The volume I read was actually four of Burroughs’s Tarzan novels collected together -- Tarzan of the Apes, The Son of Tarzan, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, and Tarzan Triumphant -- but I’m going to focus mostly on the original Tarzan of the Apes.
I found it confusing.
Here’s a high-level thematic synopsis from the volume’s dust jacket.
…Burroughs had things he wished to say about the innate nobility of mankind and the good and bad effects wrought upon man’s nature by civilization. In Tarzan of the Apes -- the story of a child of noble English blood raised to manhood by a family of apes -- Burroughs took equal parts of the myths of Romulus and Remus, together with popular legends of the “noble savage,” a built a plot around this character by doing what he did best -- telling a whopping good yarn. And he laid this adventure in the jungle, where he created a wonderful animal society conceived along the same lines as human society.
Okay, I thought. The noble savage and the innate nobility of mankind. I’ve read enough Cooper and Guthrie and McMurtry to get into that, or at least to get another take on it. Let’s see what this Burroughs fellow has to say.
It’s a hot mess.
Duty is Duty
The story opens not with little Tarzan, but with his parents, John and Alice Clayton, Lord and Lady of Greystoke, who find themselves aboard a ship that experiences a mutiny. When warned of its possibility, they have a revealing conversation about their options.
“You should warn the captain at once, John. Possibly the trouble may be averted yet,” she said.
“I suppose I should, but yet from purely selfish motives I am almost prompted ‘to keep a still tongue in my ‘ead.’ Whatever they do now they will spare us in recognition of my stand for the fellow Black Michael, but should they find that I had betrayed them, there would be no mercy shown us, Alice.”
“You have but one duty, John, and that lies in the interest of vested authority. If you do not warn the captain, you are as much a party to whatever follows as though you had helped to plot and carry it out with your own head and hands.”
“You do not understand, dear,” replied Clayton. “It is of you I am thinking -- there lies my first duty. The captain has brought this condition upon himself, so why should I risk subjecting my wife to unthinkable horrors in a probably futile attempt to save him from his own brutal folly? You have no conception, dear, of what would follow were this pack of cutthroats to gain control of the Fuwalda.”
“Duty is duty. No amount of sophistries may change it. I would be a poor wife for an English lord were I to be responsible for his shirking a plain duty.”
Here, it seems, that the rules of civilization will be their guide, and yet, those same rules prove to be their undoing, as their ‘betrayal’ is discovered by the mutineers, and they are put off the boat and abandoned on some distant African shore.
“Oh, John,” she cried at last, “the horror of it! What are we to do? What are we to do?”
“There is but one thing to do, Alice,” and he spoke as quietly as though they were sitting in their snug living-room at home, “and that is work. Work must be our salvation. We must not give ourselves time to think, for in that direction lies madness.
“We must work and wait. I am sure that relief will come, and come quickly, when once it is apparent that the Fuwalda has been lost, even though Black Michael does not keep his word to us.”
“But, John, if it were only you and I,” she sobbed, “we could endure it, I know, but---”
“Yes, dear,” he answered gently, “I have been thinking of that, also; but we must face it, as we must face whatever comes, bravely and with the utmost confidence in our ability to cope with circumstances whatever they may be. 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.”
“Ah, John, I wish that I might be a man with a man’s philosophy, but I am but a woman, seeing with my heart rather than my head, and all that I can see is too horrible, too unthinkable to put into words.
“I only hope you are right. I will do my best to be a brave primeval woman, a fit mate for the primeval man.”
To me, Burroughs is setting up some basic rules here. Man’s natural state is one of nobility, with the ability to overcome adversity. And women? Women are clearly the weaker and more emotional sex, ruled by their beating hearts instead of their thinking minds.
His Superior Being
But, of course, Alice is pregnant, pregnant with the little Lord Greystoke, the babe who would be born and, after the death of his parents, be adopted by the apes and become Tarzan. And throughout little Tarzan’s upbringing and youthful adventures, there are numerous references to his superiority. To wit:
He could not swim, and the water was very deep; but still he lost no particle of that self-confidence and resourcefulness which were the badges of his superior being.
There is, evidently, an inner superiority, an inner nobility, an inner morality that Tarzan possesses as a human, unique among the many beasts, friend and foe, that surround him. But still, there are moments where that inner morality is tested and, oddly, seems to fray a bit around the edges.
Jungle Ethics and Hereditary Instinct
There is the time he hunts and murders the native African man, Kulonga, who is responsible for the death of his ape-mother Kala.
Tarzan must act quickly or his prey would be gone; but Tarzan’s life training left so little space between decision and action when an emergency confronted him that there was not even room for the shadow of a thought between.
