The Apes of Wrath

by Richard Klaw

  The sailor, in the meantime, was both rejoiced and perplexed. He had strong hopes of now recapturing the brute, as it could scarcely escape from the trap into which it had ventured, except by the rod, where it might be intercepted as it came down. On the other hand, there was much cause for anxiety as to what it might do in the house. This latter reflection urged the man still to follow the fugitive. A lightning-rod is ascended without difficulty, especially by a sailor; but, when he had arrived as high as the window, which lay far to his left, his career was stopped; the most that he could accomplish was to reach over so as to obtain a glimpse of the interior of the room. At this glimpse he nearly fell from his hold through excess of horror. Now it was that those hideous shrieks arose upon the night, which had startled from slumber the inmates of the Rue Morgue. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, habited in their night clothes, had apparently been occupied in arranging some papers in the iron chest already mentioned, which had been wheeled into the middle of the room. It was open, and its contents lay beside it on the floor. The victims must have been sitting with their backs toward the window; and, from the time elapsing between the ingress of the beast and the screams, it seems probable that it was not immediately perceived. The flapping-to of the shutter would naturally have been attributed to the wind.

  As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye by the hair (which was loose, as she had been combing it), and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrensy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just discernible. The fury of the beast, who no doubt bore still in mind the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear. Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds, and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation; throwing down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from the bedstead. In conclusion, it seized first the corpse of the daughter, and thrust it up the chimney, as it was found; then that of the old lady, which it immediately hurled through the window headlong.

  As the ape approached the casement with its mutilated burden, the sailor shrank aghast to the rod, and, rather gliding than clambering down it, hurried at once home—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman’s exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings of the brute.

  I have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety of every person minding his own business.

  “Let him talk,” said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. “Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of this mystery, is by no means that matter for wonder which he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna, —or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has ‘de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.’”1

  _________________

  1 “...of denying what is, and explaining what isn’t” from a footnote in Letter xi in Part VI of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). “It is crotchet common to philosophers of all ages to deny what is, and explain what is not.”

  EVIL ROBOT MONKEY

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  Possibly the shortest story ever nominated for a Hugo, Kowal’s charming piece of flash fiction introduces Sly, a chimp implanted with a chip that makes him smarter than his brethren.

  Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

  Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

  In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

  The students’ teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.

  Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now, before a handler came to talk to him.

  Damn.

  He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the center and tried to lose himself.

  In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snicked open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.

  Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”

  Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.

  “Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”

  “You should have told them that I was not an animal.”

  Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”

  “And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.

  “It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”

  Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”

  “I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”

  Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived—too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel which, by the Earth and Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”

  Vern covered his
mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey.’”

  Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.

  “But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”

  Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern—rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel trying to push his anger into the clay.

  The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived in his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.

  His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.

  Vern’s eyes were moist. “Do you want me to put that in the kiln for you?”

  Sly nodded.

  “I have to take the clay. You understand that, don’t you.”

  Sly nodded again, staring at his vase. It was beautiful.

  Vern scowled. “The woman makes me want to hurl feces.”

  Sly snorted at the image, then sobered. “How long before I get it back?”

  Vern picked up the bucket of clay next to the wheel. “I don’t know.” He stopped at the door and looked past Sly to the window. “I’m not cleaning your mess. Do you understand me?”

  For a moment, rage crawled on his spine, but Vern did not meet his eyes and kept staring at the window. Sly turned.

  The vase he had thrown lay on the floor in a pile of clay.

  Clay.

  “I understand.” He waited until the door closed, then loped over and scooped the clay up. It was not much, but it was enough for now.

  Sly sat down at his wheel and began to turn.

  APES IN LITERATURE

  Jess Nevins

  Apes have appeared in literature as a metaphor for various sins and as a proxy for humanity for centuries. From ancient Egyptian religious writings to a 2011 Oscar-nominated film, apes are a constant part of human culture. However, their meanings, usages, and portrayal have changed over time.

  Apes were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans first-hand from their experiences in Africa. To both groups apes were seen as ugly, malicious, and dangerous, and “ape” was commonly used as an insult. Heraclitus wrote that “the handsomest ape is ugly compared with humanity; the wisest man appears as an ape compared with a god” (in Plato, Hippias Major, c. 390 BCE) and Horace wrote that “that ape of yours who knows nothing but how to imitate Calvus and Catullus” (Satirae, c. 35 BCE). Early Christian writers and artists used apes as a symbol for the vices of vanity, greed, and lechery, and as a symbol of unrestrained, uninhibited humanity. In Dante’s Inferno (1308–1321 CE) an alchemist describes himself as “a fine ape of nature,” and in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1623 CE) a painter is praised as being so skilled that he “would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.”

  Not all early portrayals of apes were negative. In the French story of “Milles et Amys,” which has been dated back to Alberic de Troisfontaines’ Chronicle (circa 1240), the two friends Milles and Amys are killed by Ogier the Dane during his rebellion against Charlemagne. The children of Milles are guarded by a talking ape nursemaid, who protects them from Amys’ evil widow until two angels of paradise spirit the children away. And Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West (circa 1550) has a heroic trickster monkey, Sun Wu Kong, as its main character. But most portrayals of apes, especially in the West, followed Christian teachings and portrayed them as vain and lecherous, if not worse: in the English Wagner Book (1593), an elaboration on the Faust legend, Faust’s assistant Wagner is accompanied by an ape assistant, making explicit the traditionally implicit ties between apes and supernatural evil.

