The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek
"The Elephant" by Sławomir Mrożek is a satirical tale set in a provincial Polish zoo during a communist era characterized by bureaucratic absurdities. The story revolves around a self-serving zoo director who, rather than accepting a real elephant allocated by the government, opts to create a fake one from rubber to project an image of success. His decision stems from a desire to maintain appearances and secure a bonus, reflecting a broader commentary on the failures of bureaucratic systems and the lengths individuals will go to avoid accountability.
As the narrative unfolds, the director's plan to inflate the rubber elephant leads to a series of comedic mishaps, culminating in the bizarre moment when the fake elephant unexpectedly rises into the sky, leaving a group of schoolchildren disillusioned. The story critiques the inadequacies of the zoo, where substandard conditions are masked for the sake of reputation, and illustrates how the pursuit of superficial success can result in disillusionment and chaos. Mrożek’s work serves as both an allegory and a fable, offering insight into the human condition and the impact of societal pressures on individual actions.
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The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek
First published: "Słoń," 1957 (English translation, 1962)
Type of plot: Fable, allegory, satire
Time of work: The 1950's
Locale: A provincial town in communist Poland
Principal Characters:
The director , of the Zoological GardensA party of schoolchildren
The Story
This third-person narrative focuses on the ambitious and self-serving director of the Zoological Gardens in a provincial Polish town. The zoo is substandard in this communist society in which appearances mean everything and in which major inadequacies are overlooked because they would, if articulated, reflect badly on the bureaucracy governing the country.
The zoo's animals are distinctly inferior. The giraffe has a short neck, the badger has no burrow, and the whistlers seldom whistle. The director cares little about the educational function of the zoo, which is often visited by parties of schoolchildren. The facility lacks some of the major animals that zoos should have, most notably an elephant. As Sławomir Mrożek observes, three thousand rabbits are no substitute for "the noble giant."
On July 22, the anniversary of liberation, a letter from Warsaw announces that an elephant has finally been allocated to the zoo. The director, however, seeking to cast himself in a favorable light among his superiors, rejects Warsaw's offer, saying that he can save considerable money by procuring an elephant on his own. After his letter works its way through the bureaucracy, his proposal is accepted.
On receiving this news, the director rushes his plan into operation: He has a fake elephant constructed from heavy rubber. This ersatz animal, painted an elephantine gray, is to be secured behind a railing far from visitors to the zoo. The descriptive material posted on the railing outside the elephant habitat explains that the elephant is a sluggish animal and that this elephant is particularly sluggish. The director then sets two zoo attendants to work secretly in the deep of night, blowing up the huge mass of rubber that, when fully inflated, will be indistinguishable at a distance from a genuine pachyderm.
The attendants begin their task, but their progress is slow and discouraging. After two hours, the rubber mass has risen only a couple of inches. It looks like a collapsed rubber skin, not an elephant. The attendants work under considerable pressure because the director wants the elephant in place immediately, thereby qualifying him for a bonus. The discouraged attendants notice a gas pipe that ends in a valve. They quickly connect the rubber skin to the valve, and gas passes into the cumbersome body that within a few minutes clearly becomes an elephant.
The following morning, the elephant is secured in an area in front of a large rock beside the monkey cage. A descriptive poster declares that it is particularly sluggish and that it hardly moves. Everything is now in place for visitors. The first group to arrive consists of schoolchildren, whose teacher identifies elephants as herbivorous animals related to the mammoth. The teacher explains that elephants, weighing between nine thousand and thirteen thousand pounds, are the largest land animals, outweighed in the animal kingdom only by the whale, which is not a land creature.
The children are transfixed at the sight of this huge animal, bigger than any living thing that they have ever seen. As they stand in awe watching the elephant, a gentle breeze agitates the branches of nearby trees. Just as the teacher is expounding on the elephant's weight, the breeze engulfs the noble beast. It shudders, then rises into the air. It quivers above the ground, but suddenly a hearty gust blows beneath it, causing it to rise precipitously into the sky, rising, ever rising, until it disappears beyond the treetops, as the astonished monkeys in the adjoining cage stare unbelievingly into space. The carcass finally lands in the adjacent botanical gardens, settling on a cactus that punctures its skin.
The schoolchildren who witness this bizarre incident soon begin to neglect their studies, indeed turning into hooligans. They begin to drink liquor and to break windows, no longer believing in elephants.