- Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan is a colossal daydream spanning twenty six books that spawned over forty Tarzan movies, hundreds of comic books, radio shows, television programmes, and other Tarzan paraphernalia, including Tarzan toys, Tarzan gasoline, Tarzan underwear, Tarzan ice-cream, Tarzan running shoes, Tarzan … – the list is virtually endless. Edgar Rice Burroughs became one of the twentieth century's most popular authors, and Tarzan one of the world's best-known literary characters.
Mittyesque daydreams make life bearable, and do away with the monster of ennui. Tarzan proves instrumental here. Gore Vidal calls Burroughs ‘the archetypal American dreamer’. It is no wonder then, that the basic appeal of Tarzan lies in the fact that Burroughs, a ‘master dreamer’, provides an alternative Utopia that we can inhabit. Tarzan’s world is an Eden that no serpent can invade (and if it is indeed invaded, Tarzan always overcomes), an Elysium that is idyllic and tranquil in spite of the action. To cut a long story short, an environment that one can dominate completely. Tarzan, thus, is a classic dream-self that provides the reader a spacious sense of mastery over a world that more often than not, tends to elide the individual. Tarzan triumphs even if we fail !!
Applying Freud’s idea of ‘play’ to Burroughs’ Tarzan daydream, one could say that Tarzan is a manifestation of subconscious desire. Antony Easthope points out that Tarzan, to be more precise, Burrough’s first Tarzan novel, "Tarzan of the Apes", with its African adventure setting, addresses itself to a dominantly masculinist culture; takes up directly the issue of European colonialism; and also bears the imprint of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the debate over heredity, environment and genetic racial difference.
It concerns a white man – Tarzan AKA Lord Greystoke – who has, to use colonialist phraseology, radically ‘gone native’. It contains as one of the central features, an idealised stereotype of women as the lover that stifles masculine desire. Thus, Easthope opines that "Tarzan of the Apes" explores boundaries between the self and the other; boundaries defined as those between animal and human, white and black, ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’. Consequently, as Tarzan consolidates specific binaries, this daydream transmutes into a nightmare from the postcolonial perspective, as it explores and legitimises the colonial unconsciousness.
Tarzan, which literally means ‘white-skin’ in ape idiom, is obviously a white man who cannot but survive as he is naturally the ‘fittest’. It is not surprising then that baby Tarzan survives in a remote part of wild and savage Africa. Burroughs flings a baby into the African wilderness, and the infant survives to metamorphose into Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’. In order to substantiate his ‘original jungle-hero’, and to make him credible, Burroughs takes recourse to what an African critic, N. Khalfani Mwamba, calls the ‘Tarzan Untruths’.
These ‘Untruths’ change Africa the continent, into Africa, the continent of tropical forests. Africa, comes from the Sanskrit word ‘jungala’ which means ‘dry desert’. Nevertheless, English textuality stresses the opposite, and Africa becomes the land of ‘thick vegetation and dense forests’, the African truth being that it has less forest cover per square mile than any other continent.
The first glimpse of Africa that Burroughs gives us describes its shores as, “beautiful with semi-tropical verdure”; and the country, “rises from the ocean in hill and tableland, almost uniformly clothed by primeval forest”. Strangely enough, though Eurasia has more forest cover per square mile than Africa, it is the Africans who have been termed ‘Jungle Bunnies’.
That pre-slavery Africa was ‘uncivilised’ and ‘unchristian’ is another ‘Tarzan Untruth’ or myth that many live by, and which Tarzan of the Apes no doubt endorses with its repetition of the word “savage”, which is applied to the land as well as to its inhabitants. Burrough’s camera obscura focuses only on the ‘uncivilised’, and conveniently dismisses African ‘civilisation’. ‘Civil’ comes from ‘city’, and Africa’a Ta Ibit (centuries after its construction, renamed Thebes by the Greeks) is the first historic city of historical record. Also, Ethiopia was the first Christian country in history, declared so by King Azana a full century before Constantine did Byzantium in 325 A.D.
