Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

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  In Tarzan of the Apes John Clayton, heir apparent to the title of Lord Greystoke, is cast away with his new bride on the coat of equatorial West Africa, following a mutiny aboard their yacht. They are presumed dead, and eventually do die, but their baby son is adopted by Kala, a female of an imaginary protohuman species of ape, whose own infant has been killed by the “king” of her “tribe.”

  In order to survive in this harsh milieu John Clayton Jr. must cultivate greater bodily strength and fighting skill than his adoptive kindred, and he eventually develops such supremacy that he is able to kill the king and take his place. His superior intelligence allows him to learn the use of weapons without instruction or example. He also learns to read and write (but not to speak) English from the books left behind in his parents’ ramshackle hut.

  Tarzan’s adoptive tribe has human neighbors, but are not on good terms with them, and the difference in his skin color prevents him identifying with them; it is not until he is twenty years old that Tarzan encounters other white men, who are marooned exactly as he was. This party consists of an American antiquarian, Archimedes Q. Porter, his daughter Jane and her maid, his assistant, and William Clayton.

  These newcomers fail dismally—and rather farcically—to cope with the wilderness, and Tarzan becomes their secret benefactor, watching over them and saving their lives whenever necessary. He falls in love with Jane after rescuing her from one of his adoptive cousins, who attempts to rape her, but understandable difficulties in communication prevent him from finding out that his feelings are reciprocated, and he wrongly concludes that she is in love with Clayton.

  Eventually, the new castaways are rescued by French soldiers, who are forced to abandon their commander, Paul D’Arnot, when he is carried off by cannibals. Tarzan rescues D’Arnot, and learns a great deal from him—including the French language—while nursing him back to health. D’Arnot, meanwhile, deduces Tarzan’s true identity from the contents of the hut. D’Arnot escorts Tarzan to the civilized world, and while the Frenchman sets out to prove that he is the true Lord Greystoke, Tarzan goes to America in search of Jane.

  Tarzan finds Jane in dire straits, about to be reluctantly married off to a wicked financier to whom her father owes money, but he contrives to save her from this sad fate, and from a forest fire. He is, however, still laboring under the delusion that Jane loves William Clayton, and when he receives a telegram confirming that he is the true heir to the Greystoke title, he decides that honor compels him discreetly to disappear, leaving both the title and the girl to his cousin.

  The Return of Tarzan follows the consequences of this unparalleled beau geste. Tarzan lives for a while in Paris, but he discovers that civilization is too insipid and hypocritical for his unrefined tastes, and is glad to embark upon a career as a secret agent. While he is en route to South Africa, a chance meeting with Jane’s best friend allows him to discover his mistake in thinking that Jane loved his cousin, but he is thrown overboard by his enemies before being able to do anything about it. Not until he has completed a further series of jungle adventures—in the course of which he becomes the chief of the Waziri tribe and discovers the lost city of Opar—can he locate Jane again. Even then he must take care of his civilized enemies, and overcome further difficulties and misunderstandings before finally marrying her.

  Only one other book in the series, The Son of Tarzan (1917), really carries Tarzan’s life story forward to any significant degree. Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1919) fills in details of his early life omitted from Tarzan of the Apes, but the remainder are repetitive accounts of formulaic adventures which simply constitute a series of footnotes to the story told in the first two volumes. The core of the true Tarzan myth (“true” in the sense that the grunting, liana-swinging, crocodile-wrestling paragon of inarticulacy portrayed in the early films is, as Burroughs thought, a mere travesty) is to be found entire in the first two books of the series—and there is a case to be made that it really resides in the first alone.

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  Tarzan is, essentially, a creature of two worlds. He is a jungle predator who stalks his prey, kills it—with his bare hands if necessary—and eats it raw. Other animal predators are his respected rivals, and despite his awesome physique it is his intelligence which gives him the edge over them. His ability to reason is superior to their inborn instincts, and his own instincts are those of an idealized English nobleman: he is by nature gallant, chivalrous and dutiful. It is, however, precisely these noble instincts which lead him to despise the world of civilized men.

  However paradoxical it may seem, it is Tarzan’s harsh upbringing in a world of nature red in tooth and claw which has allowed his instinctive nobility to flourish. Human “predators” he despises, because their motives for killing seem to him to be dishonest and perverted. It seems to Tarzan that like William Clayton, but in most cases infinitely more so, the vast majority of men are unentitled to their inheritance; they have, ironically, been brutalized by their insulation from the law of the jungle.

  In Tarzan’s world-view, the violence of the jungle is entirely legitimate; in the jungle one has to kill to eat, and one must fight other predators for the privilege, and that is what one does. The violence of civilized men, by contrast, is a kind of sickness, based in oppression, deceit and naked sadism. Tarzan can find no authentic morality in the world of civilized men, where competition in the interests of survival has been overtaken by competition for money, whose principal use is “to purchase the effeminate pleasures of weaklings.” He can see little moral difference between the great majority of black men (whom he considers to be superstitious cannibals) and the great majority of white men (who seem to him to be greedy hypocrites), and even that minority of men—black or white—which stands above the general run of their kind has its superior counterpart in the animal world, in species like the elephant and certain rare individuals like Jad-bal-ja the Golden Lion.

