Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan
in 1914, after successfully serializing it in 1912, and it quickly became a
modern myth: radio adaptations and movies followed as soon as technology could
catch up, as well as a bewildering 22 sequels from Burroughs himself. While the character of Tarzan is certainly
nothing new, as he is equal parts Caliban, Crusoe, and Mowgli, it goes much
further than any of these in its frankness about racial identity and the true
meaning of civilization. Few readers
know the ‘real’ Tarzan, as the 21st century has to combat the cultural
dissonance of the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” movies (he never says this or speaks
like ‘Tarzan’ in the books), or the New Age noble savage we find in
Disney. Probably the closest media
depiction of the book occurs in the 1984 film, The Legend of Greystoke,
which preserves many of the trademark elements of the book, and interestingly
casts Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman, as Tarzan (since Tarzan initially
learns to speak French, not English). What
we find in the book is astonishing and quite unusual: a Tarzan who kills
indiscriminately (often for the clothes on a natives’ back), yet is capable of compassion
and downright maudlin behavior. The book
is at once better than you were lead to believe while at times staying true to
its pulp origins. Is it great
literature? No, but it has the makings
of a great myth, and there are moments that match Kipling or Defoe, and at
times anticipate the darker worlds of Conrad. If nothing else, it merits its inclusion as a
seminal work of 20th century popular culture, and should be read widely (and by
young readers) because, when all is said and done (and making allowances for
some of the dated contents of the book), it is full of imagination and
delight.
The background is relatively
well-known: Lord Greystoke and his young wife, Alice, are traveling to Africa
to begin his colonial career when the ship’s crew revolts. The young couple is spared because they
showed compassion to one of the deckhands; the crew agrees to drop them off on
an isolated coast with all their baggage and the rudiments of survival. Here Lord Greystoke, Crusoe-like, builds a
simulacrum of England
in a small cabin to shut out the preying eyes of the jungle. The couple lives and thrives until one great
ape decides that enough is enough, and attacks Lord Greystoke, almost killing
him and his wife. Alice
never recovers from the encounter, and lives out the rest of her life in a
delirium of England
while nursing her young son. When she
dies, a final ape attack kills off Lord Greystoke as well, leaving their child
to be adopted by Kala, an ape who recently lost her own child. Placing her dead ape in the child’s cradle,
she retreats into the wild with her “white ape.” And as time passes, Tarzan (which means “white
skin”) learns to become wise and strong in the way of the apes, slowly taking
his place as one of their leaders—despite the envious disdain of their leader,
Kerchak.
What surprises the modern
reader is how explicit Burroughs is about race and all the anxieties of
cultural cross-contamination (foremost on the British empire ’s
mind in 1914). When Kala takes Tarzan
into her home, he writes, “High up among the branches of a mighty tree she
hugged the shrieking infant to her bosom, and soon the instinct that was as
dominant in this fierce female as it had been in the breast of his tender and
beautiful mother—the instinct of mother love—reached out to the tiny man-child’s
half-formed understanding...hunger closed the gap between them, and the son of
an English lord and an English lady nursed at the breast of Kala, the great ape”
(Penguin 33). Throughout the book,
Burroughs maintains that race is an illusion which hides the compassion and
depravity of man. The apes can easily be
seen as a metaphor for any indigenous colonial society, as they have names
which sound quasi-African (Kala, Tublat, Kerchak, Tarzan, etc.); while they are
not noble savages, they emerge as simple, moral creatures who often contrast
sharply with the ‘savagery’ of civilized man.
Much later in the book, when Tarzan learns about the new science of
fingerprinting, he asks a police officer: “Do finger prints show racial
characteristics?” The officer responds,
emphatically, “I think not,” but adds, in an aside, “although some claim that
those of the negro are less complex” (Penguin 251). Yet the point remains that science does not ‘see’
race nor does the law of the jungle. The
apes have their enemies as well as their tribe, which is a simple matter of
survival: but they do not see Sabor, the tiger, as a lesser race, any more than
they regard themselves as a superior.
