Lying Through One's Nose: On Masculine Sexuality and Deception in Collodi’s Pinocchio

This article considers Carlo Collodi’s classic, The Adventures of Pinocchio, in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theoretical developments of French psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay. While offering a Lacanian account of Pinocchio’s tribulations, its major purpose is not to add to the store of usually anodyne psychoanalytic mappings of Collodi’s plot, but to use Collodi’s text to interrogate and precise the function of lying and deception in male sexuation: the crucial importance, for a man, of constructing the phantasy or fiction (and hence lie) of what Lacan calls a “logical instrument” made of parts and detach