the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

I may have been in the fifth grade when I discovered that there were books about him, as that was the point I was officially “introduced” to the library and issued a library card at my elementary school. But that can't be right. I was perhaps in middle school.

Before the fifth grade, I'd read voraciously still, but I was limited to the collections of books in my homeroom and various books I'd find at home or at Grampaw and Grandmother's house. I specifically reading stuff like Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, and books about unsolved mysteries and coincidences. I also read the Encyclopedia Brittanica, incidentally; my parents had invested in a full set before I was born (?) or thereabouts, and thanks to being told to “look it up” when I didn't know how to spell something* or when I asked a question they didn't know the answer to, I learned at a tender age that much knowledge was to be had in that one book case in the living room.**

* We've all been there, haven't we? “Mother, how do you spell 'psychology'?” “Look it up!” Mother knew how to spell it, of course, but despite the counter-intuitiveness of the exercise, we got a very important life skill out of it. Even if we never found the word in question, we were certain about how not to spell it.

** I got chicken pox when I was in the third or fourth grade, I believe. While Mother was on the phone with Dr. Cousins to get advice, I looked it up. What he told her, I knew by the time she hung up the phone. She was, I think, a bit shocked and proud that I knew how to use the Encyclopedia already.

In the fifth grade, I found and studied all the books on martial arts training I could find. I'd been exposed to the idea of martial arts through watching Kung Fu at Aunt Mary's house and then various ridiculous renditions of Kung Fu Theatre on Saturday afternoons at Grandmother's house. I distinctly remember the pictures and explanations of, say, how to make a fist properly that I read in those now-rare books. (You don't learn these little nuances in martial arts classes anymore.)

So I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade when I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes. I was enthralled, even with the first book. What a magnificent story! You have a beautiful English couple of noble ancestry who are in a boat off the coast of Africa. The man saves a crew member from being beaten by his captain, and so when the crew mutinies, the crew member whose honor he'd saved protects the couple in turn, compelling the crew to leave them marooned on the coast with a few supplies (instead of simply tossing them overboard). The woman is with child. The man decides to make the best of a bad situation, laboring to pass the time and to create a comfortable, safe home for them while they await succor. The woman gives birth, and another year passes before a tribe of great apes invades their home and slaughters them. The babe is taken by a she-ape (Kala) to replace her own recently-deceased infant, and she raises him.

This much, you probably know. The story then takes an intriguing branch into how the young Tarzan teaching himself to read when he discovers the cabin then the books of his long-deceased parents (whose skeletons still lie where they fell 15 years before). And he teaches himself to read, rather accidentally, because he's studying the pictures of white people in the books—the only people he's ever seen—because he realizes they're hairless like he. At some point, he notices that certain “bugs” on the page match certain pictures. (The fantasy doesn't hold water, but it was still intriguing to contemplate.)

Around that time, my parents finally got a television. One of the few shows we watched were the old Hollywood Tarzan movies, so my appreciation of this superhero was quickly expanded to film.

I was always quite the tomboy, so I already climbed trees (and we were surrounded on all sides by forest—East Texas is semitropical—complete with grape vines and creepers. I practiced my Hollywood Tarzan yodel. I tried to swing through the trees. (Alas...grape vines tend to be attached at both the top and the bottom.)

I read all the Tarzan books the library had, which seem to have been about half of those Burroughs ever published (about 25). At some point, I tried reading one to Daddy. I loved the story so much that I wanted to share. Only when I tried to read to him did I realize that I understood—more or less—many of the words Burroughs uses but had no idea how to pronounce them. The man had a respectable vocabulary, and I absorbed it because I was fascinated with his noble savage.

I didn't realize there was a literary term for his ape-man until decades later, of course, but Tarzan was an undeniably irresistible creation. He is brilliant and humble and creative and fearless. He learns languages in a few weeks and quickly masters many. He never loses the superhuman strength or highly-developed animalistic senses of his youth. He fights lions with nothing more than a rope and a knife—and wins (of course!). But he has the instincts Burroughs imagined to be inbred to nobility: honesty, an unsullied personal honor, fairness, and an instinct to protect the fairer sex, no matter what.*

* All in all, I believe Burroughs' idea for Tarzan arose from Rudyard Kipling's “Mowgli,” but you have to admit that Burroughs took the idea to fantastic and memorable lengths.

