the city that is itself “a universally acknowledged work of art” and that gave birth to his career as an art historian, and he is returning to the place of his actual birth, to complete his life, which he also happens to view as “a work of art.”¹²

VENETIAN METAMORPHOSES

Two aspects of Coover's text reinforce this sense of Pinocchio's experience of the city as a kind of vortex. First, he takes up the familiar Venetian leitmotif of metamorphosis and, second, he structures his text in terms of Menippean satire, and Bakhtinian dialogism and the carnivalesque.

First, it is a literary commonplace that Venice is, like Pinocchio, the product of a metamorphosis, a magical transformation of nature into art. Byron's Childe Harold sees a fairy-tale city conjured up from the mud of the lagoon “at the stroke of an enchanter's wand,”¹³ and Ruskin a city made of frost-bound breakers transfixed into glittering marble and crenellated stone set with semi-precious jewels.¹⁴ Pound, with Dante's dark wood as well as the reality of the city's foundation on millions of piles made from Istrian pine transmuted by water into stone in mind, describes “a forest of marble,”¹⁵ and Witi Ihimaera's Venice is a manifestation of Hawaiki, the luminous mythic Maori citadel anchored at the navel of the universe.¹⁶ Coover's city, on the other hand, is undergoing a world-upside-down metamorphosis that will return it to the Real of its swampy origins. In San Sebastiano, the paintings and frescoes come alive to torment him, and like scenes from a macabre Disney animation, pews “[slide] apart and then together again with great clashing noises like monstrous gates,” and the floor rises and falls and splits apart beneath his feet to reveal heaps of bones.¹⁷Acqua alta turns the Piazza San Marco and its surrounding buildings into a storm-tossed ship about to loose its moorings from the surrounding labyrinth and carry its ancient mariners out to sea and a delicious “watery doom.”¹⁸ As though Hell were yawning beneath it, whole sections of San Michele heave and tremble, and headstones are sucked into oblivion before Pinocchio's eyes.¹⁹ This destruction will be hastened by a rebirth of the ruthless entrepreneurism that once made the Serenissima great. In a discomfiting burlesque of reality, Coover's Venice is being sold off to become a kind of time-share resort for the feckless rich, and there are plans for dredging “a channel deep enough for sixty-thousand-ton tankers [to service] the Third Industrial Zone, making the Veneto region the rival of Osaka, Manchester, and New Jersey.”²⁰

In true Romantic style, Pinocchio's human flesh is undergoing a mirroring metamorphosis, as it becomes a bundle of wooden sticks. The physical manifestations of his great age are not rheumatism or hardening of the arteries but dry rot and infestations of woodworm, and he has become so thin a friend is moved sadly to observe, “They could use you as a foldout in an anatomy book.”²¹ It's a nice piece of self-reflexivity that leads me to my second point.

MENIPPEAN SATIRE, BAKHTINIAN CARNIVALESQUE, AND THE DIALOGIC

Pinocchio in Venice fulfils the broad requirements of the Menippean satire, or literary anatomy, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin and by Northrop Frye. An anatomy mockingly dissects a wide range of abstract ideas as well as contemporary theories and issues; indeed, Bakhtin sees it as “the testing of an idea, of a truth [or] philosophical position” rather than of a particular human character or type. The menippea is the adventure of an idea; the protagonist is simply its vehicle.²² It is structured around such set pieces as parodically erudite digressions, deipnosophistical interpolations (feasts accompanied by mock-philosophical speeches and dialogues), dialogues of the threshold, and dialogues with the dead.²³ It is marked by “a special type of experimental fantasticality” and representations of insanity that include “passions bordering on madness”²⁴—what Frye refers to as “diseases of the intellect” and “maddened pedantry”²⁵—and Bakhtin drives home the links between the menippea and the carnivalesque. For example, both are distinguished by sharp contrasts and transitions from one position to another and by ambiguous oppositions whose design is to reveal that all things are interrelated. For example, the sacred can be profaned because it carries within itself the seeds of its profanation, the fool or servant is crowned only to be decrowned, the wise man's folly is exposed and the fool shown to be wise and, just as surely as birth leads to death, ritual death leads to renewal. Since everything contains within itself the potential of its opposite, everything is ambivalent and nothing is ever final: the carnivalised world is always in a state of becoming.²⁶

Frye illustrates his discussion with references to Apuleius's The Golden Ass, Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Kingsley's Water Babies, and Joyce's Ulysses, all of which are intertexts for Coover. In the course of Coover's anatomy, not only will Pinocchio's body undergo a Dionysiac dismemberment, but his intellectual and professional positions within late-twentieth-century academic discourse will be dissected and revealed to be, like the old professor himself, pedantic, solipsistic, fraudulent, and ludicrous. From this new perspective, the puppet's turning “from bad to good” that resulted in his acquisition of human subjectivity,²⁷ complete with a viciously well developed superego, looks less like salvation than corruption. In order to be redeemed, he must undergo a last Dionysiac and parodically Dantean metamorphosis in the course of which not only his sins and imperfections but his hard-won human flesh will be painfully stripped away so that he may be lifted from the dry rot, the “appalling human sickness”²⁸ which characterises his life of the mind and returned to the grotesque bodiliness and changeful becomingness of the puppet. Pinenut will be tortured and killed so that the puppet may be reborn and, paradoxically, this process, which includes a cruelly comic purification by fire in a pizza oven,²⁹ will “humanize him [as] ambivalent carnival laughter burns away all that is stilted and stiff” to restore his “heroic core.”³⁰

