My inquiry into the role apes play in the imagination of humans began when I asked a group of my students to consider why novelist Daniel Quinn had chosen a gorilla as the mentor and main character in his 1992 novel Ishmael . Some time after this bibliography found a home on the NILAS website, I received a letter from Daniel Quinn confirming that “whenever I go to speak, the question 'Why a gorilla?' is invariably asked, so much so that I start every Q&A session by saving someone the trouble of asking it.” He went on to say that he had been puzzled why people had focused on 'Why a gorilla?' rather than what he saw as the more relevant 'Why a nonhuman?' He admits he “was frankly unaware that gorillas have long been cast in Ishmael-like roles,” that by his choice he now “belonged to a literary tradition” which included more than a “remote philosophical connection between Kafka's ape” and his Ishmael. Having been sent the link to “Apes of the Imagination,” he was writing to acknowledge a new appreciation for the importance of his to-that-point unconsidered (but, without a doubt, inspired) choice of a gorilla mentor. I am thrilled that now visitors to Quinn's own website find a link to “Apes of the Imagination” as part of his “answer to 'Why a gorilla?'” (Quinn 2003).

        Quinn's unconscious choice may have been partially the result of zeitgeist--emerging theories about the relatedness of the great apes to that other ape, the human. Philosopher Barbara Noske, in Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (1997), reinforces primatologist Donna Harroway's observation “that among the animals themselves the primates are preeminently the boundary animals, and the discipline of primatology is really about the simultaneous and repetitive constitution and breakdown of the boundary between the human and the animals: that it [primatology] can be viewed as an exercise in boundary transgression” (80).

        In The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual , Ohnuki-Tierney explains that throughout Japanese history, the monkey/ape has been seen as both mediator between and “threat to the human-animal boundary” (6). He contrasts the Judeo-Christian belief that “transgressing the demarcation between humans and animals is ... blasphemy” to the acceptance of “metamorphosis between humans and animals” in most other religions (21). No animal is more “intimately involved in the Japanese deliberation upon the crucial distinction between humans and nonhuman animals” than the monkey, who “presses hard at the borderline, constantly threatening human identity and forcing such questions as 'Who are we?' and 'How do we differ from animals?'” (21-22). Significantly, the monkey is the only animal “addressed and referred to by san [the address used for humans] ... in adult language” in Japan (25n).

        That association seems consistent in Western traditions as well, explaining why the majority of literary works in which apes other-than-humans figure large are also exercises in boundary transgression and self-examination--in other words, satires. Yet even in these, the most recent example being Will Self's 1997 novel Great Apes, the ape characters, protagonists and narrators, are never simply stand-ins for humans. Instead, through the magic of imagination, they become the subjects of stories that reveal “how the animals themselves experience the world and how they organize this experience and communicate about it” (Noske 144), allowing them to become both Other and kin for their human readers.

        Work after work reveals as well how the ape has been valued or devalued in human cultures and how those human ideas about apes have changed the history of all the great apes. Hans Biedermann's Dictionary of Symbolism tells the reader that:

Various species of apes (Greek pithekos , Latin simia ) were known in the ancient world and were occasionally trained and exhibited in theatrical performances. “Ape” was a pejorative epithet, and the animal was a symbol of malice and physical ugliness. Nevertheless apes were often kept as exotic pets. It was popularly believed that an ape's eye rendered its possessor invisible, and that an ape's urine, spread on the door of an enemy, would make that person generally hated. In ancient Egypt, apes (long-tailed monkeys and especially caped baboons) were viewed with great respect; Nubian tribes had to provide them as tribute, and it was said ... that they understood human speech and could learn better than many schoolchildren. The screeching of baboons at dawn was interpreted as the pious animals' prayer to the sun-god coming over the horizon. Thoth (Djhuty), the god of wisdom, though usually portrayed with the head of an ibis, also appears as an old white caped baboon, sitting behind a scribe and overseeing his transcription of important texts. The ape was a holy animal in ancient India as well, as is seen from the worship of the apogee Hanuman, who appears in the epic Ramayana as Rama's powerful assistant and emissary. He is the symbol of strength, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Although Indian farmers suffer from plagues of apes, they eagerly celebrate the festival of Hanuman-Jayanti, Hanuman's birthday. The ape was revered in China as well. In South China and Tibet families proudly trace their ancestry back to simian forefathers who abducted women and had children by them. The ape Sun Wu-k'ung is famous for the acts of bravery and the many pranks he is said to have carried out while accompanying the Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan-tsang on his journey to India.... In the Chinese zodiac the ape is the ninth sign. The ape is a calendar symbol in ancient Mexican cultures also, lending its name (in Aztec Ozomatli, in Mayan Ba'tz) to the 11th day of the month. The ape was a god of dance, and those born under this sign were expected to become jugglers, pranksters, dancers, or singers. In ancient Mexico the ape has a not entirely explicable symbolic connection to the wind. In the ancient Mexican myth of periodic “ends of the world,” the second era or “sun,” the wind-sun, was ended by devastating tornadoes, and the humans of this era were transformed into apes.

In Christian symbology the ape is seen negatively, as a caricature of the human and as an emblem for the vices of vanity (with a mirror in its hand), greed, and lechery. Apes in chains symbolize the Devil vanquished. They also stand for uninhibited, filthy humans, a metaphor probably derived from the early Christian text Physiologus, where the ape is portrayed as wicked but also as prone to imitation. The hunter pretends to rub glue into his own eyes, then hides; the monkey descends from the tree and, “aping” the hunter, glues its own eyes shut, and thus can be easily snared. “Thus, too, does the great hunter--the devil--hunt us. With the glue of sin he dazzles the eyes, makes our spirit blind and sets a great snare, ruining us body and soul.” In the psychology of the unconscious, the ape is taken to be a symbol of insecurity and doubt about one's own role, as well as of immodesty. In the language of dreams, any species of ape is “that which is like the human without being human” but which seeks to attain humanity; “a person who dreams of an ape approaches this possibility from a starting-point held in contempt” (Aeppli). Asian sculptures now sold widely portray three monkeys with their hands over their mouths, eyes, and ears. Although in some countries this is widely taken to mean that it is better to see, hear, and say nothing, this is of course incorrect; it is precisely evil that one is to avoid seeing, hearing, or speaking. These monkeys supposedly originate with simian spies that the gods sent among humans to get information about their actions; charms to ward off this spying supposedly portrayed the monkeys as blind, deaf, and mute. In Japan the three monkeys are also explained by the homonym of the word saru, which means both “monkey” and “not do,” thus symbolizing conscious abstinence from evil. (Biedermann 14-16)

        Since the Renaissance, artists have been symbolized as apes, after the animal's cleverness at imitation, and they even devised singularities, ornaments and images and furniture that mischievously accepted and played with this identity (see 1740 Chardin's The Monkey as Painter ). But the devil is referred to as the ape of God, mimicking divine creativity with his perverse works (Warner 247). And, interestingly, Byron refers to himself in his role as creative artist “as a diabolically grotesque 'ape' or imitator of God” (Kenyon-Jones 36).

        The devil was called 'the ape of God,' by no less an authority than Augustine, because he imitated the divine blasphemously, through inversion and parody. The word simius, ape, was related by Isidore of Seville in his fanciful etymologies to similies, like, stressing the animal's powers of mimicry. In French, le singe was seen as a meaningful anagram of le signe , and the animal's copycat powers of signifying inspired pleasure, awe and fear: it did not need Darwin to notice the closeness of humans to apes. Naughty monkeys frolic in the margins of medieval manuscripts, playing tricks and filching from unwary travelers, apparently participating in that mark of the human, Baudelaire's satanic mirth. The animal's cleverness at imitation made it a symbol of representation, the symbol for art itself [The point, I believe, of Will Self's 1997 novel]…. In the 17th century a fashion for monkey pictures, developed in Italy and Holland, showing monkeys dressing up, reading, painting: the chimpanzee's tea party at the London Zoo, which was a feature of children's treats in the city until 1972, is the direct successor of this comic anthropomorphism. It still continues in television in Britain in the advertisement for PG Tips tea [and in the US in the 1999 sitcom about a TV station run by apes]. (Warner 335-336)

        Understandably, apes figured large in the consciousness of Western cultures after Darwin's theories began to work on the human imagination. Gordon Grice explains in his Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators that things scare or repulse us when they are either too human, too like us, or too alien. “For example, apes appear in a disproportionately large number of horror fantasies, from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to King Kong. Apes disturb us with their imperfect humanity” (72). As Boria Sax points out,

What bothered people was the idea of an ape for a grandfather, an animal that long had had a reputation as amoral and contemptible. The ape was rather an unromantic animal. Fables tended to stigmatize apes for trying to imitate human beings, while legends sometimes made them degenerate people. Apes had a reputation for lacking dignity and morality. Long before Darwin, the essayist Montaigne, chastising human pride, had observed that of all animals the apes, “those that most resemble us,” were “the ugliest and meanest of the whole herd.” (“Evolution” 3-4)

        Bellone du Chaillau's Explorations and Adventures in Equitorial Africa (1861) reports proudly on
his exploits involving the “very remarkable nest-building ape, the Troglodytes caliris ,” or gorilla, about which very little was known at the time. His armed triumphs over the ape are related in heartbreaking detail, and the reader is further educated concerning their appearance by graphic woodcuts, which depict the animal standing upright over a fallen native while baring its teeth as it approaches its enemy, which is presumably the author. (Alexander 74-75)

        That de Chaillau was later discredited by the scientific community did little to diminish the harm done to the gorilla's reputation—especially since “the later reports of the explorers and travelers who came after him,” looking for sales and a popular audience, “confirmed” his account (Alexander 75). Perhaps the most famous of these was Richard F. Burton who includes gorilla accounts in both Two Trips to Gorilla Land and The Cataracts of the Nile (1876). Few of them, collecting tales and specimens for zoos and museums seem to have gained the empathy Ethedra Lewis ( Trader Horn , 1927) did when he “'shot a mother….When she was dying she lifted her hand and put it on the baby….No man that's not homo stultus could stand it. I tried to make amends to outraged Nature'” (quoted in Alexander 78).

        More contemporary is what Cartmill refers to as “the killer ape image” meant to show humans “as sick animals, alienated from the harmony of nature by their own destructive technology” found in the writings of “many influential modern scientists, writers, and artists” (1993: 11-14, 20-24, 211ff; see also “Hunting and Humanity in Western Thought,” Social Research 62 (Fall 1995): 783). Cartmill mentions in particular Robinson Jeffers, R. A. Dent, and William Golding, but the image figures in Ishmael as well: an advertisement for “Goliath” at the carnival where the student narrator finds Ishmael/Goliath near the end of the novel is described as “more lurid than the rest [of the side show's posters].” It “depicted the gorilla…brandishing the broken body of an African native as if it were a weapon….the bloodthirsty monster” (20).

        The image is both speciesist and racist. Charles Kingsley responded “to the famine-induced destitution he witnessed in Victorian Ireland: 'I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault…..But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours'” (Cahill 6). Further support can be found in Perry J. Curtiss' Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature where “the escalating harshness of cartoon images of the Irish in London, Dublin, and New York newspapers during the Victorian era” is well-documented (The Capitol Sale Catalog [Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, September 30, 2002]: 21).

