Tarzan, like Superman, has always existed. At least, that’s how it feels to me… there was never a time in my life when Tarzan didn’t already exist. But once upon a time, someone imagined him, and gave him life on paper. More than a hundred years later, he lives on, though his creator is long gone. It was a strange experience to read the original Tarzan story.
Did you know?
- The apes that adopted Tarzan are not gorillas, they’re a fictional species. They have a language. (Reminds me of Michael Crichton’s Congo.)
- Tarzan’s ape family gave him the name Tarzan, and it means “white-skin”.
- Tarzan has long black hair.
- He taught himself to read (and write in print) by looking at books.
- He has a scar from a fight that goes from his left eye to his right ear, but it’s only noticeable when he’s angry.
- Although when young, he envied the hairy skin of the other apes, once he began to identify with the humans he saw in books, he taught himself to shave.
- Jane is American. She is blonde.
Devil in the Details
Burroughs tells a compelling and detailed adventure story, but, even apart from his obviously fictional talking ape species, his descriptions of Tarzan’s jungle environment don’t align with reality. Famously, the original magazine story included Tarzan struggling with Sabor, a male tiger. Readers weren’t having it, so Sabor became a lioness when the story was reprinted. If Burroughs could make such an obvious mistake with megafauna, then my guess is, he can’t be relied upon for other details.
Are there tornadoes in tropical west-coast Africa? Pineapples? Pisang? Plantains, yams, maize? Cassava? I happen to know that ‘pisang’ is Malay for some kind of banana. I asked Perplexity about these other details, and it says the historical meaning of ‘tornado’ in Africa was something more like thunderstorm, which fits the description of the weather event in the book, so that’s okay. Pineapples are from South America, but could have been planted in Africa. Maize and cassava are also from the Americas. Plantains are Southeast Asian. ‘Yam’ is vague; it could mean many kinds of starchy root.
The foreign-sounding words for animals belong to the invented language of the invented apes: Sabor (lioness), Numa (lion), Sheeta (leopard), Tantor (elephant), Histah (snake), Manu (monkey), Bara (deer). They aren’t names of individual animals.
Now that I think about it, the ape language invented by Burroughs isn’t so different from the minion-speak invented by Universal Studios: both languages are nonsense peppered with foreign words. And both are obsessed with bananas.
Too Many Coincidences
I mean, the plot needs certain things to happen, so they do, and other things to not happen, so they don’t. Tarzan’s English cousin, who inherited the estate that should have been his, gets marooned on the very same inch of coast where Tarzan’s parents were marooned; Tarzan’s English father chose to write his diary in French, a different language from the one that Tarzan learns from books, with the result that Tarzan can’t learn his identity from the diary. But as a baby, Tarzan left fingerprints on the diary. How convenient.
What’s the story?
This is the origin story of Tarzan. We meet his parents, who get tangled up in a mutiny on the way to Tarzan’s father’s government posting, and left with some supplies on an uninhabited stretch of African coast. A year after Tarzan is born, his mother dies in her sleep, leaving his father so grief-stricken that he fails to defend himself from the local ape chief. A mother ape whose child has just died adopts the orphaned human baby, and he grows up learning their language and their ways. But, using his superior reasoning capacity, he solves the riddle of the latched door to his parents’ cabin, and from the artifacts inside, realizes that the world contains others like himself, and starts to remake himself in their image. In particular, he begins to use weapons: a knife and a noose. He encounters local Africans and steals poison arrows and food from them repeatedly. Then come a group of foreigners: a young American woman from Baltimore, Jane Porter; Tarzan’s cousin, an English gentleman named William Cecil Clayton; Jane’s father, Professor Porter; his secretary and assistant, Samuel T. Philander; Jane’s black maid, Esmeralda. The question is, what will happen when the ape-man starts to interact with these people? You already know he falls in love with Jane, but of course it’s more complicated than that.
What’s there to like?
For all its flaws—and there is some serious racism in there—I really enjoyed this book. I think it’s that, like Superman, Tarzan is extremely powerful and honest and good. This is the lure of escapist fiction: the hero is an impossible exaggeration. The fact that he can’t exist in the real world is what draws us into the fictional one, where the good guy always wins. We want to be this man, or be protected by this man, or be friends with this man. He’s larger than life. There is no limit to the stories you can put him in. He stays the same. The outcome is always the same. But we want to watch what happens anyway.
Further Reading
Take a trip back in time to the world wide web as it looked in the late 1990s, and visit Bill and Sue-On Hillman’s website, ERBzine, dedicated to the life and works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Wikipedia says Burroughs denied being inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. Anyway, Kipling seems like the obvious thing to read next.
Movies
The 2016 Disney movie Jungle Book explores themes of identity and belonging similar to the themes in the 1999 Disney movie Tarzan. I also want to watch the 1984 movie Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. There have been a ton of movies and TV shows, but these seem like the most relevant among the recent adaptations.
I didn’t like the 2016 movie Legend of Tarzan. I think it’s probably impossible to tell a racist colonial story while also trying to repudiate racism and colonialism. Oh and it also had to transform historical depictions of gender roles, and make us believe in CGI animals. Didn’t stand a chance. Maybe the lost world genre needs to get lost permanently.
When and Why I Read Tarzan of the Apes
After enjoying Project Hail Mary, I wanted to read something else lighter and more entertaining than a lot of public domain stuff. Hence, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Genre: Adventure/Fantasy
Date started / date finished: 13-Oct-26 to 14-Oct-26
Length: 191 pages
ISBN: edgar-rice-burroughs_tarzan-of-the-apes
Originally published in: 1914/1993/2021
Source link: Tarzan of the Apes