As a site of the carnivalesque, Venice further suits Coover's mocking purpose in that since 1980 local authorities have resurrected carnival to keep the tourists coming during what used to be the low season. It's been a commercially successful but inevitably somewhat bloodless and uncarnivalesque exercise, but Coover's is carnival at its funniest, and blackest.³¹ According to the laws of the carnivalesque as Bakhtin famously explained them, not only Professor Pinenut but also Coover and his reader will be drawn into this theatre-without-footlights. While Pinocchio is mocked as the Menippean philosophus gloriosus, Coover, in the masterly creation of this intellectually stunning text, takes up with brio the role of the mocked virtuoso.³² The role of critical reader is less comfortable. As I undertake the dismemberment of this text, as I attempt to peel back Coover's textual laminations and fix the grotesque vitality of his protagonist and his “disintegrating but multilaminous island”³³ into something resembling the kind of coherence required of an academic essay, I am faced with the folly of such an enterprise. Inevitably I flatten his comic savagery and revitalising power, and I find myself in the role of Menippean loquacious pedant, a figure for the contemporary theoretical obsessions that have rendered Pinocchio “stilted and stiff.”

Venice is the perfect setting, too, for Coover's virtuoso exegesis of Bakhtinian dialogism. Coover places himself in a long line of literary thieves of language in the construction of his text, and raids the history of western literature, art, architecture, and philosophy, much as Venice raided the Eastern Mediterranean in its self-construction as a legible, urban text. Pinocchio in Venice is like the façade of San Marco, a collage of disparate bits and pieces that are nonetheless of a piece. Coover brings dozens of heterogeneous literary historical voices into dialogic collision and coexistence in a single moment in time and space, and this linguistic chaos brims with potential. In a Rabelaisian feast of scatology, profanity, and learned allusion, he takes up where Collodi left off and parodies and brings into “joyful relativity” an encyclopedic selection of western literature. In addition to the texts already mentioned, he brings to his dialogue fragments from (for example) the Christian gospels and “The Dream of the Rood,” Plato's Phaedrus, Euripides' The Bacchae, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, Congreve's The Double Dealer, Gogol's “The Overcoat,” Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy,” and his own The Public Burning. Such an anatomisation is a destructive process, but each text becomes part of a flexible structural frame that is grotesque in its Joycean “Here Comes Everybody” capacity to extend, incorporate, and transform. For example, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Derrida all, like Coover, engage in word play that is eccentric and communicative, and along with Dante, Pound, Eliot, Mann, and the writers of the gospels, they all expand the horizons of their own texts by writing in the margins of other people's. By means of linguistic belly-laughter, Coover skillfully brings all these texts into contact as he reinterprets them in the light of each other. It is part of a literary tradition, but at the same time it is, in the words of Coover's female commedia hero Columbina, “a whole new lazzo.”³⁴ By means of this carnivalesque destruction and renewal, he offers alternative endings for a huddle of angst-ridden wandering literary heroes who haunt Pinenut's journey.

PURGATORIAL VENICE

Coover's is in a long line of rereadings of Dante, which include those of Collodi, Eliot, and Pound. The latter is, like Dante and like Coover's Pinocchio, an exile with links to Venice, and it is interesting to contrast his response to Dante with Coover's.³⁵ The Cantos are structurally and thematically based on the Commedia, and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is an ironic inversion of it. In the latter, Dante's dignity is replaced by Mauberley's self-pity, an inheritance of classical, Italian, and Provençal poetry gives way to nineties decadence, and love fails.³⁶ Coover's pilgrim is self-pitying, and dignity has always escaped him. He throws tantrums, for example, when his university attempts to withdraw his franking privileges, or deprive him of his second office, and in the crisis that leads to the first Menippean dialogue of the threshold at Santa Lucia Station, La Volpe is able to play on his irascibility to steal first his dignity and then his precious manuscript. He blames his failure to command respect on the fact that he has never managed to look the part of the scholar philosopher. Not only does his recalcitrant nose continue to make a fool of him, but he complains that even after he “put on flesh” he continued “to look like a spindly unstrung puppet … a veritable insult to the rules of human proportion—where was the heroic frame, the hairy chest, where—someone has a lot to answer for!—were the powerful thighs?”³⁷

Dante's Commedia, like Collodi's and Coover's stories, hinges on metamorphosis and the Christian drama. Coover borrows the doubled structure of the Purgatorio as Pinocchio undertakes a literal journey through a city that becomes the intermediate, liminal space that lies between the Inferno of his life as a human subject and the Paradiso that will succeed it. A parallel spiritual journey takes him toward a level of understanding that will enable him to discard intellectual knowledge—philosophy—in favour of love. During four days over Easter, Dante Pilgrim journeys toward Beatrice and redemption; in the four days leading to the culmination of carnival before the grim days of Lent, Pinocchio travels through Venice-as-purgatory, toward the Blue Fairy. Like Dante, he has been lost in a dark wood and he has lived a life of exile. Like Dante, he is driven by the desire to know that is underpinned by another, less worthy desire, for fame. And as with Dante the constant inspiration of his life's work has been a long-dead girl he fell in love with when they were both children, and she has since, like Beatrice, watched his every move, and marked his every error.

