Page 176 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 151

the donkey’s wish is repressed by his master, the potter; the potter
represses himself out of his master’s fear; the donkey’s achievement is
made to remain unnoticed; the revelation of his nature is blacked out.
The donkey’s repression is not due to the strength of a symbolic system
that he would have internalized and owned; it is the result of a positive
will on the part of the one, the king, whose power controls the whole
system of social and symbolic relations. The hegemony is political.
One may, on the contrary, like to see how a flight of imagination
prompts a process of absolute inversion of the system of power relation-
ship. The order is turned upside down by a discursive fiction of mind.
It is homologous to well-known popular practices, which in carnivals
(Bakhtine 1970, 1984: 122–24) and other similar festive rituals—such
as those organized by ‘play-acting societies’ at the end of the medieval
ages and during Renaissance, and in which the donkey had his role to
play (Davis 1979: 139–250)—enact the same inversion of status and
roles, the subordinate taking up roles of king and clergy, master and
husband, lord and superordinate.
However, the inversion remains highly ambiguous, and the narrative
open-ended. Four contrasting interpretations seem possible:

1. The inversion might be construed as a mockery of the king and
his power. The donkey’s mimicry debases those in power. The
status of the king is deflated. Once appropriated by a donkey,
the king’s power becomes redundant and illegitimate, and the
king loses all ascendancy. For a while a ludicrous fiction, the
textual discourse writes off the entire given dispensation that
is grounded in the king.
2. One may, on the contrary, understand that the donkey, zeal-
ously and jealously, attempts to emulate the king. I stressed
-
the care taken by the Vadars to situate themselves in close
.
proximity to the king as his most dedicated servants, and in
critical circumstances to act as the saviours of the kingdom. We
may understand that this proximity projects itself in a dream
of assimilation to the king’s power. Then, while the oppressed
donkey succeeds in imagination to equal and even excel the
king, the latter’s feedback is a repressive control of the rival. The
donkey should remain the sacrificial scapegoat at the base of
the social order. Mimesis and violence are the two basic drives
of any society (Girard 1985: 61–67).