        Although we may not be as upset by the killer ape image or the open sexuality of the great apes as were our Victorian ancestors who reveled in rumors “about young ladies being abducted by apes,” there is still reluctance to acknowledge how close the kinship is among orangutan, gorilla, chimp, and human. Nonetheless, increasingly, the scientific evidence makes it impossible not to acknowledge, as Marian Scholtmeijer points out in her essay on nonhuman characters in the work of Flaubert and Kafka,

In a post-Darwinian world, all stories are stories about apes told by other apes—or at least primates. Implicitly, all stories are about the struggle of a particular species of ape to invent and preserve a nonanimal identity for itself. (“What Is 'Human'?” 139)

As she goes on to write, “Only a few writers consciously incorporate that struggle into the bodies of their texts. Gustave Flaubert and Franz Kafka are foremost among them” (139). But they are far from the only writers conscious of the significance of that struggle to the survival of humans and other species. The ape narrators in Flaubert's Quidquid volueris and in Kafka's “A Report to an Academy” were given voice in order to help readers see that their culture had conditioned them to deny their animality, their essential primate nature, although “one sign of difference between Kafka and Flaubert—and, I would argue, of cultural progress on thinking about animals—is that Kafka's ape is not a biological hybrid of ape and human, as [Flaubert's] Djalioh is, but an ape who has decided to become human” (Scholtmeijer "What Is Human?" 128).

        What the Western human culture story defines as human seems to the ape in Kafka “a series of tricks suitable for the vaudevillian stage, a kind of overlay willed onto animal nature.” The text itself consists of his “explaining to a group of scientists how he became human” (Scholtmeijer "What Is Human?" 129). Like most of the works of the human imagination included in this bibliography, the tone of “A Report to an Academy” is ironic and the literary mode it most closely fits is satire, but it is the human animal who is the butt of the joke—and only humans who deny their animal nature. In Flaubert and Kafka, as in the other writers who have created related ape characters, “the animal does not represent limitation, lumpish materialism, stupidity” as they often do in works by human primates intended to bolster rather than challenge the culture story. Instead, the ape characters stand “as a reasonable ontological alternative to the human state,” with “the power to challenge [human] metaphysical values and thoughts” (Scholtmeijer "What Is Human?" 129).

        This is precisely the power the American novelist Daniel Quinn gives to his gorilla mentor in Ishmael (1992) and My Ishmael (1997) and the British Will Self gives to his chimpanzee characters and narrator in Great Apes (1997), marking these novels as the latest in the line that begins actually even before the contributions of Flaubert and Kafka. And just as Kafka's vision suggests an evolutionary leap beyond Flaubert's, Quinn's and Self's suggest the continuing process of growth in our cultural thinking about animals and about our own animality. What follows is an annotated bibliography, arranged chronologically, of the stories told in texts and films relevant to this growth. It is my hope that readers will use it--as critic Marian Scholtmeijer has in "Animals and Spirituality" (cf. Entry 1992 Ishmael for extensive quote).

        Recent scientific studies of ape behavior confirm that much of what had been assumed to be “anthropomorphized” or “fantasy” in fiction's depiction of apes is closer to the reality that earlier scientific assumptions could admit. Philip Armstrong's What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (2008), in a section titled “The Island of Doctor Yerkes,” goes so far as to state that “The shift in representations of human-animal relations during the twentieth century can be measured in reference to one species—the gorilla—indeed in reference to one gorilla narrative, King Kong. ” He finds Barbara Creed's 2007 essay “What Do Animals Dream Of? Or King Kong as Darwinian Screen Animal” particularly helpful because it traces how “the changes in Kong's characterization over seven decades derive from an equally marked alteration in perception of the great apes, resulting not just from the influence of environmentalist thought but more specifically from the work of primate researchers, both in the field and in laboratories,” giving us “a detailed examination of the interconnections between primate-themed fictional narratives and scientific study of the great apes in the last century” (200).

        The importance of story in establishing and changing the attitudes of a culture make understanding the status of an animal in literature particularly important for students of animal/human relations attempting to better the lives of nonhumans and humans alike. As Robert Michael Pyle puts it “In the Shadow of Jane Goodall”:

Children's [and adult's] stories about animals are often faulted for being “anthropomorphic,” or mere human projections. The danger of this lies in reducing animals to our own amplitude of motive by giving them human traits—“big bad” wolves, “wise” owls. But I believe that children [and, he might add, adults touched by Ishmael's teaching] relate to these fabulous animal characters more than to plain descriptive accounts. Because they're more accessible, these compelling stories can teach more of how real animals might behave. In Grahame's Wind in the Willows , Rat and Mole have human speech, but behave like their animal namesakes. Thornton Burgess's Grandfather Frog may have worn a waistcoat, but he also did what frogs do. After all, emotion, play, and intelligence did not arise with us. Jane's work with the chimps demonstrated this conclusively. In giving them names and viewing them as personalities, which they patently possess, she mortally punctured the self-serving view of the world as a human-centered place. Maybe imagination is as good a way as science for individuals to discover this for themselves. (43)

Primary Sources Arranged by date

the devil resembles the monkey in that he has no scripture (caudex, i.e., codex), and thus the ape/monkey symbolizes base forces, the devil in disguise. The much maligned animal appears in medieval art as a symbol of sin, malice, cunning, and lust” (Benton 89-90).

It is true that Caliban shares his tempestuous island with monkeys and that he worries that Prospero will magically transform him into an ape with a forehead "villainous low."

Like the European characters in The Tempest, we are [still] perfectly convinced that our little drama is the only one that matters, that our little island has space for only a single species, that our little universe contains the sole important reality and ethical significance.

Caliban knows better. (86)

Before Europeans came to the island, Caliban was mute--capable merely of "gabbling" like an animal or, to recall the words of Prospero's daughter, Miranda, "a thing most brutish." Out of pity Miranda taught him language, and Caliban became one of the most eloquent characters in the drama. [He is also the only character who speaks both verse and prose. The Europeans are limited by class: aristocratic characters speak only in verse, while lower class characters express themselves entirely in prose.]…. Language endows Caliban with great dramatic power. And it emphasizes for us the paradox of his treatment by the Europeans. He talks entirely like a person, like an intelligent and refined fellow European; but the Europeans continue to regard him as a slave or animal, an irritatingly contentious piece of property that can be bought and sold and owned and used, a strange and deformed brute who by his very nature is [like Wu Chang's Monkey(1659)] "deservedly confined into this rock." (Peterson 223)

         “Fremiet's sculpture depicts another [besides Poe's orangutan] criminal ape, this time a gorilla. Information about gorillas reached Europe in the 1850s, and they were soon competing with orangtutans for the title of 'scariest living arthropoid' in the human imagination. Fremier made his first sculpture of a gorilla dragging off the body of a woman in 1859. In this later version, the gorilla has captured a live female, and the mystery is not 'whodunit' but 'why?' The sculptor provides some ambiguous clues. The wounded gorilla carries a rock, so it may be fleeing a conflict. The woman is young, naked, and struggles ineffectively…. A snake slithers out of a crack in the rock of the bas. It might suggest a jungle environment, or a fall from innocence.

        “Contemporary critics interpreted the scene as a rape. This reading—the King Kong version—gained strength from ideas about race and gender that we find abhorrent today, but which were widely accepted as 'scientific' in the late nineteenth century and beyond….Thus the notion of a gorilla consumed with passion for an African woman (just one step away on the hideous evolutionary ladder) seemed feasible.

        “Fremier himself countered the rape story by stating that his gorilla is a female. If so, her motive is hunger, and murder and cannibalism would be her crimes. Ironically either interpretation would represent an advance inhuman understandings of primate psychology, by acknowledging that such animals were capable of feeling and independent action, and (think of the gorilla's rock) were intelligent enough to use tools or weapons deliberately” (Lippincott and Bluhm 134; illustration 135).

Actually Tarzan first appeared in a short story in 1912 in a magazine called All Story ; once the novel appeared, 24 Tarzan novels followed. David Arthur Jones, in a comprehensive essay on the ape in Burroughs' Tarzan series, asserts that “the ape is the central character in the Tarzan Series….It is a basic relationship with apes, or with ape-like creatures, that must be considered absolutely fundamental to a complete understanding of Tarzan and, perhaps in some ways, an understanding of the entire Burroughsian world” (1).

Certainly no earlier literary treatment allowed the gorilla to be seen as such a complex and sympathetic character, and the popularity of the series undoubtedly influenced the popular view of them. Particularly important is the range of personality types found among Burroughs' gorilla characters. Kala, who, having lost her own infant, eagerly adopts, nurses, protects and teaches the orphaned white ape, John Clayton, Lord of Greystoke, is undoubtedly meant to invoke comparisons with the wolf mother of Romulus and Remus. However, she evokes reader empathy as her more famous predecessor does not (although allusions to Kipling's Jungle Books and presenting Tarzan as Kala's "best beloved" suggests Kipling's more sympathetically presented wolf parents were consciously on Burroughs' mind). In contrast are old Kerchack who killed Kala's original infant and her mate Terzok who hates the adopted white ape and remains his arch enemy through much of the novel, coming closest to revenge when he carries away Tarzan's mate-to-be, Jane Porter, to "a fate a thousand time worse than death." These primates are, in other words, as fully developed as characters as are Burroughs' human creations, interacting in Tarzan's life as fully, if not more fully, than do most humans he encounters in the novel. Some, like Kala and Terzok even have whole chapters devoted to presenting their points of view and perspectives, not only on Tarzan's life, but on their own ape dramas. This actually calls into question theories like Berglund's which claims that “[t]he immediate vision of the book figures these ideogogical correlatives…--emperialism, idealism, mimeticism, monoculturaliztion—that sustain a tradition of…Commonwealth history” (55).

To be fair, Burroughs does differentiate these apes from ordinary gorillas: they are "of a species closely allied to the gorilla, yet with more intelligence, which with the strength of their cousins, made [them] … the most fearsome of those awe-inspiring progenitors of man." Actually, the gorillas who attacked and killed Tarzan's human parents are "the deadly enemies of his [adoptive] tribe." Kala herself, but nine or ten when she adopts Tarzan, " was large and powerful--a splendid, clean-limbed animal with a round, high forehead, which denoted more intelligence than most of her kind possessed. So, also, she had a greater capacity for mother love and mother sorrow." (One almost suspects Burroughs had at least imaginatively happened upon the prototype of the close relative of the chimpanzee, the bonobo!)

The reader learns that Tarzan means "white skin" in the language of these super-apes, a language they use to communicate daily but also use to tell stories which pass both new information and rituals from generation to generation. This is often overlooked by critics commenting on Tarzan teaching himself to read and write from the books in his parents' hut. Berglund assumes that Tarzan “intuits writing is a product of humans” yet “refrain[s] from using it with” the native humans because he is, at heart racist and “senses an inherent connection between the written word, the self-created English book and whiteness” (60). Actually, he probably is aware the natives, whose oral culture is familiar to him, simply do not read, making it as useless to share the books with them as with the apes he respects.

When Kala is killed by a poisoned arrow, Burroughs shows Tarzan grieving as any man would for a beloved mother, but he also reveals that Tarzan's aesthetic sense has been affected both by nature (attraction to Jane) and nurture: "What though Kala was a fierce and hideous ape! To Tarzan she had been kind; she had been beautiful." Without question, Burroughs' fiction remains essentially focused on the human, ascribing most of Tarzan's finer senses and impulses to his being human (and aristocratic!). But readers nourished on his empathetically presented apes and his frequent editorializing on the false boundaries erected between humans and other animals, would be especially open to the work of Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas that has fueled the current drive for equality under the law for all the greater primates (see Peterson and Wise).

This fifth novel in the Tarzan series is of particular interest because in it Akut, a gorilla from Tarzan's adoptive band, serves as the mentor of young Jack Clayton, Tarzan's and Jane's only child, after the boy rescues the captive ape from life as a circus performer in London. The two embark for Africa where Jack intends to return Akut to his people. When circumstances lead Jack to return with Akut, the boy is quick to answer the call of the wild. In fact, this novel is really Burroughs' Call of the Wild , just as the original Tarzan is his White Fang .

