Summary
Chicago-born writer (1875–1950), “a resolutely minor but prolific talent”, whose twenty-eight Tarzan novels created the cultivated, voluble ape-man — John Clayton, Lord Greystoke — that Johnny Weissmuller’s monosyllabic film Tarzan both derives from and displaces in Said’s “Jungle Calling” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.315-318).
Details
- His fantasy is Anglophilic and racist: his heroes are always “grey-eyed”, tall Anglo-Saxons, his heroines less emphatically WASP ladies, his villains unfailingly males — East European Jews, Arabs, blacks — women being almost completely exempted from evil or sin; he was obviously influenced by Robinson Crusoe, Kipling’s Mowgli and Jack London (PDF p.316-317).
- The Tarzan of Tarzan of the Apes (1912; fiction) is cultivated, proposing to Jane in a full periodic speech — “for your sake I have become a civilized man—for your sake I have crossed oceans and continents—for your sake I will be whatever you will me to be” — where the movie Tarzan is barely human (quoted PDF p.315).
- His plot system (fiction) never deviates: Tarzan, raised by the ape Kala after his parents’ shipwreck deaths, teaches himself to read and write from their cabin, kills Kerchak, marries Jane in the second novel and sires Korak; the anthropoids divide into Tarmangani, Mangani, Bolgani and Gomangani; his wealth comes from the lost city of Opar, and a fountain of youth in a late novel keeps him at ninety appearing no more than thirty-five (PDF p.317-318).
- He was a relentless Darwinian who believed the white man would come out on top no matter how handicapped by nature, Tarzan’s adventures being heavily plotted proof that the white man must triumph because he has Reason — a worked-out theory of the hierarchy of races the film Tarzan’s behavior partly contradicts (PDF p.318, 320).
Related pages
Johnny Weissmuller, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays