Excerpt 1, on “Tarzan’s First Love”
Modernism, at its heart “emphasized the sharp difference between
conscious surfaces and unconscious depths of experience” (55), writes Alzina
Stone Dale in her critical assessment of T.S. Eliot, a younger contemporary of
Burroughs (Burroughs 1875-1950; Eliot 1888-1965). This sharp difference
between surface and depth is what Tarzan realizes in the course of the story. On
the surface, Tarzan is one of the tribe of Kerchak. He eats where they eat. He
travels where they go. He sleeps where they sleep. But there exists a sharp
difference between him and them.
This difference is embraced in the Disney movie Tarzan, a movie which
Richard Corliss says shows Tarzan “search[ing] not so much for his mate Jane
as for his place in a society of men and apes” (220). The movie, Corliss
continues is “about the pain and triumph of racial or social assimilation” (221).
The theme remains salient in Tarzan II, as well, particularly in the Phil Collins
song “Who Am I?” This question underlies the first novel and focuses this
collection of stories. Barbara Creed says that Tarzan of the Apes “is an attempt
to define what it means to be human” (162).
Even Taug, who is a childhood friend, sees Tarzan’s physical form as
different. Taug, whom Holtsmark identifies as a type of “jungle Narcissus
infatuated with his own charms” (71), studies Tarzan and concludes “there was
no comparison” (Jungle Tales 16) between them. Tarzan lacked a “beautiful
coat,” “broad nostrils,” and “blood-shot eyes” (16), all beautifiers that Taug
identified in himself. This superficial discrepancy then indicates the underlying
differences in nature between the two. Tarzan’s capacity for reason is the
primary difference. In examining why Tarzan was attracted to Teeka, Burroughs
equivocates saying Tarzan “probably reasoned” (8) that her playfulness was the
cause. No other figure in the story is noted as having reasoned. This difference
gives him forethought, compassion, altruism, and eventually isolation. When the
panther screams, all the apes flee, but the narrator points out: “With the ape-boy
[. . .] it was different” (12). His response to Teeka’s danger displays the
underlying difference in the way he thinks. He can extrapolate that his own
danger is also a danger to others. He sees Teeka’s danger and in un-apelike
fashion calls for their companions to turn on the intruder. He reasons that “if all
those of the tribe who chanced to be present today would charge, Sheeta, the
great cat, would doubtless turn tail and run for his life” (12). But the
subconscious shallowness of these creatures becomes as clear as the superficial
differences. Tarzan is left to face the danger alone.
This profound difference between Tarzan and the apes is illustrated,
literally, by Burne Hogarth in his pictorial version of the story. The text indicates:
“Tarzan and Taug took to the trees together, the shaggy coat of the fierce ape
brushing the sleek skin of the English lordling as they passed through the
primeval jungle side by side” (23). From this, one would expect a straightforward
movement such as Russ Manning creates (see figure 1-1). A youthful Tarzan
stretches out horizontally to the left, while Taug, above and behind, reaches
forward with the same arm in the same direction. The two are clearly
companions in proximity and intent. Hogarth’s interpretation of the scene (see
figure 1-2) opposes Manning’s interpretation and shows through the orientation
of the two figures the fundamental difference between them. As they travel,
Tarzan’s and Taug’s bodies are oriented in opposing directions, one head first
the other feet first. Tarzan swings over the branch, while Taug dives under it.
Walter James Miller has pointed out: “Physically they may be traveling together,
but mentally they are going in opposite directions” (11). This is the realization
that Tarzan comes to as the story ends, that while he is in the world of the apes,
he is not of that world. Hogarth, of all the comic illustrators, is able to capture,
according to Holtsmark, the “unmistakable sense of urgency, vibrant and
controlled movement, and aliveness” (106) that is central to Burroughs’s work.
He is able to take a visual image and produce in it and through it a psychological
interpretation that transcends the words of the caption and gives definition to the
reader’s own or alternate building sense of Tarzan internally.
Modernist writers, according to Dale, were characterized in their work “by
swift perceptions and abrupt juxtapositions of unrelated particulars” (55). In one
sense, Burroughs’s creation in 1912 of the hyphenated ape-man was just such a
juxtaposition embedded in a complex sociological and psychological field (or, in
this case, jungle). The character of Tarzan is marked by perceptions much
quicker than the apes of nature, as he displayed when he roped the panther that
pursued Teeka. The tension between human nature and ape nature drives both
the character of Tarzan and the plot of the story.
Between the first appearance of Tarzan and the time that Burroughs wrote
“Tarzan’s First Love,” Eliot wrote one of his most important early poems, “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, printed in Poetry, June 1915. Prufrock
represented the tension between timid youth and cynical middle age.
Burroughs’s tension, while less philosophical, is bolder in the audacity of its
circumstance. And, while contemporaneity does not equal relationship, there is
certainly a kinship between Prufrock and Tarzan in their recognition of and
inability to reconcile incongruent halves.
Eliot’s “Prufrock” takes its genesis from Dante’s Inferno, as the epigraph
indicates. The futility of lasting achievement is implicit in Dante’s character
Guido da Montefeltro, who speaks only because he is sure that his words can
never be taken to those who would be affected by them. He gives life to the
words only because he believes they are eternally dead. This co-existence of
contraries is the framework within Eliot’s poem. Prufrock combines several
contraries: youth versus age, life versus death, and thoughtfulness versus
complacency, for example. The joining of life and death became especially
important for Eliot. The persona of a later poem, “Journey of the Magi,”
comments, “I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different”
(Complete 69). The implication in had thought is that the persona realizes the
error of such an assumption. The opposite, the statement implies, is true: birth
and death are much the same. In many ways, the Prufrock poem is the
Modernist exemplum of William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
Eliot’s poem affirms Blake’s claim: “Without Contraries is no progression.
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to
Human existence” (248). However, Eliot could not maintain the optimism that
one might find in Blake. Eliot ends his Prufrock poem with drowning rather than
the less damning oppression of the law that Blake identifies. Eliot’s question in
“Choruses from ‘The Rock’” focuses the issue: “What life have you if you have
not life together?” (Complete 101). More like Eliot than Blake, Burroughs ends
this story in estrangement rather than assimilation, a young man alone in the
jungle.
The idea of civilization as a jungle was in the popular imagination. Upton
Sinclair had written his landmark novel of insensitive greed and civilized animality
a decade earlier (The Jungle, 1906). Clarence A. Andrews claims that “[t]he real
shock of [Sinclair’s] book comes in our realization of the parallel between animal
and human” (4), an idea promoted centuries ago by Solomon: “I said in mine
heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them,
and that they might see that they themselves are beasts” (Ecclesiastes 3.18).
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, made the connection across the ocean at about the
same time. In his Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Empty House,”
Watson, the narrator, remarks: “I knew not what wild beast we were about to hunt
down in the dark jungle of criminal London” (560). In this case the “beast” is
expert tiger hunter Colonel Sebastian Moran.
Burroughs begins the story with Teeka, “a most alluring picture of young,
feminine loveliness” (7). A newcomer to the Tarzan stories will not know from
this that Teeka is an ape. The first intimation that this is the case, delayed by two
paragraphs, is the narrator’s statement that Tarzan “had known no other
associates than the sullen bulls and the snarling cows of the tribe of Kerchak, the
great ape” (7). The conflation of human and animal is implicit in the opening
description, and an explicit difference between Tarzan and the apes of Kerchak
does not come until later in the story when Tarzan begins to compare himself
(ironically) to Teeka, juxtaposing her “handsome coat of hair“ with “[h]is own
smooth, brown hide” (8). This comparison began for Tarzan when he was
“nearly ten” (Apes 36), in a poolside epiphany; he had gone, in Tarzan of the
Apes, to a lake bank for a drink with “one of his cousins,” where he is “appalled”
at the differences in their reflections (37). As Taug does later, Tarzan goes on, in
“Tarzan’s First Love,” to compare his teeth, eyebrows, nose and mouth to Teeka,
recognizing his own inferiority: “Tarzan had often practiced making his mouth into
a little round circle and then puffing out his cheeks while he winked his eyes
rapidly; but he felt that he could never do it in the same cute and irresistible way
in which Teeka did it” (8). Here the juvenile copying understates but confirms the
parallel between human and animal that Andrews identified.