Not that the book shares our
modern view of race, exactly; the tribesmen that Tarzan encounters are
typically vicious and savage. Though
Burroughs explains that they invade Tarzan’s part of the jungle because they
have been driven out by white colonists, still they delight in torturing their
prisoners (which Tarzan finds revolting), particularly noble white prisoners—such
as the Frenchman D’Arnot, which Tarzan saves from ritual dismemberment. Being “black” and an ape is certainly
superior in this book to being “black” and a man; these tribesmen are summarily
dispatched by Tarzan whenever he feels like it: he uses a rope-noose to hang
them from the trees to steal their clothes and arrows, and habitually sneaks
into their village to steal poisonous arrows and play macabre tricks on them
(like dumping dead bodies, or rearranging furniture). They soon consider him a malicious god of the
forest for whom they have to make offerings.
Yet even here Burroughs makes an enlightened remark: when Tarzan
encounters tribesmen in another part of Africa , he
defaults to ‘kill’ mode before D’Arnot stops him, saying, “You must not,
Tarzan!...White men do not kill wantonly” (Penguin 240). Clearly this is a joke, since Tarzan has
encountered pirates who kill and eat one another, and the reader, too, knows
the “wantonness” of colonial progress. However,
I should also probably mention Esmeralda, Jane’s black servant from Baltimore,
who is overweight, hysterical, and speaks in dialect. On second thought, you can read that part for
yourself...
Civilization finally comes
creeping into Tarzan’s world when he discovers his father’s cabin and its store
of books—particularly, picture books that contain “strange little bugs” that
dance about the pages. With painstaking
patience—and perhaps, a dash of preposterousness—Tarzan learns to associate the
pictures with the bugs, and is soon reading entire books in English. However, he has never heard the language nor
understands that the bugs correspond to sounds, which leads to complications
when another set of colonists are shipwrecked on the shore. True to its pulp origins, the next Lord
Greystoke is thrown off here by pirates along with a professor, his daughter,
Jane, and their servant (as I mentioned above), and the professor’s
assistant. The quartet are quickly at
the mercy of the jungle, but Tarzan performs feats of superhuman prowess to
save them from the fangs of Sabor, among others. They are quickly convinced that this is some “jungle
god,” as he cannot speak and moves like an ape; even the note he leaves them,
proclaiming his identity as “Tarzan of the Apes” makes little impression, since
they assume this is some second jungle dweller, watching from afar. The most interesting early part of the novel
occurs when Jane is kidnapped by a rival ape, Terkoz, who decides to make her
his wife. This is straight out of the
pulp tradition, though it also shares the fin-di-secle fears of colonial
monsters raping virginal Englishwomen such as Dracula, etc. Tarzan fights a bloody battle with Terkoz
while Jane is left gasping against a tree, “her hands tight pressed against her
rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination,
fear, and admiration—[she] watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval
man for possession of a woman—for her...the veil of centuries of civilization
and culture was swept from the blurred vision of the Baltimore girl” (Penguin
175).
Burroughs has great fun with
this: the two young people are thrust into a fantastic Eden ,
where they live in solitary splendor and almost—but not quite—indulge in their
deepest carnal desires. After the battle
he “took the woman in his arms and smothered her upturned, panting lips with
kisses” (Penguin 176). Pretty racy for
1914, yet Jane knows better; after a moment of intense passion, she beats him
off, and feels the mortification of lacking a chaperone. Yet soon after she admires him as a “perfect
creature...Never, she thought, had such a man strode the earth since God
created the first in his own image...She began to comprehend, also, that she
was entirely contended by sitting here by the side of this smiling giant eating
delicious fruit in a sylvan paradise far within the remote depths of an African
jungle” (Penguin, 184, 191). Here is the
Tarzan from the movies, the “Me Tarzan, You Jane,” though he never speaks at
all: their language is couched in looks and kisses, in a time before language
or civilization. While this can seem
somewhat corny to a modern reader, it underlines Burroughs’ theme of our place
in society: does civilization make us happier?
Does it lead to meaningful lives?
Are we truly free while protected from the apes and tigers of the world?
Or do we simply lock ourselves in with
even greater terrors—ourselves?
Race rears its head once again
when Jane returns to Clayton, the second Lord Greystoke, who convinces her that
the “forest god” is one of the “black tribesmen,” who are thieves and
cannibals. Clearly he’s jealous, and his
point is well taken, for Jane soon reflects, “She tried to imagine her wood-god
by her side in the saloon of an ocean liner.
