Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I have put off writing this book review because I do not know how to go about it. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Tarzan of the Apes is a classic adventure story that has been rehashed and reinterpeted many times. If you have not read the book, you may still think you know it. You probably do not. None of the screen versions have been completely true to the story. The novel itself works well as a stand alone book, but continues through many subsequent novels.

I have hesitated to write this review because of all the things Tarzan is. It is racist and sexist. There is a palpable confidence in English racial superiority. The blithe chauvinism of the author about “civilization” against all the non-Europeans of the world is a running theme in the book. In a dozen ways this book is embarrassing to read, and even more embarrassing to enjoy.

Because I did enjoy it. I could not help myself. Despite Burroughs’s gall in writing dialogue like the following, when John Clayton confronts the African jungle where he and his pregnant wife have been abandoned by mutineers:

“Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here to-day evidences their victory.”What they did may we not do? And even better, for are we not armed with ages of superior knowledge, and have we not the means of protection, defense, and sustenance which science has given us, but of which they were totally ignorant? What they have accomplished, Alice, with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that we may accomplish also.”

Ah, the triumph of the Englishman over the ignorance of the past. The Englishwomen do not seem to fare so well, however. Civilization seems to have rendered them rather wimpy. Clayton’s wife, unable to mentally withstand the horrors of life in a jungle, goes insane and spends the rest of her short life happily believing she is in her parlour at home. Clayton and she are both killed by savage apes, and their son is adopted by an ape mother recently bereft of her baby.

The superiority af the English genes are shown by the boy’s brilliance and physical prowess. He grows up to be stronger, smarter and more deadly than any of the apes, and outwits the African men and women living in the jungle, too.

The story is, of course, preposterous. The existence of feral children raised by animals has been claimed but never proven, but the children possibly produced by it certainly remained mentally and physically underdeveloped for the rest of their lives. Animals cannot raise healthy human children.

But the appeal of the story is something mythic, something as old as Gilgamesh: a hero, stronger and taller and better than most men, but still a man, faces impossible odds, suffers great heartbreak, but survives. Tarzan is both pitiable and admirable, and I found myself trying to imagine the story as occuring on some other planet so I could enjoy the thrills of his exploits without the racist baggage of history. Because this is a great story, and everything else considered, I still cannot help but like it.

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