ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 3

 

Arguably a lot more uncanny narratives invoke passive potency than do marvelous ones...-- ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 2.

Aesop's famous tale, "The North Wind and the Sun," has often been used to describe the difference between "active power" and "passive potency"-- more typically known as "force and persuasion." The titular wind and sun make a bet as to who can make a certain mortal man take off his coat. The wind bombards the man with chilly gales, but that manifestation of force only makes the fellow clutch his coat around him more tightly. Then the sun slowly increases his heat-- and in due time, the man removes his coat of his own volition.

I just lied a bit, for effect. Both of the sky-entities are exerting force/active power; the sun's exertions are just subtler. A true illustration of passive persuasion might involve the sun assuming the appearance of another mortal, and in that form, he could mess with the coated man's head, suggesting how hot it was, until the power of suggestion caused the guy to remove his garment. Since the folktale-sun would not be exerting direct force, only indirect persuasion, my ad hoc revision of Aesop would fit the category I've termed "passive potency." The example loosely parallels that of Mulan's supernormal allies cited in ANOMALIES PT 1, who don't give the heroine any active aid, only bits of information or (often unhelpful) advice.      

In the quote above I mentioned the generalization that "the marvelous" most often deals with "power" and "the uncanny" with "potency," and in many past essays, I've drawn the distinction between marvelous and uncanny as that of "reality" and "fantasy," as in this statement from 2015's OUTRE OUTFITS OVERVIEW: 

When attire is not actually marvelous-- that is, when it does not confer marvelous power on a character, like Iron Man's armor-- it must conform to the rules of causal coherence. However, it can still be "uncanny" rather than "naturalistic" on the terms cited in POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2.  It's not that clothes "make the superman," as they do with Iron Man. But if they are uncanny, they can make the man SEEM LIKE a superman.

 

This is not so much a rule, though, as a broad generalization with respect to all twelve of the "uncanny trope" categories I devised.  (Tangentially, it doesn't look like I've done any surveys of all twelve categories here since 2014's THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2 -- and that was written before I severed the "outre outfits" category from those of "superlative skills" and "diabolical devices.") At present I can't think of any uncanny costumes that confer "passive power." They only confer "passive potency," in that they persuade witnesses to deem the wearers to be larger-than-life representations of justice or of corruption. 

However, in Part 2 I briefly referenced Tarzan. He doesn't "seem" like a superman within the uncanny domain; he would only "seem" like a superman if compared to a superman from the marvelous domain. But Tarzan possessing the utmost strength and speed attainable to a human makes his skill "superlative." Both Tarzan and Superman possess "active power" despite their disparate phenomenalities, while the previously mentioned Major Victory has only "passive power" by virtue of having been restored to life after his death. "Passive potency" applies to beings that may be marvelous or uncanny, but who operate more on the level of suggestion. Mulan's dragon is marvelous but cannot do anything beyond the level of "persuasion," and every hero who dresses up in a non-powered uncanny costume is using the art of persuasion to make himself seem more than normal. 

Finally, the best examples of "passive power" would seem to be in the category of "diabolical devices." As originally conceived, the Batarang was just a fancy version of a naturalistic boomerang, and so it possesses the same level of power when used. Aside from that usage, the Batarang can't do anything but look a little cooler than a regular 'rang.

However, if Batman attaches any sort of specialized tech to his Batarang-- even something as relatively simple as a smoke-bomb-- then it's no longer functioning as a boomerang, and the tech-addition registers as "active power" once more. Fin ally, examples of "active potency" are rare by my reckoning, with the most fruitful category being that of "enthralling hypnotism," since hypnotists are using specialized skills of persuasion. Somewhat similarly, the metaphenomenon that started these ruminations-- a Chinese doctor's use of weird acupuncture in LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING-- coheres with active potency, since the doctor was working with his patient's "chi meridians" to produce a curious metaphenomenal effect.

                  

THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

I don't know when I'll get the time to reread Frank Herbert's original DUNE and thus do an "official" Reading Rheum review of it. But since I have read the book three times, I have a reasonably good recollection of its major tropes and conceptual scope. My main aim here is to set down some general ideas about the novel so that I don't repeat myself when I cover the David Lynch film on my movie blog.   

  I've also read a pretty fair sampling of Herbert's other science-fiction novels, and though I've not looked at any of them in the last twenty years, my overall recollection is that none of them exhibit the mythic imagination of DUNE. But most of them follow the pattern of good didactic science fiction: they set up some intellectual problem, based on some metaphenomenon predicated upon sci-fi's famous "one gimme" rule, and proceed to discuss the societal or psychological ramifications resulting from the phenomenon. But there's usually not a lot of symbolic depth in purely didactic arguments, though, as I've argued frequently on this blog, sometimes the didactic and mythopoeic forms of discourse can work together to good effect.  But this didn't happen with most Frank Herbert books, which are mostly concerned with didacticism-- much like the majority of the DUNE sequels, though I admit I've not reread any of these in twenty years either.                                                                                                    

I haven't taken any surveys of science fiction fandom, but the dominant impression I've gained from both personal conversation and message boards is that almost no one likes any of the sequels better than Original DUNE. One can find fans who like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN a great deal more than the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, or THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK more than the 1977 STAR WARS. But in a statistically dominant sense, DUNE is the "first child" that everyone likes, and all the sequels are the equivalent of red-headed stepchildren.                                                         

My perhaps-superficial, definitely-not-researched impression is that when Herbert conceived DUNE he drew upon a number of intellectual interests-- the ecology of sand-dunes, the effects of psychotropics on human perception, and perhaps most of all, the mystique of the savior-- and allowed himself to build on all of these concepts in a manner more mythopoeic than didactic. The didactic impulse was certainly there, though. Herbert stated in interviews that he set up the Campbellian heroic structure of DUNE with the long-range intention of undermining the savior-mythology behind the rise of the heroic Paul Atreides. This authorial intent is particularly strong in GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, where the great Messiah of the Spice mutates into something akin to a sandworm. And yet, Herbert sold his myth-world so thoroughly that most readers were as immersed in that world as Herbert himself was when he created it. The author created a beautiful dream just so that he'd be able to wake the dreamers from their illusion and reveal, "see, you shouldn't have fallen for my glamorous hoax." Instead, many if not most readers saw Herbert's deconstruction of his original dream as the real illusion-- again, judging purely by the general fannish opinion that the later books were inferior to the original. (I will add that I found a few of the early sequels at least interesting in their own right, including GOD EMPEROR, but some of the later books are entirely forgettable.)                                                                  