An abiding theme of the Purgatorio is reunion and reconciliation, and Dante brings together not only old friends, enemies, families, and lovers, but dispersed communities of texts. In carnivalised Venice Pinocchio is reunited with the ghosts of his past as, within the text, dozens of disparate literary voices are brought into dialogue. Dante is spiritually reunited with Beatrice, a type of Christ. Pinocchio's reunion with the Blue Fairy, on the other hand, is concerned ultimately with the body rather than the soul.

In the century that has followed the publication of Collodi's Pinocchio, a flourishing industry has developed that encompasses long-nosed souvenir puppets and masks hawked at shops and market stalls in Italy and in Little Italies from Toronto to Melbourne, together with adaptations in various media. Disney's 1940 animated film—a “vandal's raid” Jackson Cope notes has already been repulsed by Coover with The Public Burning³⁸—is still widely available on video and is re-released in cinemas from time to time. Perella points out that more recently the academy has taken “this most fortunate of Italy's minor classics” to its heart, because of the subtlety of its linguistic and narrative strategies, its literary and sociocultural allusiveness, and its use of archetypal patterns and images.³⁹ At conferences and in scholarly journals Pinocchio is earnestly compared to Odysseus, Aeneas, Christ, and Dante, and even to Renzo, the working-class hero of Manzoni's revered political novel I Promessi Sposi.⁴⁰ (It is no comfort to be reminded I am not alone in my loquacious pedantry!)

Coover's Pinocchio, then, parodies as it joins a tradition of adaptation and interpretation that includes popular and academic culture. But Coover is manifestly outside the tradition, too, in that his reading of Collodi's puppet is as expansive and all-encompassing as most translations, rewritings, and interpretations have been “monolithically reductive.”⁴¹

Perella notes that “Collodi himself was among the first to feel uneasy about [his] tale's ending … which he once told a friend he could not remember having written [though] the manuscript copy leaves no doubt.” In what he suggests “may well be the story's cruellest image,” the chestnut-haired, blue-eyed “real boy” eyes his discarded puppet self “propped against a chair, its head turned to one side, its arms dangling, and its legs crossed and folded in the middle so that it was a wonder that it stood up at all.” He says “with a great deal of satisfaction: ‘How funny I was when I was a puppet! And how glad I am now that I've become a proper boy!’”⁴² “His subsequent uneasiness,” suggests Perella, “betrays the ambivalent attitude he had toward his wayward, unregimented puppet and the deep-rooted sympathy he had for the free-living street kid.”⁴³

Coover takes advantage of Collodi's ambivalence toward his protagonist to address questions relating to the acquisition of bourgeois subjectivity and to “rescue” Pinocchio. As he does so he emphasises ambivalences in Mann's semi-autobiographical novella about artistic creativity and the role of the writer in the early twentieth century.⁴⁴ The result is a seriously funny critique, and a self-reflexively parodic study of the role of the artist and thinker in Coover's own historical moment—our historical moment—of literary and theoretical discontent. Aschenbach's earnest tones may be heard in Pinocchio's thoughts from Coover's opening pages. For example, his own great epic, Maia (the mother of Hermes), a “richly patterned tapestry … that gathers up the threads of many human destinies in the warp of a single idea,”⁴⁵ sounds suspiciously like Pinocchio's Mamma. Both men have spent their adult lives striving for perfection, in the pursuit of idealised beauty and truth, and both have achieved a public dignity Mann and Coover agree to be inimical to the artistic imagination. Both doubt their intellectual capabilities, and both are physically frail; their success is a “heroism born of weakness.”⁴⁶ Both are deeply dissatisfied, both are drawn with uncharacteristic spontaneity to visit Venice, and both will die there. Both see premonitory visions on arriving in the city: Aschenbach sees an old fop pretending to be a youth, and Pinocchio a crazed figure fleeing through the streets. Aschenbach will “become” the fool he despised, as Pinocchio will “become” the fleeing madman, and Aschenbach's fool. Each has a strange encounter with an impertinent gondolier, and each has problems with missing luggage, which lead to an immersion in the city that would not otherwise have occurred. Each contemplates his life from a deck chair on a Venetian beach, though Aschenbach's beach is the Lido and Pinocchio, whose meeting with carnival has snatched him from wealth and respectability into homelessness, occupies the no-man's-land where a derelict boatyard meets the lagoon. Both have doubts about being in Venice at all but their desire for what lies beyond the pleasure principle means neither has any intention of leaving. Both feverishly hunt an unsuitably young lover through the labyrinth, and both delude themselves as to the nature of their passion with parodic readings of Plato's Phaedrus. Aschenbach dreams of a Dionysiac orgy, and Pinocchio's carnivalesque rebirth depends on his becoming the object of its terrifying reality.