Showing himself the true son of Tarzan, he becomes Korak which, in the language of the apes (a tongue for which the boy has a natural aptitude), means Killer. Here, as is not so evidently the case in earlier novels, the ape is a speaking character: "The language of the great apes is a combination of monosyllabic gutturals, amplified by gestures and signs. It may not be translated into human speech." Burroughs uses the adventure of the two to force his readers to recognize the remarkable similarities between the two primate species as well as the crucial differences. The maturing Korak is more and more attracted to the girl he rescues, fortuitously revealed to be the kidnapped daughter of a French nobleman and a suitable mate for a Lord of England. But Akut's sexual interest is also aroused by one of his own kind. He finds the human Meriam too "smooth and hairless," "snakelike," and "unattractive," while the "true feminine beauty" of his own species lies in the "great, generous mouth; lovely, yellow fangs, and…softest side whiskers." No interspecies sex despite clear similarities!

The story and its narrator, Red Peter, play a crucial role in a lecture being delivered to an academy by the main character in J. M. Coetzee's 1999 The Lives of Animals . Her point is that Kafka intended his character to be understood, not as a "defective human being" but as "a branded, marked, wounded animal presenting himself as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars." It is toward that end that Coetzee's readers are asked to understand the "arduous descent from the silence of the beasts to the gabble of reason" that the experimental ape took upon himself. Kafka, whom Coetzee sees as playing a similar scapegoat role in the Europe of his time, was not unaware of the parallels between the ape and his fellow Jews, but Coetzee's text speaks of the nonhuman--not of members of human minorities--as the real scapegoat in human history.

Other critics have suggested that “'A Report to the Academy' … seems to be a communication seeking to establish a contrast between two life forms in an objective fashion. After all, it is crafted as the presentation of a learned paper before a scientific society, a paper in which the deliverer is engaged in describing his former life-style as an ape. The chronological distance between the life reported upon and the actual life of the reporter may be short—just five years—but it is in fact a chasm, for, as its author points out, 'an infinitely long time [in which] to gallop at full speed' had indeed transpired. And this is a gap equivalent to the ape's humanization. The instrumentality required to bring this qualitative change was precisely the ape's refusal to be 'stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the remembrances of my youth.' But is this not the same as having broken the lived continuity of the ape's life? Is this not precisely the reason for autobiography having in this case been transmogrified into a scientific report? In other words, the ape has become a man by having stepped outside his former life and thereby gained the capacity—since the sufficient distance of objectivity had thus been brought into being—to speak of an ape's life in a detached, scientific manner. The ape's purpose, namely, 'imparting knowledge,' was accordingly accomplished to perfection.

        “Yet there are indications—the possible product of Kafka's ironic self-distancing from the ape's own self-distance—which suggest that the humanization of the ape is not and cannot possibly be achieved completely since, in a way, the ape-man mirrors his present companion, 'a half-trained little chimpanzee' that he cannot bear to see, for 'she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye.' (My italics.) In his present condition, he seems to connect with his companion as his manager relates to him, for the manager 'sits in the anteroom; when I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. Nearly every evening I give a performance, and I have a success which could hardly be increased.'” (Garcia-Gomez 125-126)

“...the film was inspired by the then-current interest in the Voronoff theories of prolonging life and youth by the transplanting of animal glands (mostly from monkeys) into human beings. These experiments, well-covered by the press of both continents, had inspired a best-selling novel Black Oxen (later released in movie form early in 1924), as well as the dusting off of an old Marie Corelli novel, Young Diana , which served as a Marion Davies vehicle in 1922.... A Blind Bargain was more outrageously fantastic than either of these:

        Robert, a young man down-and-out (Raymond McKee) agrees to submit to an experiment to be performed on him by the eminent scientist Dr. Lamb (Lon Chaney) in return for which Lamb agrees to treat Robert's sick mother. The young man soon realizes that the experiment may cost him his life after he discovers that the hunchbacked assistant (Lon Chaney) of the doctor is really an ape-man, the result of a previous experiment. The ape-man reveals to Robert the doctor's secret operating room and the hideous creatures kept in cages in varied stages of human completion. Dr. Lamb overpowers Robert and straps him to the operating table, after which the ape-man releases a gorilla-like monster who crushes the life out of the mad scientist.

        “Based on the novel The Octave of Claudius by Barry Plain, the film is basically a free adaptation of Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau with its semi-human horrors, sympathetic man-beast, and grisly climax. It was to become the archetype of the mad scientist movies and it further enhanced the reputation of Lon Chaney...” (Clarens 46).

        Every other summer or so I reread "His Monkey Wife"…and urge others to do so too. The stumbling block has been that the book has been out of print for years…. So I am happy to report that Collier's work has just returned to print thanks to Paul Dry Books ($14.95).

        The novel is one of the great idiosyncratic comedies in English--a designation, incidentally, that is a literary category in my mind…. Suffice it to say that what distinguishes the books in this category is not only that each is so idiosyncratic as to be sui generis, but also that the fulcrum of their comedy is cultural piety and the Western literary tradition….

        "His Monkey Wife" is written in high-flown, often urgent prose. It is a love story and concerns Mr. Fatigay, a schoolmaster, and his "petit, dark and vivacious" disciple, Emily: the toast of the British Museum Reading Room and a chimpanzee. As in most love stories there are moments of passionate jealousy, longing, and fierce romantic intrigue, all conveyed with such a fine and delicate sensibility that one should, perhaps, be ashamed of oneself for laughing. But then, as P. G. Wodehouse observed, comedy is "the kindly contemplation of the incongruous."

“The original beauty and the beast film classic tells the story of Kong, a giant ape captured in Africa and brought to New York as a sideshow attraction. Kong falls for Wray, escapes from his captors and rampages through the city, ending up on top of the newly built Empire State Building. Moody Steiner score adds color, and Willis O'Brien's stop-motion animation still holds up well. Remade numerous times with various theme derivations. Available in a colorized version (what a monstrosity).

The laserdisc, produced from a superior negative, features extensive liner notes and running commentary by the film historian Ronald Haver” ( VideoHound's 161).

Clarens credits Merian C. Cooper, one of America's foremost documentary film makers: “While Cooper and Schoedsack were on location in Africa shooting some animal footage for Paramount's version of the Four Feathers (1929), Cooper became interested in the habits of the gorilla. He conceived an idea about an outsized ape of superior intelligence running amok in the city streets of the civilized world. He embellished this concept with a few more specific scenes: the gorilla would fight one of the giant lizards of Komodo (then of widespread topicality because two of the reptiles had been brought alive to New York's Bronx Zoo where, with dispatch, they died); for a climax the gorilla would make one last stand on top the recently finished Empire State Building...” (91-92).

“There can be no doubt that its Beauty-and-the-Beast leitmotiv formed itself in the core of the original conception. The film opens with an 'old Arabian proverb': 'And the Beast looked into the face of Beauty and lo! his hand was stayed from killing and from that day forward he was as one dead.' It closes with the mournful Dedham, standing to the side of the fallen giant, informing a callous cop that 'Twas Beauty killed the Beast'--and this theme is reiterated and enhanced throughout the film by the secular liturgy of the myth: the golden-haired virgin offered to the barbarous demigod (variously a dragon, unicorn, minotaur or, here, an arthropoid) who is unable to spill this ritual victim's blood, the sacrificial maiden then becoming the prize in a combat between beast and hero” (Clarens 93-94).

        “King Kong (1933) encapsulates these underlying misconceptions [of the 19th c belief that the “missing link” among Other people in Other places]: this classic film, still one of the most popular ever made, begins as an ethnographic expedition, to find the 'Eighth Wonder of the World.' Kong is once described as an ape in the film, but he is far more deeply anthropomorphized, as a king who is worshipped as a god by the dancing and drumming savages outside his sanctuary. The moment that he desires Fay Wray,…King Kong defined for generations of viewers, his tragic, transgressive, beast-like male desire. King Kong is a dark, looming, cannibal giant who snatches tiny victims; like the bogeymen of myths, he changes scale phantasmagorically in the course of the film, all the better to penetrate the innermost corners of the mind. Like ogres and giants in fairy tales, he symbolizes a prior time of greater barbarism that threatens to wreck the civilization of the heroes, exercises an irresistible fascination, but cannot in the end prevail against it. In the course of the film, he changes, however, into a symbol of tragic male bondage and is felled by his own overweening desires. The final icon of the film—King Kong on the pinnacle of the Empire State Building snatching at aeroplanes like a cat swatting at flies—crystallizes the lure and fascination of the imagined unruly and primitive rampant, the very thrill of the bogey inside us.” (Warner 336)

        “The misestimation of our genetic neighbors in the cinema has never abated since King Kong set the high-water mark for countless scary gorilla movies. Degrading stage acts with live chimps and orangutans dressed in human clothes began in vaudeville and continue today. From the indignities of the organ grinder to Bedtime for Bonzo , primates have never had a chance to be them-selves in our eyes.” (Pyle 310). Especially suggestive are Kinnard's observations that "O'Brien's…strangely beautiful landscape on the lost [Skull] island" are "based on the eerie black and white drawings of Gustav Dore" (16); that much of the film "is intentionally styled larger than life in order to impart a mythic, timeless structure" (27); and that, in fact, "Everything about KING KONG--the writing, the direction, the acting, and special effects--is larger than life, aiming for a fairy tale, story book quality" (33). See also Mitman, 55-58.

“Jungle lord Johnny Wessmuller returns in a hair-raising adventure, the second installment in the MGM series. The Ape Man and his British gal, Jane, see their exotic lifestyle threatened by the arrival of Jane's ex-beau and his ivory-hunting pal. This restored version features Maureen O'Sullivan's long-unseen topless swimming scene. With Neil Hamilton, Paul Cavanagh.”

"This was the second MGM Tarzan picture of six starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, and since it was the last one made before the Production Code came into full effect, it goes much further in playing up the erotic life of Tarzan and Jane (a practically naked Maureen O'Sullivan)…. Jane's skinny-dipping still shocks" (Daly 76).

        “A lonely ape-man (Zack Williams) supposedly created by the experiment of a female mad scientist, breaks loose and kidnaps a newlywed bride. Early all-black horror film from the story “House of Horror” by star Spencer Williams, late in TV's Amos 'n' Andy…. The title is a take-off from the successful early mondo movie Ingagi , which had phony scenes of apes abducting topless starlets. Although race movies were made in every genre, strangely, this is one of the very few black-cast horror movies” ( Video Hound's 248-249).

        Other entries add to our understanding of mondo documentaries of the 1930s in which the hunting and dissecting of wild animals, including the gorilla, were as frequent as the unfamiliar and therefore astounding customs of indigenous peoples (lip-splitting, bug eating). There was apparently as endless an appetite for apes capturing buxom women as today's nature films display for predators chomping on prey. Ingagi , as well as Forbidden Adventure and Bowangi Bowanda , led “the way for Kroer Babb's release of Karamoja ” ( Video Hound's 296).

        “Works of science fiction written around the premise of genetic accident exhibit striking similarities, even when the fictional sources of the accident may contrast sharply. Genetic alteration caused by man himself is perhaps the most common subject in biological fiction. Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1948) early raises very disturbing questions about the possibility; and, as more people began to recognize the potential destructiveness of atomic war and radioactive fallout, the 'alteration by warfare' motif became increasingly popular in science fiction. Huxley's novel, like his After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) and Wells's The Time Machine (1895), builds on the idea of man's degeneration as a species. Ape and Essence , however, is an even more forceful, more sardonic condemnation of human weakness and stupidity than the two earlier works. Within a 'screenplay' framework, Huxley unfolds his portrait of the human species, whose genetic structure has been mutated by radioactive fallout, rapidly degenerating into bestial, fear-ridden behavior and slavishly devoted to the 'worship of Belial.' In a series of often bitterly satiric scenarios, Huxley delivers a powerful warning of how men, disregarding even their own self-interest, have set themselves in a direction which will lead to their own destruction. Either men, reproducing without limit and plundering their own planet, will eventually starve to death or, more likely, they will turn their own technology loose and ravage the world in a great holocaust.