  Apes took on a still darker edge at the turn of the seventeenth century. John Donne’s Progresse of the Soule (1601) played up the apes’ supposedly lust-filled nature by showing an ape fall in love with Siphatecia, Adam’s fifth daughter, and have sex with her. This was the beginning of the “rape ape” theme, the motif of the crazed ape dragging a woman away in order to violate her. The “rape ape” motif, embodied in an anecdote of a male ape carrying off a female “Hottentot,” became a common part of seventeenth-century travel narratives and eighteenth-century prose narratives such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

  At about this time scientists in the West began to experience apes first-hand. In 1698 a live chimpanzee was captured in Angola and brought to England, and his death and that of other primates in the seventeenth century were opportunities for scientists, including Carl Linnaeus, to dissect them and eventually create a taxonomy of primates. In 1766 the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon, used the term “Jocko” to describe the smaller species of African apes, and the term entered common usage, though it was eventually limited to being synonymous with chimpanzees, as were the terms “orang” and “orangutan.”

  A competing view of apes had arisen in the mid-eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) countered Hobbes’ view, that man’s life was “poor, nasty, brutish and short,” with the idea that original man was free, happy, and good. Rousseau’s “Discourse” popularized the concept of the Noble Savage. When Rousseau wrote “Discourse” he was working under the influence of the Count de Buffon. In Note Ten of “Discourse” Rousseau quotes Buffon regarding “orang-outangs” and compares them to men, going so far as to theorize that some kinds of apes, like the orangutan, are actually primitive men.

  It was in the Rousseauvian mode that the French writer Charles de Pougens wrote Jocko (1824), the story of an orangutan who falls in love with the novel’s narrator. Unfortunately for Jocko, the narrator is greedy and forces Jocko to bring him precious stones. Jocko dies and the narrator returns to Europe a rich man. De Pougens wrote under the influence of Rousseau, and de Pougens’ audience viewed Jocko as a Noble Savage. Jocko was immensely popular and widely imitated. However, the novel’s lack of condemnation of the narrator’s greed and heartlessness toward Jocko prompted the Russian author Alekseii Perovskii to write a satire of Jocko: “Journey in a Stagecoach” (1828). “Journey” tells the story of Fritz, a man raised by Tutu, a female gorilla, but who chooses a wife over Tutu. Tutu breaks a locket with the wife’s picture in it, and Fritz shoots her. But he is haunted by her voice forever after. Perovskii includes in “Journey” all the irony de Pougens left out of Jocko as well as the balancing of the moral scales.

  The proposed innocent simian of de Pougens and Perovskii were, with the evil/depraved ape of tradition, one-half of the most common mode of portrayal of the apes in the nineteenth century. The other half consisted of parodies, satires, and fables.

  As early as 1727 apes were being used in parodies of popular works. Peter Longueville’s The Hermit, a parody of Robinson Crusoe, has the titular character be adopted by Beaufidelle, a Friday-like ape sidekick. The Hermit was nearly as popular as Robinson Crusoe and was reprinted for over a century. Less well known, but popular in France, was Albert Robida’s Saturnin Faroundal (1879), a parody of Jules Verne’s romans d’aventures, in which the titular character is raised by monkeys, becomes their king, and with their help conquers Australia.

  Far more authors found primates useful as vehicles of satire. John Gay’s “The Monkey Who Has Seen the World” (1728) satirizes humanity by having a monkey who has lived among humans escape to the wild, only to bring human vices with him. Apes were common vehicles for a satire of human civilization or of other cultures: Thomas Bond’s “A Merry Tale” (1823) and Arthur Brookfield’s Simiocracy (1884) of England, William Hauff’s “The Young Englis
hman” (1826) of Germany, James Fenimore Cooper’s Monikins (1835) of both Great Britain and the United States.

  Apes also appeared in a more fabular role. Zaccaria Seriman’s Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle terre Incognite Australi (1772) portrays a race of dog-headed monkeys living in Australia who are visited by a pair of shipwrecked men, while Pilpai’s “The Monkey and the Tortoise” (1854) tells the story of a monkey who sacrifices himself to help take his people’s land back from a group of bear invaders.

  During the first half of the nineteenth century apes lost their symbolic weight and largely became just another plot element. In T. L. Peacock’s Melincourt (1817) the ape, Sir Oran Haut-Ton, becomes a Member of Parliament (for a rotten borough), but Melincourt is a satire of the British government rather than of humanity as a whole. And when Edgar Allan Poe used an orangutan as the murderer in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), it was not to convey a symbolic message or to make a political or religious point. The orangutan was used solely as a plot element.

  This changed in the 1860s, following the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the resulting furor over evolution. Darwin’s controversial linking of apes and humanity led dozens of writers to comment fictionally on the similarity or lack of same, and on the truth or falsity of Darwin’s claims. One of the earliest of these fictional comments was the Reverend Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1862–1863), which equates apes with degenerated, stupid humans. A year later, the poet Robert Browning wrote “Caliban Upon Setibos,” a soliloquy by Shakespeare’s Caliban, in which Caliban ponders his place in existence and his god, and in so doing comments on the ideas of evolution and natural selection.