Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Maxim Biller's "THE MAHOGANY ELEPHANT"

Monday night, I read the interview between the New Yorker and Maxim Biller. Often writers annoy me in interviews, but Biller made me a believer when he said, “I always try to keep it simple. I think the writer has to write in such a way that people know what he is talking about. Only then can they start to discover the secret of the prose behind the prose.” Has there ever been a clearer evocation of the Hemingway school of prose? the secret behind which universal emotions are exchanged. Like Hemingway, Biller’s story, THE MAHOGANY ELEPHANT is more like a beautiful scene in a play than a narrative. Not that it doesn’t progress, because it does. A middle aged man, about whom no physical detail is spared, and his girlfriend – less described than the boyfriend – come together after three months apart. She has returned from India, a trip after which they’ve agreed to marry or never see each other again. 

However, it doesn’t look hopeful: she tells him she didn’t miss him, and gives him a present that he throws into the trash. They talk awkwardly, and she tells the boyfriend how the present has more importance than he or the reader expected, prompting the main character to search through the trash for the elephant. We find she lost it three times, and he has lost it a fourth. She helps him clean the mess of the trash, nevertheless, and jokes that they are done; a joke both the reader and character think is true. The narrator waits for her to urinate and realizes he isn't really sad about the break-up, more ready to start the joy of being alone. (funny, since alone he will be.) But, he is wrong; he finds her in his bedroom, clothed, and resigned to marrying him.

That’s it. We are given very little back-story, no long, exquisite stream of conscious, no highfalutin epiphany or grand understanding of life. The plot is a woman’s surprise decision to bind herself to a lifeless relationship. But, the remarkable victory is how individualistic and universal both characters feel. The waiting lover is described as, “he sorted out his photos, rearranged his books, moved the furniture around, and then he went on waiting.” This could be any guy killing time, but the next detail give us a key personality insight: “After that, he read all the letters he had ever received and threw most of them away, and then he bought a large map of India and hung it above his bed. Or rather, he didn’t buy a map of India, but that was what he really wanted to do.” This moment reveals to the reader that despite the narrator's claim to care about this woman, he feels little sentimentality about the relationship. Furthermore, we come to see him as the type to imagine hanging a map of India as a sign of endearment, but doesn't actually do it. 

Throughout the story, whether he is looking outside at the “large green leaves,” analyzing his girlfriend’s urination patterns, texting her apology's while she is flying, petulantly making “up his mind to say as little as possible,” forcing her to drink wine instead of water, or throwing away the elephant she gives him, the reader sees the pettiness of the boyfriend. He is waiting for her to make a decision, while asserting very little himself; his passivity along with his desire for her “to suffer a little; he wanted her to say it and feel unhappy about hurting him” make the reader empathize with the girlfriend and want her to get away.

She doesn’t, instead she dies in the end; not literally, but examine how her voice and her appearance is described in the story. One of the first details we learn from the boyfriend is “she had lost weight on her travels […]She was tired […]she’d gone away to recover from feeling tired all the time, and now that she was back she was still tired.” He goes on to say, “And she’d grown older. Older or harder or more serious – he wasn’t sure which. There was a gray tinge to her tanned skin, the kind you usually see only on older women.” 

Also, one of the story’s most marvelous lines is assigned to her. The boyfriend asks how she wants her water, and she says, “room temperature.” Such a nice moment, because the emotional temperature of the room is so dry and dead, for her to want her water this way anticipates her last decision. The set-up for this revelation is telling. The boyfriend is looking for his girlfriend, and the narrator notes, “she said quietly,” and then a line down, “she said even more quietly.” The boyfriend can’t locate her, and her voice is dissipating like she is on her death bed, which becomes literal when the boyfriend finds her “in the bedroom. She was lying in his bed fully clothed,” like a person in a casket, I would add. The narrator, however, gets the same point across in the last sentence: “She lay there in his bed fully clothed, and then she turned on her side, laid her head on the pillow and put her hands under it, and looked at him gravely and sadly.” Note the use of the adverb gravely, never used more appropriately.

Again, that’s it. Except there is more, an element of what I will call magic, meaning less rabbits out of hats and more a sense of the metaphysical or spiritual. The lost elephant adds this to the story and throws off easy interpretations, taking the story a step further. The elephant’s fourth disappearance is a great metaphor because it tells you everything and nothing. The magic is that the lost elephant suggests an alternative force sending both characters a message, which is brilliant, because it’s a message neither the reader nor the characters understands but knows is important.

7 comments:

lit up said...