Homer's Odyssey is an intertext for Collodi, but it is Joyce's response that is most clearly heard in Pinocchio in Venice. Coover's text shares characteristics with Joyce's in its structure and in its details. For example, Joyce plays on his text as anatomy by devoting different sections to different bodily organs. Coover in turn devotes sections to the ear (Pinocchio's are the first of his organs to be shed, reminding us he never was much of a listener), the tongue, the intestines, the kidneys, the flesh, the skeleton, the locomotor apparatus, and the genitals. Pinocchio's famous phallic nose is the only organ to remain in good working order until the end. It continues to embarrass him almost until the moment of his death, but in true carnivalesque fashion, what was folly for Aschenbach is revealed to be wisdom for Pinocchio as he is led by the “nose” to paradise in the arms of the Blue Fairy.

Dublin and Venice are distinguished by the juxtaposition of land and water—along with the littoral, tidal space of its Bay and the Liffey, both of which are central to the narrative construction of Ulysses, Dublin even has a Grand Canal. Both texts reflect the liminality of their topography, subsuming earlier texts, breaking them down and bringing them together in a destructive-reconstructive flood of words. For all that both are in some respects so novelistically realistic that routes may be traced down to the narrowest lanes and alleys, both are labyrinthine, disorienting, and nightmarish. Both are filled with the hubbub of hundreds of voices—those of their protagonists competing with those of their intertexts. Both are peopled with ghosts, including Stephen Dedalus's revenant mother and the Blue Fairy (Pinocchio's surrogate mother) who, from her inception in Collodi's text, has never been able to make up her mind whether she is dead or alive. Bloom and Pinocchio each pay a visit to “Hades,” represented by a cemetery.⁴⁷

Both contain set pieces devoted to Platonic discourse in libraries: Joyce's “Scylla and Charybdis” section is set in the National Library in Dublin and Coover's chapter 21, “Plato's Prank,” in the Salone Sansoviniano of the Libreria Marciana, the original Venetian state library. Pinocchio, perched between Plato and Aristotle who have been his own Scylla and Charybdis and whose portraits flank the entry to the Salone, rehearses a mock-Platonic speech to the Blue Fairy (disguised as Bluebell, a buxom college co-ed) as Phaedrus.⁴⁸

At the end of the Cyclops section, Bloom/Jesus/Moses becomes Elijah as he escapes The Citizen to ascend into heaven amid clouds of angels—“like a shot off a shovel.”⁴⁹ Pinocchio has visions of angels, too, but he escapes the carabinieri to experience a bathetic descent rather than Bloom's mock apotheosis. Ignoring Arlecchino's warning to stick to him “like shit to a shovel,” he is distracted by a glimpse of the Fairy, “just drifting by as though in an angelic vision.” He staggers through a tiny underpass, the Sottoportego del'Uva, misses his footing, and as though “pitched from a slick shovel,” he undergoes a second lustration, not in Dante's Lethe but in the “slimy ooze” of a side canal, Rio di Santa Margherita.⁵⁰

As the end nears, Pinocchio comes to regret a life in which he rigorously repressed any impulse toward pleasure, and his snappish “No, no, … that's not what I mean at all”⁵¹ brings into focus echoes of Eliot's Prufrock that have been present since Pinocchio's arrival in Venice. Both men walk the streets of an unreal city in search of an elusive answer. On his arrival at Santa Lucia, Pinocchio's aged body makes its way along the platform “like a crab,” reminding us of Prufrock, whose tough outer shell has protected him from pain but also from love and who, in his loneliness, soliloquizes: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”⁵² When his old enemy Il Gatto, disguised as a female tourist bureau clerk, drops his key, it “clatters to the floor like a coffee spoon.”⁵³ Both cities are wreathed in fog. It “rubs,” “licks,” “lingers,” “slips,” and “curls” about Prufrock's city and, yet another avatar of the shape-shifting Blue Fairy, it haunts Pinocchio's: “swirling,” “coiling,” “like teasing wisps of bluish hair,” it exacerbates his short-sightedness and the descending fog of old age.⁵⁴ Prufrock holds up a mirror to Professor Pinenut's sorry hairless thinness and to his fussy sartorial vanity as well as to his much-regretted failure to have “dared,” and his dawning realisation that he may indeed have been “obtuse,” “ridiculous,” “the Fool.” He predicts people will say of him: “How his hair is growing thin!” and “how his arms and legs are thin!” A friend, on seeing Pinocchio's body, sighs “He's thin as a nail, he's lost all his hair.”⁵⁵