A few months ago, I rediscovered Tarzan. The entire series is in open domain now, readily available for free thanks to Project Gutenberg and sites like manybooks.com. I downloaded the easily-obtainable ones, ensuring I got the first book of the series in the mix. I would reread them when opportunity offered.

About a week ago, I noticed Tarzan of the Apes on my Kindle and thought...why not?

It's still a fun read. Make no mistake about that. Just like The Hunger Games series, the writing may not be “all that,” but the story is still wonderful and just...fun. I still love the character and the general idea of it. In my world of difficult reading,* it's occasionally good to just let go and let bad literature take me away.

* I mean “difficult” in the sense of “difficult to understand” and/or “difficult to read because humans are horrible to one another,” both of which tend to characterize the canon. Both are most rewarding to read in that one's ability to understand one's native tongue is refined and one more closely understands the travails of one's marginalized fellow man. Such writing can also be uplifting, in its own way, but it can become burdensome from time to time. And when that happens, there's plenty of “bad” literature to relieve one. :)

At the same time, I wonder at many of the assumptions and prejudices that are built into the story. I've studied enough history—particularly America's history of racial relations, thanks to my master's thesis—to recognize that when Burroughs portrayed Africans or people of African descent as stupid and superstitious, he was merely portraying a commonly-believed “fact” of his time. He published the original Tarzan story in magazine serial form in 1912, at which time most whites believed blacks to be “lesser” beings, a sort of “missing link.” En masse, they bought into the pseudo-scientific “proof” that blacks were more animal-like. Such proofs included arguments like this: Notice the musculature of the Negro, how well developed it is, like that of a beast of burden. Ergo, they are more like the beasts than we are. And they lack common knowledge and simple learning, so they must be stupid. (Never mind that they were fantastic physical specimens because white men forced them to do all the manual labor, and never mind that teaching a black person to read was a capital offense....)

Despite this knowledge of what was taken to be “common sense” among the “cultured” white folk of the time, I find myself not entirely forgiving Burroughs for his ignorance and prejudice. In the original book, for example, Jane Porter and her father are eventually marooned in the very inlet Tarzan's parents are. Jane is accompanied by her faithful servant, Esmeralda, a “two-hundred eighty pound Negress,” who tries to crawl into a tiny cupboard to save herself from a lioness and who faints at the slightest provocation while Jane—the well-bred (white) Southern belle (from Baltimore, Maryland?)—shows the steel backbone of a warrior.

Seriously, y'all. If “heredity” means nearly as much as Burroughs asserts through the person of Tarzan, then would not Esmeralda be far better equipped to deal with jungle threats than sweet little well-bred Jane? Even in Burroughs' eyes, the jungle is Esmeralda's hereditary home—not Jane's.

Then Esmeralda is made to utter things like this: "What is it now? A hipponocerous? Where is he, Miss Jane?" And "You all don't mean to tell me that you're going to stay right here in this here land of carnivable animals when you all got the opportunity to escapade on that boat? Don't you tell me that, honey." And so forth, being the clear medium of comic relief. I'm reminded of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story where Lee goes to a movie with his white girlfriend; the audience is laughing at the antics of the “comic” Chinese landlord on-screen, but Lee is not amused.

The same sort of problem—based on poorly-researched information a century back—arises with the inbred “nobility” of Tarzan. His sense of honor and right and wrong comes from heredity, in Burroughs' world. He just knows that X is right and Y is wrong, and he knows to be concerned with others' opinions of him. His “instinct” guides him to protect Jane and her friends against the denizens of the jungle, and to behave toward her like any other well-bred English lord would be expected to. His noble breeding also makes him more perfectly formed and beautiful than other men. Of course.

This is where we get into the silly notion that you can read the heart through the eyes and face. If the person is evil, they will have evil eyes and a “swarthy” face, etc. This dumb notion pops up everywhere in the books.

OH. And in the book I'm reading now (the second in the series), Tarzan is in the Arab world and rescues a young woman who had been abducted from her father (a sheik) then sold into being what amounts to a prostitute. When Tarzan returns her to her father, he is overjoyed and offers Tarzan anything he has.

Does anyone see the problem with this plot device?

So. He's still my favorite superhero. The notion of the noble savage is, to me, irresistible. But even while I enjoy the books, they abrade me.

d