    
  Speaking as I was of influences, some critic, whose name I did not preserve, remarked that the sandy wasteland of the planet Dune had an interesting predecessor in science fiction literature: "the sands of Mars," as Arthur C Clarke called them. And the foremost mythographer of Mars in early science fiction also dealt in a lot of the same elements of combative adventure and medieval intrigue as Herbert: the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now, the Mars books of Burroughs are as bereft of didactic insights as the majority of Herbert books are lacking in mythopoeic power. The unremembered critic argued that Herbert had to some extent built upon Burroughs' high-adventure mythos and imbued it with far greater subtlety and intellectual heft, and I agree that this is certainly possible, even if Herbert only knew the John Carter series by reputation. But I'd argue that there's another Burroughs series that may have had more structural impact on Herbert, and that's the Tarzan series, which, more than the Mars books, Herbert could have known from cinema had he never cracked one of the original stories. The trope common to both Tarzan novels and Tarzan movies might be boiled down to "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Tarzan, the scion of good colonists, doesn't "go native" like various Joseph Conrad protagonists, but rather "goes ape," which contingency makes the ape-man into a superhuman figure. (A drug-free one, by the way.) The morality of Tarzan's interactions with Black Africans, corrupt Europeans and ruthless Arab slavers was not something Burroughs could have addressed intellectually, even had he wished to do so. But when in DUNE we see two great Renaissance-style families vying to take control of Planet Dune's spice-commodity-- the noble family Atreides and the decadent Harkonnens-- what we're seeing is an old wine decanted into a new, and perhaps more elaborate, bottle. It's to Herbert's credit that in the early novels he doesn't ever reduce the entire three-way struggle to pure politics-- though I can't speak to the later ones.       

THE READING RHEUM: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (1929)

 TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, ERB's fourteen-years-later sequel to the 1915 PELLUCIDAR, is one of the author's better spinoff stories, but it's best known for launching his "crossover project." In addition to spinning off the title character with only a token reference to former star David Innes, the authorial prologue-- in which ERB chats with radio-expert Jason Gridley about the supposed reality of ERB's fantastic stories-- sets up the action of the sequel TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. During the chat, ERB and Gridley supposedly get a very long radio-broadcast from Innes' buddy Abner Perry, telling them the entire story of prehistoric hero Tanar and ending on the revelation that Innes is still in the hands of enemies. At this point Gridley declares that he'll marshal forces to rescue Innes, said forces including the Lord of the Jungle, while Gridley gets a secondary hero-role as well as the standard romantic arc.                                                                 

  I'll touch on two quick points before getting to the main TANAR plot. The first is that, during the prologue, Gridley expresses the same opinion I did in my review of PELLUCIDAR: that Hooja the Sly was one of ERB's better villains, but that as far as ERB is concerned, the Sly One was sincerely killed off. The second concerns those now politically incorrect Black Monkey-Men from the first Pellucidar novel. The tribe does not come on stage in the course of TANAR, but the hero has a flashback in which he remembers being held captive by the tailed people, during which time they taught him the skill of bounding about the tops of trees. This past history comes in handy when ERB wants his caveman hero to swing through the forest with his lady love in his arms. If there wasn't such a time discrepancy between the first two books and the third one, I'd think that was the only reason ERB introduced the monkey-guys.                          

Anyway, fourteen years after the conclusion of PELLUCIDAR, David Innes' prehistoric empire is threatened by seafaring invaders called Korsars. Innes' forces repel the attackers, who unlike the primitives possess huge sailing ships and firearms. However, Tanar-- the son of one of ERB's many tedious noble savages-- is taken aboard one of the ships. Tanar encounters the ruler of the Korsars, an older man known as "The Cid," and the ruler's teenaged daughter Stellara. The Cid-- whose people will later be revealed as descendants of Barbary pirates who blundered into the earth's core--wants Tanar to reveal the process by which Innes' scientists compound gunpowder, since the Korsars' formula is faulty. Tanar is a warrior and knows nothing about chemistry, but he allows the Cid to think that he Tanar can be of assistance. As for Stellara, she and Tanar go the same way as every other ERB couple: falling in love at first sight and not being able to express themselves.                                     

  In fact, though Tanar's episodic adventures wandering about the earth's core are just par for the course, the romance between the hero and his lady is better than the average Burroughs romance. ERB captures much of the hormonal confusion of youth as Tanar and Stellara quarrel while displaying unconditional loyalty toward one another. In two of the roaming adventures, ERB creates a couple of primitive societies he may have meant to be mirror-images of one another. The first is Amiocarp, a tribe in which the members express love very openly, in marked contrast to Tanar and Stellara, who can't manage to know their own hearts. The second is Hime, a tribe in which all the members constantly show hatred and contempt for one another, which represents the fractiousness between hero and heroine-- though of course true love wins the day in the end.                         

This time the heroine has two unwanted suitors. The first one, Bohar, is encountered on the Korsar ship during Tanar's captivity, and halfway through the book Tanar kills this rival. Then, very late in the story, Tanar and Stellara get hauled to the Korsar base, and ERB belatedly reveals that the Cid intends to marry off his daughter to a brute named Bulf, whom Tanar also slays in due course. Strangely, the Cid doesn't ever have a reckoning for his crimes, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't appear in the later books. This might be understandable if the Cid was genuinely the father of Tanar's beloved. However, thanks to one of ERB's more intricate birth-mystery plots, Stellara reveals that she knows that she is not the child of the Cid, even though he thinks that she is. (Their few scenes together also display only contumely toward each other, so one assumes the Cid was not much of a daddy.)                                                                           

                                                                                                                                       Further, since childhood Stellara has known that she was the child of a primitive chieftain, and that her mother was stolen in a Korsar raid before being "married" to the Cid. There's some amusement-value in the author's decorousness about sex, since it goes without saying that for the Cid to believe Stellara his progeny, he has to have had sex with the deceased mother at some point. A contemporary author might have pictured Stellara as lusting for vengeance upon the false parent who raped her mother. But that wasn't in ERB's wheelhouse for whatever reasons. The author does devote some space to having Stellara find her way to her original tribe, where she meets her real father. But ERB seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the relationship between the heroine and the Cid-- who never even learns, so far as the reader knows, that he was tricked into raising another man's child. And even though the Cid doesn't suffer for his act of rape-- I don't even think he has any major scenes in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE-- one might imagine that the slaying of Bulf, who explicitly would have taken Stellara by force given the chance, provides a substitute for the non-punishment of the novel's main villain. (ERB also never imagines what would have happened had The Cid forced himself on Stellara's mother more than once, but the erudite reader may argue that he did, but never learned that he was "firing blanks," as even people of ERB's time would have comprehended.) ADDENDUM: After TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Gridley gets another one of those loquacious radio broadcasts, this one relating the entire story of the 1931 FIGHTING MAN OF MARS.         

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this essay-series, I provided a broad sketch of how the specific genre of "the costumed superhero" had been treated in American movie serials, stand-alone films, and TV shows both live-action and animated for several decades. I purposely excluded narrative radio-shows, about which I have no expertise, as well as all of the "superhero-adjacent" genres, like jungle-hero tales, superspies and spacemen. In this essay, I want to include some "costumed crusaders" I omitted for the decades of the 1950s and 1960s (up until 1966 and the birth of Batmania). In addition, I'll mention some of the "adjacent" genres that arguably affected the superhero's development in movies and TV, though I'm going to set aside both space opera and all forms of archaic heroic fantasy as too complicated for this essay.

