Unless you count me catching the sight of a herd crossing an elephant corridor in the Serengeti with a voiceover that makes me look out of the window to check whether the Brits have really left the country. In that case, since our television is in the living room, I do occasionally see an elephant or five in the room. But barring this convoluted route that isn’t the Real PcDerm, no, I have never seen an elephant in the room. And I suspect neither have any of you, dear Ganesh-loving readers.
And yet, the phrase, if not the animal in the phrase, ‘elephant in the room’ pops up from time to time. As an idiomatic expression, I grant there is girth to it – an enormous issue that is so obvious that everyone knows about it, and yet no one wants to mention it lest everyone starts talking about it. Because doing that would make everyone enormously uncomfortable, embarrassed, petrified and/or all of the above.
The phrase has its origins in a short satirical fable by 19th century Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov, ‘The Inquisitive Man’. So short is the story that it bears full (19th century translated) quotation:
‘Good day, dear friend; where do you come from?’
‘From the Museum, where I have spent three hours. I saw everything they have there, and examined it carefully. So much have I seen to astonish me, that, if you will believe me, I am neither strong enough nor clever enough to give you a full description of it. Upon my word it is a palace of wonders. How rich Nature is in invention! What birds and beasts haven’t I seen there! What flies, butterflies, cockroaches, little bits of beetles! – some like emeralds, others like coral. And what tiny cochineal insects! Why, really, some of them are smaller than a pin’s head.’
‘But did you see the elephant? What did you think it looked like? I’ll be bound you felt as if you were looking at a mountain.’ ‘Are you quite sure it’s there?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Well, brother, you mustn’t be too hard on me; but, to tell the truth, I didn’t remark the elephant.’
Krylov’s protagonist is likely to have been one of those absent-minded chaps who can’t see the trunk for the trees, a notion repeated in Mark Twain’s 1882 short story, ‘The Stolen White Elephant’ where a bunch of useless detectives search high and low for a pilfered Siamese tusker while it’s right under the metaphorical noses. But in the modern usage of the phrase, it’s not ineptness that makes an enormous affair invisible, but a conscious decision to treat it as non-existing.
In this manufactured approach to dealing with a proverbial elephant indoors, the 1935 Broadway musical, Jumbo, comes closer to the mark, when a character leading an elephant on the stage is stopped by a policeman who asks him what he’s doing with an elephant on the streets of New York, to which the reply comes with slapstick trumpet fanfare, ‘What elephant?’
Keeping a mammoth controversy under wraps takes a lot of effort. In the days of the VHS, I would be sent out by my father to get movie videos on rent that we would then watch at my aunts’ place. On one occasion, we got the lesser known Clint Eastwood thriller, Tightrope. All was going well, with the cop trying to hunt down a 1980s San Francisco Jack the Ripper. Then the tape rolled to a scene in which the killer was getting ready to kill a prostitute settled comfortably in a jacuzzi.
My father and I kept watching, occasionally looking down at our toes and fingers. But behind us where my aunts, mother and grandmother were yapping, there descended a silence as death and adult impropriety converged in a hot tub. No one spoke about it again, not my father, not I, not anyone else in the room. Until today.
That, my friends, is an elephant in the room. Or, more correctly, a prostitute in a tub in the room.