Jurgis Rudkus, Sinclair’s protagonist, endures the “jungle” of Chicago.
Even before Sinclair, British icon and author Rudyard Kipling said in 1891 that
Chicago, the first “real city” he had found in America, was “inhabited by savages”
and “barbarians” (American Notes 207). Burroughs himself was living in Chicago
when he began Tarzan’s story. The book, Griswold points out, “was started in
the midst of one of the country’s great economic depressions, by a failed
businessman who was writing in a rented office in Chicago and who had seen
that it was a dog-eat-dog world out there, a ‘jungle’ where only the fittest
survived” (107; see also John Tucker’s “Tarzan Was Born in Chicago”). Certainly,
Burroughs reveals just such a parallel in this story (and in other stories involving
Tarzan). It is worth noting that Burroughs himself grew up on Chicago’s West
Side, and between the publication of Sinclair’s novel and the writing of “Tarzan’s
First Love” also lived primarily in the Chicago area (see Bill Hillman’s “ERB
Houses: The Family Tree from 1875-1950.”). Jurgis survives by virtue of three
things, Andrews says: ”his physical strength, his cunning, and his willingness to
adapt to any situation” (6). While Tarzan’s story’s attack on social conditions is
subtle compared to Sinclair’s, these three virtues imbue Burroughs’s character
with the same vitality. Tarzan’s physical strength is demonstrated early in the
story, when he wrestles with the ape, Taug. His cunning shows even more than
his strength in this story with his use of the knife and rope in giving himself an
advantage over his adversaries. And, it is his adaptation that allows him to
release his claim on Teeka and choose in the end to go alone. It is noteworthy
also in Sinclair’s The Jungle, that Jurgis’s wife, Ona, betrays her husband with
another man while Jurgis is out and that Jurgis later loses his family to the urban
jungle of Chicago, just as Tarzan loses Teeka to Taug while Tarzan is away,
eventually losing her and his sense of family with the apes in the jungle of Africa.
Burroughs makes this city-jungle connection explicit in “The Capture of Tarzan”:
“the teeming jungle with all its myriad life, like the swarming streets of a great
metropolis, is one of the loneliest spots in God’s great universe” (24).
This human-animal dichotomy and the use of jungle as metaphor is also a
manifestation of Modernist thought. Jurgis’s Chicago, Prufrock’s London, and
Tarzan’s Africa all present an alienating environment which threatens to separate
each protagonist from meaningful unity with others. In Tarzan’s case, David
Adams claims “the jungle represents the unconscious where he must work out
his identity as a human being” (“Folklorist” 4). Jurgis and Prufrock attempt the
same in their respective environments. The jungle becomes, in the words of
Sarkis Atamian, “the unknown, uncharted territories of the soul[,] and the beasts
are the challenges of the demons in all of us” (117).
Burroughs accomplishes much in this brief story. It is a story that centers
on the quest for acceptance. This desire is not limited to Modernist writers,
though. “Tarzan’s identity confusion,” Vernon writes, “resonates perfectly with
that of [an] adolescent reader” (29) today. Tarzan, of course, in searching for
assimilation manipulates and contorts himself by whatever means available to be
a “normal” member of the tribe. The modernist conclusion of such a quest,
though, is foregone. The appearance of these needs is self-deluding; the
Modernist end comes in alienation, loss and despair. What is most important is
the conclusion. Tarzan is left unassimilated; in fact, he is alienated from the very
society that he grew up in. This sentiment is often one that is indicative of the
Modernist world. Antonis Balasopoulos has suggested that Tarzan’s separation
from the apes is a positive situation. His claim, that Tarzan’s “freedom from
Nietzschean ressentiment renders him immune to the malaise and discontent of
‘civilized’ modernity” (206), seems to leap over the events in Jungle Tales, for
discontent is central to the entire collection.