To borrow from Edward Said, the Orient - Africa with "Tarzan of the Apes" -, becomes a projection of the European underground self. Africa has often become the locale for metaphysical encounters with evil as in books like, "Heart of Darkness", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "The Mighty Young Joe", and "Out of Africa". Tarzan needs Africa to confront his evil or ‘savage self’. This savage “Tarzan of the Apes” grasps his “food in his strong brown hands, tearing it with his molars like a wild beast"; whereas, “Monsieur Tarzan” uses a “knife and fork” to eat “cooked food” as “No civilised men eat raw flesh”. Though the “blacks” cook their meat, they are still less ‘civilised’ than Tarzan. Tarzan will not “ruin good meat (by cooking it like the blacks) in any such foolish manner”, and he “craves” and “needs” meat because he descends from an ancient “race of meat eaters”.
Burroughs probably introduces “raw flesh” in order to justify, to quote Roland Barthes, Tarzan’s “bull-like strength”. In his essay, "Steak and Chips", Barthes examines the steak myth, and comes to the conclusion that steak derives its prestige from its quasi-rawness. In it,
‘…blood is visible, natural, dense, at once compact and sectile. One can well imagine the ambrosia of the Ancients as this kind of heavy substance which dwindles under one’s teeth in such a way as to make one keenly aware at the same time of its original strength and of its aptitude to flow into the very blood of man’.
Applying the same analogy to Tarzan’s meat eating habits, Burroughs no doubt is justified in his portrayal of this “giant figure bearing a dead lion upon its broad shoulders”.
Animals, rather, “savage” animals are of course an inherent part of the African wilderness. Burroughs’ scant knowledge of wildlife is evident in the fact that “Sabor”, the tiger in his magazine story ("Tarzan of the Apes" was first published in a magazine called All-Story) was not native to the African continent. “Sabor” became a lioness when "Tarzan of the Apes" was published in book form. And is it mere coincidence that the animals have names that have an Oriental ring? Kala, Tublat, Kerchak, Horta, Dango, Bara, Numa, Sabor, Sheeta and the like, are definitely if not Oriental, at least ‘un-European’.
In comparison to “his” Apes, Tarzan is the “superior being” because of his “superior intelligence and cunning” and “the divine power of reason”. His cunning ensures that he teaches himself to use the “full-nelson” successfully on every beast. The beast of course is too dumb to think of rolling on its back and crushing the “mighty” Tarzan with its weight. Tarzan can’t be conquered as these “brutes” cannot imagine hunting in groups. Had they done so, Tarzan may have been defeated. But of course, they don’t. It is Tarzan who teaches them to unite; and thus, gives them the means to “overthrow” their “cruel chief” Terkoz. Implicit here is the ideology that ‘white is right’, and just and fair, and hence, should rule. An absolutist vein runs right through all Tarzan novels.
Tarzan can see with his “sensitive and highly trained nostrils”. Olfactory nerves, Burroughs informs us, are merely under-developed in man. It is not to be wondered at then that Burroughs almost forces Tarzan’s son Korak into the African continent in order to develop Korak’s faculties. Tarzan reigns because, “in his veins…flowed the blood of the best of a race of mighty fighters, and back of this was the training of his short life-time among the fierce brutes of the jungle”. This makes him fit to not only rule over “his” apes, but to also colonise the village of Mbonga.
Easthope points out, that "like Heart of Darkness", "Tarzan of the Apes" assumes that white people are in some way inherently superior to black people. He feels that employing the narrative figure of a European ‘gone native’ makes it possible to admit the, ‘exploitative purpose of imperialism while simultaneously recuperating it’. He shows how a structure of imperialist ideology is constructed on the basis of racism and genetics. Thus animals, apes, Africans, and Europeans form a hierarchy according to inherited intelligence, with Europeans at the top.
When Tarzan encounters the “blacks” for the very first time, he finds that, “these people were more wicked than his own apes, and as savage and cruel as Sabor herself”; and towards the end of the novel, during the discussion on finger prints, Burroughs has the officer stating “..some claim that those (fingerprints) of the negro are less complex”. On first coming across Europeans, Tarzan concludes that, “they were evidently no different from black men – no more civilised than the apes – no less cruel than Sabor”. Thus, Tarzan’s superiority is confirmed as he combines two hereditary attributes, i.e. ‘intelligence and an aggression not inhibited by civilization’ (perhaps another reason for the stronger physique).