I see them everywhere: Those ho-hum, zombie-like love affairs that neither want to live nor die. The lovers seem glued together by an invisible force, which upon closer inspection might smell like loneliness or indecision or boredom or obligation or...nothing at all.

"The Mahogany Elephant" brings to mind the pink elephant that languishes in the middle of such a relationship. Not sure if the notion of "pink elephant" exists in German, though (the story is translated). If not, Biller still uses the small, black, mahogany elephant in the same manner: an elusive thing in the relationship that nonetheless looms large but unspoken. That the story is about the unspoken might also speak to its brevity (one mere double-spaced page).

The narrator, who receives said elphant as a gift from his prodigal girlfriend, tosses it in the trash. When he tries to retrieve it, it's nowhere to be found, and the reader presumes the girlfriend fished it out of the trash when she went to get some water in the kitchen. We know she'll eventually lose it anyway: "I lost the first three...Do you think that means something?" Disappearing elephants, it seems to me, incarnates this couple's on-again-off-again passion. She only bought the gift when she suddenly remembered him at the airport--and what's worse, she confesses this casually. And just when the narrator is sure it's over, she transports herself to the bedroom. Taken at face value, what this mixed message implies makes me suck my teeth: for women, yes is no and no is yes. But the story isn't as simple as that. It captures, with sharp detail, ambiguity of emotion, of being neither here nor there emotionally or physically.

"Elephant" begins in media res--you hit the ground running, but don't find yourself tripping. There are no lengthy backstories, justifications, or explanations. By osmosis and the Biller's wizardry, you come to get to know this couple in single page. I envy such brevity, precision, and simplicity. At the same time, there's a blandness to the story that I'm not digging too much. Perhaps it's fitting, this blandness, in that it makes me feel as ambivalent as the couple.

The image that accompanies the story serves as counterpoint and comes closer to the story's core than the elephant: a red candle shaped as an embracing couple whose flame has already consumed the top of the man's head.

sidik fofana said...

Andrew, this is an ill idea for a blog. I've read every post you've written and they're on point!

I'm surprised you generally liked this story though. The symbolism is very deep and there is a lot of layers to the dialogue but the story itself was kinda boring. I found it hard to believe that he would throw a gift his girlfriend gave him from India in the trash right away but then again I don't know the nature of their relationship. It was kinda funny now I think about it. It was one of those Seinfeld situational comedy moments...your girl telling you how the lengths she went to get you something that you just threw in the trash. That was humorous.

I don't know, maybe I've just been tainted by American movie culture, but I generally gravitate towards stories about people killing not dying, people fcuking not loving, and people sniffing not epiphany'ing. This story lacked in that area for better or for worse. Even the love scene (or almost love scene) was unappealing to me.

But, above all, I do recognize it as good writing. There were many interpretations that I didn't see the first time, especially the whole death/decaying thing which was pretty big. Great post, Andrew. I look forward to reading more.

Drew said...

First off, thanks so much for reading and posting Sidik. I’m
excited that you are going to be
reading, and hope you will continue to post responses. I would appreciate it endlessly.


Killing but not dying. Interesting phrase. So many of movies today have just that. People killing others, but no one really dying. Killers get a lot of airtime in our culture, and in their stories, the victims’ deaths are treated with aloofness; hurry back to the killer and see who he will get next! Last night, another writer friend and I were talking shit, and the notion of grotesqueness and sentimentality came up. This is what I liked so much about the story: the lack of sentimentality and the subtlety of the grotesqueness. Neither character spills their heart. And when the writer gives us insight into the boyfriend’s heart, we find there isn’t much there; mostly bitterness and resentment, which, I thought, was the reason he threw away the present. I think he figures she is about to leave him, and this present is a ‘dear john’ elephant. (Also, we are told in the beginning that he had started throwing away her letters while she was away. What a throwback! Letters. I use to have a drawer fill of those monsters of sentimentality.)


Blandness. I find some story’s affect on the reader has to do with taste. In writing workshops, instructors always tell classes not to respond to a story based on their own individual taste, a necessary proclamation, but not really possible. Can one ever eat a story without their own taste buds? Others have told me they found this story bland. I agree in a way; if the story had been twenty pages I would have expected more dramatics, but two pages, I found the tension of the girlfriend’s decision legitimately suspenseful. But what really made me love the story were the truths illuminated about relationships: Our main character is sitting on the couch, expecting his girlfriend to come and break up with him, and the narrator notes, “It was as if he himself had just come back from a journey, a very good one, but difficult, too; indeed, often simply tedious. And, now that he was back, he was glad not to be traveling, glad that he could just sit here where he had sat for years.”