So I noted that the last serial of any kind appeared in 1956, and that American television in the 1950s did not show nearly as much enthusiasm for costumed heroes:

Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. 

 

As for "adjacent types," DICK TRACY got a live-action teleseries that lasted from 1950 to 1951, which did adapt some of Chester Gould's freaky fiends, like Flattop and the Mole. Later, around the time both Bomba and Jungle Jim stopped appearing in features, Jungle Jim and Sheena both got one-season TV shows in 1955. One year later, ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU presented the classic non-costumed super-villain with his own series. And all of the above did better than James Bond. One year after Ian Fleming published the first Bond tale, that novel was adapted into a single episode of the teleseries CLIMAX, which didn't exactly launch a new media franchise for the hero. During that decade Fleming would use more Gould-like villains in the novels, but in movies and TV the character would not catch the world on fire until nine years after the appearance of the book CASINO ROYALE. 

I also noted that though there had been a smattering of stand-alone films for live-action costumed heroes in the 1930 and 1940s, in the 1950s there was nothing but two LONE RANGER features, INVISIBLE AVENGER (a failed TV pilot issued as a feature), and a handful of "masked swashbuckler" movies. (I don't count SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, the pilot for the teleseries, even though it received theatrical release.) The only "superhero-adjacent" franchise that continued production of feature-films throughout the fifties and into the sixties was that of Tarzan. 

As for 1950s cartoons, I mentioned only the packaging of Mighty Mouse cartoons for THE MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE, but there are others worth noting, and sometimes excluding.

The first made-for-TV cartoon was CRUSADER RABBIT, produced in 1950 by Jay Ward's animation studio. I've seen a few episodes of this cartoon-- which loosely borrowed the format of the live-action serial, albeit with episodes of five minutes at most. I don't think CRUSADER was relevant to the superhero idiom despite the fact that the opening shows the bunny dressed in a knight's armor. From what I've seen, Crusader and his buddy Rags Tiger just walked around sans costumes (or any attire but their fur). In fact, the opening cartoon emphasizes that even though Crusader wants to be heroic he doesn't have any powers, like flight or X-ray vision. As more than one person had asserted, Crusader and Rags, being an intense little guy and a big dumb guy, look like a template for Ward's later Rocky and Bullwinkle.

For comparable reasons I also dismiss 1957's TOM TERRIFIC from consideration. The titular character was a little boy with a magic hat, and he sometimes used his magic to thwart villains, but mostly in a comic manner, lacking the superhero's emphasis on action. But 1957 also introduced a spaceman/spy/superhero hybrid in COLONEL BLEEP. In this series-- some episodes of which may be missing from circulation-- Bleep, a super-powered alien with a gumdrop-shaped head, functioned as an "intelligence agent" hunting down criminals with names like Doctor Destructo and the Black Knight of Pluto, some of whom made multiple appearances. In fact, one surviving episode, "Knight of Death," may be the first time in which previously established villains teamed up on a TV cartoon, for in that episode Bleep is challenged not only by the aforementioned Black Knight, but also the Black Robot and a pirate named Black Patch. (I sense a recurring motif in there somewhere.) The same team returned in "The Hypnotic Helmets."

Even though I asserted that the TV studios seemed unwitting of the "birth of the Silver Age" in comic books, oddly 1960 opened with an animated parody of Batman and Robin. A studio known for very crude early TV toons-- one online article called the studio-head "the Ed Wood of TV cartoons"-- accepted a pitch for COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE. And as most fans know, the pitch came from the man who co-created Batman, Bob Kane. The show has its fans, but though I'm not one of them, there's no debating that CCAMM is a costumed-crusader show, in which cat and mouse used a variety of super-weapons to defeat villains. (I should also note that in 1960 Kane was still packaging BATMAN comics for DC, who would buy out Kane's contract in 1966.)

Like Mighty Mouse, Popeye's theatrical cartoons had been airing on TV for some time, and in 1960 King Features commissioned 220 new Popeye cartoons, at least some of which still showed the sailor-man using spinach-power to smite such nogoodniks as Brutus and the Sea Hag.

Briefly detouring into live-action, in 1961 one production company made the attempt to adapt another King Features property: the superhero/jungle adventurer The Phantom, but all that resulted was an unsold pilot. The same year saw the debut of a DICK TRACY cartoon show. However, though the slapstick scripts did utilize mild versions of classic Gould grotesques like Mumbles, Pruneface and The Brow, Tracy himself only appeared in the role of a supervisor, handing off the arrest-chores to four goofball detectives. Again, I disallow this one due to the downplaying of the combative mode.

Jumping back for one paragraph to the general category of live action, James Bond made his movie debut in 1962's DOCTOR NO, which arguably re-created the "superspy," realizing effects far beyond anything the genre had accomplished in serials like SECRET AGENT X-9. Though NO and later Bonds were British productions, the American company United Artists provided funding, thus tying the franchise into the American aegis. Surprisingly, it took about two years for either America or Europe to begin coming out with their own superspies. Then France initiated in 1964 a "re-imagining" of the FANTOMAS property, a three-film series that showed some Fleming-esque aspects. The U.S. launched THE MAN FROM UNCLE that same year, and WILD WILD WEST would follow in 1965 . After that, the floodgates were opened, though few imitators were as good as Fleming at creating vivid super-villains. Also, as mentioned in the previous essay, in 1963 Disney released its second costumed crusader TV-show, a three-episode adaptation of Russell Thorndyke's "Scarecrow of Romney Marsh."

Back to TV cartoons. THE MIGHTY HERCULES, debuting in 1963, deserves a quick mention, despite my disallowing archaic fantasy here, because the Greek strongman kept encountering a regular rogue's gallery, AND kept defeating them with the softness in his eyes and the iron in his thighs (if you believe the theme song). 

UNDERDOG showed up in 1964, and got right everything that COURAGEOUS CAT did wrong. The super-powered dog in the baggy long underwear had a decent rogue's gallery, though only two evildoers, Simon Bar Sinister and Riff Raff, made more than one appearance. JONNY QUEST debuted that year as a night-time animated show, and some Bond influence can be seen there as well, as in the debut episode "Mystery of the Lizard Men," with its very DOCTOR NO-like plot.

With 1965 we get into nebulous territory. The idea of adapting BATMAN as a live-action series began to get serious consideration in 1964, but it's hard to say if the earliest negotiations were known to the public. The actual show had to begin production at least by late 1965, but Hollywood would have been gossiping about the project long before the actual production. Did any cartoon shows about superheroes and their near-relations take influence from such gossip? Probably not 1965's SINBAD JR, about a heroic sailor who obtained super-strength from a magic belt (rather than a green vegetable). Nor ROGER RAMJET, with Jay Ward finally dipping his toes for real into the genre of the funny superhero. But in Fall 1965 Hanna-Barbera released its comical versions of both a superhero and a superspy-- i.e., ATOM ANT and SECRET SQUIRREL-- and the former might have been inspired in part by some notion that superheroes might start getting hot again.

