From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey by Georgia Panteli (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey by Georgia Panteli Kelly Mckisson From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey. By Georgia Panteli. (Studies in Comparative Literature, 40) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xi+ 178 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–781887–12–7. When in 2023 Guillermo Del Toro's stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio won the Oscar for best animated feature, audiences were again captivated by the adventures of the now one-hundred-and-forty-year-old mischievous puppet. Carlo Collodi's classic, first serialized in an Italian children's magazine in 1881–82, and then expanded and published as a novel in 1883, has been so widely translated and adapted that it remains 'one of the most famous texts in the world' (p. 1). So proclaims the first line of Georgia Panteli's slim book, From Puppet to Cyborg. Panteli's comparative project tracks contemporary retellings of the Pinocchio myth and analyses how they reinterpret and revise the original's concern with a desire to be human. The pleasure of reading Panteli's book comes not from one centrally sustained argument but instead from thought-provoking insights revealed by unearthing Pinocchio elements in multiple recent reimaginings, across three media forms and multiple languages. As the title suggests, Panteli's survey makes a suitable case for the Pinocchio myth, and especially the wooden boy's desires, as an early precursor to posthuman narratives—here, readers should expect the posthumanism aligned with Nick Bostrum's Tn Defense of Posthuman Dignity' (Bioethics, 19.3 (2005), 202–14), which refers to the transhuman or superhuman extension of the human category. Panteli moves from cyborg Pinocchios in science fiction film and television to ironic Pinocchios in postmodern metafiction and then to subversive Pinocchios in contemporary graphic novels, making new use of Collodi's original myth in each instance. The structure and analysis of From Puppet to Cyborg resemble the picaresque journey of Pinocchio's adventures: with few sections longer than fifteen pages, the book's Introduction and Conclusion bookend three parts that are divided into prefatory pieces and nine short chapters. The Introduction is one of the longest sections, providing an overview of the contexts for Collodi's original and subsequent international translations, as well as twentieth-century stage and film adaptations. Here, Panteli makes a case for understanding Pinocchio's part in the fairy-tale tradition, following Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale (Russian original 1928), as well as Pinocchio's function as modern myth, fitting Joseph Campbell's formula from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first edition 1949). Outlining the themes and archetypes of the Pinocchio myth—for example, fairy and talking animal characters; moments of confrontation and transformation; the hero's journey [End Page 595] of separation, initiation, and return—allows Panteli to engage these elements as connections for comparative analysis through the book's survey of contemporary retellings. In Part i, Panteli claims that Pinocchio's status as 'the first simulacrum to have his own wish to become human' sets him apart from earlier inanimate transformations, such as Pygmalion's Galatea, and instead connects him to science-fictional cyborgs (p. 26). Rachael of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), David of Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and the Sharons of Battlestar Galactica (2004) are 'semantic relatives and thematic cognates' who negotiate their own relationship with humanity (p. 30). In Part ii, metafictional author characters in Jerome Charyn's Pinocchio's Nose (1983) and Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice (1991) adopt and then reverse elements of the Pinocchio myth to satirize the human condition, especially through a focus on ageing and death, a perhaps not-so-happy ending for all puppets-become-human. The psychoanalytic cues of these postmodern novels allow Panteli to re-examine features of the original myth, such as the Oedipal relationship between Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy. In Part iii Panteli reads two graphic novels, Ausonia's Pinocchio (2006) and Winshluss's Pinocchio (2008), for how they deconstruct—perhaps more literally, break apart and reverse or reject—the myth's progress narrative of human becoming, especially to effect a critique of consumerist values. Panteli achieves no...