THE BAKHTINIAN LOOPHOLE AND THE POLITICS OF BOURGEOIS SUBJECTIVITY

The text as anatomy reflected in the body-in-bits-and-pieces is reinforced by the repetitious use of that stock scene in Menippean satire, the marvelously termed deipnosophistical interpolation. Within an hour or two of Pinocchio's arrival, the first of three Menippean feasts takes place. It's a recapitulation of the dinner the puppet shared with Il Gatto and La Volpe at the Gambero Rosso, the Red Crawfish Inn, in Collodi's Pinocchio. The first time, because of his greed and naivety, the young puppet was tricked into parting with the gold coins that were supposed to change his life from poor to rich, from bad to good. This time, Il Gatto and La Volpe are rather thinly disguised behind commedia masks. Pinocchio is gulled again. To be fair, he is tempted by what he falsely believes to be a free meal, but this time he's vulnerable not because he's a poor child who would like to be a rich one, but because he's an old man who wants to belong. Again, Pinocchio eats little while his companions consume what is this time a meal of truly gargantuan proportions, but he does join them in drinking rather a lot of good local wine and grappa. Punningly foregrounding the role anatomy will play, the menu includes tripe, sweetbreads, kidneys, “pickled spleen and cooked tendons … slick and translucent as hospital tubing … sliced stuffed esophagus [and] calf's liver alla veneziana.”⁵⁶ In carnivalesque terms, this feast is only a precursor to the one that counts.

Deserted by his companions and lost in “the snowy night” of the Venetian labyrinth, Pinocchio's digestive organs collapse under the assault of so much wine on an all but empty stomach. Other figures appear from his past as he relives the nightmare of his puppet past and the “galantuomo, and universally beloved exemplar of industry, veracity, and civility” is apprehended by the law for, among other things, “indecent exposure” and “polluting the environment.”⁵⁷ Collodi's puppet had friends as well as enemies, however, and Pinocchio is rescued by Alidoro, the police mastiff who in the earlier narrative had rescued him from death-by-frying at the hands of a fisherman. He and his philosophical watch-dog friend Melampetta begin the process of reconstructing Pinocchio's clean and proper wooden body. As the old professor discourses, the dogs deconstruct his confessional monologue and his hard-won human body with their tongues.⁵⁸ Amidst much blasphemy and good-natured Rabelaisian punning, and with a cheerful fortitude that contrasts starkly with Pinocchio's “in spite of” heroism, they lick away his excrement, and make a start on his solipsistic metaphysics and his subjectivity. Careful as they are, “the little duck's as brittle as croccante and flaking like puff pastry”⁵⁹ so that they inadvertently lick away scraps of flesh, and an ear.⁶⁰ It is the first step toward the revelation, literal and metaphorical, of the puppet beneath (“it's the naked truth we want, the unvarnished reality!”⁶¹ It is an example of Coover's excess-with-a-purpose, since this feasting followed by literal purgation and cleansing links commedia dell'arte to that other Commedia—the purgation and cleansing undergone by Dante Pilgrim as he makes his way through his Purgatorio to seek redemption in the presence of his dead beloved, Beatrice. His sins and imperfections, too, are slowly, painfully stripped away until he is a new man.

A third and equally astonishing cena is the Dionysiac cannibalism that occurs at the height of carnival. Again, Pinocchio is the feast. Wrapped in pizza dough and baked to a donkey-shaped crisp in memory of an earlier metamorphosis, he's delivered up to a maenadic throng of tourists and Juventus fans, who begin to tear him apart, and eat him. A few fingers and his feet are demolished along with the pizza dough before the commedia puppets rescue him and he's flown to safety behind the Teatro Malibran, by the Lion of San Marco. He's reached the heart of the labyrinth, and is one step from his destiny, the lost and longed for body of the Blue Fairy, his Beatrice, his Penelope, his Molly Bloom, his Anna Livia Plurabelle, the first object of his desire.

In order to explain how Coover creates the possibility of Pinocchio's carnivalesque redemption, it is necessary to go back to Derrida. I have mentioned that Plato's Pharmacy, Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus, is an intertext, and although his voice is not as clearly heard in this dialogic engagement as many others are, its influence is insistent. Coover reminds us that his wooden-headed puppet was born from a wooden log, and in one of a series of droll “wooden” puns that run through his text, he links log to the logos, word, logic, reason. This leads him neatly into Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence, the privileging of unity over difference, speech over writing.

The Phaedrus is central to Mann's Death in Venice. He parodically rereads that part of the dialogue which focuses on love, and the role of beauty in guiding us toward a higher realm.⁶² Derrida discovers an ambivalence in Plato's attitude to the morality of writing, and also asks, again self-reflexively, whether the writer can ever “cut a respectable figure.”⁶³ These are of course also concerns for Mann. Coover parodies Mann's version of the dialogue, and Derrida's text informs the whole of Pinocchio in Venice.

The dialogue between Plato and Mann and between Plato and Derrida is straightforward, but it is Coover's genius that, by means of his reading of Derrida, he is able to bring Collodi and Mann, who are to say the least an unlikely couple, into jarringly disjunctive yet productive dialogue, bringing to light elements in each that allow for the possibility of new readings. The cruelly repressive aspect of Collodi's Bildungsroman is made to chime with Aschenbach's own repression, and Coover focuses on that repression rather than on the “happily ever after” of Pinocchio's metamorphosis into a human child. He rereads Collodi through a darkly carnivalesque lens, interweaving Aschenbach's encounter with Dionysiac passion into a reversal of Collodi's puppet's journey to create an apocalyptic voyage into the labyrinthine Real that is at once funny, and cruelly shocking.

