‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’

Brecht is said to have kept a small stuffed-toy donkey on his work-desk; around its neck a hand-lettered sign saying, ‘I, too, must understand.’ Quite often, I feel like I am that donkey.

‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’ Thus Prince Myshkin enthuses to the giggly Yepanchin girls in The Idiot. Such is the Prince’s idea of sitting-room small-talk with young ladies. Kafka had to persuade Max Brod that Dostoyevsky's characters were not all lunatics but merely ‘incidentally mad’; and Myshkin is perhaps the maddest, if only because of his purity. I imagine readers like myself who love Myshkin and The Idiot do so in much the same way as the Prince was ‘awfully fond’ of the ‘good-natured and useful’ donkey.

Robert Bresson, too, was very good on the ‘exquisite sensitivity’ of certain animals, and so was very taken with The Idiot, in particular the profound communication that Myshkin claims to hear in a donkey’s braying. ‘Absolutely admirable’, Bresson declared, ‘to have an idiot informed by an animal, to have him see life through an animal, who passes for an idiot but is of an intelligence.’ He went on to take the novel as his template for Au Hasard Balthazar.

My daughter spent much of last week puzzling over Disney’s Pinocchio, a fine bit of work, if a tad perplexing (also a tad unsettling) for a 3-year-old, in respect of its complicated fantasy-morality: one of the high points of which is the forced metamorphosis of a pack of juvenile delinquents into a herd of pack-mules, carted off to a life of hard labour for their sins. Yes, a donkey’s lot can be a source of great pathos. One would like to think that at least some of Pinocchio’s mates ended up on sandy beaches wearing straw hats and giving pleasure rides to little kids.