And that's where I will leave things for now, because after BATMAN came the deluge.

METAPHENOMENAL MUSINGS PT. 2

The second and last elephant in the room is that even though fans of what I call "the metaphenomenal" often use the term "fantasy-fans" for themselves (unless they're really uncompromising SF-adherents), they often consume a lot of content that would not meet the definition of fantasy I proposed in Part 1, "as violations of what can happen in either time, space, or both." This is particularly true in the world of fantasy-film fans. It's for these audiences that concordances of fantastic film include such items as PSYCHO (serial killer), TARZAN OF THE APES (man raised by animals), and even the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ (extended fantasy dream-sequence).

None of these movies technically break with accepted standards of causation within time and space. Serial killers, feral children and extended dreams are all conceivable in our reality, so they don't break with the perceived rules of time and space. However, the way in which each of these famous movies presents these unusual phenomena may be deemed to *bend* those rules. Serial killers don't commonly have the complicated double identities of a Norman Bates, long dreams are not as structured as those of Dorothy Gale, and there has never been a feral child who turned out as good-looking as Tarzan.

At the same time, it's not impossible to depict parallel versions of these real-world phenomena in which no rule-bending takes place. Carl Jung had many symbolically complex dreams that could be recapitulated in the medium of cinema without making them seem as if they had the structure of fiction, after the fashion of OZ. And there have been cinematic treatments of the real-life deviate Ed Gein, on whom Norman Bates was partly based, and of the real feral child Victor of Aveyron, the basis of Francois Truffaut's THE WILD CHILD.

Following (but not wedded to) some terminology introduced in academic circles, I've called this "rule-bending" category of the metaphenomenal "the uncanny" while the "rule-breaking" category is "the marvelous." In contrast, all those works that simply "follow the rules" I deem "the naturalistic." There are surely concordances that don't follow my categories, that may occasionally include THE WILD CHILD or the 2000 movie ED GEIN. But I believe these are minor exceptions. Most such compendia avoid the strictly naturalistic studies of serial killers like Ted Bundy or the Hillside Stranglers, but serial killers whose fictional careers suggest the bizarre and the extraordinary generally find themselves in such encyclopedias.

I plan to devote a separate essay to some of my recent thoughts about the process by which "works of the uncanny" distinguish themselves from "works of the naturalistic," but to conclude, my idea of the typical fantasy-fan, with an equal appreciation for both forms of the metaphenomenal, is illustrated by this except from the letter of a somewhat famed fantasy-author:

If. in fact, man is unable to create living things out of inorganic matter. to hypnotize the beasts of the forest to do his will, to swing from tree to tree with the apes of the African jungle...or to explore... the deserts of Mars, permit us, at least, in fantasy, to witness these miracles, and to satisfy that craving for the unknown, the weird, and the impossible which exists in every human brain.-- H.P. Lovecraft.

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1929)

 

SPOILERS (for a novel printed back in 1929, HAH)

Within two years in the early nineteen-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs had authored what most of his fans regard as his three seminal serial concepts: TARZAN and JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 1912, and the PELLUCIDAR series, beginning with AT THE EARTH'S CORE, in 1914. Roughly fifteen years later, ERB then made an ambitious attempt to correlate all three concepts within a series of novels written from 1929 to 1930. Slightly later, he also provided a link to his "Venus" books, which are usually regarded as a concept distinctly inferior to the other three. This didn't happen until 1932, so it was probably just an afterthought for ERB.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

The TANAR narrative ends with the revelation that Innes has been imprisoned by evildoers, so Gridley makes the promise to come to Innes' rescue. The story of the rescue-mission makes up the narrative of TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. Gridley seeks out Tarzan in his African jungle and convinces the ape-man to help save Innes, even though neither Gridley nor Tarzan has ever encountered the Pellucidaran adventurer. Tarzan uses his personal wealth and contacts with some characters from an earlier TARZAN novel to bring about the construction of a unique dirigible, with which the heroes plan to journey to the earth's core via a polar entranceway. Most of the technicians manning the dirigible are Germans, which may be ERB channeling memories of the German use of zeppelins in World War One. Tarzan also brings along a small group of his Waziri warriors and an American Negro cook (more on whom later).

Anyone hoping for a major encounter between two of ERB's creations, Tarzan and David Innes, is doomed to disappointment. Innes is not rescued until CORE's final pages, and the character rates only a couple of paragraphs-- which is more than we see for other Pellucidaran support-characters (including the aforementioned "Tanar"), who get the equivalent of footnotes. The only substantive crossover is the one between the hero Tarzan and the setting of Pellucidar. Since the latter is not the star of the Pellucidaran novels, CORE is in essence what I've called in this essay a "high-charisma crossover," since only one of the crossover-presences possesses centric stature. 

Gridley, though he debuts in a Pellucidar novel, is only weakly correlated with the Pellucidar mythos, and even less so with the Mars series. He's allowed to shine as a secondary, support-cast hero in CORE for reasons of romance. ERB always worked a romantic subplot into his adventure-stories, and since Tarzan like David Innes had already become "an old married man," Gridley was elected to play the role of the Earnest Young Man who completes a romance-arc with a comely savage girl of Pellucidar, the amply-named Jana, Red Flower of Zoram.

The structure of CORE amounts to a series of search-and-rescue missions. Both Tarzan and Gridley get separated from the crew of the dirigible, so that both are able to pursue distinct story-arcs. Tarzan gets stuck with the non-erotic duty of befriending some of Pellucidar's noble warriors-- a gorilla-man and the brother of Jana-- while Gridley saves the lissome Jana from both human and animal marauders. Love is swiftly kindled between Gridley and the primitive naif, but like one of ERB's earlier heroes, Billings of the 1918 PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, the civilized Gridley becomes a trifle snobbish in the presence of the uneducated girl. Jana, possessing the full array of feminine intuitions, senses his diffidence and "catches him by running away." This strategy leads to more arduous treks and more battles with the denizens, animal and human, of Pellucidar. Thus both Gridley and Tarzan burn up most of the book's continuity until all the good-guy protagonists are united so as to bring about the anti-climactic rescue of David Innes and the plighting of troths between Gridley and Jana.

