ON DONKEYS IN LITERATURE / Features / Untitled Books

“At critical moments, both Lucius and Pinocchio attempt to speak, but find they can only bray, and few sounds are more brutish and inarticulate.”

ON DONKEYS IN LITERATURE

Only a superior beast of burden can find happiness in a burst balloon, argues Cornelius Medvei.

Appropriately perhaps for such a hard-working and adaptable animal, the donkey has been put to many different literary uses. It appears in scripture and political allegory, children's stories and travel records, not to mention the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes. But no consistent picture emerges from all these descriptions. Rather as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each concentrates on a different aspect; one emphasises the donkey's stubbornness, another its status as a beast of burden, another its intelligence. What follows is a brief survey of a very disparate canon.

All four gospels describe Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, but only Matthew interprets this as a sign of humility, referring to the prophecy in Zechariah, "Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass". It might be said that the donkey's principal function in this Bible story is to be misunderstood; the people welcome Jesus by spreading garments and branches in his way, as they would for a king entering the city in triumph. The symbolism of the donkey is lost on the eyewitnesses, but not on the readers of the gospel account.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Midas is called upon to judge between the gods Apollo and Pan in a music contest. When he casts his vote in favour of Pan, Apollo takes revenge by giving him ass's ears. The metamorphosis is not surprising in itself, given that transformation is the central theme of the poem, but it is remarkable how many of the subsequent appearances of donkeys in literature also involve transformations. A century or so after Ovid, Apuleius' The Golden Ass tells the story of Lucius, who rubs himself with a stolen ointment which he hopes will change him into an owl. Instead, he turns into a donkey. This misfortune apparently results from a mix-up with the magic ointments, but in the context of the story it is clearly also a punishment for his meddling with the supernatural. A further instance of transformation as punishment occurs in the nineteenth century, in Pinocchio, whose hero is turned into a donkey as a consequence of his laziness. All these punishments, though harsh, are fitting in their own way: Midas' "insensitive" ears are replaced with those of an ass; Lucius becomes the opposite of what he had hoped - a donkey, the emblem of folly, rather than an owl, symbolising wisdom; while Pinocchio and his idle playmates are transformed into beasts of burden.

Being a human in donkey shape is presented as an unpleasant experience. As donkeys, Lucius and Pinocchio are ill-treated by their owners, neither can stomach the fodder he is given, and Pinocchio is sold for his skin, while Lucius is threatened at one point with castration, and later with being forced to copulate in a packed amphitheatre with a woman who has been convicted of murdering several people (it goes without saying that the two books are somewhat different in tone). Beside these indignities and abuses, they have to contend with the loss of speech. At critical moments, both Lucius and Pinocchio attempt to speak, but find they can only bray, and few sounds are more brutish and inarticulate than the discordant braying of a donkey. In Lucius' case, at least, there is some compensation; he finds that with his long ears he can eavesdrop on people's conversations, and in this way hears various tales which he recounts to punctuate the main narrative.

But however distressing it may be for its victims, transformation into a donkey also has great comic potential. Maybe the best-known donkey transformation of all, the ass's head imposed on Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is played largely for comic effect, being a piece of mischief rather than a punishment. Much of the comedy lies in the fact that unlike Midas, Lucius and Pinocchio, Bottom is only dimly aware that he has been transformed. Hence his observation that he must go to the barber, as he is "marvellous hairy about the face", his unusual appetite; "I could munch your good dry oats," he tells Titania, "methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay..." and the frequent unconscious puns; "This is to make an ass of me, to fright me if they could," he remarks when his companions run off in terror at his first appearance with the ass's head.

There is a similar comic dislocation between perception and reality in Don Quixote, except that it is the other way around - the marvels are all in the hero's mind, while his surroundings remain resolutely mundane. Don Quixote sees windmills as giants, and his old horse as the noble steed Rocinante, but interestingly he does not submit Sancho Panza's donkey to the same imaginative transformation. Instead, he expresses doubt as to whether a donkey is a proper mount for a squire, and only reluctantly allows Sancho to bring it with him on their adventures. Perhaps, though, this dim view of the donkey is as mistaken as his other perceptions. Sancho's own high opinion of the animal is made clear throughout the story; it is shared by his wife, who shows more concern for the donkey's health than for that of her husband when he returns home. And it is surely significant that when the thief Gines has the opportunity to steal either Rocinante or Sancho's donkey, he chooses the donkey, on the grounds that no one will give him any money for Don Quixote's horse.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes is another book in which a donkey plays a supporting role, but Stevenson's relationship with Modestine is more troubled than Sancho Panza's with his donkey. As a contemporary review in the Spectator put it, somewhat disapprovingly, "The early part of the book is taken up by the account of how this donkey was purchased, how it was over-laden, and how much the writer had to beat it." Despite his difficulties in getting the donkey to go where he wanted her to, Stevenson writes about her with affection, if not always with his full attention: however charming she may have been, as a travelling companion Modestine was no substitute for Fanny Osborne, the American woman he was hoping to marry and who had returned to California shortly before he set out on his trip - although the donkey did have one distinct advantage at least, in that she carried his luggage.

In the twentieth century, donkeys appear as characters in their own right. A.A. Milne's Eeyore, with his put-upon air, his pessimism and his presumably masochistic taste for thistles, is instantly recognisable: he is someone who enjoys being miserable. This is of course a human trait, but as donkeys often wear a look of patient suffering, with their ears drooping and their eyes downcast, the anthropomorphism does not seem out of place. All the same, there is something theatrical about Eeyore's misery, and his relentless sarcasm and occasional unguarded moments of euphoria on being reunited with his missing tail, or receiving a burst balloon and an empty honey pot for his birthday, invite the reader to suspect that the whole performance may be a front.

Benjamin, the donkey in Animal Farm, shares Eeyore's morose outlook, but his cynicism seems more rooted in experience. He is one of the most intelligent animals on the farm; beside the pigs, he is the only one who can read, although he chooses not to, on the grounds that there is nothing worth reading. Above all, he has no illusions; he is neither enthusiastic about the animals' revolution, nor surprised at its eventual failure, and it is Benjamin alone among the animals who realises what is happening when the carthorse Boxer is taken away to the knacker's. He is the only donkey so far mentioned who is credited with a high level of intelligence, which is odd given that, as Robert Graves comments in his introduction to The Golden Ass, "asses are really far more sagacious than horses".

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Caroline: A Mystery by Cornelius Medvei is published by Harvill Secker
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Monday, 20 December, 2010