Often simply tedious! Maybe, I like this story because I find life to be, above all, tedious, and this story makes art of that. No killing, making love or fucking, no sniffing, nor epiphanying, just two characters overwhelmed by the tediousness of life. The answer to why they would choose this life is lost like the elephant.

fitzcarraldo said...

Its nice to be able to post after everyone else has posted, because your critique is conscious of the wisdom of the other critiques. Anyway. I just finished reading two stories by Charles D'Ambrosio, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, from The Dead Fish Musuem, and I recommend him really highly. My heart was just shaken and squeezed back to life after spending a week studying angry Surrealist manifestoes. He's some new hybrid of Thom Jones and Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson - a big guy with an aching heart. But whatever.

I should also say I like the occasional physical responses Lit Up includes, as when, in response to 1966's mention of cutting out a Vietnamese woman's vagina, she crossed her legs on the train, or when, in response to the woman in The Mahogany Elephant's sudden withdrawal into the bedroom, she sucked her teeth. I'm interested in physical responses to stories, I guess, and yours are funny and interesting.

One thing I wanted to address in this story is Maxim Biller's humor. I went into the story knowing he wrote a humor column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine. But I think I would have noted the humor anyway, which comes off as almost Woody Allenesque in a few instances. Like: "She was tired, but then she was always tired; she'd gone away to recover from feeling tired all the time, and now that she was back she was still tired." This has that whiny, terminally discontented sense of humor Allen, and a lot of Jewish humor, thrives on as away of avoiding or dealing with depression and morbid neuroses. A few exclamation points pop up here and there too, usually attributed to the male character, who is almost hilariously blase about this whole thing, even as his future wife returns to him looking older, worn out and depressed. He's been waiting for his girl to come home, and one of the first thing's he does it throw away a gift he brought him! He seems to have been through enough hardship in his life to embrace the comedy of love or something. Or just not to care anymore. Or he's managed to get some distance from his own feelings - to protect himself a little with indifference - whereas this woman is genuinely in touch with her emotions and suffering for it. Or maybe he's just an asshole?

Also, see the bit of ridiculous bathroom humor that precedes the heartbreaking end by about 80 words: "So today she wasn't as nervous as usual! As soon as that thought occurred to him, he felt nervous and wanted to go to the bathroom himself." The juxtaposition with, and the seamless and immediate transition to the grave image (as Andrew, that world class interpreter of images, dreams, intentions) was what nailed the story down for me.

And what a fucking story! Did you notice how it's not stated whether they found or did not find the elephant in the trash when they look together? All that's said is: "It was soon done." Indeed! They then adjourn to the bathroom and wash they're hands and smile in the mirror at one another, as if they'd just committed a crime. And yet this doesn't get you any closer to the "meaning" of the elephant. And I'm very much okay with being suspended in that mystery, since he's arranged for it so well.

I admit to loving this kind of story. The simplicity and iceberg quality (you know - the tip of the iceberg exposed hinting at the giant mass of ice below, like Hemingway always said, that f'ing genius) really does allow you contemplate the invisible poetry as Biller calls it in his interview. You look right through the prose like a perfectly clear sheet of ice, beneath which things keep flashing and moving and coming into focus and withdrawing again. It's a certain kind of writing, of course. If you want to pay attention to prose there're enough Updike and Nabokov novels and short stories to keep anyone busy for at least a couple years.

Lastly, the mystical aspect of those damn elephants. A bunch of interpretations are available, and the story seems to encourage them. Like the past lives interpretation. "I lost the first three,' she says of the elephant. "Do you think that means something?" Then she goes on: "I know this one's ugly! ... You should have seen the others. They were really pretty!" Of course this is stretching it, but why not stretch it: does she, as an Aries, have some kind of knowledge of their successful past lives together, and acknowledges that this current one they're living isn't measuring up to that standard of happiness and love? Or in the time they spent together before she left (remember, they barely had much time together before she left: she's been gone (3 months) "for almost as long as they'd known each other!"): were these the happy days that she wasn't able to accept, perhaps being predisposed to depression herself? Whow knows really. I don't. But an amazing story.

Scott Colom said...

I just found out I can get the stories from online. So, I will read and then read your post.

Anonymous said...

Good for people to know.

Anonymous said...

What do you guys think is the theme of "The Mahogany Elephant?"

Lara Vapnyar's "LUDA AND MILENA"

A writing teacher once told me you can write a story with two main characters only if both characters want the same thing. Like the naïve Ro...