#12 — Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1919)
Jungle Tales of Tarzan is a collection of short stories and the sixth book in the Tarzan series, but it is curiously set in between two chapters of the original novel, Tarzan of the Apes.
I needed a palate cleanser after reading something quote unquote heavy. I enjoy pulp fiction, whether it’s noir, adventure or (most often) SF or whatever, and among the unread books in my queue was this mass market paperback I’d bought last year at Powells for a buck. I’d never read any books about the famous Ape-Man, and so I thought perfect, let’s enjoy some silly adventure stories. Hitherto the only thing I knew about Tarzan was that Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller played him in the movies, and I only knew that because I’d been once or twice to the park in central Florida (read: swamp) where they were filmed.
So anyway, it turns out that Tarzan is a huge asshole.
Jungle Tales is some of the most bombastically and unintentionally funny stuff I’ve read in a while. I don’t imagine the author expected his audience to laugh much while reading his Tarzan stories, or at least not at the parts where I more than once laughed literally out loud. These stories are a treasure trove of encoded information about race, gender, and nature from the perspective of an early-20th century white American guy named Edgar Rice Burroughs. His creation Tarzan is an orphaned white English aristocrat who was raised by apes in the jungle in Africa (where in Africa? IN THE JUNGLE in Africa!), and he kills animals and black people with his hands and teeth. Tarzan loves practical jokes, and among his favorite pastimes are “baiting the blacks”, tormenting the blacks, and murdering the blacks (in this case “the blacks” are a village of native Africans, so two-dimensional and caricatured they may as well have leaped from the early scenes of the movie “King Kong” and into Burroughs’ books).
Burroughs has it that the villagers (who are cannibals, dear me! They are also very immoral and lazy, oh my!) moved into the jungle to escape the slave traders and other brutalizers in the Belgian Congo, though I read this less as his sympathy for the black Africans and more as his condemnation of European colonizers (he’s also very hard on the English aristocracy). They’ve escaped the horrors of King Leopold, but in the jungle they have to deal with lions and apes and panethers, not to mention Tarzan (the good guy, remember) who torments and tortures and kills them for sport.
In one story, called “A Jungle Joke”, Tarzan foils the villagers’ plan to catch a lion, and in the process he switches the goat they’d used as bait with their witch-doctor; when they check the lion trap the next morning they indeed find they have captured a lion, and they also find the mutilated body of the witch-doctor (hee hee!). Later, after they take the captured lion back to their village, Tarzan frees the lion in such a way that about a dozen more villagers are mauled to death and one is eaten alive while Tarzan watches from a tree and giggles. This story once again is called “A Jungle Joke” and Tarzan is the protagonist who later became a popular leading man in films and television, including Disney.
Moving past the cringe-worthy racism that soaks through every page of this book, there are other flaws and head-scratchers that are much more entertaining and less awful and depressing. For example: Tarzan learns how to read by staring at books even though he doesn’t speak English (he doesn’t even speak human). He figures out what the word “God” means (in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, as in omnipotent creator/giant beard in the sky), and goes on a quest to find God and beat him up (Tarzan is very macho).
One time, Tarzan stole tainted elephant meat from the villagers (in the process of which he shoved one of them into the stew pot for a good joke), and not knowing the meat was tainted he ate it, and then he tripped balls.
Tarzan isn’t all about killing black guys and biting animals to death. He also learns about the meaning of family and parenthood. Tarzan wants very badly to have a baby to care for, and after he realizes he can’t make one with one of his she-ape family members, he decides to steal one from the black villagers. To his credit, Tarzan realizes (eventually, after the kid is almost eaten by hyenas because of Tarzan) that the child should be with his own mother, even if she is ugly and black with gross stuff in her face.
Did I say this book made me laugh? Well, it did, but only until about halfway through. By the fifth or sixth story I stopped laughing and started wondering more or less “What the fuck?” I mean, Burroughs isn’t the worst writer ever, his language is somewhat eloquent and he really likes to use words like “thews” and “spoor”, which was amusing for a while. And the logical inconsistencies and Burroughs’ obvious and total lack of knowledge about the jungle was good for a few giggles (lions, apes, people, hyenas, elephants, panthers, gorillas and rhinoceroses all living essentially on top of one another in the jungle…lions in the jungle? Oh and Tarzan’s ape tribe have a verbal language well-developed enough to discuss concepts like God, and did I mention Tarzan learned what the word “God” meant by staring at a book for a long time?). But the laughs began to wear thin around the time Tarzan fed the outcast leper to the leper’s own pet hyenas, and I finished the book as quickly as possible, racing through the last story wherein Tarzan becomes head of his ape tribe by rescuing the moon from a lion in the sky (say what?).