  It scarcely needs to be emphasized that Tarzan’s jungle bears very little resemblance to the actual African rain forest, ecologically speaking. Many of the animals featured in Tarzan of the Apes (including lions) are not forest-dwellers, and the apes which play such a vital role are entirely imaginary. The author’s version of the novel also featured tigers, though this proved a little too much for the copy-editor, who removed them. Tarzan’s jungle is a purely hypothetical construct: a primeval state of nature inhabited by archetypal symbols (thus, each species has its identifying name: Numa the Lion, Tantor the Elephant, etc.) If we are to make sense of this we can only do so in psychological terms; matters of narrative realism do not enter into it.

  Tarzan of the Apes is a curious celebration of Rousseauesque ideas about the nobility of savagery and the idea that a fundamentally virtuous human nature is routinely spoiled and perverted by cultural artifice. As a parable of the power of innocence, it has a considerable appeal to those individuals who feel most acutely the manifold constraints and petty injustices of life in civilized society. Many of those most afflicted by such stress are children, but anyone can identify with Tarzan who has felt the weariness of conformity with social norms and the frustrations of confrontation with cultural complexity. Tarzan is, however, more than just a mighty barbarian licensed by circumstance to do all the things we are physically and circumstantially prevented from doing; he has a wholeness which we have not. He has the heart of a lion and the mind of an aristocrat, and the two are not in conflict. In him, emotion and intellect, appetite and self-control, id and superego, are in perfect harmony. If he is out of place in high society, that is only because high society is not worthy of him; he is at home in the jungle not because he is bestial but because he is strong enough to subject the jungle to his ennobling influence, in becoming its rightful and acknowledged king.

  The most lyrical passages in the Tarzan books describe the moments when Tarzan comes home to the jungle after a time in the civilized world, and celebrates his release. There
is a similar critical moment in The Son of Tarzan, when Tarzan’s son—who has been brought up to be properly civilized—is forced by circumstance to discover his true self in that same jungle. This is the ultimate liberation which the Tarzan books offer their readers: not simply the joy of casting off all the shackles of civilization, but the promise that when that is done, you will find yourself at home. Perhaps Tarzan’s jungle is a perverse Utopia, but it is a Utopia nevertheless. It is a turbulent Garden of Eden where the lion will never lie down with the lamb, nor can he ever be expected to, but it is a kind of Eden. It is a paradise for the adventurous, who would be bored to tears in Heaven.

  Many adults would deem this a childish idea, and it is perfectly understandable that no one but a child is likely to be sufficiently unselfconscious to confess that his idea of the good life involves the freedom to slaughter human and animal villains on a massive scale. If we were honest, though, there would probably be few among us who could claim to be entirely unafflicted by fantasies of doing violence—often extreme and ingenious violence—to those who annoy and frustrate us in the thousand trivial ways which everyday life permits and necessitates.

  It is partly because Tarzan of the Apes offers us this kind of gratification in an unashamedly straightforward fashion that Tarzan has won his privileged place among modern hero-myths. But our recognition of the Tarzanic dreams which lurk within us is not without irony, as British satirists knew very well when they employed “Tarzan” as a mocking nickname for the politician Michael Heseltine—whose entitlement to it may, in the end, have been what dissuaded his fellow MPs from electing him their leader. Nor is this irony absent from the books, which recognize and try to deal with it. The ironic dimension shows up most clearly in Tarzan’s problematic relationship with Jane.

  Jane, as befits a modest heroine cooked up according to the conventional recipe of her day, is a civilizing influence on her husband. She threatens to enmesh him in a net of domesticity and tame him. In most melodramas, this is seen as a suitable fate for a hero, or at least a suitable end for a book, but it is clearly not right for Tarzan, nor for a series of more than twenty books. After their marriage, Tarzan does his best to live with Jane in London, making relatively infrequent returns to his true home, but the conflict of interest between them quickly becomes exposed when their son Jack begins to show signs that he is a chip off the old block. Jane tries to stamp out these atavistic tendencies, but is thwarted—Jack’s eventual escape from his false home to his true one is a triumph, and amply demonstrates to Tarzan the folly of allowing himself to be tamed. The family moves to Africa, but this is only a partial solution to the problem.

  In Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1918) Burroughs afflicts Tarzan with amnesia so that he can revert fully to type, but this was not a solution which could be extended indefinitely. Burroughs must have realized by then what the pressure of melodramatic convention had presumably prevented him from realising before—that the end of Tarzan of the Apes, far from being a natural lead-in to a sequel, was in fact a perfect conclusion: Jane should indeed have been left to the weak-kneed cousin, while the true hero remained married to his jungle.

  In order to solve this problem Burroughs initially took the courageous course; in the magazine serial which became the first half of Tarzan the Untamed (1920) he simply killed Jane off. He relented of this harsh decision, however, and brought her back to life in the book version; it is not entirely clear whether this was because his courage failed him in the face of the awesome might of literary convention or because he realized that a Jane who had been carried off, but not killed, could have an entire novel (Tarzan the Terrible, 1921) devoted to her recovery.

