I appear to have sparked a rather serious cultural crisis in last week’s column by referring to the creator of Pinocchio, the puppet- who-became-a-boy, as Stromboli, rather than Gepetto.
The screams of protest came in a thin but steady stream. Bright and early on Monday morning a lady
with a strong Dutch accent, who claimed to be the president of the Pinocchio Protection League, called me to protest at this unforgivable slur on Gepetto’s good name.
Two readers wrote in during the week to say that there was no such person as Stromboli in the story anyway, and that I was making the further mistake of confusing the ruthless puppet master who tempted Pinocchio into a life of showbiz and corruption with an active Italian volcano. And finally, one of these readers pointed out that Pinocchio did not become “almost human”, as I had said, but actually became “fully human”.
Well, blow me down. My errors were so profound that I began to feel my nose growing longer and longer, as happens to people who deliberately go around telling lies.
The puzzling thing was that no one in this newspaper’s incredibly well-developed system of checks and balances, from editors to sub-editors and proof-readers, had picked up this terrible series of blunders as the column passed through the system towards the printing presses. No one seemed to care whether the character’s name was Stromboli or Polony.
Does this mean that the entire Mail & Guardian operation is staffed by philistines (as many senior politicians firmly believe, anyway) who don’t give a fig about folkloric characters who have become part of the historical reality of the European imagination?
It seems to me that the irritable wrath of these responses reflects a perception, strongly held in parts of our society, of a kind of cultural genocide that has swept through this country since its belated transition to democracy. Europe’s cultural icons, from Pinocchio to Beethoven, are being relentlessly ignored or deliberately misinterpreted as South Africa slowly drifts away from its colonial past.
But then again, I guess I’d also be a little irritated if foreigners slipped up in their interpretation of African myths and legends that I hold dear.
But is it really of critical importance whether a wooden puppet becomes “almost human” or “fully human”? The whole idea is ridiculous anyway.
But let me give some context to these appalling blunders. Of course I know the story of Pinocchio. I probably saw the Disney cartoon version on the big screen when I was about six years old, and was enchanted by it, as any child would be. To my discredit, however, it has never even crossed my mind to read the book on which this movie was based.
These days, of course, we have that same Disney version of Pinocchio in our video collection at home, and are constantly badgered by Little Miss Thing, the four-year-old who runs our lives, who constantly demands that we sit and watch it with her. As is the way with adults, you watch with half an eye and listen with half an ear, seizing every opportunity to slip out of the room for a glass of wine, a hasty interaction with the Internet or a lengthy telephone call to distant parts.
Little Miss Thing, on the other hand, is content to watch the same stuff over and over again, and probably knows the whole thing off by heart.
That Disney might well have changed the name of the puppeteer from whatever it was in the original to “Stromboli” is yet further evidence of the vulgarisation of not just European culture, but world culture generally by the unbridled power of the Hollywood studios. My further confusion of the roles of Stromboli and Gepetto clearly helped to make the world a worse place than it already is.
But, eish, everybody makes mistakes from time to time. I am well known for being a real pain around the M&G for meticulous checking and cross-checking, driving characters like our resident boffin, affectionately known as “Prof”, to the edge of distraction with my requests for corroboration of detail, especially with reference to classical literature.
On this occasion, however, the Prof was way beyond my reach. I was on an aeroplane at 9 000m above the Sahara Desert, and had woken with a start during this long overnight flight, remembering that the deadline for the delivery of that week’s column would shortly expire. And so, in the cramped confines of an economy class seat, I banged away at my story for the next two hours.
I had no way of checking any details, either in the air over Africa or on the ground at our destination in Geneva. And so those fatal slips went humming all the way to Johannesburg on the silent breath of the Internet, and I went gaily on about my Swiss business in the city of Geneva.
Of course there is no excuse for shoddy journalism. But things do need to be put in perspective.
One of the concerned readers quoted above wrote: “Given that confusion [of Gepetto and Stromboli] in paragraph one, can I really be surprised that I failed to come to grips with this episode in a series of usually lucid insights?” He then goes on to contradict himself by calling the column in question: “… a fascinating piece and culturally important …”, but ultimately feels morally obliged to add, as a final stab: “… but it was bloody hard to wade through after that”. (“That” being the unforgivable role-switch between good and evil, represented by the contrasting figures of Gepetto and Stromboli.)
OK, OK. I back down. I fall on my sword. I will read through the complete works of the Brothers Grimm and the Swiss Family Robinson before I utter another word on any culturally sensitive subject.
But I still stand by what I said about the rest of that Eurocentric claptrap that is cluttering up our local cultural space. Dialogue, and the warping of received perceptions, are still the stuff of life and art, after all.
The rest is silence.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza