Freeing the Elephants

By Adam Gopnik
Issue: Sept 22

No, not another political article, or one on elephants that can paint, but one on the meaning of the Babar children's stories.

Gopnik holds that they are "a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination." The book is not only about taming the wild elephants and putting them in outfits and making them ride elevators and other civilized situations, it is also about recognizing the absurdism inherent in those situations.

The books also contain the struggle between the desire for order and the desire for chaos. Gopnik writes "We would all love to be free, untrammelled elephants, but we long, too, for a green suit."

Illustration slideshow