The pessimism and distrust of technology and science voiced in this novel finds similar, though usually less skillfully crafted expression in many fictional [and filmic] speculations about accidental genetic alteration” (Parker 36). Cf. also Stableford 314-315.

        Peterson points out that this Universal International film, like so many cinematic comedies that feature performing apes, is less concerned with realism than with entertainment. As a result "the apes are humanized to such an exaggerated and surprising degree that they become central characters in what would otherwise be purely human drama." Here, Ronald Reagan plays Peter Boyd, a "psychology professor," who is engaged to the Dean's daughter. When his paternity is revealed, Dean Tillinghurst breaks the engagement, leading "to a nature versus nurture debate between the dean and the psychology professor." Bonzo becomes the professor's project to prove his nurture hypothesis.

        In the end, as we might have guessed, instead of Professor Boyd teaching Bonzo to be more human, Bonzo teaches Boyd to be more human--to descend slightly from his professorial remoteness and to recognize that he really loves the beautiful woman he hired to help him play 'father' to Bonzo, rather than the spoiled and manipulative …Valerie Tillinghurst. [Peterson's main point here is that] the exaggerated anthropomorphism…leads us into deeper and deeper levels of illusion [that provoke the viewer to ask: If Bonzo is] someone profoundly humanlike and ultimately fragile…why is he being treated so much like an animal?" (140-143).

“The story centres on.a member of the rare (fictional) primate species of the title, who is being studied along with his mate in a zoo enclosure…until the military decides to send the ape into orbit in a rocket as part of the space race between the Soviet bloc and the Western allies….Attempting to save 'his' ape from such a fate, [Professor] Darrelhyde appeals to the head of the League for the Prevention of Unkind Practices to Animals who assures him that 'Percy is being sacrificed in a good cause' (Brophy 1953: 65), because the rocket experiments will lead to space stations allowing allies to spy on 'the Ruske' from space….Brophy's satire thus suggests a structural link between the biological ordering of nonhuman animals—into lists of laboratory subjects sacrificed, taxonomic categories, reproductive statistics, habitat fields, research stations and zoological parks—and the administration of human space by the military-industrial complex” (Armstrong 187).

“The last book in the Chronicles of Narnia , this is the final confrontation between the forces of evil and good. Once more Aslan and the children triumph, but at a price that may have the listener/reader asking questions. The ape, Shift, gets a lion skin that he drapes over the donkey, Puzzle, and passes him off as Aslan. The killing of the Talking Trees and selling of the Talking Beasts into slavery with the Calormines begins. King Tirian and Jewel, the unicorn, arrive, the King quickly giving himself up to Shift so that he can find out about Aslan. Two children, Jill and Eustace, come to his aid as the sides of good and evil are drawn once more” (Apseloff 433). What is significant is that the ape Shift is a negative character who is largely responsible for the fall of Narnia. He and the Cat are, as Blount points out, “the only delinquent Talking Beasts”:

        Shift, who is lazy, artful, ambitious, and greedy, starts by exploiting the gentle donkey Puzzle and goes on to exploit all the other Talking Beasts by working on their simple, loyal credulity. In a way, he is a Beast descending into Humanity, for this is what humans do. Shift even ends by dressing like a human. The Ape's aim is to sell Narnia to Calorman. Only the Cat sees through the Ape's trickery and connives at it, and is punished in the inevitable way by losing the faculty of speech, becoming witless and wild. (302-303)

“What would you do…if you took your newly-wed wife on a honeymoon and found your pet gorilla making unseemly advances toward her on your wedding night? That's what Lance Fuller did—shot the beast! But worse was to come. On honeymoon safari in the jungle, another gorilla kidnapped her to join his male pals in a cave of sin. What's more, she liked it and threw rocks and things at hubby to keep him away” (Gifford). Written by Edward D. Wood and produced by Allied Artists, Frank reports that the film is about “A big game hunter [who] discovers that his wife is the reincarnation of a gorilla--when they go on an African safari honeymoon [and] she regresses to simian form and rejoins her own people. A really ridiculous monster movie but great (if unintentional) fun. A dreadful warning against marriage if there ever was one. [He quotes:] “'...will need lurid advertising to pay off....an odd and unconvincing mixture of hypnotic regression and big game hunting in Africa'. Variety ” (24).

“speculative fiction adventure with Swiftian social satire” (Greene 2). Source of idea for the film series, but quite different from the films. In the novel a manuscript containing the story of three astronauts and a chimpanzee named Hector who reach an earth-like planet in a far off galaxy is found drifting in a bottle in space. The identity of the two travelers who find the tale is kept secret until the final pages of the novel. They are not human as the reader assumes, but chimpanzees, part of the society of higher primates (chimps, gorillas, and orangutans) that rose on Earth after the fall of humans--exactly as the astronauts in the story had found to be the case on the planet they "discover" and are stranded upon.

        It is a shock to the two surviving astronauts to find humans, fine physical specimens with no cultural, linguistic, or intellectual attainments, used as experimental animals by the higher, rational apes who have speech. One of the astronauts devolves under the force of the shock. The other, the narrator of the tale, succeeds in convincing his ape masters that he is not like the humans of their planet by revealing his skill with language and technology while a subject in their human language experiments. Although this brings him equal treatment initially, he is soon perceived, as was Gulliver by his Houhyhmn masters, as a danger. With the help of two sympathetic chimpanzee scientists, he escapes with his primitive human wife and their son, managing to get back to the spaceship and return to Earth. In the intervening centuries, Earth has become a mirror image of the planet he has escaped, ruled by chimp intellectuals, orangutan administrators, and a gorilla military.

        These make the same arguments in reverse that are current in our own culture now ("Ape is of course the only rational creature, the only one possessing a mind [and a "spiritual essence"] as well as a body;" "The scientists were divided into two groups: those who refused to acknowledge that an animal had a soul of any sort, and those who saw only a difference of degree between the mentality of beasts and that of apes").

        "In his last years [Willis] O'Brien toyed with the idea of reissuing KING KONG in a film pitting the giant ape against an animated version of the Frankenstein monster. Attempting to secure permission for the use of the Kong character from RKO, the project was taken out of his hands and licensed to the Japanese Toho Studios, which used O'Brien's concept as the basis for the juvenile film King Kong Vs. Godzilla" (Kinnard 34). Fortunately O'Brien died in 1962, a year before the resulting film was released in the United States.

“The planet issues a collective shudder as the two mightiest monsters slug it out. In the Arctic Ocean, Godzilla frees himself from the iceberg prison he found himself in at the end of Godzilla Raids Again, destroys a nuclear sub for a snack, and heads for Japan to raise hell. Meanwhile, on tropical Farou Island, rare medicinal berries cause an ape to grow far beyond Kong size. The president of Japanese drug company (Ichiro Arishima) has the beast captured, with plans to star him on the TV show he sponsors, but the monster escapes en route and swims ashore to raise hell. Kong is subdued by the berry juice and transported to meet Godzilla, in the hope that the two menaces will finish each other off in a grand duel on Mt. Fugi. A co-production between Toho and various American parties, this was the first Godzilla (or King film for that matter) to be shot in color and scope. The f/x are not as good as in sequels to follow, but acceptable-though the Kong costume is horrible. A persistent false rumor—that a different ending was seen in Japan with Kong defeated—makes no sense, as Godzilla is the villain in both versions. However, Universal drastically changed the original for U.S. release, adding senseless scenes while omitting vital footage, even going so far as to replace the score with stock library music. AKA: King Kong Tai Godzilla ” ( Video Hound's 161-162).

Walcott has admitted to drawing in Makak a “'portrait of the black man as an ape, the black man as a savage, the conventional, very hard-to-break, heraldic, inherited view which we were taught in the Caribbean about the African' (“Remarks,” 24-25).” His comment “Came in response to Walcott's description of the character called Malak in Dream on Monkey Mountain [based on a man named Malak (Monkey) Roger he knew in Saint Lucia]….he may have worked for somebody called Roger, so…people were calling him: “…Roger's monkey.” …He would get very drunk. He was an ugly, short, ferocious man…. But the central thing, of course, is the figure of the Ape. The African is the ape. The African is the baboon. Tarzan and the Apes. It is not only Tarzan and the apes; it's Tarzan and all of the apes, meaning not only Cheeta, but Cheeta's buddies. Meaning those wild guys coming through the jungle screaming…. That's the African we were shown in the Caribbean” (“Afterword,” 272-273). Quoted in Arnold 8-9.

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into a chair
then tied his pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
And whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

Sheila Egloff comments that Donovan's novel is descended from Aesop's didactic beast tales and sees it in “the mainstream of escape stories.” She writes that “it follows the experiences of a group of apes fleeing the laboratory experiments in transplants for the betterment of the human race. As didactic as [Adams'] The Plague Dogs [which also takes aim at senseless experimentation of nonhuman animals], it also touts the superiority of apes over humans. Sasha, the commentator, says of humans:

They are taught at the youngest age to see progress in change. It is why they get their education, and subsequently set their minds to improving the world. I dearly love their innocence, it is so sweet and shortsighted. And their great intelligence, it makes them the most stupid of all animals. This is another sad truth that all apes know.

....the group of apes does become a 'family.' In the end they are defeated by hunters and the weather; and the two remaining apes have to return to the experimental station. Donovan's message is clear and simple” ( Thursday's Child , 114-115; Worlds Within 260). As Judy Allen-Newberry puts it: “Family speaks clearly in behalf of all animals....Sasha [the narrator] best explains Donovan's intentions: 'As I am not by ape-nature reflective, I hope the facts that I recount will speak for themselves'” (43). They do.

“An expedition looking for oil deposits on an uncharted island finds a giant ape which they trap and bring back to New York. The creature escapes and wreaks havoc until it is killed on top of the World Trade Center. Glossy, overbudgeted remake of the classic King Kong which abandons all the mystery and fantasy of the 1933 original in favor of a facetious and camped up version that never thrills. The special effects are dismal in comparison with its predecessor and, instead of Willis O'Brien's superb animation, most of Kong's appearances here are reduced to Rick Baker running around in an obvious monkey suit” (Frank 86).

        Kinnard refers to the film, not as "a remake at all, but a spoofy send-up, …so corrupt and so diffused by its negative, low-brow 'camp' approach that it completely dissipated the mythic…potential of the original material" (32).

A fourteen-year-old Ozark farmboy learns an invaluable lesson, not only about monkeys and chimpanzees, but about human values and self-involvement. The novel brings the science and ethics of Jane Goodall to a situation Ishmael might have arranged for a young student deeply influenced by patriarchial values but also possessing the goodness and love necessary to seeing the world anew. Adults will find the novel interesting and moving as well—at least I did.

        A Warner Brothers film "starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan identified in the credits as Mantis,…another ape comedy classic." Eastwood plays tough guy Philo Beddoe, under whose "chiseled Ice Age exterior churns a New Age male sensitivity" for which Beddoe finds no outlet until he meets "Clyde, the orangutan." Clyde becomes "the barfighter's confidant and foil--at once pet, pal, and sidekick. Late one night Beddoe and Clyde sit together under the stars; the barfighter…unburdens himself to the ape: 'I suppose you think I'm crazy, traipsin' across the country after a girl I hardly know. Hell, I'm not like Orville [his best human buddy]…. I'm not afraid of any man, but when it comes to…a woman, my stomach just turns to Royal gelatin.' Beddoe even takes Clyde to bars for a drink…, and in a moment of enormous inspiration decides that Clyde needs a positive sexual experience ('to get laid'), just like any other normal guy, so they break into a zoo and find a female orang for Clyde. Discreetly, we are shown Clyde entering a cage occupied by the female of his choice and then the door slowly closing. Clyde has found his own stuff of dreams" (Peterson 142).