Thus, as Kulonga emerged from the shadow of the jungle, a slender coil of rope sped sinuously above him from the lowest branch of a mighty tree directly upon the edge of Mbonga’s fields. Ere the king’s son had taken a half-dozen steps into the clearing the quick noose tightened about his neck.
So rapidly did Tarzan of the apes drag back his prey that Kulonga’s cry of alarm was throttled in his windpipe. Hand over hand Tarzan drew the struggling black until he had him hanging by the neck in mid air; then Tarzan, climbing to a larger branch, pulled the still thrashing victim well up into the sheltering verdure of the tree.
He fastened the rope securely to stout branch, and then, descending, plunged his hunting-knife into Kulonga’s heart. Kala was avenged.
Note that in the opening paragraph in this murder, Tarzan is described as essentially not thinking, as acting on instinct. Which instinct, though? The one of his noble superiority? No, evidently, the one of his savage “life training.”
Tarzan examined the black minutely; never had he seen any other human being. The knife with its sheath and belt caught his fancy; he appropriated them. A copper anklet also took his fancy, and this he put on his own leg.
He examined and admired the tattooing on the forehead and breast. He marveled at the sharp-filed teeth. He investigated and appropriated the feathered head-dress, and then he prepared to get down to business, for Tarzan of the apes was hungry, and here was meat; meat of the kill, which jungle ethics permitted him to eat.
Now, it seems, his “life training” will surely come into conflict with his “inner morality.” No? He’s not actually going to eat the flesh of another human being is he?
How may we judge him, by what standards, this ape-man with the heart and head and body of an English gentleman, and the training of a wild beast?
Yeah. Good question. How would we judge Tarzan in this situation?
Tublat [an ape], whom he had hated and who had hated him, he had killed in a fair fight, and yet never had thought of eating of Tublat’s flesh entered his head. It would have been as revolting to him as is cannibalism to us.
But who was Kulonga, that he might not be eaten as fairly as Horta, the boar, or Bara, the deer? Was he not simply another of the countless wild things of the jungle who preyed upon one another to satisfy the cravings of hunger?
Of a sudden, a strange doubt stayed his hand. Had not his books taught him that he was a man? And was not “the archer” a man, also?
Burroughs is referring here to the books Tarzan found in the deserted hut of his dead parents, many of them early readers and primers designed for children, and through which Tarzan had taught himself to read and understand something about himself and the world he had come from.
Did men eat men? Alas, he did not know. Why, then, this hesitancy? Once more he essayed the effort, but of a sudden a qualm of nausea overwhelmed him. He did not understand.
All he knew was that he could not eat the flesh of this black man, and thus a hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide law of whose very existence he was ignorant.
Quickly he lowered Kulonga’s body to the ground, removed the noose, and took to the trees again.
Again, not thinking. Tarzan does not reason that it is not good to eat men, he comes to that knowledge instinctually, evidently from the deep well of his inner and untutored morality.
The Mere Pleasure of Inflicting Suffering and Death
Or was it? Because a few paragraphs later we are given this description of Tarzan inner life and motivations.
Tarzan of the apes was no sentimentalist. He knew nothing of the brotherhood of man. All things outside his own tribe were his deadly enemies, with the few exceptions of which Tantor, the elephant, was a marked example.
And he realized all this without malice or hatred. To kill was the law of the wild world he knew. Few were his primitive pleasures, but the greatest of these was to hunt and kill, and so he accorded to others the right to cherish the same desires as he, even though he himself might be the object of their hunt.
His strange life had left him neither morose nor bloodthirsty. That he joyed in killing, and that he killed with a laugh upon his handsome lips, betokened no innate cruelty. He killed for food most often, but, being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure, a thing which no other animal does; for it has remained man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.
Wait … what? Being a man, he killed for pleasure, the pleasure of inflicting suffering and death. This, evidently, has nothing to do with his “life training,” but neither, it seems, does it have anything to do with his “inner morality.” This is yet a third drive -- something brutish, but decidedly human.
Burroughs will go on to single out Reason (strangely capitalized) as the thing that separates man from animal…
But there was that which had raised him far above his fellows of the jungle -- that little spark which spells the vast difference between man and brute -- Reason.
…but again and again, Tarzan will not act out of Reason, but out of instinct, an instinct that is now hopelessly confused between the baseness of the animal, the depravity of the man, or the nobility of the English gentleman.
Sadism
After the murder of Kulonga, Tarzan will continue his vendetta against the people of his tribe and village, terrorizing them as a secret, stealthy, and to their way of thinking, supernatural killer in the trees.
Scarcely had Mbonga ceased speaking when a great crashing of branches in the trees above them caused the blacks to look up in renewed terror. The sight that met their eyes made even Mbonga shudder.
Turning and twisting in the air came the dead body of Mirando, to sprawl with a sickening limpness upon the ground at their feet.