Gridley is little more than a stereotypical earnest adventurer, the image of the reader's identificatory figure. Jana is slightly more complex. Her fulsome nickname establishes both that she's beautiful and she knows it, but unlike many of ERB's savage heroines Jana can at least attempt to defend herself, using a spear to slay a primitive hyenadon, much like the character of Meriem in THE SON OF TARZAN. She's extremely proud and doesn't allow Gridley the luxury of pretending that they're "just friends," and her determination to make him confess his feelings in spite of his upbringing drives the romantic subplot. As for other characters, Tarzan is just Tarzan, though as in earlier novels he tends to shift into an animal-like affinity with the natural world whenever that suits ERB's purposes. The rest of the support-characters, good and bad, are all stock figures, though the Negro cook Robert Jones requires a little extra comment. It may be that the commercial reprint of CORE I read expunged some "pickaninny" humor, for Jones doesn't really do much in the story, though he does speak in the mushmouthed Southern dialect usually reserved for Negro characters. His backstory is curious. Though he was captured in Germany while serving as a cook for the American forces during World War One, Jones got along well enough with his captors that he never went back to America and simply continued working for German employers until being hired for the dirigible-adventure. The temptation is to believe that Jones is one of ERB's "cheerful Negroes," though at least he's never as pusillanimous as the maid Esmerelda from TARZAN OF THE APES. 

Yet just as Esmerelda was unfavorably contrasted with the noble Black Africans of the first Tarzan novel, it may be that Jones is meant to be an unfavorable contrast with the fighting Waziris on the expedition, who are clearly shown to be capable of learning the operation of the dirigible from the German crew. This interpretation would cohere with ERB's overall program of critiquing civilized life in contrast to the lives of noble savages, a prevailing theme in the majority of the author's works. CORE is full of such trenchant observations, most often lobbed against pampered Europeans, and even against the American Gridley and his circle of friends. Because Pellucidar is a place where the perception of time is somewhat erratic, ERB also scores some points against the workaday world experienced by his readers, the world of punching time-clocks and societal demands. 

Of course, it must be said that ERB's critique of modernity is a shallow one, rooted in the escapism of noble savages who are just wholly good or wholly bad. ERB actually seems less interested in the Pellucidaran people than in the multifarious prehistoric animals. ERB gives a lot of attention to describing all the exotic biological features of the fauna: cave-bears, pterodactyls, even a quasi-stegosaur capable of limited glider-flight. There are also a few animal-human hybrids, such as the aforementioned gorilla-men, the Sagoths, and reptile-men, the Horibs, the latter proving to be among ERB's best villains. ERB fills these descriptions with considerable verve and thus gives Tarzan one of his best settings for adventure.

On a minor note, the novel ends with one member of the dirigible-crew still missing, but this contrivance takes place simply to set up that character's own debut as a starring hero in the 1937 Pellucidar book BACK TO THE STONE AGE, also a very minor crossover since David Innes makes a token appearance therein. Gridley did not appear in this story, but he has another introductory role in the 1932 PIRATES OF VENUS, the first in the "Carson Napier of Venus" series. 

ERB didn't seem to pursue crossovers much after this period from 1929 to 1932. But TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE is certainly the best of his crossover works, as well as one of the best of the Tarzan novels.

LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE

                           

 Whatever the virtues of my essay-series HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY,  it did not succeed in supplying a succinct “summation of my NUM theory,” so here’s a one-essay shot at simplification.

 Almost all Western critics from the 18^th century on have formed their theories against a background of predominantly “realistic” literature, in which it is taken for granted that the world of literature ought to emulate the world one sees outside one’s window, or, failing that, the world one would have seen had one lived at a certain time and place. Only in the 20^th century did some critics, such as Northrop Frye and Leslie Fiedler, attempt to articulate systems that accounted for the appeal of what is usually called “fantastic literature.” Even so, these authors still focused mostly on authors whose metaphenomenal visions had proved popular for centuries: Swift, Milton, Poe, et al.

My amateur “poetics” takes metaphenomenal literature as the starting-point and views all the developments of realistic literature as reactions against the literary formulas—tropes, as many call them-- of myth and folklore.

 

As it happens, the earliest literary critic—or at least, the earliest whose works have survived to the present day—lived in an era (384-322 B.C.) in which most major literary works took place in metaphenomenal worlds, whether they recapitulated the major mythic narratives associated with the Greek pantheon, as seen in Homer’s two epics, or simply used relatively minor fantasy-tropes, like the ghost that appears in Aeschylus’s THE PERSIANS. Because Aristotle’s literary world was full of gods, curses and oracles, his POETICS, the first extant statement of artistic principles, does not address in depth the subject of phenomenality; of how a given literary work portrays the nature of the phenomena available in its world. The POETICS makes several statements that are relevant to the subject of phenomenality, such as when the philosopher opines that comedy tends to be more down-to-earth than tragedy. But the closest Aristotle comes to an overall statement on what phenomena a work can portray is his elaboration upon the concept of mimesis (“imitation.”) For Aristotle, what he calls “poetry” is the “imitation of an action” of which the poet has conceived, and the philosopher breaks down three categories of narrative action of which the poet can conceive: “things as they are or were,” “things as they are said to be” (that is, things whose veracity the poet cannot vouch for), and “things as they ought to be.” The last category may have taken in for the rare narratives that paralleled what we now call science fiction, such as Aristophanes’ THE BIRDS (414 BC), which depicts the titular avians creating the imaginary domain of Cloud Cuckoo Land. But Aristotle does not offer more than one or two examples of each of these categories, for he did not live in a world whose literature privileged the naturalistic. There was no need to justify the metaphenomenal worlds of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, since everyone accepted them as genuine art.

 

If there is a “fatal flaw” in Aristotle’s categories, it would be his failure to point out that even the author’s depiction of “things as they are” were not windows upon reality as such; that they were, as much as depictions of gods and ghosts, literary tropes; formulas that were meant to evoke certain responses in their audiences. For instance, a scene in THE ODYSSEY depicts a servant’s recognition of the disguised Odysseus thanks to an unhealed scar on the hero’s leg. Even though the epic is full of gods and monsters, this scene is predicated on a naturalistic detail that convinces because everyone in the audience is familiar with the fact that wounds don’t always heal properly. Nevertheless, the scene is not “reality,” but an “imitation of reality.” It is not any less a construct than, say, a scene in THE ILIAD wherein Zeus makes the very un-human statement that, if he so desired, he could absorb all of his fractious fellow gods into himself as a show of his omnipotence.

 

Aristotle almost certainly knew that even realistic tropes were still products of human artifice, but he does not explicitly say so. There is no over-arcing statement to parallel that of the modern philosopher Suzanne Langer, who labeled all the productions of art as being “gestural,” i.e., that they gestured toward aspects of human existence without actually being coterminous with those aspects. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s works during the European Renaissance resulted in a misinterpretation of his concept of mimesis, so as to emphasize only “things as they are or were.” Of course, it may be that the Renaissance critics merely chose to emphasize the parts of Aristotle that validated their own culture, since during that period literature became increasingly naturalistic.

 

The predominant naturalism of 18^th-century works like MOLL FLANDERS and TOM JONES as I said, a reaction against the older forms of European romance and religious rhetoric, which had served roughly the same cultural purpose in the European countries that Greek polytheism had served in Greece. That century saw a limited counter-reaction against naturalism in a short-lived vogue for “Arabian Nights” fantasies and the more protracted European fascination with Gothic horrors. In the 19^th century the latter form of metaphenomenal literature also spread to the United States of America and affected the oeuvres of Poe and of Hawthorne. But the Gothics and all the subcategories of metaphenomenal fiction—eventually given the rubrics of “fantasy, horror and science fiction” in the ensuing century—were not regarded as being on the same quality-level as naturalistic literature. Not until the latter half of the 20th century did naturalism lose some of its hold on the Western psyche, resulting in the proliferation of so-called “speculative fiction,” much of which was given more literary cachet than the old “science fiction and fantasy.”