Consequently, the text vindicates white supremacy as there is darkness at the heart of all men in a continuity stretching back to ‘the earliest beginnings of the world’; so that by nature, Europeans are no better or worse than the Africans. But, their right to assume the role of the coloniser is justified because they (whites – here, Tarzan) are more intelligent, endowed with the “divine power of reason”, and having access to better ideas and technology.
"Tarzan of the Apes", in defiance of anthropology, treats cannibalism as an index of primitivism. While the Africans lick their “hideous lips in anticipation of the feast (of human flesh) to come”, Tarzan can’t bear the idea of consuming human flesh, and his “hereditary instincts” make the prospect nauseating to him.
Though Europeans head the hierarchy, here again Burroughs makes distinctions. The English (Tarzan), French (D’Arnot) and Americans (Jane Porter & Co.) belong to the ‘higher white races’, whereas Italians and Portuguese do not. We realise that it is not just Darwin who dominates. John Stuart Mill also makes his presence felt. Economics matters.
Burroughs almost hypocritically talks of, “that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they (Africans) had fled the Congo Free State..”. A perusal of the history of colonization shows us that Belgium had occupied a large chunk of Africa called the Belgian Congo.
Belgium was no doubt seen as a threat by other European nations, who were on a similar ‘civilising mission’, and had dispatched many a “Father Constantine” to legitimize their intrusion, lauding it as the ‘white man’s burden’.
In later novels, Russians are villains – e.g. Rokoff and Paulovitch in "The Return of Tarzan" and "The Beasts of Tarzan". Arabs are also demonised in subsequent Tarzan books. In "Tarzan of the Apes" itself, we have the two caricatured characters of Professor Archimedes Porter and his assistant Samuel T. Philander discussing the Spaniards and the Moors; Professor Porter asserts that “Moslemism was, is, and always will be, a blight on …scientific progress…”. Colonisation offers a fig leaf in the form of ‘progress’, and in the process the land and the Bible exchange hands. Political and religious ideology makes its presence felt in Tarzan.
As an anthropologist, Burroughs is pleasantly vague. His apes are carnivorous, and they are able, he darkly suspects, to mate with human beings. Terkoz on seeing Tarzan pursuing him, concludes that, “this (Jane) was Tarzan’s woman”, and rejoices, “at this opportunity for double revenge upon his hated enemy”. Though an ape ‘desiring’ a human mate is obviously an anomaly, what comes across as even more shocking is that he thinks that he can avenge himself using Jane. Terkoz here thinks like the ‘other’ man despite his inferior intelligence – a WASP woman is always ‘desirable’ to the ‘other’. So, are Burroughs’ apes, really apes? The ape “Death Dance”, an imitation of the so called ‘rites and rituals of tribal Africa’ makes one suspect otherwise. The apes seem to be just another extension of “savage tribal” Africa, and consequently, less animal and more “savage”.
As some feminists have pointed out, colonization has its roots in patriarchy. More often than not, women are considered property. If Terkoz considers Jane property, so does Tarzan when he “takes his woman into his arms and carries her into the Jungle”, no doubt to rape her. Once again heredity triumphs, and he behaves like the “perfect gentleman”, and Jane is not molested. But then again, the very notion of chivalry is steeped in patriarchy, wherein a woman becomes someone who is, to quote the sentimental lovelorn Tarzan, “created to be protected, and…he (Tarzan)… created to protect her”.
In "Tarzan of the Apes", Easthope tells us ideologies of empire and race are reinforced with the masculinist ideology of gender. Women are immobile, naturally loving and potentially transcendent, while men are active, aggressive rationalists. We see the traditional gender distinction between the Madonna and the Whore mapped onto the distinction between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbaric’. We see two versions of Jane. First as Jane the Baltimore girl; and then the African Jane who watches with “…mingled horror, fascination, fear, and admiration…the primordial ape battle with primeval man for possession of a woman – for her”. In the ‘heart of darkness’ the, “veil of centuries of civilisation and culture”, is swept, “from the blurred vision of the Baltimore girl”. The text envisages a woman as, ‘actively experiencing heterosexual desire’.
