THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN OF THE APES (1912), THE RETURN OF TARZAN (1913)

In this essay I’m going to concentrate on three significant tropes in the first two Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (henceforth ERB). Thus, instead of recapitulating plot-points as I’ve done in most prose fiction reviews, I’ll assume that the reader is basically familiar with the plots, the better to concentrate on trope analysis.

Though ERB’s Tarzan books eventually fell into largely routine formula, the first two stand at the apogee of 20^th-century literary mythmaking. Tarzan may have taken some inspiration from Rudyard Kipling’s books about the animal-reared Mowgli (though ERB never admitted such an influence), and for the most part Kipling is still esteemed above ERB by most literary critics. But the first two Tarzan books exceed the admittedly fine Kipling works in terms of the complexity of ERB’s mythic rendering of the savage foundling idea. This complexity expresses itself through the author’s often unpredictable use of three major tropes, which I will call (1) the colonialism conundrum, (2) the cannibalism conflict, and (3) the consanguinity conjecture.

The prevailing notion that ERB was an ardent defender of colonialist policies may be one reason for critical disdain of his work (though it didn’t seem to do Kipling any great harm). In truth, TARZAN OF THE APES is often critical of European encroachment on Africa. Prior to the hero’s birth, Viscount John Clayton and his wife Alice have been sent to Africa so that Clayton’s new position will make it possible to bring a halt to “unfair treatment of British black subjects” in the Congo. Later in the novel, long after Tarzan has grown to manhood amid his adoptive ape-clan, a tribe of Black Africans moves into the apes’ territory while fleeing the depredations of Europeans seeking “rubber and ivory.” To be sure, ERB certainly shows aversion to some aspects of Black African culture and physical appearance, which he knew only through secondary sources. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, ERB does not demonize whole races. If Tarzan takes charge of an entire tribe of Black Africans, as he does in RETURN OF TARZAN, it’s because Tarzan has by that time been exposed to Europe’s recorded knowledge regarding battle tactics. Thus he can successfully command the Waziri tribe to repel the assault of Arab raiders because Tarzan has access to the same sort of tactical knowledge that gave the Arabs an advantage in tribal Africa.

Cannibalism is one of the practices that ERB attributes to certain tribes of Black Africans. I’m certain any number of parvenu intellectuals could mount defenses of the practice, citing Western misinterpretations of what the ritual did or did not mean in real-world Africa. ERB, however, treats cannibalism not specifically as a perversion of Black Africans, but as one that descends from humankind’s animal forbears. Not until Tarzan has grown to maturity among the apes is he allowed to participate in the ritual of the Dum-Dum. During this tribal gathering, the apes make noise upon a naturally occurring (and highly improbable) jungle-growth that serves as a giant drum. As the anthropoids drive themselves into a frenzy dancing to the drum-rhythm, they nerve themselves up for the ultimate transgressive act of their kind: devouring the flesh of a slain ape from a rival tribe. ERB does not make learned comparisons to the long history of cannibalistic practices, particularly those known from archaic Greece, but there can be little doubt that the author suggests that the Dum-Dum is the ancestor to such rituals, even as apes are ancestors to men.

Tarzan himself comes very close to sullying his palate with this meal. But when he tries to get a taste of the forbidden fruit, he’s attacked by his foster-father Tublat, mate to Tarzan’s mother Kala and the ape-man’s long-standing enemy. Tarzan slays Tublat and spends weeks recuperating from injuries, but the question of further participation in the cannibal-ritual does not come up again. Further, once Tarzan finds the cabin of his late parents, he has begun to think of himself as something other than an ape.

Thus, when the tribesman Kulonga slays Tarzan’s adoptive mother, thinking nothing of eating an ape’s flesh, Tarzan slays Kulonga in vengeance, but cannot bring himself to devour Kulonga’s flesh.

I don’t deny that ERB invokes the idea of some mysterious “hereditary” aspect that causes Tarzan to refrain. Yet, to be sure, in RETURN it is specified that Black Africans who don’t eat flesh despise those that do. Since it would seem unlikely to state that the non-cannibalistic blacks are guided by “heredity,” I would argue that on the contrary ERB has suggested a natural progression in culture to which black people have as much claim as white people: a “thou shalt not” injunction against the eating of one’s own kind. It is also an injunction that the wicked can choose to rebel against. In the last half of RETURN, Jane is set adrift on the sea in a lifeboat after her ship is wrecked. With her are other escapees: some other sailors, her fiancée William Clayton (Tarzan’s cousin), and Nikolas Rokoff, a loathsome fellow who’s continually made attempts on Tarzan’s life throughout the novel. The other sailors die and are thrown overboard, because William will not allow Rokoff to eat their dead bodies. Later, however, William himself stands in danger of being killed and consumed by the wicked Russian. Clearly, Rokoff’s being white does not immunize him from attempting omophagia, even if only for pure survival. That particular peril is ended when the lifeboat reaches land.

The implied distant relationship between apes and men brings up the issue of possible consanguinity between the two species. Though ERB’s readers may have told any number of jokes, racist and otherwise, about the interbreeding of apes and men, few of them would have literally believed that any fruit could come of such a union. ERB skillfully suggests this possibility in a purely metaphorical sense, thus allowing his readers to take pleasure in the fantasy without violating the dictums of science. For instance, the one thing that almost everyone knows about Tarzan is that he became a physical marvel due to being raised by apes. Indeed, most imitations reproduce this same trope. What practically none of them seek to duplicate is the incident of Lady Alice’s symbolic rape. Though Alice is already expecting at the time, ERB has an unnamed ape attack her. She manages to shoot the ape, killing it, but its body falls atop her. Thereafter, Alice loses her mind and endures only long enough to give birth to her son before dying. Clayton is then slain by Kerchak, leader of the ape-tribe, paving the way for Tarzan to be adopted by Kala. I suggest that, though ERB could have terminated Lady Alice via any number of exotic diseases, he knew that on a subconscious level his readers would read the ape’s attack as a “rape,” so that in a symbolic sense, Tarzan is half-ape because, as the superstition goes, “his mother was scared by an ape.”

Jane, of course, is also famously menaced by an ape, and this one, Tarzan’s foster-brother Terkoz, is explicitly looking for a new mate after being routed from his tribe. ERB was probably aware that in reality apes didn’t generally seek to cohabit with humans, but he loads the dice by portraying Terkoz as being in a crazed state. One must admire the cleverness of ERB, to have Jane menaced physically by Tarzan’s foster brother, after having revealed that her principal suitor is William Clayton, Tarzan’s male cousin and thus a brother-analogue.

ERB’s strangest experiment with consanguinity appears in the last quarter of RETURN OF TARZAN. In the latter half of TARZAN OF THE APES, the author foregrounds the existence of Opar-- the first of many, many African lost races ERB will produce-- by having Jane’s scholar-father reference the strange civilization. Yet ERB takes his sweet time about bringing the Oparians on stage, given that they don’t appear until after Tarzan has completed a long series of unrelated adventures—being challenged to a duel in France, fighting bad Arabs and helping out good ones, getting tossed off a boat by his nemesis Rokoff. Presumably ERB wanted to show his hero undergoing a wanderjahre after nobly foregoing a romantic union with Jane, for those wanderings had to come to an end once he returned to the jungle and inevitably married his one true love. Further, once the hero was ensconced in Africa with his wife and his faithful Waziri, he could—and did—encounter the Oparians numerous times.

Just as Rokoff’s white skin did not shield him from backsliding into the iniquity of cannibalism, the white skins of the Oparians does not prevent them from being corrupted by consanguinity. Tarzan makes his first acquaintance with the men of Opar—all ugly, apelike brutes—when they capture him for sacrifice to their sun-god. However, the ape-man soon learns that all of the Oparian women are comely beauties, most especially High Priestess La. She intends to sacrifice the intruder to her god, only to fall in love with him after he rescues her from a crazed male. After that, La gives Tarzan a mini-history of her people’s colonization of the jungles of Africa. She claims that they had many colonies, but that they lost all heart when they learned that their mother country had “sunk into the sea.” This leads to all colonies save Opar being overwhelmed by the “black hordes.” But though Opar remained strong against black tribesmen, the denizens chose to commingle with the semi-intelligent apes like those that raised Tarzan. Indeed, the only reason Tarzan can communicate with La is because they both know ape-lingo.

La’s history of her people’s degradation is a masterpiece of equivocation. On one hand, ERB has La argue that the reason the men are all ugly is because the ones who stayed in Opar were “the lowest types of men,” while the women are good-looking because they descended from the noble lines of the priestess-clan. On the other, as if to tacitly admit that this eugenics fantasy is nonsense, ERB throws in the detail that some Oparians apparently couple with apes willingly: “in time we will no longer banish those of our people who mate with apes, and so in time we shall descend to the very beasts from which ages ago our progenitors may have sprung.” Of course, even if La admitted that a lot of current citizens were still mating with anthropoids, this wouldn’t explain the radical physical differences between males and females, any more than does the eugenics scheme. In essence, Opar escapes these categories because ERB as an author is fascinated with the opposition of Masculine Ugliness and Feminine Beauty. To be sure, this serves one immediate purpose, to make La fall hopelessly in love with Tarzan as the incarnation of Masculine Beauty. But one can’t help but feel like there’s more to Opar than setting up that particular plot-point.

By way of wrapping up, I’ll note that the one thing I don’t think Opar signifies is “apes=black people.” Had ERB wanted to suggest that the Oparians had degraded themselves by intermarrying with a tribe of Black Africans, he certainly could have done so without bringing apes into the picture. Rather, the males of Opar take on the brutishness of simians not because they are literally born of human-ape unisons, but because their mothers are all “scared by apes.” While this sort of thing has no deleterious effect upon Tarzan’s good looks, the male Oparians are perhaps further compromised by their living in a dying society, while the ape-man lives out in the wilds, coping with danger and death every day. In a strange sense, Tarzan becomes more conscious of his humanity by observing the things his ape-brethren cannot do, while the Oparians have surrendered any illusions about the difference between the two species. As for the Oparian women, perhaps in ERB’s world infants with two X-chromosomes just aren’t as vulnerable to having their humanity scared out of them.