 

In my discussion of Aristotle I mentioned that Classic Greek literature could embrace both “naturalistic tropes,” which were often with the limitations of human fallibility and mortality,” and with “marvelous tropes” about gods and ghosts, describing imagined states of existence beyond the realm of human limitations. Gothic fiction was instrumental, however, in promulgating the interstitial category of “uncanny tropes.” Such tropes had existed even in mankind’s prehistory, and in my essay UNCANNY GENESIS I cited some examples of uncanny tropes from archaic story-cycles, such as the extra-Biblical “Bel and the Dragon” and “the Six Labors of Theseus.” But there’s no doubt that Gothic practitioners like Ann Radcliffe had a much more sustained effect in elaborating stories in which supernatural occurrences were “explained rationally.” In truth, though, the “rationality” of uncanny stories like THE ITALIAN and THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO is compromised from the start by even allowing for the possibility of the supernatural, in contrast, say, to Jane Austen’s Gothic spoof NORTHANGER ABBEY, in which the existence of the supernatural is not even slightly validated.

 

The domain of “the naturalistic” emphasizes conformity with whatever idea of “natural law” an audience may expouse, whereas the domain of “the marvelous” conforms to whatever concepts are seen as transcending natural law, be it through Christian miracles or futuristic inventions. The domain of “the uncanny,” though, endeavors to perform a high-wire balancing act between these two literary phenomenalities. It might be argued that some forms of “the uncanny” sway toward the domain of naturalism, as when the story’s hero unmasks a marauding ghost as sinister Uncle Eben. But other forms sway closer to the domain of the marvelous. Nothing in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original TARZAN story literally transcends natural law, however much one questions the probability of the hero’s advancement to his status of “lord of the jungle.” Tarzan is supposedly no stronger than a human male can be at the peak of development. But his immense strength SEEMS to make him a “superman,” as does his rapport with jungle-beasts like apes and elephants. And so, even though the author is working with a set of uncanny tropes akin to those of Ann Radcliffe, emphasizing *semblance* rather than *actuality,* Tarzan’s origins do not reduce him in stature in the way that arguably Uncle Eben is reduced by the revelation of his ghostly imposture.

 

All of these sets of phenomenality-tropes reflect the desire of human audiences to see stories that reflect either direct physical experience or indirect mental experience. It may be argued that the exigencies of physical existence signify that humans can never be “free” in the sense of being independent of those exigencies. However, literary work allows audiences to think and feel what it would like to enjoy such freedom, whether that sense of freedom is ultimately validated or frustrated. The freedom to think in terms outside those of immediate experience have arguably made it possible for humans to concoct real handheld communication devices to match those of the fictional STAR TREK. But even if no such innovations came about in response to fictional inspirations, literature is at its best when it offers its audiences the mimesis of all possible worlds.

A LOVECRAFTIAN SEGUE

The following quote was taken from a letter written by H.P. Lovecraft to the pulp magazine ALL-STORY. This excerpt appeared in an essay in the collection LOVECRAFT AND INFLUENCE, analyzing the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs on the Providence author. In his essay "A Reprehensible Habit," Gavin Callaghan did not elaborate on the context of the letter, except insofar as it illustrated his thesis, and the ellipses in the excerpt are presumably Callaghan's.

If. in fact, man is unable to create living things out of inorganic matter. to hypnotize the beasts of the forest to do his will, to swing from tree to tree with the apes of the African jungle...or to explore... the deserts of Mars, permit us, at least, in fantasy, to witness these miracles, and to satisfy that craving for the unknown, the weird, and the impossible which exists in every human brain.

Though Burroughs' name is not mentioned, the references to Tarzan are unmistakable, and it's likely that the part about creating creatures from inorganic matter alludes to ERB's 1927 Mars-novel THE MASTER MIND OF MARS. What's more significant to me and my NUM formula, though, is that HPL speaks of the uncanny feats of Tarzan as being as much a "miracle" as the marvelous super-science of Mars. I find this intriguing because HPL himself wrote very little in the way of "uncanny" horror fiction, one exception being "The Picture in the House," a story of rural cannibalism. Almost everything he himself penned fit into his definition of "supernatural horror"-- though by this he didn't mean traditional ghosts and goblins, but usually his own unique take on super-science. My memory is that in his long essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," HPL barely alludes to anything in the realm of the uncanny-- which would not be unusual, since by definition the uncanny does not include the genuinely supernatural-- not to mention anything "miraculous."

I've long maintained that the factor uniting the uncanny and the marvelous is the quality of "strangeness." I deduced this general law from the many examples of compendia of fantastic film that always include fearsome psychos alongside forbidden planets, fake ghosts alongside real ones, and so on-- a recent example reviewed here. But of course, long before there were any such compendia, pulp magazines like WEIRD TALES offered both uncanny and marvelous terrors to their readers. HPL's letter records the personal testimony of a fan who liked both types of weird fiction-- even if he himself concentrated on just one of the two in his own creative endeavor. 

On a side-note within this segue from the current "strangeness/unfamiliarity" essays, I would say that HPL didn't take many tropes from ERB, given the latter's emphasis on physical adventure and romance-- with one exception, for some of ERB's works are as fascinated with the concept of societal devolution as those of the Providence horror-meister.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SON OF TARZAN (1915)

 

The first two Tarzan books display a high mythicity, and, going on memory, the third, BEASTS OF TARZAN, at least displays some interesting motifs. However, the fourth book—THE SON OF TARZAN, the only entry in the Tarzan series not to star Tarzan himself—lacks the imaginative free play seen in the earlier books. SON’s plot consists of dozens of melodramatic incidents piled chock-a-block on top of one another. This is not a bad thing in itself, since Edgar Rice Burroughs remains one of the best blood-and-thunder writers in pop culture history.

Jack Clayton, son of Tarzan and Jane, makes a couple of brief appearances in earlier novels as an infant, but SON begins with the character as a pre-teen in the England of 1915. Despite knowing nothing of his aristocratic father’s history as an “ape man,” Jack displays an unstinting fascination with all things jungle-related. This fascination leads him into contact with one of Tarzan’s enemies from previous books, one Paulvitch, and an attempt to return a captive ape to Africa. The latter task causes young Jack to become stranded in Africa, where in jig time he’s transformed into a junior version of his father through contact with Tarzan’s old ape tribe. They dub the boy Korak, and he drifts away from his memories of civilized life and his parents with extraordinary ease. Like Tarzan, Korak immediately starts making enemies in Africa, due to his possession of an un-beastlike strain of compassion.

