From the Elephant's Back Read Online Free PDF Page A

grown-up females. But as yet it was not very big or strong; so it took me to practise upon. It had learned to say salaam, to pick up money from the ground, and was now learning how to hoist a man on to its back. A grown man would have been too heavy, so Sadu was told to practise with me. This he did with pleasure. They hold out their trunk curled up at the end like a human hand; you put your foot into it and presto you are raised in the air, and placed securely on the animal’s back, between those two fantastic ears, the signs of supernormal spirituality, they say. They have a singular floating walk, a little humorous, like a drunken Irishman.…But the proverb says that whoever sees the world from the back of an elephant learns the secrets of the jungle and becomes a seer. I had to be content to become a poet. (this volume 3–4)
    For Durrell’s vision, the elephant becomes a partner while both are children and playmates unaware of the training to which they are being subjected. Moreover, while the elephant grants the gifts that allow Durrell to become a poet, its walk “like a drunken Irishman” signals Durrell’s most frequently used escape from being identified as British and a royal subject—his dubious claim to Irish ancestry. The elephant and the child are a part of each other, and hence both are reflections of Durrell himself. Perhaps more importantly, both resist the politics of the conflicting governmental bodies and material conditions in which they find themselves constituted as subjects.
    This childhood experience of India, which fostered his first literary work and shaped the rest of his career of alienation from Britain, is reflected in Durrell’s approach to other homes, most notably the Mediterranean and Greece. “Helene and Philhellene” anticipates the critical vision articulated by Edmund Keeley in Inventing Paradise and by David Roessel in In Byron’s Shadow . It shows Durrell again revising the literary influences that shaped his interactions with others such that the historical desire for ancient Greece, which so blinded the vision of the Romantics and Victorians (and arguably a great many of the High Modernists), is displaced by a recognition of the Modern Greece that cannot be ignored, and also the historical desire is also displaced by the recognition of the rich culture that Classicism can inspire one to overlook. Durrell’s argument for the virtues of a contemporary vision is strikingly prescient and sets us to reconsider his frequently presented colonial attitudes toward Greece:
    â€œHellas” is written rather than “Greece” in order first of all to point the difference between the Philhellene of yesterday and the Philhellene of today—for up to almost the present generation the passionate bias of the English writer and scholar has been towards the classical world. In a sense Greece has represented to him, in terms of landscape and climate, the flowering of an education.…But the classical bias has had its defects no less than its virtues. It has tended to blindfold the traveller to the reality of contemporary Greece. (this volume 107)
    For Durrell, thinking back to his young adulthood and happy years on Corfu, this contemporary vision demonstrates the transformation of the Romantic vision of a Classical Hellas into a modern vision of Greece, which has been documented by Roessel. For Roessel, “With contemporary notions of dancing Zorbas and Shirley Valentines with or without bikini tops, we might forget that before the late 1930s almost no one went to Greece to find their inner selves. This is the Greece that Miller and Durrell began to construct” ( In Byron’s 6). Durrell’s frame is Modern Greek literature, and in his view the quasiparental relationship to Byron and imperial power remains, but with the significant recognition that Greek authors have transformed and surpassed this restriction: “not only