Coover makes this link by means of Derrida's investigation of Plato's use of the word pharmakon and its cognates in the Phaedrus and elsewhere. In the Phaedrus it is used to refer to writing as opposed to speech as a kind of drug, and Derrida uses this to illustrate the difference that constitutes language. He argues that pharmakon must be translated as both remedy and poison, not as one or the other. Coover takes this up when he reminds us that Collodi's Fairy's gift of life to Pinocchio, which entailed his metamorphosis from puppet to human, hinged on his learning to take her bitter “good medicine” that transformed him into un ragazzino per-bene, which might be translated only somewhat ironically as “a bourgeois masculine subject.”⁶⁴ Coover exploits the element of ambiguity in Collodi's ending to make it clear that the hand the Fairy has dealt Pinocchio is a far from straightforward one. The Pharmakon, as Derrida reminds us, always “partakes of both good and ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable,”⁶⁵ and it becomes clear that the Fairy's medicine, her cruel normalising bourgeoisifying pedagogy, may have given Pinocchio life and enabled him to achieve worldly success, but it destroyed in him everything that was life-affirming.

Collodi's story is a didactic fable for children about a puppet who comes to life, but the subtext is the construction of a new Italian bourgeoisie. Pinocchio was written in the years following Unification, when it was felt that if Italy were to compete with her Northern neighbours, a hardworking bourgeoisie would have to be created from a largely peasant working class, perceived to be lazy and essentially anarchic. Collodi's text is part of that improvement project, and Pinocchio's is an instructive example of the carnivalesque grotesque body that must be excluded in the creation of the modern state. His is a lazy, far from docile, and with that famous nose, inappropriately sexual, body.

But as Perella pointed out, Collodi is ambivalent, and here we have an example of the Bakhtinian loophole that is essential to Coover's project. It makes possible the double movement that makes present what was absent. Coover's dialogue with Collodi (via his dialogue with Derrida and Bakhtin) shows the redeemed ‘proper boy’ who transcends his puppet self to be an unpleasant prig who in Coover's ‘sequel’ grows up to be a self-absorbed if highly respected fool. It is a reading Collodi would have appreciated, and through the Bakhtinian loophole Coover constructs an alternative narrative that exposes the horror of the bourgeoisification Collodi half recommends, half resists. Everything Pinocchio does in his effort to be good is aimed at pleasing the Blue Fairy, and at regaining oneness with her. In Coover's version, Pinocchio's friends are quick to recognise that her maternal influence has been far from healthy—she is, after all, an avatar of death. Collodi's Fairy is a gruesome necrophiliac who likes to play unpleasant, spooky games with little boys, games which Coover's text reveals are designed to leave them intimidated, guilt-ridden and dependent, to say nothing of sexually perverse. Her medicine, far from doing Pinocchio good, seems to have ruined his life. It is pharmakon as poison.

Mann has said he intended the outcome of Death in Venice to be a shift away from his usual coolly analytical style. He had been reading Nietzsche, and considered whether a bringing together of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac might not be the key to a renewal in German art. T. J. Reed's convincing reading suggests that the ambivalences in the text, which include its ambiguous ending and its “strange mixture of enthusiasm and criticism, classical beauty and penetration, elevation and sordidness,” may be attributed to the fact that he found himself unable to complete the text as he had planned it, and that it was only finished after he read Lukács's essay on Socrates. Lukács “provided a sterner, potentially moral view at a time when Mann was deeply dissatisfied with the story as he had begun it.”⁶⁶

Mann's ambivalence toward contemporary art and the role of the artist is engaged through parody in the irascible, reactionary, monologic views of Professor Pinenut. Art's endeavour must be the ceaseless striving for perfection in which eternity is what counts. History is the bit that goes wrong. Any kind of provisionality is abhorred as some kind of shilly-shallying pluralism. What the world needs is Professor Pinenut's self-righteous ‘good medicine,’ a good dose of absolutes.

But Pinocchio learns much through his suffering, and as he dies he rejects the self he has become in favour of the part of him he has denied. Through this acceptance Coover is able to suggest the “something more positive” Mann could not allow Aschenbach, and at the same time Pinocchio as Prufrock dares to leave behind his crab-like shell, and Pinocchio as Bloom—in no uncertain terms—renews his physical relationship with the Fairy/Molly. Like Aschenbach, and like Collodi's puppet, Pinocchio dies at the end of Coover's narrative, but this is the longed for Lacanian “second death.” He is able to make a good death as the last fragments of his human body are removed, and the anarchic puppet is revealed. With great courage, and a mixture of terror, excitement, and serenity, he faces the abyss of the Real, and makes peace on his own terms with the Blue Fairy as the monstrous feminine. Before the altar of the Miracoli church, and in a blasphemous Pietà, the Fairy cradles Pinocchio's broken, anatomised body, no more now than a bundle of crumbling wooden sticks. He is fit only for recycling and—recycling yet again the trope of self-reflexivity—she whispers “We'll make a book out of you!” In response to Derrida's invisible presence, to difference, and to the pharmakon as remedy and poison, the pharmakon as speech and writing, Pinocchio undergoes a last metamorphosis. “[W]ith his vanishing voice” which will not vanish because it will be part of the endless dialogue of literature that contains past, present, and future (and with a wink to Henry Louis Gates's “signifyin[g]”), he replies “But a talking book, Mamma! A talking book …”⁶⁷