Whereas the second Tarzan book benefitted from a resourceful main villain, SON splits its focus with three more limited dastards. A cannibal king, Kuvudoo, has the least to do, followed by a nasty Swedish ivory-poacher, Malbihn and an Arab chieftain, known only as the Sheik. All three are brought into conflict by Korak by their attempts to prey upon the novel’s female lead Meriem, who plays “Jane” to Korak’s Tarzan.

Meriem presents a more interesting character than Korak, if only because she’s the subject of an involved Dickensian foundling-plot. The Sheik, desiring revenge on Meriem’s French father, kidnaps the child, takes her to his own tribe of Arabian bandits, and raises her as his own offspring. The Sheik subjects Meriem to a series of parental cruelties that make the abuses of Tarzan’s ape-father look like benign neglect. Korak rescues her and schools her in jungle-survival, though this doesn’t keep her from being the constant prey of the book’s villains. Nevertheless, Meriem is a more dynamic character than Jane, and though she’s not a formidable fighter, she defends herself ably on a couple of occasions, hearkening back to the female lead of Burroughs’ “Mucker” series. Meriem also learns how to swing her way through the African jungle, and arguably this makes her one of the first “jungle girls” in pop fiction.

Jane was menaced by the threat of rape once in the first book and by romance with someone other than Tarzan in the second book. Meriem is threatened with rape by the Swedish raider, with cannibalistic consumption by Kuvudoo’s tribe, and with illicit romance with a young English nobleman. Further, although the Sheik fades in importance after Korak first rescues Meriem, the Arab leader comes up with the most horrific doom for the young girl: attempting to marry Meriem to his half-brother, who is both a half-caste (described as looking “black”) and an apparent victim of syphilis, since part of his face has been eaten away by “disease.” Though the Sheik does not state his game plan outright, his overall plan seems to be not just to despoil Meriem by having her “uncle” rape her, but to have her impregnated with a non-white child as well.

Though SON OF TARZAN boasts no positive characters of color, it must be admitted that the blonde Swede Mailbihn is just as rapacious as any denizen of Africa. Further, though the young English nobleman, Morison Baynes, doesn’t want to rape Meriem, he does plot to take her back to England as his mistress, which rates as a lesser form of degradation. Baynes starts out as an egotistical bounder and a coward, a loose satire on the entitlement of the sons of civilization. However, Baynes’ feelings toward Meriem become protective and he ends up sacrificing himself for her, which is the much same fate Burroughs meted out to William Clayton, Jane’s most prominent suitor in the first two books.

The jungle romance of Korak and Meriem never becomes as ardent as the early lovemaking of Tarzan and Jane. This is certainly because the two of them begin their relationship as pre-teen youths and implicitly only develop romantic feelings in a gradual and decorous fashion. One assumes that Jack Clayton learned something about the birds and bees before his jungle sojourn, but Meriem doesn’t get any such schooling at the hands of her nasty adoptive father, and initially can only think of Korak as a “big brother.” The author inevitably is obliged to show the two young people fall in love, but Burroughs never seems very comfortable with these scenes, and remains vague about the characters’ respective ages during their largely chaste interactions.

Burroughs doesn’t really elaborate a distinct myth-persona for Korak, and toward the book’s end Korak himself states, “There is only one Tarzan; there can never be another.” I take this as the author’s tacit admission that Tarzan is his superior creation, and in future books Korak only appears a few times in supporting roles. The character only became a regular headliner in the 1960s, when Gold Key Comics published KORAK, SON OF TARZAN, a well-done juvenile series loosely based in Burroughs’s concepts, accrue any great personality, appearing to be nothing more than “Tarzan Lite,” an athletic ape-boy who’s never quite as lusty or as savage as his old man.

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN OF THE APES (1912), THE RETURN OF TARZAN (1913)

In this essay I’m going to concentrate on three significant tropes in the first two Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (henceforth ERB). Thus, instead of recapitulating plot-points as I’ve done in most prose fiction reviews, I’ll assume that the reader is basically familiar with the plots, the better to concentrate on trope analysis.

Though ERB’s Tarzan books eventually fell into largely routine formula, the first two stand at the apogee of 20^th-century literary mythmaking. Tarzan may have taken some inspiration from Rudyard Kipling’s books about the animal-reared Mowgli (though ERB never admitted such an influence), and for the most part Kipling is still esteemed above ERB by most literary critics. But the first two Tarzan books exceed the admittedly fine Kipling works in terms of the complexity of ERB’s mythic rendering of the savage foundling idea. This complexity expresses itself through the author’s often unpredictable use of three major tropes, which I will call (1) the colonialism conundrum, (2) the cannibalism conflict, and (3) the consanguinity conjecture.

The prevailing notion that ERB was an ardent defender of colonialist policies may be one reason for critical disdain of his work (though it didn’t seem to do Kipling any great harm). In truth, TARZAN OF THE APES is often critical of European encroachment on Africa. Prior to the hero’s birth, Viscount John Clayton and his wife Alice have been sent to Africa so that Clayton’s new position will make it possible to bring a halt to “unfair treatment of British black subjects” in the Congo. Later in the novel, long after Tarzan has grown to manhood amid his adoptive ape-clan, a tribe of Black Africans moves into the apes’ territory while fleeing the depredations of Europeans seeking “rubber and ivory.” To be sure, ERB certainly shows aversion to some aspects of Black African culture and physical appearance, which he knew only through secondary sources. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, ERB does not demonize whole races. If Tarzan takes charge of an entire tribe of Black Africans, as he does in RETURN OF TARZAN, it’s because Tarzan has by that time been exposed to Europe’s recorded knowledge regarding battle tactics. Thus he can successfully command the Waziri tribe to repel the assault of Arab raiders because Tarzan has access to the same sort of tactical knowledge that gave the Arabs an advantage in tribal Africa.

Cannibalism is one of the practices that ERB attributes to certain tribes of Black Africans. I’m certain any number of parvenu intellectuals could mount defenses of the practice, citing Western misinterpretations of what the ritual did or did not mean in real-world Africa. ERB, however, treats cannibalism not specifically as a perversion of Black Africans, but as one that descends from humankind’s animal forbears. Not until Tarzan has grown to maturity among the apes is he allowed to participate in the ritual of the Dum-Dum. During this tribal gathering, the apes make noise upon a naturally occurring (and highly improbable) jungle-growth that serves as a giant drum. As the anthropoids drive themselves into a frenzy dancing to the drum-rhythm, they nerve themselves up for the ultimate transgressive act of their kind: devouring the flesh of a slain ape from a rival tribe. ERB does not make learned comparisons to the long history of cannibalistic practices, particularly those known from archaic Greece, but there can be little doubt that the author suggests that the Dum-Dum is the ancestor to such rituals, even as apes are ancestors to men.