        As with the 1951 Bedtime for Bonzo, the film's "exaggerated anthropomorphism" succeeds in leading the audience to ask questions about the ethics of our treatment of "so human an animal." Ironically, Peterson discovered that the ape who played Clyde, Popi, was a featured performer in Bobby Berosini's Las Vegas Chimp Act, the subject of a well-know PETA exposé (Peterson 158ff).

Although humans, genetically enhanced dolphins, and other galactic species are featured in this first Uplift novel, one genetically altered Chimpanzee, Dr. Jeffrey appears early in the novel. He is "the first of his species to become a full member of a space research team": "two centuries of genetic engineering had wrought changes in the skull and pelvic arch, changes modeled on the human form…. He looked like a very fuzzy, short, brown man with long arms and huge buckteeth" (77). His thumb had been altered but he is still able to communicate only with the help of a computer keyboard. Still he is skilled enough to pilot a Sunship, a solar probe, and has a well-developed sense of self. There is real grief among his various colleagues when "Scientist-Chimpanzee Jeffrey's Sunship [is] destroyed in the chromosphere of [Earth's] Sun!" (110).

Hated what chimpanzees represent…. Along with dolphins, they meant instant status for the crude, vulgar human race. The Pila had to fight for half a million years to get where they are…. (224-225)

For more on Brin's concept of Uplift and its effects on the great apes, see the other novels of the series: Startide Rising (1983), The Uplift War (1987), Brightness Reef (1995), Infinity's Shore (1996), and Heaven's Reach (1998).

Unlike the real Congo, Crichton's Congo is bursting with gorillas. First, there is Amy, a fast maturing female mountain gorilla who is really the novel's leading lady. Amy has, under the guidance of primatologist Peter Elliot and the staff of Project Amy, acquired a signing vocabulary of 620 words. Her dream-inspired finger-paintings, mysteriously reminiscent of a 1642 Portugese print of the Lost City of Zinj, lead to Elliot and Amy joining forces with a field expedition from the Huston-based Earth Resources Technology Services on the trail of rare blue diamonds valuable as superconductors. The expedition encounters both the mountain gorillas with whom Elliot hopes Amy might serve as ambassador and what appears to be a new species of gray gorilla, warrior apes, developed and bred by the people of the Lost City to guard their diamond mines. Apparently after a rebellion against their masters, these gray gorillas continue to protect the Lost City from all who venture too close. Like Amy, these apes sign but use their gestures only to supplement a spoken language that Elliot guesses may be the result of their former masters' primitive experiments in interspecies breeding. Just as Amy represents the good gorilla of contemporary literature, the gray apes represent the fearsome and brutal ape of legend and folk tale--with a typical Crichton twist or two. First, except when their boundaries are threatened, the gray apes are typical peace-loving and family-oriented gorillas. And, second, what will be the effect on the culture of the mountain gorilla when Amy's offspring, fathered by wild gorillas and taught by their mother to sign, interbreed with other wild gorillas and signing becomes part of their culture? Or, indeed, what will happen “'when circumstances may force some human beings to communicate with [nonhuman] primate society on its own terms. Only then human beings will become aware of their complacent egotism with regard to other animals'”

Big gorilla in the L. A. Zoo
Snatched the glasses right off my face
Took the keys to my BMW
Left me here to take his place

I wish the ape a lot of success
I'm sorry my apartment's a mess
Most of all, I'm sorry if I made you blue
I'm betting the gorilla will, too.

They say Jesus will find you wherever you go
But when He'll come lookin' for you, they don't know
In the meantime, keep your profile low
Gorilla, you're a desperado

He built a house on an acre of land
He called it “Villa Gorilla”
Now I hear he's gettin' divorced
Layin' low at L'Ermitage, of course

The the ape grew very depressed
Went through Transactional Analysis
He plays racquetball and runs in the rain
Still he's shackled to a platinum chain

Big gorilla at the L. A. Zoo
Snatched the glasses right off my face
Took the keys to my BMW
Left me here to take his place

"This story, set in California, is told in the third person by a twelve-year-old boy named Kriss….
"Kriss is hopeless in the woods, so his parents are sending him to camp in his grandmother's backyard near Big Sur. Planning to ride as far as Soledad and then hike the rest of the way on his own, Kriss leaves early and alone for the bus station. He does not have enough money to ride the bus, so he hitches rides and makes it to Route 1, running along the coastline, where he is picked up by a driver in a white van.

        "The van contains chimps from the UCLA Language Lab that can talk in sign
Language. A radio warns that an earthquake is predicted, but Ed, the van driver, says it will only be a little tremor. An enormous earthquake hits, cars are overturned, and the road becomes a mass of tumbled blocks.

        "Kriss and the chimps escape from the van and begin walking. Before long one of the chimps is killed when the bank it is standing on gives way. Kriss and the other chimps break into a cabin to get a little food. They are joined by an old Man and meet another chimp from an abandoned pet shop. The old man is ill and Kriss lights a fire to help keep him warm. This attracts a helicopter that rescues Kriss and the old man. The chimps are left behind." ( Exploring the World of Animals [Teacher Ideas Press, 1997] 94).

“As in Gor's Saga, a sadistic scientist with a God-complex, seeks to create a sub-human race through combining ape and human genetic material, suitable for tests of drugs and medical procedures. Dr. Jenner's experiments are backed by a sinister government agency,
Rather like 'The Shop” in Stephen King's Firestarter. Chad is the first successful ape-human hybrid, produced at the Jenner Clinic, a Laboratory masquerading as a fertility clinic. (Embryos of the hybrids Are implanted in the wombs of women clients.) Chad is treated with such brutality that he escapes and massacres everyone at the clinic. An impassioned argument for animal rights, Chimera explores the ethics of cloning, fertility experiments, genetic engineering, and animal experimentation” (Blousfiled 4).

Although, as in Sundiver (1980), only one chimpanzee character appears, Charles Dart, a paleontologist, holds his own among Brin's neodolphins, humans, and other less familiar galactic citizens. He is a more central and complex character than Dr. Jeffrey, although their shared characteristics mark each as markedly chimpanzee despite their genetic enhancing. Dart, unlike Jeffrey, can speak ("At his best, Charles Dart sounded like a man speaking with gravel in his throat. Sometimes, when he had something complicated to say, he unconsciously moved his hands in the sign language of his youth"--73). Not a particularly sympathetic character as are most of Brin's chims and neo-chimpanzees, he is obsessed with his work and his self-importance.

        While the crew of the Streaker struggles to avoid detection by other galactics in the seas of Kithrup, Dart wants only to explore the subduction zone he has discovered on the planet. In order to reach the depths of the subduction, he plans to split it open with a small A-Bomb, thus endangering the indiginous life on the planet as well as his own crewmates. His determination to have his work recognized as being "on a par with any human!" comes from a sense of ultimate rejection as a scholar. Once he had reached what he had thought of as success--memberships in "all the right professional societies," enthusiastic responses to the papers he presented on earthquake activity in Chile, California, and Italy; and good job offers, it came to him that much of what he'd assumed was acceptance was "tokenism." And that, plus plain old fashioned speciesism, explained why no graduate students sought to study with him when his human colleagues were overwhelmed with eager candidates (397). This may be Brin's way of suggesting some of the problems to be faced should chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas be acknowledged as the equals of humans in our own time.

Features Lamark's Educated Apes, a dozen chimpanzees, dressed and seated at desks, while another, dressed as the professor, teaches the class. Unaware that they are being observed, the apes are in fact in charge of their own behavior and are engaged in discussing a diagram the professor has placed on the blackboard. When the clown Walser, the human observer, is himself observed by the apes, the professor quickly erases the diagram and the group indulge in the antics humans expect of monkeys. The professor quickly puts dunce caps on all, including Walser. As he does so, “[t]heir eyes met.

        “Walser never forgot this first, intimate exchange with one of these beings whose life ran parallel to his, this inhabitant of the magic circle of difference, unreachable…but not unknowable; this exchange with the speaking eyes of the dumb. It was like the clearing of a haze. Then the Professor, as if acknowledging their meeting across the gulf of strangeness, pressed his tough forefinger down on Walser's painted smile, bidding him be silent” (quoted in Adcock and Simms 220).

Although the novel's main characters are a human, Amanda Jaworski, "a sexy subparticle physicist and 'America's leading lady astronaut'" and her beloved cat, Schrodinger (who is, indeed, alive and dead at exactly the same time!)--and who is, according to Washington Post reviewer Grace Lichtenstein, "perhaps the best-realized animal in recent popular fiction," the brainy chimp 342 is also a fully and realistically realized character who plays a crucial role in the novel's theme and plot. He recalls the chimps used in NASA space experiments as he and Amanda--"'sponsored by the entire military establishment of the United States and utilizing all of technology'"--chase to the moon after Schroedinger. They are finally successful, not because of military might and technology, but because they are protected by "a young boy and a magic ring..and…by the cat" himself (Lichtenstein 6).

Findley's novel tells the story of Noah's Ark from the point of view of those creatures Noah did not include among the “clean” animals. Narrated by his wife's blind cat, who is one of the unwanted, events lead inexorably to the reader's discovery that, far from saving the world, the voyage destroyed what was valuable in the world--enchantment, the unicorn, fairies, and man's sense of unity with the rest of creation. The apes here are the children of Noah and his wife and sons and daughters-in-law who are throwbacks to the evolutionary past they have come to deny. Rather than being “bestial,” these children are peaceful and loving. And are born under a death sentence, for Noah has decreed that each one shall be destroyed at birth, an order Mrs. Noah has ignored now and then, putting her into the camp of the unwanted along with the cat her husband, the master scientist and rationalist, blinded in an experiment.

In 2035 the world is populated by computers, smart apes, humans, and talking animals of all species. From this mix, 3, then 12 genius children, only a few human, emerge. Does one of them contain the serpent's egg that will save or destroy the world?

Dr. Horace Worblehat, a member of a small elite group of senior Librarians of Disk World's Unseen University. He (thereafter called the Librarian) is transformed by a magic spell into a large male orangutan and, “discovering that being an orangutan has certain advantages to a librarian, he refused to be transformed back into a human, and has remained an orangutan ever since” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Librarian_(Discworld) ). “[H]e has shown considerable interest in the arts, both as a patron and performer” and “often participates directly, indirectly, or tangentially in the many strange adventure that occur in Terry Practhett's novels” (Gwyn 2). He is able to travel through L-space and is an on-going player. He plays major roles in Sourcery , Guards! Guards! , Moving Pictures , Small Gods , Lords and Ladies , Men at Arms , Soul Music , Interesting Times , Maskerade , Hogfather , The Last Continent , The Last Hero , Night Watch , Thud! , and the Diskworld computer game. See Gwyn: “one of Terry Pratchett's most brilliant and endearing creations.”

An Air Force pilot is assigned to a special project involving chimpanzees. He must decide where his duty lies when he realizes the chimps are slated to die. Peterson describes the film "as an animal-rights fantasy based on a true story" in which the Air Force "subjected at least 3,000 rhesus monkeys…to blasts of radiation up to 200 times the standard lethal dose…and then observed how well and how long they could perform various tasks while they were dying of radiation sickness." The point was to determine how humans might function under similar circumstances. The film, "produced by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker,…substituted chimpanzees for monkeys, recognizing that apes would much more fully communicate their own personalities and potential for suffering. 'This is a film about people coming to grips with the fact that nonhumans have emotions and intelligence, and that therefore we have a responsibility towards them,' said Parkes.

"The central chimpanzee character is a charming young individual, named Virgil in the movie. He has been taught sign language by a beautiful woman scientist (played by Helen Hunt) before winding up in an Air Force laboratory cage that is opened and closed by a…pilot on probation for being too much of a hot dog (Matthew Broderick). That a caged chimpanzee can communicate with sign language leads the hot dog pilot to wonder where the animal came from, which leads boy to meet girl and a mutual love interest to develop, which leads the Broderick character to begin 'coming to grips with the fact that nonhumans have emotions and intelligence, and that therefore we have a responsibility towards them" (Peterson 147).