She saw him eating with his hands, tearing his food like a beast of
prey, and wiping his greasy fingers upon his thighs...She saw him as she
introduced him to her friends—uncouth, illiterate—a boor” (Penguin 206). She is torn between her “primeval” desire for
him and the sense that a good Baltimore
girl needs a man who can navigate the avenues of society (like Clayton). Worse still, a jungle god must have a jungle
wife and jungle children who would be as “black” as he is: “if he belonged to
some savage tribe he had a savage wife—a dozen of them perhaps—and wild,
half-caste children...when they told her that the cruiser would sail on the
morrow she was almost glad” (Penguin 230).
Yes, she gladly flees her one flirtation with love and happiness to do
the right thing as so many women had done before her. Sex has no place in marriage, nor even love;
one could at least respect a man who washes his fingers in rose water before
cutting his meat!
As Jane is forced into an
arranged match with another suitor, one who ‘buys’ her to pay off her father’s
debts, Tarzan decides to become civilized and travel to America to find
her. He accomplishes this with the help
of D’Arnot, the Frenchman who teaches him to speak French and confuses the hell
out of poor Tarzan (who can only read English).
Indeed, he gives Tarzan several lessons on how “white men” act which
seek to underline the primacy of Western civilization: eat with knife and fork,
dress properly, don’t kill wantonly, use reason before strength! However, Tarzan’s travels fail to support
these theories, as when he encounters a group of white hunters who claim that fear
has no place on the hunt. And how could
it—they are safely protected by a entourage of whites and natives each with a
small arsenal at their disposal. As
Tarzan counters, “to me the only pleasure in the hunt is the knowledge that the
hunted thing has the power to harm me as much as I have to harm him” (Penguin
245). He then sets out to hunt a tiger
naked with his bare hands, and rejoices in the freedom of this decision (which
runs counter to everything D’Arnot has taught him): “it was with an exultant
freedom that he swung once more through the forest branches. This was life! ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its
narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and
conventionalities. Even clothes were a
hindrance and a nuisance” (Penguin 247).
True, Tarzan learns to wear a suit and tie and eat with knife and fork,
but he remains an “ape” within, never truly understanding why man would
willingly submit to the yoke of society.
The novel ends with the
question posed a final time to Jane, who flees to the wilds of Wisconsin
to prepare for her marriage with the sinister Mr. Canler. There a forest fire engulfs the area and Jane
is helpless once more—until Tarzan magically appears (pulp fiction, remember). For a moment, they relive their Edenic bliss
in each other’s arms, away from the watchful eye of society. However, as soon as he takes her back, she
must make a decision: Tarzan or Canler?
Passion or Preservation? Tarzan
makes the decision even easier for her: he strangles Canler almost to death
until she intervenes, and Canler agrees to leave her free to marry whomever she
chooses. Now it’s between Tarzan and
Clayton, the current Lord Greystoke.
However, at the fateful moment, Tarzan receives a telegram from D’Arnot
confirming a scientific theory: the matched Tarzan’s thumbprints to the line of
Greystoke: he is the true Lord Greystoke. With a single word he could replace Clayton
on the seat of power and take Jane with all due rank and civility. Yet by this time she has already made her
choice, asking herself “could she love where she feared?” She is terrified of Tarzan, at least what he
represents, which is a total release of sexuality at the most primal
level. As she reflects, “That she had
been carried off her feet by the strength of the young giant when his great
arms were about her...seemed to her only attributable to a temporary mental
reversion to type on her part—to the psychological appeal of the primeval man
to the primeval woman in her nature” (Penguin 274). Women cannot re-enter the Garden
of Love
Tarzan realizes that she will
never see him (in this book, at least) as anything more than an ape, a savage
from another land. When Clayton asks him
on the last page “how the devil did you ever get into that bally jungle,” he
only responds, suppressing the telegram, “I was born there...My mother was an
Ape, and of course she couldn’t tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was” (Penguin
277). Tarzan, it seems, has now truly
become civilized: he has learned to tell the ever-practical social lie. And lying about one’s origins is the very
backbone of respectable society. So ends
the first of 23 volumes of Tarzan of the Apes, a book that teeters
between utter conventionality and truly inspired fantasy. At its best, it is a powerful metaphor for
racial identity in a world of us and “other,” and the ability of even the “lowest”
species to ape the necessary rudiments of society. Indeed, in many ways we could argue that
Tarzan has to forget more knowledge than he learns to become civilized, and
even then, the lessons rarely take. If
being a proper Englishman means hunting without danger, worshipping money as a
god, and sacrificing passion to propriety, perhaps true enlightenment dwells in
the depths of the jungle, waiting for the shipwreck of a new Adam and Eve?
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