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sophia_sol) wrote2017-11-18 02:25 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2017-11-18 02:25 pm
Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A deeply ridiculous and kind of objectively terrible book but I mostly enjoyed it anyway!
The general plot outline is well known - child brought up feral by apes, first meets other humans as an adult, falls in love.
But there's more going on than that. Tarzan is also SECRETLY THE HEIR TO A LORDSHIP. Also there's MUTINY. Also there's PIRATE TREASURE. Also there's mistaken identity where the other white humans who show up when Tarzan's an adult think Tarzan's two people: the mysterious wild man who doesn't know how to speak any human language, and TARZAN OF THE APES who writes mysterious notes to them in English. And so on and so forth.
There were lots of implausibilities; the author doesn't know how humans work, or how apes work, or for that matter how any other kind of animal works. Perhaps the worst is that Tarzan, despite knowing no human language, manages to teach himself to read using children's books he finds in his dead parents' hut. Also the sheer degree of his physical abilities. Also a lot of other things.
A detail I found particularly silly about this book was the inconsistency of whether hunting and killing for joy is a human thing or not. Earlyish it's stated that Tarzan, unlike any of the animals of the jungle, kills for fun, as a thing only humans do. But then later another predator (iirc it's the lioness?) is mentioned as stalking someone out of the joy of it, because if the animal were hungry the person being stalked would already be dead instead of the animal dragging the whole thing out. And then later yet the book says Tarzan only kills as needed for food/safety. Evidence that this book was being written according to the principles of "what sounds good at the time" instead of, like, careful plotting and consideration.
I'm really not sure WHY I enjoyed this story (fun adventure? enjoying rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness? Something else? idk!) but I really did! Except the racism.
I was surprised to find this book both a lot more racist AND a little less racist than I was expecting. There was a village of savage black superstitious cannibals, which like, nope. BUT they were acknowledged as very rightfully fleeing the terrible atrocities of King Leopold, which is a surprising degree of allowance of humanity from an author who characterizes black people as all being savage superstitious cannibals (unless the black person is a mammy stereotype. There's one of those too!). Like, I think the author was maybe trying but had literally zero clue how to not be appallingly racist. The parts of the book that involved black people were all really unpleasant.
Anyway I'm pretty sure I need to watch the disney adaptation now, which I've never seen before but from what little I know of it I'm pretty sure it can only be an improvement on the book. I hear there are no black people at all! Which....is its own kind of problem, in a story set in Africa, but at least there's no explicitly racist portrayals of people of colour?
The general plot outline is well known - child brought up feral by apes, first meets other humans as an adult, falls in love.
But there's more going on than that. Tarzan is also SECRETLY THE HEIR TO A LORDSHIP. Also there's MUTINY. Also there's PIRATE TREASURE. Also there's mistaken identity where the other white humans who show up when Tarzan's an adult think Tarzan's two people: the mysterious wild man who doesn't know how to speak any human language, and TARZAN OF THE APES who writes mysterious notes to them in English. And so on and so forth.
There were lots of implausibilities; the author doesn't know how humans work, or how apes work, or for that matter how any other kind of animal works. Perhaps the worst is that Tarzan, despite knowing no human language, manages to teach himself to read using children's books he finds in his dead parents' hut. Also the sheer degree of his physical abilities. Also a lot of other things.
A detail I found particularly silly about this book was the inconsistency of whether hunting and killing for joy is a human thing or not. Earlyish it's stated that Tarzan, unlike any of the animals of the jungle, kills for fun, as a thing only humans do. But then later another predator (iirc it's the lioness?) is mentioned as stalking someone out of the joy of it, because if the animal were hungry the person being stalked would already be dead instead of the animal dragging the whole thing out. And then later yet the book says Tarzan only kills as needed for food/safety. Evidence that this book was being written according to the principles of "what sounds good at the time" instead of, like, careful plotting and consideration.
I'm really not sure WHY I enjoyed this story (fun adventure? enjoying rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness? Something else? idk!) but I really did! Except the racism.
I was surprised to find this book both a lot more racist AND a little less racist than I was expecting. There was a village of savage black superstitious cannibals, which like, nope. BUT they were acknowledged as very rightfully fleeing the terrible atrocities of King Leopold, which is a surprising degree of allowance of humanity from an author who characterizes black people as all being savage superstitious cannibals (unless the black person is a mammy stereotype. There's one of those too!). Like, I think the author was maybe trying but had literally zero clue how to not be appallingly racist. The parts of the book that involved black people were all really unpleasant.
Anyway I'm pretty sure I need to watch the disney adaptation now, which I've never seen before but from what little I know of it I'm pretty sure it can only be an improvement on the book. I hear there are no black people at all! Which....is its own kind of problem, in a story set in Africa, but at least there's no explicitly racist portrayals of people of colour?