Tarzan himself comes very close to sullying his palate with this meal. But when he tries to get a taste of the forbidden fruit, he’s attacked by his foster-father Tublat, mate to Tarzan’s mother Kala and the ape-man’s long-standing enemy. Tarzan slays Tublat and spends weeks recuperating from injuries, but the question of further participation in the cannibal-ritual does not come up again. Further, once Tarzan finds the cabin of his late parents, he has begun to think of himself as something other than an ape.

Thus, when the tribesman Kulonga slays Tarzan’s adoptive mother, thinking nothing of eating an ape’s flesh, Tarzan slays Kulonga in vengeance, but cannot bring himself to devour Kulonga’s flesh.

I don’t deny that ERB invokes the idea of some mysterious “hereditary” aspect that causes Tarzan to refrain. Yet, to be sure, in RETURN it is specified that Black Africans who don’t eat flesh despise those that do. Since it would seem unlikely to state that the non-cannibalistic blacks are guided by “heredity,” I would argue that on the contrary ERB has suggested a natural progression in culture to which black people have as much claim as white people: a “thou shalt not” injunction against the eating of one’s own kind. It is also an injunction that the wicked can choose to rebel against. In the last half of RETURN, Jane is set adrift on the sea in a lifeboat after her ship is wrecked. With her are other escapees: some other sailors, her fiancée William Clayton (Tarzan’s cousin), and Nikolas Rokoff, a loathsome fellow who’s continually made attempts on Tarzan’s life throughout the novel. The other sailors die and are thrown overboard, because William will not allow Rokoff to eat their dead bodies. Later, however, William himself stands in danger of being killed and consumed by the wicked Russian. Clearly, Rokoff’s being white does not immunize him from attempting omophagia, even if only for pure survival. That particular peril is ended when the lifeboat reaches land.

The implied distant relationship between apes and men brings up the issue of possible consanguinity between the two species. Though ERB’s readers may have told any number of jokes, racist and otherwise, about the interbreeding of apes and men, few of them would have literally believed that any fruit could come of such a union. ERB skillfully suggests this possibility in a purely metaphorical sense, thus allowing his readers to take pleasure in the fantasy without violating the dictums of science. For instance, the one thing that almost everyone knows about Tarzan is that he became a physical marvel due to being raised by apes. Indeed, most imitations reproduce this same trope. What practically none of them seek to duplicate is the incident of Lady Alice’s symbolic rape. Though Alice is already expecting at the time, ERB has an unnamed ape attack her. She manages to shoot the ape, killing it, but its body falls atop her. Thereafter, Alice loses her mind and endures only long enough to give birth to her son before dying. Clayton is then slain by Kerchak, leader of the ape-tribe, paving the way for Tarzan to be adopted by Kala. I suggest that, though ERB could have terminated Lady Alice via any number of exotic diseases, he knew that on a subconscious level his readers would read the ape’s attack as a “rape,” so that in a symbolic sense, Tarzan is half-ape because, as the superstition goes, “his mother was scared by an ape.”

Jane, of course, is also famously menaced by an ape, and this one, Tarzan’s foster-brother Terkoz, is explicitly looking for a new mate after being routed from his tribe. ERB was probably aware that in reality apes didn’t generally seek to cohabit with humans, but he loads the dice by portraying Terkoz as being in a crazed state. One must admire the cleverness of ERB, to have Jane menaced physically by Tarzan’s foster brother, after having revealed that her principal suitor is William Clayton, Tarzan’s male cousin and thus a brother-analogue.

ERB’s strangest experiment with consanguinity appears in the last quarter of RETURN OF TARZAN. In the latter half of TARZAN OF THE APES, the author foregrounds the existence of Opar-- the first of many, many African lost races ERB will produce-- by having Jane’s scholar-father reference the strange civilization. Yet ERB takes his sweet time about bringing the Oparians on stage, given that they don’t appear until after Tarzan has completed a long series of unrelated adventures—being challenged to a duel in France, fighting bad Arabs and helping out good ones, getting tossed off a boat by his nemesis Rokoff. Presumably ERB wanted to show his hero undergoing a wanderjahre after nobly foregoing a romantic union with Jane, for those wanderings had to come to an end once he returned to the jungle and inevitably married his one true love. Further, once the hero was ensconced in Africa with his wife and his faithful Waziri, he could—and did—encounter the Oparians numerous times.

Just as Rokoff’s white skin did not shield him from backsliding into the iniquity of cannibalism, the white skins of the Oparians does not prevent them from being corrupted by consanguinity. Tarzan makes his first acquaintance with the men of Opar—all ugly, apelike brutes—when they capture him for sacrifice to their sun-god. However, the ape-man soon learns that all of the Oparian women are comely beauties, most especially High Priestess La. She intends to sacrifice the intruder to her god, only to fall in love with him after he rescues her from a crazed male. After that, La gives Tarzan a mini-history of her people’s colonization of the jungles of Africa. She claims that they had many colonies, but that they lost all heart when they learned that their mother country had “sunk into the sea.” This leads to all colonies save Opar being overwhelmed by the “black hordes.” But though Opar remained strong against black tribesmen, the denizens chose to commingle with the semi-intelligent apes like those that raised Tarzan. Indeed, the only reason Tarzan can communicate with La is because they both know ape-lingo.

La’s history of her people’s degradation is a masterpiece of equivocation. On one hand, ERB has La argue that the reason the men are all ugly is because the ones who stayed in Opar were “the lowest types of men,” while the women are good-looking because they descended from the noble lines of the priestess-clan. On the other, as if to tacitly admit that this eugenics fantasy is nonsense, ERB throws in the detail that some Oparians apparently couple with apes willingly: “in time we will no longer banish those of our people who mate with apes, and so in time we shall descend to the very beasts from which ages ago our progenitors may have sprung.” Of course, even if La admitted that a lot of current citizens were still mating with anthropoids, this wouldn’t explain the radical physical differences between males and females, any more than does the eugenics scheme. In essence, Opar escapes these categories because ERB as an author is fascinated with the opposition of Masculine Ugliness and Feminine Beauty. To be sure, this serves one immediate purpose, to make La fall hopelessly in love with Tarzan as the incarnation of Masculine Beauty. But one can’t help but feel like there’s more to Opar than setting up that particular plot-point.

By way of wrapping up, I’ll note that the one thing I don’t think Opar signifies is “apes=black people.” Had ERB wanted to suggest that the Oparians had degraded themselves by intermarrying with a tribe of Black Africans, he certainly could have done so without bringing apes into the picture. Rather, the males of Opar take on the brutishness of simians not because they are literally born of human-ape unisons, but because their mothers are all “scared by apes.” While this sort of thing has no deleterious effect upon Tarzan’s good looks, the male Oparians are perhaps further compromised by their living in a dying society, while the ape-man lives out in the wilds, coping with danger and death every day. In a strange sense, Tarzan becomes more conscious of his humanity by observing the things his ape-brethren cannot do, while the Oparians have surrendered any illusions about the difference between the two species. As for the Oparian women, perhaps in ERB’s world infants with two X-chromosomes just aren’t as vulnerable to having their humanity scared out of them.