With one accord the blacks took to their heels, nor did they stop until the last of them was lost in the shadows of the jungle.
Again Tarzan came down into the village and renewed his supply of arrows, and ate of the offering of food which the blacks had made to appease his wrath.
Before he left he carried the body of Mirando to the gate of the village, and propped it up against the palisade in such a way that the dead face seemed to be peering round the edge of the gate-post down the path which led to the jungle.
He positioned the dead body in a way to strike further fear into his helpless prey? This is innate morality? It reads more like sadism to me.
A Brave Primeval Woman
Eventually a party of Englishmen will come looking for Lord and Lady Greystoke, and among their party will be a young and beautiful American named Jane Porter.
From the trees Tarzan of the apes watched this strange ceremony; but most of all, he watched the sweet face and graceful figure of Jane Porter.
In his savage, untutored breast new emotions were stirring. He could not fathom them. He wondered why he felt so great an interest in these people -- why he had gone to such pains to save the three men. But he did not wonder why he had torn Sabor from the tender flesh of the strange girl.
Surely the men were stupid and ridiculous and cowardly. Even Manu, the monkey, was more intelligent than they. If these were creatures of his own kind, he was doubtful if his past pride in blood was warranted.
But the girl, ah! -- that was a different matter. He did not reason here. He knew that she was created to be protected, and that he was created to protect her.
Oh boy. More not thinking. More lack of reason. So to which instinct am I to attribute his protective feeling of Jane Porter? The gentleman? The brute? The devil?
We will quickly find out. As the melodrama progresses, Jane will be abducted by one of Tarzan’s ape enemies, an animal banished from Tarzan’s tribe named Terkoz.
He was right above them when he discovered them. The first intimation Jane Porter had of his presence was when the great hairy body dropped to the earth beside her, and she saw the awful face and the snarling, hideous mouth thrust within a foot of her.
One piercing scream escaped her lips as the brute’s hand clutched her arm. Then she was dragged toward those awful fangs which yawned at her throat. But ere they touched that fair skin another mood claimed the anthropoid.
The tribe had kept his women. He must find others to replace them. This hairless white ape would be the first of his new household.
He threw her roughly across his broad shoulders and leaped back into the trees, bearing Jane Porter away toward a fate a thousand times worse than death.
I should say so. In the idiom of Burroughs’s narrative, the apes are something more than dumb animals, with a never-explained language of their own and, in the case of Terkoz, a guile befitting a Saturday matinee serial villain. He clearly has designs on mating with Jane Porter.
But what of Tarzan and his motivations? He will of course fight and kill Terkoz. But he will do it, it seems, from the very same drive and desire that compelled Terkoz.
Like two charging bulls they came together, and like two wolves sought each other’s throat. Against the long canines of the ape was pitted the thin blade of the man’s knife.
Jane Porter -- her lithe form flattened against the trunk of a great tree, her hands tight pressed against her rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear, and admiration -- watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman -- for her.
As the great muscles of the man’s back and shoulders knotted beneath the tension of his efforts, and the huge biceps and forearm held at bay those mighty tusks, the veil of centuries of civilization and culture was swept from the blurred vision of the Baltimore girl. When the thin knife drank deep a dozen times of Terkoz’s heart’s blood, and the great carcass rolled lifeless upon the ground, it was a primeval woman who sprang forward with outstretched arms toward the primeval man who had fought for her and won her.
And Tarzan?
He did what no red-blooded man needs lessons in doing. He took his woman in his arms and smothered her upturned, panting lips with kisses.
For a moment Jane Porter lay there with half-closed eyes. For a moment -- the first in her young life -- she knew the meaning of love.
His First Ancestor
Okay. I don’t even have time to go into this cliched portrait of young Jane Porter of Baltimore who almost -- almost -- gives in to the primeval lust she feels for Tarzan, the evidently quintessential primeval man. When reading it, the lurid melodrama seemed to stick to my very fingers as I turned the page, but my mind was more focused on the strange double standard that Tarzan was creating in my mind -- more rational and moral that the finest man, while at the same time (and seemingly the majority of the time) more emotional and primeval than the basest animal. And for this, the next section doesn’t disappoint.
But as suddenly as the veil had been withdrawn it dropped again, and an outraged conscience suffused her face with its scarlet mantle, and a mortified woman thrust Tarzan of the apes from here and buried her face in her hands.
Tarzan had been surprised when he had found the girl he had learned to love after a vague and abstract manner a willing prisoner in his arms. Now he was surprised that she repulsed him.
He came close to her once more and took hold of her arm. She turned upon him like a tigress, striking his great breast with her tiny hands.
Tarzan could not understand it.
A moment ago and it had been his intention to hasten Jane Porter back to her people, but that moment was lost in the dim and distant past of things which were but can never be again, and with it the good intention had gone to join the impossible.
Since then Tarzan of the apes had felt the warm form close pressed to his. The hot, sweet breath against his cheek and mouth had fanned a new flame to life within his breast. The perfect lips had clung to his in burning kisses that had seared deep into his soul.
Again he laid his hand upon her arm. Again she repulsed him. And then Tarzan of the apes did just what his first ancestor would have done.
He took his woman in his arms and carried her into the jungle.
Not just like his first ancestor. Importantly, just like Terkoz. Terkoz and Tarzan both sling Jane Porter over their shoulders and carry her -- against her will and as though they owned her -- off into the jungle. In this and in so many ways, Tarzan has not the inner morality of the noble savage, he has only the mighty instinct of the ape.
The Son of Tarzan
It only gets worse in the sequel, The Son of Tarzan.
The pelt of a leopard covered the nakedness of the youth; but the wearing of it had not been dictated by any promptings of modesty. With the rifle shots of the white men showering about him he had reverted to the savagery of the beast that is inherent in each of us, but that flamed more strongly in this boy whose father had been raised a beast of prey. He wore his leopard skin at first in response to a desire to parade a trophy of his prowess, for he had slain the leopard with his knife in hand-to-hand combat. He saw that the skin was beautiful, which appealed to his barbaric sense of ornamentation, and when it stiffened and later commenced to decompose because of his having no knowledge of how to cure or tan it it was with sorrow and regret that he discarded it. Later, when he chanced upon a lone, black warrior wearing the counterpart of it, soft and clinging and beautiful from proper curing, it required but an instant to leap from above upon the shoulders of the unsuspecting black, sink a keen blade into his heart and possess the rightly preserved hide.
There were no after-qualms of conscience. In the jungle might is right, nor does it take long to inculcate this axiom in the mind of a jungle dweller, regardless of what his past training may have been. That the black would have killed him had he had the chance the boy knew full well. Neither he nor the black were any more sacred than the lion, or the buffalo, the zebra or the deer, or any other of the countless creatures who roamed, or slunk, or flew, or wriggled through the dark mazes of the forest. Each had but a single life, which was sought by many. The greatest number of enemies slain the better chance to prolong that life.
This is no noble savage, this son of Tarzan who, has the added advantage of having actually been raised in English society -- not abandoned like his father and raised “a beast of prey.” As I read these passages I often thought of the “savages” portrayed in Cooper’s fiction -- Chingachgook, say, or even Uncas -- and thought I saw the makings of another of my speculative and comparative PhD theses between the two characters.
The point is driven home all too well when the son of Tarzan takes the name Korak, which literally means “Killer” in the odd languages of the apes. In this story, the love interest -- or should I say, the object of our hero’s primal lust -- is a young woman named Meriem.
To the mind of the ape-man, knowing as he did the proclivities of the savages, there was but a single explanation -- Meriem had been killed and eaten. With the conviction that Meriem was dead there surged through Korak’s brain a wave of blood red rage against those he believed to be her murderer. In the distance he could hear the snarling of the baboons mixed with the screams of their victims, and towards this he made his way. When he came upon them the baboons had commenced to tire of the sport of battle, and the blacks in a little knot were making a new stand, using their knob sticks effectively upon the few bulls who still persisted in attacking them.
Among these broke Korak from the branches of a tree above them -- swift, relentless, terrible, he hurled himself upon the savage warriors of Kovudoo. Blind fury possessed him. Too, it protected him by its very ferocity. Like a wounded lioness he was here, there, everywhere, striking terrific blows with hard fists and with the precision and timeliness of the trained fighter. Again and again he buried his teeth in the flesh of a foeman. He was upon one and gone again to another before an effective blow could be dealt him. Yet, though great was the weight of his execution in determining the result of the combat, it was outweighed by the terror which he inspired in the simple, superstitious minds of his foeman. To them this white warrior, who consorted with the great apes and the fierce baboons, who growled and snarled and snapped like a beast, was not human. He was a demon of the forest -- a fearsome god of evil whom they had offended, and who had come out of his lair deep in the jungle to punish them. And because of this belief there were many who offered but little defense, feeling as they did the futility of pitting their puny mortal strengths against that of a deity.
This is not a thinking human. This is a savage animal, blinded by fury, sinking its teeth into human flesh in its mad desire for satiation.
So what, in the end, is Burroughs doing here? Is he mocking the trope of the noble savage? He paints both Tarzan and Korak both as paragons of innate virtue and as animals driven by unthinking lust and rage. Is he saying that there is no such thing as innate morality? Or is he saying that the law of the jungle is, in fact, the only innate morality that matters?
Both ideas are probably giving Burroughs too much credit. From my view, he is primarily “telling a whopping good yarn.”
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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