While Tarzan expresses one version of feminine sexuality, it simultaneously denies another. Easthope points out that for Tarzan, his ape mother Kala was an object of Oedipal desire - he considered her “kind and beautiful”. Easthope argues that a post-puberty Tarzan should have similarly found either another adult ape, or some African woman attractive. But this obviously does not happen as his ‘race’ can’t be contaminated. By completely denying any desire for the African ‘other’, and instead displacing and sublimating such desire onto Jane and the wish for her as a composite figure between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’; Easthope feels that the novel contradicts itself at a fundamental level. Sexuality is thus circumscribed by the ‘projections of the white European male mind’.
The object position of all women, especially non-WASP, which the textuality of Tarzan reinforces, is also reflected in the movie-remakes of the book, as well as in the comic strips. As Kovel points out, mass media and the movie industry have had an obvious ‘white male nationalist propagandist character’. No wonder then that in one comic strip called "Legion of Hate", an all woman African nation – called of course a “tribe” – and referred to as ‘Amazons’, forge an alliance with the Nazis only because they are interested in “mating with white men”.
Jane Porter and her maid Esmeralda share this yoke of patriarchy in "Tarzan of the Apes". Esmeralda unfortunately, is what Sandra Gilbert would call ‘the doubly colonised’ because of her colour and gender. Though Esmeralda speaks English, it is pidgin, and she is forever invoking “Gaberelle”. Her grammar is skewed, – “what am it now? A hipponocerous? Where am he, Miss Jane?” – and her speech is servile and inarticulate – it is ‘darky’ dialogue.
The native is always inferior even if he has been salvaged by using what Gramsci calls ‘hegemony’ - power achieved through a combination of coercion and consent. Gramsci argued that the ruling classes achieve domination not by force or coercion alone, but also by creating subjects who ‘willingly’ submit to being ruled. The colonizers tried to achieve this by forcing an alien language and an alien God (all other religions are ‘heathen’) on those they colonized, and Esmeralda is but one example of the ‘willing’ subject.
Colonization plays an important role in identity formation (or malformation) of the ‘willing’ as well as ‘unwilling’ colonised subject. Franz Fanon, citing his own example, shows us how a person who is colonized, not only loses his identity in the process of colonization, but also fails to assume another identity even in a postcolonial setting. At the screening of a Tarzan film in France, Fanon was shocked when he realised that he was expected to identify with the ‘negro’ instead of, as he had always done, with Tarzan. Thus his black skin/white masks reflects the miserable schizophrenia of a colonized identity that is supplemented by likes of Tarzan.
Towards the "blacks", Tarzan is quintessentially colonial. If he feels that ape vocabulary is insufficient (at least in "Tarzan of the Apes"), he considers the “natives” as people almost without a language. When Jane Porter and her father arrive in Africa, Tarzan sends them a note – “THIS IS THE HOUSE OF TARZAN…”. His miraculous grammatical accuracy is more than fantastic, but what is more implausible is the fact that he never thinks of using this language with the villagers of Mbonga. In response to this, Jeff Berglund critiques,
‘If he (Tarzan) intuits that writing is a product of humans, why does he refrain from using it with other humans? If the binary opposite of textuality is orality, then the Africans of the Mbongan tribe in their extreme orality – cannibalism – are alienated from the English book, from all that it connotes, the power it bestows…Tarzan…intuits that writing is a means of communication between white humans, not just between paper and reader’.
This may be construed as an example of how colonialism conceptually depopulates countries, either by acknowledging the native but relegating him or her to the category of subhuman, or simply by looking through the native, denying his/her existence. Disney’s supposedly innocuous animated version of Tarzan (not of the Apes – that it is only Tarzan is significant, and reveals Disney’s agenda) happily elides the natives and depopulates Africa of most of its population – there are no Africans in Africa in the Disney version.
As Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson tell us, such depopulation was a necessary practice for invoking the claim of terra nullius upon which the now disputed legality of imperial settlement (as opposed to ‘invasion’) is based. Only empty spaces may be settled, so the space had to be made empty by ignoring or dehumanising the inhabitants. As Peter Hulme points out, ‘The topic of land (was) dissimulated in the topic of savagery, this move being characteristic of all the narratives of the colonial encounter’.
Inscribing the natives as primitive and unable to make use of the natural resources around them allowed first the biblical parable of the ten talents, and then the Darwinian theory of natural selection to justify dispossession as part of Destiny. Resistance was interpreted as malignant treachery and a justification for brutal suppression, and even annihilation. Of course, they (in "Tarzan of the Apes", the French), “spared the children and those of the women whom they were not forced to kill in self-defence, but when at length they stopped… it was because there lived no single warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga”.
If labour was required in the coffee plantations or on cattle stations, to exploit the ‘natural’ wealth of the seemingly limitless tract of land, a new encoding of the native was employed. The coloniser now saw the native, in Kipling’s phrase, as ‘half savage and half child’. Childhood itself, as Jo-Ann Wallace demonstrates, was not a primordial concept in the Anglo-Saxon archive, but one that had been comparatively recently developed. It is almost, she argues, as though the idea of childhood was a necessary conceptual precursor to empire.
Tarzan, the coloniser, exploits “his children” in later novels like, "The Jewels of Opar". He robs (Burroughs conveniently calls it “replenishing his (Tarzan’s) store”) the ancient city of Opar of gold and jewels and uses the natives as coolies. Tarzan is the “protector” - he “protects” the High Priestess of Opar, the enchanting and exotic La from her own “tribe”. (La is just one of the many high priestesses and princesses who love Tarzan and assist him when the need arises: Tarzan, of course, is immune to their charms and always returns to his Jane). In a similar fashion, Tarzan “protects” his “blacks” from other “invaders”(i.e. east European Jews, Arabs, blacks – women being almost completely exempted from evil or sin).
In order to achieve all of this, Tarzan uses violence continually. He hunts not just animals, but also murders wantonly. Even when he is in the city, his muscles serve him well. He bashes up a gang of goons in a flat, and then jumps out of the window and escapes the law enforcers that arrive on the scene. Later, on the insistence of his friend D’Arnot, he goes to meet the police to mollify them, and explains to their satisfaction why he chose to dive out of the window. Praising Burrough’s visual melodrama, Vidal says that “he (Burroughs) had a gift very few writers of any kind possess: he can describe action vividly”. Though the action itself is not really all that intriguing, what is important is the ideological underpinning.
Physical violence preoccupies the narrative, and it almost transparently reveals the intention of the text – i.e. to construct ‘a moral universe’. All Tarzan novels endorse and legitimize a certain kind of violence by creating a false consciousness that is essentially absolutist in nature. The actual attack on the village of Mbonga is sub-ordinate compared to the ideology backing it.
As David Bozarth points out, Tarzan of the Apes ends before we are shown that Tarzan of the later books who abandons his wife and family to go on obsessive feral man junkets. Each time he reverts from ‘civilised’ society, Tarzan murders native blacks or incites riots in reclusive societies by defying ‘established’ authorities. During the Great War, he embarks on a personal vendetta against Germans in Africa, becoming a grim methodical executioner.
The body counts in all Tarzan books are excessive – and most are killed by the apeman himself. In World War II, Tarzan slaughters ‘monkey men’ (Japanese soldiers), and Nazis (Dark Horse Comics – "Tarzan the Untamed" and "Tarzan and the Lions of Xuja") in a killing frenzy obviously sparked by wartime sentiments. Violence against the state is castigated. But violence perpetuated by the state is valorised – “duty is duty”, and the nation is supreme. This was one of the tenets constantly evoked by the colonialist to justify the means he used to reach his end.
Tarzan is thus a white adult fantasy, replete with degenerative human behaviours under the guise of popular entertainment. The Tarzan nightmare, declares Mwamba, will keep recurring as long as ‘racism, sexism, military adventurism, and greedy individualism’ thrive!
Dismissing Tarzan as popular fiction, and hence low culture, would be fatuous - it is popular potent fiction !!
« return.