At the end of the film, Virgil and the other chimps [Bluebeard, Ethel, Ginger, Goliath, Goofy, New Recruit, Razzberry, Spike, Winston] fly off in a plane as the flight simulation used in the radiation experiments have taught them to do! They crash in the Everglades, but after the rescue attempts cease, the Hunt and Broderick characters spot the chimps close enough by for her to be able to sign to Virgil "You are free" and for him to respond by leading the others, among them young females, off deeper into the wilderness.

        Ironically, despite the pro-chimp messages of the film, Peterson's research provides evidence that the chimpanzees used in the film were mishandled and even beaten by their trainers and that "criminal complaints" were filed "on eighteen felony counts of cruelty to animals against six animal trainers involved in" the Twentieth-Century Fox film (Peterson 148-149).

After a car crash leaves her in an irreversible coma, 13 year old Eva Adamson wakes up to discover her brain has been transplanted into the body of a chimpanzee. Her father, a chimp researcher, saw the operation as the only hope to save his daughter's life. Having grown up with her father's “subjects,” Eva in time becomes their champion, determined to save them from exploitation and experimentation and drawn by her new biology to leave the human world and enter the world of the chimpanzee.

"Eva" (Laureleaf, $5.50 paperback) is my own favorite of Dickinson's works. In this provocative tale, the brain of a young accident victim is implanted in the head of a chimpanzee. But Eva is not only an inteligent girl with an exterior now hideous by human standards; she has taken on the primate's sensibility along with its form, and the book becomes a meditation on identity. "What you are is a pattern," Eva realizes, "an arrangement, different from any other pattern that ever was or ever will be." Eva's mother is nearly destroyed when Eva, human brain still active, joins the chimps, but Eva, despite her abiding love for her mother, accepts the primate life and bears daughters of her own. The book presents mother-daughter relationships not chiefly as emotional bonds but as the species' way to educate, to refine--a bold and satisfying bit of feminism. (A. S. Byatt, on first encountering this writer's work, mistakenly guessed that Peter Dickinson was the nom de plume of a woman.) Eva grows old within her tribe. She accepts the implacability of death as instructively as a Tolstoy hero. All this happens, too, under a brilliant surface: the biography of a notable being. (Pearlman N4)

“Though he won a Nobel Prize for his genetic research into cures for lethal diseases, Richard Lee has become a recluse. He lives in a walled compound with a strange child, Adam, whom he keeps from all contact with the outside world. Dick, we learn, was fired from a prestigious position at a Cambridge University research institute because of a coalition of religious fundamentalists and animal rights activists. Violent protests erupted when Dick published a paper concluding that a species of chimpanzee is genetically 90% identical to a human being and postulating a common ancestor for both. Adam is the result of Dick's having altered simian chromosomes responsible for the difference between the two species so as to make a chimp's offspring…more human. In the near future world of the novel, the existence of humanity is threatened by climatic changes, war, and disease. The dominant species of the future, the novel suggests, will no be humans, but descendents of the chimpanzee. Gribbin is a science popularizer as well as a science fiction writer. Unlike many of the more fantastic uplifted animal fictions, Father to the Man is informed by a knowledge of genetics” (Bousfield).

Although no ape actually appears in her novel, Kingston claims “I was playing with the idea of the mythic monkey, the saint/trouble maker who brought the Buddist scriptures from India. He stops in China, but I have him continuing until he comes to America in the '60s. You could see it breaking up the order of the Establishment, making chaos and freedom, trying to do things through trickery” (Denison 10). Wittman Ah Sing (the obvious allusion to the great American trickster, Walt Whitman, is intentional and telling), the human protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey , is the reincarnation of the mythic adolescent Monkey. Breaking boundaries is his natural activity. One of his Monkey fantasies may perhaps be the source of Simon Dykes' apocalyptic vision in Will Self's 1997 Great Apes : “'The curtain opens...the great killer ape in chains sees the audience.... The chains snap.... Swooping Fay Wray up in his mighty arm, he and she swing across the ceiling of the San Francisco Opera House.... The ape is loose upon America.' ...the proud Chinese King Monkey becomes the hunted King Kong, American movie outlaw beast” (Hyde 352). “If Wittman has his way, a new American novel and drama will soon appear” (Hyde 354).

        Kingston describes this novel of broken boundaries whose protagonist would combine the spirits of Monkey and Tripitaka and would come “'singing a new theogony'” (Hyde 310). What she calls the Global novel is to encourage nonviolent means to arrive at a nonviolent end and is not conceived solely in terms of human action or drama although it will require humans that have learned “the culture and history of the land” as have the Native Americans, humans who are “root[ed] in the earth.” Animal helpers like coyotes (the archetypal Native American trickster) and pheasants will appear “miraculously...and will help deconstruct the cities,” and Monkey, retaining his ancient symbolic powers, will become the intermediary in destroying the boundaries that separate humans from one another and from the other animals (Kingston 38, 39).

Maggie, scientist, teacher, chimp-trainer, determines to recondition the chimpanzee Hilda, the star of a language-learning experiment, raised like a human child. The plan is for Maggie to spend six months with Hilda in the wilds of D'Jarkoume in West Africa, teaching Hilda to fend for herself and to rejoin a wild band of chimps when she comes into estrus. The novel opens after they have spent eight years attempting to get Hilda, who does not want to return to the wild, to accept the necessity of doing so.

During the 1970s a head injury study sponsored by the NIH led to "a 1990s script for the American television series Quantum Leap--in which a human inhabiting a chimpanzee discovers his head ready to be smashed by a piston for research purposes--some research-industry spokespeople leapt into action, eager to deny any image that so powerfully compared the suffering of humans to the suffering of chimps. Frankie Trull, executive director of the National Association for Biomedical Research, also complained to the producer. As Trull wrote elsewhere, having a person enter a chimpanzee's body in a piece of fiction on television might 'reinforce the idea that at least some animals are morally equal to humans'" (Peterson 230-231).

        To the Ete people, the advancing jungle was just another invader to adjust to. Legend told of many others, even long before the Tall People came and went away again.
        …
        Now a new invader was seen clambering through the trees. Chimpanzees, spreading from what had been their last redoubts, were also increasing, returning to reclaim their last ancient range.
        "Are they good to eat, grandfather?"…. Kau thought back, remembering meat he'd tasted in his youth. It hadn't been all that bad.
        But then he recalled also, when the Ete used to squat at the back of the Lesse village clearing while movies were shown against a tattered screen. One had been a disturbing tale, all about apes that had talked and yet were misunderstood and abused in one of the Tall People's crazy cities. He remembered being sad--thinking of them as brothers.
        "No," Kau told his grandson, improvising as he went along. "They have almost-people spirits. We'll eat them only if we're starving. Never before."
        One day, not long after, he awoke to find a mound of fruit piled high beside his hut. Kau contemplated no connection between the two events. He did not have to. (352-352)

Private investigator Stuart Winter, searching for a missing deaf woman, investigates the gorilla trainer, Dr. Harrison, who directed the missing woman's teaching the gorilla Joseph to sign. Since her disappearance Joseph has been morose and shows emotion when the woman's name is mentioned. The gorillas Joseph and Bathsheba are treated as complex characters and the problem of their education and upkeep and the ethics of using them in a language experiment are all woven into the mystery of Anita Walters' disappearance.

The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This myth of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world…. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The takers [Ishmael's name for Western humans] are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it everywhere like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness. (311-312; see also 1960 Roger Price, J. G., The Upright Ape )

        Why do we need a gorilla to offer us a new philosophy of living? Marion Copeland asks this question at the start of her online posting "Apes of the Imagination." The bibliography Copeland provides offers many uses of apes both sacred and secular. At the end of her survey the question remains open.…[But provokes an answer from this critic, who concludes that] It is reasonable to conclude that the novel's spiritual aspect is essentially associated with the fact that, in it, a human person is being schooled by a gorilla. The gorilla assists in the fiction that the novel transcends culture for its message. Unlike a human mentor, a gorilla--notionally--has no personal investment in upholding one [human] cultural system above another--except for that system which will save gorillas.
        …for all that Quinn makes no effort [earlier she writes "makes little attempt"] to imagine the mind of a gorilla or speak from a natural gorilla's sensibility, there is merit in his choice of a gorilla as opposed to other imaginable beings. The program of living he espouses seems refreshingly earth-bound. Even if it does not take a special perspective to assert that the world was "made" equally for "jellyfish or salmon or iguanas or for gorillas" (57) as for human beings, ex cathedra pronouncements to that effect have a hectoring quality about them. Ishmael's stance is less wise than sensible, and perhaps that common touch could not be achieved, given the subject matter, with a human or superhuman teacher.
        However, one is left with a disturbing feeling that the gorilla is gratuitous. Or rather, that the novelty of the philosophy arises only from the fact that it is delivered by a gorilla, and not a very gorilla-like gorilla at that. The spiritual utility of Quinn's gorilla becomes apparent, however, with the koans that frame the story. In response to the opening koan, "With Man Gone, Will There be Hope for Gorilla?" (9), one is inclined to answer with a decided "yes. Even more hope." In response to its reversal at the novel's conclusion, "With Gorilla Gone, Will There be Hope for Man?" (263), one is inclined to answer with a decided "no. Humankind cannot survive without other animals." But the puzzle is less easily answered than this, and more realistic, precisely because Quinn has used a gorilla as his philosopher. Substitute any other creature for "man" and "gorilla" in the koans and the question is still urgent. The koans drive home the message that all species on earth, including the human species, are interlinked, are valuable to one another. The loss of the lemur would diminish the world for sea lions no less than it would for humankind. Furthermore, although an animal rights perspective tends to make a person misanthropic, Quinn effectively presents the case that the loss of the human species, as a species, entails an equal diminishment of the world. The fact that a gorilla has addressed a human being in Ishmael carries the message over the abstract qualities of the similarly positioned Gaia hypothesis and into a fairly effective conjoining of the realistic with the spiritual. Ishmael does not oblige animals to speak before they attain a meaningful relationship with us. ( "Animals and Spirituality" 387-389)

        Ads for Jennie call her "one of the most endearing animal heroines of our time." "Endearing," like "charming," is a demeaning term, and no one uses the word "heroine" without intending to raise questions about political correctness -- unless apparently, the female is nonhuman as Jennie, a chimpanzee, is. Without intending to demean, such ads reveal prevalent attitudes toward nonhuman animals that are, in fact, part of what Preston investigates in the novel. For all Jennie's human qualities, she is never presented as anything other than nonhuman. Her difference from human primates become more and more pronounced as she matures, ceases to be cute, and becomes a sexually mature chimpanzee. The fascination of the novel is in the tension developed in and among the novel's characters, including Jennie, by her similarity to and difference from her human family and tutors. The novel, told through excerpts from the writings of and interviews with those humans most involved first with Jennie's being raised as a child and sibling in a human family and then with her becoming the subject of an ASL (American Sign Language) experiment, uses these tensions to raise large moral and ethical questions about primates in particular and all nonhumans by extension.

        Readers familiar with the voluminous literature about language experiments with the great apes; about the use of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans in laboratory experiments and in the entertainment industry; and about the poaching and capture of these primates in the wild will recognize the depth and breadth of the research that preceded the writing of this novel and informs its characterization of Jennie and her human contacts. From the opening where her mother, fatally poisoned by the arrow of a bushman employed to obtain museum specimens for the researcher who becomes Jennie's "father," Jennie presents the reader with confusions about gender ("endearing" and "charming" are also terms human women have had to overcome), species and, in general, about Western humans' understandings of nature and the wild -- these are, of course, confusions that have allowed the culture's use and, as is the case here, tragically well-intentioned abuse of the nonhuman (and often of the human as well). Finally, Jennie like the well-known Elsa and Digit, like the female chimpanzee characters in John Collier's My Monkey Wife , Mary Tannan's After Roy , and Peter Dickinson's Eva , is "sacrificed" in what seems, despite her ASL, to be silence. Her screams when she is separated from her family and relocated on an island where experimental chimps are released into the "wild," communicate little, or little that can be admitted to, to the humans whose words record her story for the reader.

        Only her human brother, Sandy, and perhaps her human father, Hugo, hear Jennie's final message. Hugo fails to survive a simple operation soon thereafter. Sandy turns his back on what another recent primate protagonist, Daniel Quinn's Ishmael (1990), calls the Story of Taker Culture, a story that must be deconstructed if paradigms that allow Ishmael and Jennie to survive are to emerge. Finally, as seems implicit in Preston's choice of narrative device, the boundaries that separate humans from their animal kin need to be broken down and that can be done only by examining our own human stories and languages for their biases and then by listening to the voices around us, voices that, like Jennie's and Ishmael's, have their own stories to tell. (Copeland 1995; cf review by Cathy Young Czapla in Animal People Dec, 1994:19). See 2001 The Jennie Project .

“The animals that seemed closest to humans were monkeys and apes. The Bestiary said that monkeys were named 'simia' because 'people notice a great similitude to human reason in them.' As this descriptive reference indicates, people's interest in apes was largely due to their perceived similarity to humans. Therefore, the popularity of and speculation about apes increased after the 12th century when people began to reflect upon the possibility of similarity between animals and humans. In his comprehensive study of apes in the Middle Ages, H. Janson has observed that there are no surviving representations of apes in early Christian art and no portrayals of apes parodying human behavior before the 12th century. After the 12th century, however, apes were increasingly shown as 'images of man, but a deformed image representing man in a state of degeneracy.' ….

“The growing popularity of thinking about apes (and therefore about humans) may also be seen in post-12th century literature. Apes had not been particularly featured in the classical fables, nor in the rediscovery of the fables in the early 12th century…. As new fables were created for the exempla of medieval preachers, however, apes were popular protagonists. Two of the most frequently used of the top six newly developed exempla in the medieval collections concerned apes. For example, the most popular was that of a foolish ape who threw away a nut because of a bitter rind.

“Even in the earlier human exemplar literature, however, apes were treated somewhat differently from the other animals. While other animals were portrayed with human qualities and behavior, apes were shown as themselves, pale imitations of humans. Therefore in the exemplas literature they were disdained as more bestial and thus inferior to other animals that were portrayed as human. For example, in the Reynard epic, when the human-like Reynard meets an ape, he refers to the simian as 'a foul beast.'

“…Instead of being raised above other beasts because of their perceived similarity to humans, apes and other simians were portrayed as ridiculous. Lacking dignity of their own, they were shown imperfectly imitating their betters, humans. The most popular ape tale of the foolish mother who drops her favorite twin is a lesson of imperfect human motherly love.

“Fable stories of how to catch an ape are even more direct examples of imperfect imitation. An often repeated classical tale said that a hunter who wanted to catch an ape could put on a pair of boots weighted with lead in the presence of a watchful ape. The shrewd hunter would then pretend to leave, abandoning his boots. The curious ape would imitate the hunter's actions and try on the boots. Unable to run in the weighted boots, the ape would be easily caught. This classical tale is entertaining and lacks malicious tone, but other similar tales with a stronger warning against imitative behavior were even more popular in the Middle Ages. Alexander Neckham in the 12th century tells about catching an ape by pretending to rub bird-lime in the eyes, which blinds the imitative ape. A prospective hunter had even less work to do in a tale seemingly invented by Alexander. A cobbler, annoyed by an ape, drew the blunt side of a knife across his neck. The foolish imitative ape cut his own throat.

“As you see, these tales are not stories of foolish human behavior, but they are tales of foolish ape behavior. And apes were foolish because they were perceived to resemble humans. There seem to be two general morals to be drawn…: 1) Do not try to be something you are not…. 2) Creatures that do not fit clearly into categories are at best foolish, at worst dangerous. Both these morals and the increasing popularity of apes point to the growing concern with ambiguity between humans and animals.

“This increasing ambiguity may be seen most clearly in scientific writings of the 12th and 13th centuries. The two most important and original writers on the subject of apes and people were Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century abbess, and Albert the Great, the 13th century scholastic….

“The two writers represent a striking turning point in the vision of the relationship between humans and animals. As Janson writes, 'Their main significance…lies in the fact that they established a theoretical bridge, however frail, between man and the rest of the animal world, with the ape serving as a kind of pillar in midstream.'” (142-144)

One of a series of encouraging tales for readers age 5-8 featuring a beguiling young chimp (the illustrations are by the author) who longs to be a soccer player but lacks the self-confidence to rely on his own talents (and is too poor to buy the cleats necessary to play well). An encounter with a mysterious old-fashioned soccer player who looks very much like Willy provides him with both cleats and, ultimately, self-confidence. Other Willy stories include Willy the Champ , Willy the Wimp , Willy and Hugh , Willy the Dreamer , and Willy's Pictures . Browne also wrote Gorilla for the same age reader.

        Serendipity is sometimes a reviewer's best friend! I began reading The Woman and the Ape immediately after finishing David Abram's The Spirit of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon, 1996) so it was Abram and not other reviewers or jacket blurbs or fond memories of Smilla's Sense of Snow that prepared me for Hoeg's newest novel. This novel is like Smilla only in that its central character is female and Danish, both of which make her an Outsider in the world of her British husband, Adam Burden, a behavioral scientist who treats his wife, Madelene, as a valued and frivolous pet. The ape of the title is not any known species of ape, educated and socialized like Koko or the latest pygmy chimp phenom. He belongs to a species not encountered before by Western science, possesses a brain as large or larger than modern man, walks upright, is capable of eye contact, and, although he does not speak at the outset, learns to speak both English and Danish under Madelene's tutelage once the two have escaped from Adam's control.

        He is the prize capture of a crew of traders in exotic animals, one Adam Burden hopes to turn into compelling proof of his own scientific acumen. With the ape's discovery as his crowning achievement, there could be little argument against his being appointed Director of the New London Regent's Park Zoological Garden which, like so many modern zoos, will be a center for the protection and breeding of endangered species as well as an educational and entertainment magnet for the public.

        Adam's sister, Andrea, who heads Britain's Animal Welfare Foundation, tells Madelene that “biologists calculate that this city [London] contains more than thirty million nonhuman creatures, representing 10,000 separate species. They put the animal biomass at 350,000 pounds per square mile.... there are more animals in London than in any British oak wood.... London is one of the largest habitats for nonhuman creatures on this earth.” Interesting in its own right because metropolises world wide are, in fact, inhabited by thousands of species, the fact becomes basic to the novel's theme which Madelene utters when she first conceives of a plan to free the ape, Erasmus. She saw that “the principle of the city....had totally enmeshed the globe. There was no longer any outside for the ape at her elbow. Any zoo, any game reserve, any safari park whatever was now contained within the bounds of civilization.” She tells Erasmus that “If there's any freedom to be found it'll have to be on the inside.” Unfortunately, however, it also becomes clear that London -- the city -- is not a natural habitat but a machine. It, not the natural world, is the “factory for the manufacture of suffering" which Andrea Burden claims God, like most behavioral scientists "a bit slow on the uptake," had created.

        After some truly funny scenes as Madeline and Erasmus escape, St. Francis Forest, "the London Zoo's private wildlife reserve, the largest zoological breeding and research center in Europe," becomes their sanctuary and the setting for the interspecies love and sex that has so titillated some reviewers. Far from being "Ray Bradbury for Vikings," The Woman and the Ape is an environmental fable with a jolting message. Our large brains are turning the planet's natural environments into machines unsuited for the survival of living creatures. The novel suggests that our only hope for a future would be the evolution of a species--the children of Erasmus and Madelene-- that retains the powerful roots in the natural world that Abram refers to as the spirit of the sensuous and would therefore be able to reverse the process by which London has transformed the globe. Perhaps one should, however, find fault with Hoeg's romantic and anthropocentric decision to make that savior species one so like ours that at the end our genes will mix with its, as Madelene's genes do with Erasmus' as they leave England to sail to the undiscovered land of the ape's origin, a land which can only exist if, in fact, there still is an outside, a place that has remained nature and not machine. (Copeland 26)

After many years of language training
In the Yerkes Primate Lab (our animals
have indoor/outdoor access and may
withdraw from lessons at will) Sherman
the chimp, after correctly categorizing

        socket wrench
        stick
        banana
        bread
        key
        money
        orange

as either food or tool
used the incorrect lexigram
to classify a sponge.

The chimp has one hundred keys
to choose from. First, he was
asked to sort food and tools
into two bins. Later,
instead of bins, to press
the lexigram for food or tool.

He could string lexigrams to say

        please
        machine
        give
        piece
        of banana

Sherman's apparent mistake
was subsequently read
as the interpreter's
misunderstanding of the animal's
intent. An active eater,
Sherman is prone to
Sucking liquids from a sponge,
often chewing and swallowing
the tool as if it were food.

        Quinn's title for this sequel to Ishmael (1992) lends the clue essential to understanding the theme of My Ishmael. The relationship of the novel's 12-year-old narrator, Julie Gershak, to her gorilla mentor is a jealous one. She takes an instant dislike to his other current student, Alan Lomax, the narrator of the original novel because she is reluctant to share Ishmael with him, and, in fact, she doesn't, refusing to allow her sessions to coincide with those of this “dark, intense,” conservatively dressed man who seems to her about her mother's age and has “'intellectual--keep your distance' written all over him.” Ironically, the really possessive student turns out not to be Julie but Lomax as the reader learns (and possibly remembers) when Ishmael is forced, by the death of his benefactor and former student, Rachel Sokolow, to leave the office building where both Lomax and Julie have served their apprenticeship. The daughter of the man who originally discovered Ishmael's genius and bought him, Rachel had been a student of the gorilla from the time of her birth and his messenger until the time of her death.

        Ishmael knows his students well-enough to be aware that, although Julie may be jealous of his time, it is Lomax who, appraised of the gorilla's departure, will display a possessiveness that, given free rein, would return Ishmael to captivity in order to keep him. Ishmael makes it clear in the original novel that the underlying theme of his teaching is captivity, that his effort is to lead his students to free themselves and then others from living as captives to their culture story's capitalist patriarchal paradigm. So it is particularly ironic that Alan Lomax fails to see that his plan to “save” Ishmael by buying him and keeping him a prisoner of his need, albeit while caring for him, demonstrates his continued adherence to his culture story. Therefore, Ishmael knows Lomax is helpless not to stand in the way of his return to the place of his birth and captivity in Africa to rejoin the Leaver culture of the endangered wild Mountain Gorillas.

        He also knows that Julie, although also loath to lose her teacher, would never attempt to subvert his plans. He literally trusts her with his life. She instinctively understands that he is well aware that he may not survive in the wild, may not be accepted by a gorilla band, may fall prey to poachers, but she respects him (and herself) enough to allow him to make his own choices and to help him in whatever way she can. As it turns out, Julie becomes key to the success of Ishmael's plan, in the process demonstrating that she will be both a good teacher and an able bearer of Ishmael's message to the world (which Alan Lomax becomes, too, after he believes Ishmael had died and can let him go). For both, writing the story of their apprenticeship becomes the first step in their own curriculum, their first contact with those who are to become their students and carry their version of Ishmael's message to the world.