The central Derridean différance that informs every aspect of Coover's Pinocchio's journey, and is central to my reading of it, is crystallised as the text ends not with a whimper but with Pinocchio's theft and modification of Molly Bloom's Joycean “yes … ! Good …”⁶⁸ which brims with potential and denies linguistic boundaries as it denies Mann's tragic ending. The difference hinges in large part on the linguistic play that dances across a carnivalesque world-upside-down, and is achieved by means of a Derridean “double gesture” that refuses to simply reverse Platonic oppositions but unsettles and displaces them (as Bakhtinian dialogism doesn't merely reread earlier texts but opens them up to new interpretations), and so creates a new and productive medium.⁶⁹

Bakhtinian theories of the dialogic and of carnival and Derrida's questioning of western metaphysics become part of the complex matrix of the grotesque body of the text that is a figure at once for the palimpsest that is the mythologised textual city of Venice and for the grotesque body of the city itself, in a process that shatters in order to reincorporate and revivify the fragmented body of western literature. Coover's text becomes an exemplum of Plato's pharmakon in that it is an interweaving of texts that is a remedy against forgetting at the same time as it is a risky unravelling of that history from which a new fabric may be formed.

Coover's text is not merely an engagement with différance; it is a seriously ludic, infinitely iterable “staging” of Derrida's questioning of the metaphysics of presence. In a neat reverse mirroring of Derrida's own practice of bringing literary texts to bear on his critique of western philosophy, Coover undermines that tradition's logocentrism by an overt inscription of philosophy—in particular a rereading of Derrida's rereading of Plato's Phaedrus—on the grotesque body of western literature.

CONCLUSION

For Coover, as for most of the late-twentieth-century writers listed in the introduction to this essay, Venice “works” as a setting for reasons that can be defined as post-Romantic—that is, the attraction to “beauty in decay” remains. But there's an extra resonance now, as Venice also becomes a figure for global environmental degradation. In terms of the city as culture, Venice stands for all we have made, and for all we stand to lose. Linked to this, it is also an object of what Andreas Huyssen terms “museal desire.” Huyssen points out that we live in a period that has witnessed, paradoxically in a time characterised by the waning of history and by cultural amnesia, “a memory boom of unprecedented proportions.”⁷⁰ Coover's city is a realisation of Huyssen's creative fissure that occurs between the past and the present and between historical events and their contemporary representation. It is both a productive theatre of contestation, and “an anchoring space” within millennial uncertainties that enables an engagement with the present and with the future. This does not make it a symptom of conservative nostalgia; the crumbling stage on which Pinocchio finds himself is hardly an exquisite representation meant to stand in lieu of the perfect city that is slipping from our grasp. Rather, the perfection of Venice preserved as the consummate medieval-Renaissance urbs, the kind of space Huyssen might term a “burial chamber” of our collective western past,⁷¹ is smashed open, in a defiant and loving carnivalesque act of creative destruction.

Notes

1. Tony Tanner refers to Sir John Mandeville's prototypical and influential Travels, first published in Anglo-Norman French in 1356–57 and soon translated into English, and he credits a description by Sir Roger Ascham (1570) as identifying “Venice as a place, the place, of love, lechery, sensuality, prostitution as well as a place of wise rulers, and just laws” (Tanner 1992, 5).

2. This comes from the opening paragraphs of his essay “Venice,” first published in Century Magazine in 1882. He quickly qualified his statement by adding that when it comes to writing about Venice “the old is better than any novelty” and that “[i]t would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say” (Italian Hours 1), presumably since that could mean either that the city had been desecrated by the ill-considered and poorly executed renovation and modernisation Ruskin had warned against, or—perhaps worse—that it had been successfully saved from its gorgeous decline. For all that he considered it to have become nothing more than “a battered peep-show and bazaar” (7), he went on to write two novels and a novella and three more essays for which Venice is the focus.

3. It is of course difficult to trace “popular” fiction once it is out of print, and so it is difficult to confirm these figures, but I have taken account of the Marciana's eccentric Tursi Collection, a gift made to the library of modern non-Italian literature set in Venice. I thank Marino Zorzi, director of the library, for giving me access to this archive.

4. This number doesn't include novels in translation, or those in which Venice plays only a small if significant role.

5. Examples include Anne Rice's gothic romance Cry to Heaven (1982); historical novels by David Thompson (The Mirrormaker 1993) and Ross King (Domino 1995); detective novels by Donna Leon (the Guido Brunetti series, 1992–98), Anthony Appiah (Another Death in Venice 1995), and Michael Dibdin (Dead Lagoon 1994); and romances by Erica Jong (Serenissima 1987), Ardythe Ashley (The Christ of the Butterflies 1991), and Judith Krantz (Lovers 1994).

