Page 173 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

148 Guy Poitevin

to portray themselves as masons of palaces and cities for kings. As a
matter of fact, they often enjoy conceiving of themselves as dedicated
servants of kings and saviours of kingdoms in critical circumstances. 16
As a matter of fact, the discourse lays a claim to more than a social
status—to a hidden identity. The display of strength in the instant
construction of a entire city made of brass and copper, a princely
marriage secured as due right, and the living in a palace regularly built
by the king, though, logically contrast an undeniable hidden essence of
power with contrary worldly appearances of subservience: the power
to erect cities operates in the night and is kept unnoticed, the royal
palace is built in the heart of a jungle.
These logical oppositions are not mere mental play of opposites,
nor complacent contemplation of the hidden capacities of the donkey.
The narrative is no fancy tale. The donkey’s tremendous skill to build a
lasting city, his marrying a princess and his residence in a palace mean
-
to lay and legitimate the claim of the Vadar community to a status of
.
Ksatriya. The servile animal is in essence a prince. A community with
.
a low status makes a symbolic attempt to upgrade itself to the high-
est possible on on the strength of its performance as builder, a king’s
distinctive prerogative.

Prince Riding a Heavenly Horse
The third process of community recognition takes as its base the figure
of the donkey projected as a divine entity. I have already stressed in
the other levels the pervading logic of binary opposition and inversion:
here also it is in the middle of the night that a horse descends from
heaven and stages a reversal of the apparent reality; the princely power
of the donkey as a true Ksatriya and supra-human denied recognition
.
by king and citizens in the day is fully deployed and manifested when
darkness wraps the whole earth. The beast of burden is transfigured as
to incorporate its proper form of god by an intervention from heaven
that reverses its worldly subalternity. Then the ‘true story’ can be re-
alized and confessed by the queen: ‘The donkey is an incarnation, an
-
avatar of god.’
Let us not miss the intention of the final statement of the discourse
as the queen likely does: she seemingly understood nothing more than
what the theological utterance itself states about the divine nature of the
donkey. But the queen is only an ‘actant’ of the narrative. The ‘actor’ of