Tarzan’s world, a literal jungle, has him trapped. This becomes a
metaphor for Modern existence. The duality of Taug’s literal caging and Tarzan’s
emotional bondage is a significant double binding. First, in Tarzan’s attempt to fit
into his ape world, he is like Taug, who is physically caged by Mbonga’s warriors.
Taug is helpless to set himself free in this situation. Likewise, Tarzan is trapped
in a cage, a much larger one, made up of the jungle that he calls home. Just as
in the Modern age that which should bring comfort brings despair, the home of
the jungle is also the cage that bars him from assimilation. This double image
reinforces the message and provides, in the end, the ironic context of Tarzan’s
final statement. Taug’s separation from his own kind is short and temporary.
The distance from the tribe to the cage is easily covered by Tarzan when he
goes to free him. The distance from Tarzan’s jungle cage to Europe or America,
however, is insurmountable because it is inconceivable. Tarzan has no way to
contact a rescuer, nor could he communicate his desire for rescue if someone
were to enter his jungle from the faraway Anglo world. Also, his bondage is as
much emotional as physical. He doesn’t know who he is; his quest for
acceptance is equally a quest for self-identity. Just as Taug lacks the physical
dexterity to unlatch the cage that holds him, Tarzan lacks the mental framework
to escape the jungle. He has only the fragments, the clues left in the enigmatic
cabin by the shore, of what he is looking for. Tarzan’s escape is likewise twofold.
He needs the physical relocation that would put him back to his hereditary own,
and he lacks, as do all adolescents, the emotional maturity to understand whom
he is. It will take the arrival of a rescuer, physically and emotionally, to free him
from his bondage. In this story, no rescuer arrives, and Tarzan is left alone.
The renunciation of his fellows, of course, anticipates and reflects the
renunciation at the end of Tarzan of the Apes, a book paradoxically written four
years earlier but the end of which takes place in the plot line some years later.
There, when William Clayton asks Tarzan how he came to be raised in the
jungle, Tarzan must respond in a psychological welter of emotions – because
Clayton is engaged to Jane, because Clayton is the current Lord Greystoke, a
title and social status Tarzan has just learned is his, and because Tarzan
believes Jane loves Clayton. Tarzan’s denial of all is wrapped up in the terse
explanation: “My mother was an Ape, and of course she couldn’t tell me much
about it. I never knew who my father was” (219). At this point, it is as if Tarzan is
claiming an opposing variation of his statement at the end of “Tarzan’s First
Love”: “Tarzan is an ape-man. He will go alone.” Assimilation, again, is
frustrated as Tarzan stands in a different jungle, either literally at the edge of a
Wisconsin forest, or metaphorically in the impersonal jungle of civilization. In
terms of plot, though, this second alienation is yet to come.
When near the end of “The Wasteland” Eliot writes “The jungle crouched,
humped in silence” (Complete 49), the reader might well understand this in terms
of Tarzan’s jungle, uninviting and alienating. “Tarzan’s First Love” ends, at least
from a formalist stance, with isolation. Like the ending of “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock,” Tarzan is left drowning emotionally. The irony of the final line in
“Prufrock” – “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (7) – is applicable to
Tarzan’s situation as well. It is the human voice within him that wakes a
consciousness of separation. That consciousness in turn drowns his attempt at
assimilation with the apes. The human voice brings both life and death, the
paradoxical words of Guido da Montefeltro. The final word is not physical death
but the psychic death that accompanies the recognition that in a Modernist world
one is truly alone. The wisdom to be gleaned from the experience comes in the
individual taking personal responsibility for his or her life. This is a personal
journey that must be taken by the individual; no one can take another person’s
journey. While the unnamed author of “War and Literature,” a contemporary
local article and interview considering Burroughs, may have meant something
different, the claim that “Burroughs is a modern of the moderns” is surely worth
evaluation.