  The problem of what to do with Jane hung over the remainder of the series. In Tarzan’s Quest (1936) he experimented with the possibility of elevating her to heroic status, allowing her to function as a substitute in much the same way that her offspring had been allowed to come into his heritage in The Son of Tarzan, but this was distinctly unconvincing and hardly in the spirit of the overarching enterprise. The alternative solution which Burroughs found to the threat which Jane posed to his otherwise invincible hero was infinitely preferable: in almost all the adventures chronicled after Tarzan the Terrible he virtually ignored her, remaining mindful of her existence while ruthlessly excluding her physical presence.

  This was the best possible solution to the dilemma which Jane’s existence posed. Jane’s death might have allowed Tarzan to be tempted again, but while she was permanently present—although conveniently left offstage—the question of Tarzan being ensnared by sexual attraction simply could not arise. This was doubly convenient. Tarzan is the kind of hero who must, indeed, remain “untamed” and “terrible.” In a different era he might—like modern haunters of urban wildernesses who are “licensed to kill”—have been prodigiously promiscuous, but given the attitude of his time he was far better off being safely married to an absentee wife, honor-bound to be utterly chaste.

  Philip José Farmer, whose Tarzan Alive (1972) offers a “corrected” biography of a person whose career was allegedly misreported by Burroughs, tried to adapt his character to the modern formula, but it is by no means clear that such a move was necessary or desirable. A plethora of loveless sex is not particularly attractive, and as a narrative device it quickly becomes as boringly ritualistic as slaughtering lions. It is not surprising that Farmer’s own Tarzan pastiches were initially produced as exercises in pornography (although one of them, Lord of the Trees, was eventually published—in a rather slim edition—in a version from which all the sex scenes had been carefully excised).

  It is not simply the fact that Tarzan was the product of a sexually-inhibited era that makes his innocence appropriate. One can readily see, in retrospect, that he never should have tried to “grow up” at all; his closest literary relative is not Kipling’s Mowgli, whose task is to be educated in spite of his peculiar circumstances, but J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. It was a mistake for Tarzan to take Jane back from his effete cousin, but it was also a mistake for him to try to set up home in Paris and become a secret agent. His one and only true home was his jungle Never Land, and as Peter Pan found out at the end of the novel version of his career, Peter and Wendy (1911)—there was nothing for one such as he within the borders of the real world but tragic disillusionment. Even the most determined popular fiction always has to recognize, in the end, that in the real world, uncompromized nobility cannot hold a candle to hypocrisy.

  At one point in The Return of Tarzan Burroughs states explicitly that to be a child or a primeval man is “the same thing in a way,” and that Tarzan is both. This opinion, outdated now, is consonant with the thinking of many early anthropologists, who tried to account for the “primitiveness” of alien cultures by likening their ways of thought to those of children—a view wholeheartedly endorsed by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913). Burroughs is content to differ from all these contemporaries—even, and especially, from Barrie—in seeing nothing incomplete in Tarzan’s situation. Tarzan is not a case of arrested development: he is the authentic, whole man; it is those who have gone on to maturity who have become fragmented, as he nearly does himself.

  This image of the ideal man recurs in other Burroughs novels, ranging from the offbeat romance of The Eternal Lover (1914-15; in book form 1925) to the playful comedy of The Cave Girl (1913-17; in book form 1925). It is the condition to which all his heroes tacitly aspire, even though they may not be aware of it themselves. Nor is this an implicitly masculine ideal, despite the implication of such exercises in role-reversal as H. M. E. Clamp’s Wild Cat (1935), in which the feral woman is condemned by an unthinking author to that hideous fate-worse-than-death which is reserved for the heroines of popular romantic fiction. True female Tarzans can be found in Burroughs’s The Cave Girl and in S. Fowler Wright’s The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928) and Dream; or, The Simian Maid (1931).

  This image of innocent wholeness is, of course, quite false. Ta
rzan of the Apes is a bare-faced lie, from beginning to end—but Burroughs’s genius as a writer of popular fiction lay in the realisation that it is not necessary for a writer to pretend too much, and that readers are capable of being grateful for the kind of sincerity which goes straight to the heart of their nostalgic daydreams.

  We are all condemned to live in a world whose moral and material imperfections are manifest, and where honesty is—let’s face it—the second best policy. Why should we be ashamed to deal with bold and naked lies, if they offer us a vision of a way of being which not only licenses all the impulses which civilized society necessarily and rightly demands that we should suppress, but insists that we would be better and happier people were we fortunate enough to enjoy that way of being?

  Tarzan of the Apes is the purest kind of romance there is, because it is one of the few novels which does not pretend that romance must, in the end, be accommodated to social institutions. Its big lie leads us not to the counterfeit ecstasy of wealth and marriage, but to the true ecstasy of being the rightful king of the jungle. It leads us, admittedly, nowhere—”nowhere” is, after all, what Utopia means—but it really is useful to have such a destination available.

  The tide of literary fashion has now brought us back to an era when it is vey difficult indeed to get to nowhere from here and now but that is a state of affairs which is not entirely to be welcomed.