        Alan Lomax was too absorbed by what Alan wanted to be able to give any thought to what Ishmael wanted. Worse than possessive, his unwillingness to allow Ishmael to move on and to move on himself threatens his usefulness as Ishmael's message-bearer. The reader comes to understand that Ishmael's plan to thwart Lomax is as much to free the man to take on the burden of his message as to assure Ishmael's own survival or freedom. It remains for Lomax to learn from Julie's story why others cannot be bought or owned or kept in captivity even if it is a protective captivity. It will undoubtedly be a painful lesson just as the lesson learned in Quinn's second novel, The Story of B (1996) is a painful one. And Julie's education will continue as she reads first Alan's and then B's versions of Ishmael's story and writes her own at 16, publishing it when she is 18 and the political situation in the countries that border on Ishmael's territory make it safe to share. Patience and timing are crucial skills for any teacher to learn.

        There is more in My Ishmael about the gorilla's theory of education than would have interested Lomax, who has completed his culture's curriculum, since Julie is still in public school and very much involved in the existing system. Perhaps for the same reason, there is also a clear statement of the value system Ishmael believes his students can learn from observing Leaver cultures like those of indigenous humans and nonhumans like the gorilla: Julie becomes more open to the wisdom of our “neighbors in the community of life” than most students would be because she has done less forgetting of her original ties to nature and the planet than Ishmael's adult male students have been led to do. She even comes to understand what seems to be the hardest thing for Western patriarchal cultures to accept: that there is no one right way for people to live and that no one has the right to impose unwanted values and beliefs on another individual or culture. Unlike Ishmael, which ends in Lomax's despair over the gorilla's death and his own loss, My Ishmael has a positive ending. This is obviously intended to provide proof of the wisdom of supposing that a little child may well lead us into a sustainable future that will allow both Ishmael and his kind and our kind to survive and be happy.

        In The New York Times Book Review 's “Notable Books of the Year 1997” (7 Dec 1997), Great Apes is described as “The seventh book of a death-defying British satirist [. It] proposes a world of civilized chimpanzees, in which a celebrated artist registers his alienation by suffering delusions of humanity” (62). Self's narrator, a chimpanzee psychologist obviously inspired by Oliver Sacks, is called upon to treat a well-known chimpanzee artist who thinks he is human in this clever and affecting satire, a kind of updated Planet of the Apes .

        In the “Author's Note,” W. S., who identifies himself as a chimpanzee novelist, explains that his decision to create a human protagonist was directed by the great tradition of satire. His goal? To promote a deeper understanding and appreciation of humans, thereby improving the conditions under which domesticated humans, especially in research facilities, are kept. He is anxious to have his readers give “the whole question of animal rights their fullest attention” and “to consider enlarging the franchise of chimpunity to admit subordinate species, such as humans.” Self's novel uses its chimpanzee protagonists, including the artist Simon Dykes (whose delusion that he is human powers the plot), for exactly such purposes in terms of enlarging the anthropocentric franchise to admit the other Great Apes. In the process it is hard for the reader to ignore just how close to and yet how distinct from chimpanzee culture human culture is. His conceit, once acknowledged, is simple: chimps rather than humans have evolved to produce a technologically and intellectually complex culture by the 21st century. Self underscores this reversal by a “further reversal of domesticated species [16 hand dogs live in the chimpanzee's stables while lap horses share their homes]..., adding a further half-twist of weirdness to the [human/chimp] reversal....”

        The depth of Dykes' delusion (and Self's satire) demands the reader's attention -- perhaps even a second or third reading, since most readers initially deny their own primate, indeed their own animal identity. Reading a work like philosopher Barbara Noske's Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals carries Self's thesis from fiction to reality with startling effect. Regaining the relationship makes reading Great Apes an easier if not necessarily more comfortable experience. Questions are inevitable. Is Self (or W. S.) right that our innate need to be touched/groomed, as gorillas and chimps groom, has been sacrificed to our denial of our primate identity, leading to the need for drugs and kinky sex as an excuse to touch? Premature babies, denied touch, fail to thrive. What else, essentially human, perishes without a cloth mother in the behaviorist-psychologist's lab of a civilization the novel exposes?

        The satire slices to even deeper nerves. Chimp or human, 21st century civilization seems inevitably to be a realization of “Lang's vision [in Metropolis] of an inhuman, urban [world], ruled by the Moloch of machinery” in which individuals are the clogs. It is that vision--the twisting and distressing of that body by the metropolis, by its trains and planes, its offices and apartments, its fashions and fascisms, piazzas and pizza parlours--that has become the subject of Dykes' paintings and perhaps, as well, the cause of his denial of his body and identity. In this Self echoes the warnings of Peter Hoeg's 1996 apocalyptic novel Woman and Ape although, unlike Hoeg, Self makes use of his extensive knowledge of apes in film and literature. Self's readers will be led to reconsider the implications of works as varied as King Kong and Thomas Love Peacock's Melincourt . Dr. Busner's therapy to reawaken Simon Dykes' chimpunity includes gathering together all “the works of theoretical anthropology, field studies, fictional works....films, television documentaries, still photographs” that examine the human--all reversals of works depicting the chimpanzee or other great ape from Edward Topsell's 1699 anatomy to Jane Goodall to all four of the Planet of the Apes videos and relevant websites, all obviously sources Self himself utilized in researching his subject to establish the verisimilitude essential to his satire and theme.

        Along the way Busner, the chimp Oliver Sacks, provides the psychological theory appropriate both to understanding his patient and to reading Self's novel: “an inter-subjective ... approach, somehow to...see the world with his eyes,” to enter the protagonist's story as the protagonist, “actively deconstructing the ideological categories that surround our notions of disease [and species].” Concern is expressed for the suffering of veal calves and others slaughtered for food, for the imminent extinction of both the whales and wild humans (i.e. great apes). As in Hoeg, there is need for another Ark “to sail a menagerie away from the inundation of the city. Ground it again on a greenfield shore, where evolution could begin anew.”

Entertainment Weekly 's Mike D'Angelo (16 Jan 1998) warns that “This fictionalized account of socialite Trudy Lintz ([Rene] Russo), who maintained a menagerie on her Brooklyn estate, may look like an adorable kiddie romp, but it has more in common with King Kong than with Going Ape . The title character, a baby gorilla adopted by Lintz in the 1930s, grows to be an uncontrollable force of nature (a teenager, in short); the resulting violence is probably too intense for small children. Older viewers will be distracted by the blatant Buddy fakery--he might as well have a sign reading 'Property of the Jim Henson Creature Shop' hung around his neck. (Having him interact with real chimps was a bad move.) Russo emotes her heart out, but this strange little movie remains a nice try at best” (74).

        Perhaps the best thing about the movie is where it deviates from history, allowing Lintz to come to her senses about allowing her apes to be apes instead of pseudo-humans and providing them with a protected but relatively natural and ape-appropriate habitat.

Captivity begins as several chimpanzees escape from the South Carolina Primate Project, a sanctuary for liberated laboratory apes located near a rural community. This is of special concern because several of the apes are diseased and one has been driven mad by his experiences in the labs. The story behind the escape forms the backbone of the novel's complicated plot, all of which relate to the novel's major themes. Abuse and captivity. The director of the sanctuary, primatologist Dana Armstrong, is herself the survivor of her psychologist father's language experiment. Both she and her infant brother and the chimpanzee infant, Annie, were raised together and encouraged to communicate in ASL as well as spoken language. In Dana's mind the other two are equally her siblings and Annie's abrupt disappearance when she became what the Armstrongs saw as a danger to their human children remains an echoing emotional wound. The history of the three Armstrong “children,” preserved in detail on films, has become a part of every primate studies program.

“Dana's early experience as a subject of scientific study has made her empathy with her current charges especially compelling. Wesselman has had no comparable experience. She came to her subject after reading “a brief article about female primatologists who taught captive baby chimps how to behave around their own species,” an experience reflected in the novel as Dana and her assistant attempt, to what extent that is possible, to prepare their new resident apes to enter into one of the two chimpanzee cultures the Project's grounds has room to house. Wesselmann “spent about a year researching chimpanzee behavior” before attempting to create chimpanzee characters, research that intensified while she was writing the novel. She credits Goodall's In the Shadow of Man , Roger Fouts' Next of Kin , and Franz de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics and Chimpanzee Culture , as well as her work on the animal rights movement and the illegal marketing of exotic species for an earlier novella, Vibrissa which explores the theme of animal rights. I have no proof that her research led her to Preston's novel Jennie but the thematic parallels between his chimpanzee's story and Wesselmann's Annie's (and of course between both these novels and the titular character of Daniel Quinn's by now iconic Ishmael ) would suggest she had.

        “I found it disappointing that, unlike Preston and Quinn, Wesselmann fails to make Captivity as much the story of its nonhuman primate characters as of its human primates. When she discusses point of view in the Readers Guide provided by the novel's publisher, Wesselmann admits she favors “strong woman [characters] like Dana, but…also occasionally write[s] from the point of view of men, as [she] does…in Captivity .” She does not discuss the possibility of writing from the nunhuman point of view. Even when Dana finds that one of the new chimps seems to know sign language, her determination to break the Project apes of identifying with humans prevents her from asking for and possibly learning the chimp's story from her own perspective. In contrast to Preston, who takes his readers into the tormented mind of the adult captive Jennie. Wesselmann's readers know the chimpanzees at the Primate Project only through the eyes and minds of the novel's human characters. Because they are, for the most part, trained primatologists, one would like to suppose theirs would be objective and unbiased perspectives, but of course the reader is haunted by both the language experiments recalled in Jennie and Captivity and the debilitating laboratory procedures that have left the chimpanzees Wesselmann's Dana is able to protect maimed in mind and body.
        “According to HSUS's Michael Markarian's “Animals & Politics” blog as of 18 April 2008 “1,200 chimpanzee are still used in U. S. laboratories” and “the U. S. remains the largest user of chimpanzees in biomedical research, as England, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Australia, and Japan have all banned or limited their use. Some chimps have been languishing in labs for more than 40 years, confined in steel cages for most of their lives and enduring sometimes painful and distressing experimental procedures” despite the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (CHIMP) Act Congress passed in 2000 and upgraded in 2007. That upgrade was meant to insure that chimps, once in sanctuary, could not be placed back into research.

        “But there is, as Wesselmann's novel recognizes, a paradox inherent in our efforts to save these and other abused beings. Despite our efforts, they will never exist outside of captivity. Similarly, endangered or threatened wild animals protected in wild life parks and reserves also survive in captivity and, should they escape, will be returned or killed as are the chimpanzees at the beginning of Captivity . Quinn's Ishmael tells his human students that all beings who live by the laws of Mother Culture are equally captive. Can any of us, under those strictures live as free beings with certain inalienable rights? Or is survival inherently dependant on remaining in captivity? And, if that is so, should any endangered species, including our own, be prevented from determining its own fate (or taking its own chances) as have all the species that lived and disappeared before us and have lived and disappeared unnoticed all around us ever since? (Copeland review)

“The finalists for the U.K.'s prestigious Man Booker Prize this year include new novels by Nobel winner J.M. Coetzee, A.S. Byatt, and… Me, Cheeta , a 'memoir' by the chimpanzee star of 1930s Tarzan movies (published in the U.S. on March). British writer James Lever is actually the uncredited author of the book, a satire of golden-age Hollywood that boasts cameos by Esther Williams and Errol Flynn. But if Me, Cheeta actually wins, can it still be called the Man Booker Prize?” (Geier 62).

        In his review in The Guardian , Nicholas Lezard confirms that “This Chimp's a Champ” claiming that what he first took for “a tiresome rip-off; ooh, the chimpanzee who starred in the Tarzan movies has—ho ho!—written a book!” turned out to be “the most audacious, funny and even moving novel that I have come across in years….And the prose…well, no wonder people were wondering whether Will Self or Martin Amis were behind the pseudonym (only revealed some time after publication. There are sign, incidentally, that Lever has read, and tried not to overlap with, Self's splendid Great Apes ). The prose is impeccable—supple, intelligent, penetrating, vigorous. A delight to read.”

Secondary Sources