6. Coover 1991, 20.

7. Coover 1991, 291.

8. Collodi 1986, 456–61.

9. Coover 1991, 47.

10. Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence, and he took the pen name Collodi from the Tuscan town in which his mother was born. Nicolas Perella, in his excellent introduction to his parallel text of Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, notes that although there is some disagreement, “not a few Italian readers have claimed that the environments in Pinocchio bear the unmistakable character of Tuscany,” and they note not just signs of “a mid-nineteenth-century Tuscan mentality” but “a characteristic recourse to linguistic provincialism and witticisms—the famous arguzia toscana” (Perella 1986, 1, 63). Coover produces a parodic late-twentieth-century Venetian mentality, and replaces arguzia toscana with Venetian dialect slang crossed with traditional commedia dialogue and carnivalesque curses and blasphemy.

11. Coover 1991, 14.

12. Coover 1991, 14.

13. Byron 1986, 4.1.

14. Ruskin 1851–53, Vol. 2, 67–68.

15. Pound 1964, Canto XVII.

16. Ihimaera 1986, 430.

17. Coover 1991, 128.

18. Coover 1991, 185.

19. Coover 1991, 216.

20. Coover 1991, 202, 203.

21. Coover 1991, 72.

22. Bakhtin 1984, 114–15.

23. Frye 1957, 308–12; Bakhtin 1984, 114–19.

24. Bakhtin 1984, 116.

25. Frye 1957, 309.

26. Bakhtin 1984, 124–25.

27. Collodi 1986, 456–61.

28. Coover 1991, 285.

29. Coover 1991, 271.

30. Bakhtin 1984, 133.

31. Pinocchio in Venice is Coover's second rewriting of Collodi's story. The first, The Public Burning, is also a highly carnivalised, dialogic novel, although as Jackson Cope points out, Coover could not have read or even known about Bakhtin by the time that novel was completed. The influence of carnival came to him first through literary history rather than through literary theory (Cope 1986, 72).

32. Cope notes that Coover “exists” in The Public Burning, through “dozens of allusions to his former novels, to his own novelistic obsessions. “He sees him as rendered “a bit singer in his own chorale, “pushed aside by the “cacophony of views, overlapping of voices “in that text (Cope 1986, 71–72). The same could be said for Pinocchio except that Coover also, self-mockingly, inhabits the body of his protagonist. Pinenut teaches at an East Coast university, for example, and when, near the end of his life, he nestles into the soft bosom of the Blue Fairy, it reminds him of a cornfield in Iowa. Coover is a member of the faculty at Brown University, and by birth an Iowan.

33. Coover 1991, 295.

34. Coover 1991, 307.

35. In political exile from Florence, Dante wrote the Commedia in Ravenna and spent time in nearby Venice. Unlike Pinocchio he was not able to return home. The Arsenale is said to have influenced the hellish imagery in the Inferno; Coover renders the whole city hellish.

36. Hutcheon 1989, 88.

37. Coover 1991, 118.

38. Cope 1986, 16.

39. Perella 1986, 2, 5.

40. Perella 1986, 4.

41. Perella 1986, 2.

42. Perella 1986, 54–55; Collodi 1986, 460–61.

43. Perella 1986, 55.

44. In an autobiographical sketch, Mann states that a trip to the Lido furnished him with all the material for the novella, and that his task was merely to interpret it. Like his protagonist (and like Pinenut), he was at a literary standstill, and at a crossroads in his development (Gronicka 1964, 46; Reed 1974, 149). Like Pinocchio, Aschenbach comes to Venice because he finds himself unable to complete the work he has undertaken: “it would not yield either to patient effort, or a swift coup de main” (Mann 1989, 7, 8).

45. Mann 1989, 7. Compare Coover 1991, 14.

46. Mann 1989, 11.

47. Joyce 1968, Ch. 6 “Hades”; Coover 1991, Ch. 19 “At L'Omino's Tomb” and Ch. 20 “The Original Wet Dream.”

48. Coover 1991, 236.

49. Joyce 1968, 449.

50. Coover 1991, 140, 154, 155.

51. Coover 1991, 175; Eliot 1917, 1. 97.

52. Coover 1991, 15; Eliot 1917, 1. 73–74.

53. Coover 1991, 17; Eliot 1917, 1. 51.

54. Eliot 1917, 1.15–22; Coover 1991, 13, 178, 258, 293.

55. Eliot 1917, 1. 117–19, 1. 41, 44; Coover 1991, 68–69.

56. Collodi 1986, 166–69; Coover 1991, 34.

57. Coover 1991, 47–48.

58. Coover 1991, 66–78.

59. Coover 1991, 76.

60. Coover 1991, 99.

61. Coover 1991, 76.

62. Mann 1989, 70–71.

63. Derrida 1981, 74. “Is writing seemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is it proper to write? Is it done?”

64. Collodi 1986, esp. Ch. XVII and Ch. XXXVI.

65. Derrida 1981, 99.

66. Reed 1974, 166.

67. Coover 1991, 329.

68. Coover 1991, 330.

69. Derrida 1982, 329.

70. Huyssen 1995, 5.

71. Huyssen 1995, 15.

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