|
|
Compiled by:
Marion W. Copeland
128 Amherst Rd.
Pelham, MA 01002
mwcopeland@comcast.net
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. His choice may have been partially the result of emerging theories about the relatedness of the great apes to that other large primate, 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)
From the Renaissance, artists were 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. But the devil is also the ape of God, mimicking divine creativity with his perverse works. (Warner 247)
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 similis, 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. 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)
Although we may not be as upset by 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 between 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 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 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 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 a brief annotated bibliography, arranged chronologically, of the stories told in texts and films relevant to this growth. 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
Aesop’s Fables
Nicholas Howe includes fables among “other troubling works that cross adult distinctions between the comforting and the frightening, between the human and the animal”--works like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Self’s Great Apes (645-646). “The fable as a form explores those regions where human and animal overlap” (Howe 648). Indeed, Aesop is said to have been an animal, probably a baboon, granted speech by Isis and art by the Muses because of an act of kindness he had displayed (Howe 649).
12th century, English--Worshop Bestiary, fol.19v (Morgan
Library, New York
“...among the jungle animals in the bestiaries is the ape or monkey. The Worshop Bestiary depicts a mother ape who is attacked by an archer as she carries her babies, one blue and the other green. The bestiaries explain that if a monkey gives birth to twins, she strongly prefers one over the other. If she is pursued, she holds the one she loves in her arms while the one she detests clings to her back. But when she becomes too tired to run on only her back legs, she must abandon the one she loves and is left carrying the one she hates.
“The bestiaries note that the monkey has no tail (cauda)--an observation that is explained symbolically rather than scientifically: 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).
c. 1425-50 (French, Burgandy) Monkey Breaker. Silver, gilt, painted enamel. Cloister Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
“An
allied view of monkeys--thirty-five of them, to be exact--is seen on the
celebrated breaker at the Cloisters. On
the outside of the breaker, they [Barbary apes] rob a peddler as he sleeps,
taking his clothes and other possessions, and play in the trees. On the inside they act as hunters and even
use hunting hounds as they chase a stag.
The medieval artist has portrayed with exaggeration the monkeys’ ability
to ‘ape’ man’s behavior” (Benton 90).
1596 (China) Wu Ch’eng-en, Xiyou ji or Record of a Journey to the West, partially translated as Monkey by Arthur Waley (1942, republished 1989); trans Anthony C. Yu. The Journey to the West. 4 vols. U of Chicago p, 1977; trans W. J. F. Jenner. The Journey to the West. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1982; David Kherdian, trans and adapter. Monkey, A Journey to the West. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1992 (Based on the two 4 vol. translations and illustrated with woodblocks by the Japanese Hokusai and others first gathered for a 1833 Japanese retelling; another colorfully illustrated version is the translation of Pan Cai Ying, Monkey Creates Havoc in Heaven, trans by Ye Pin Kuei and rev. by Jill Morris. China: Liaoning Fine Arts Publishing/ Viking Kestrel, 1987.
Its 100 chapters fall into three sections, the first dealing with the birth of Monkey from a stone egg and his acquisition of the magic powers that he later puts to use to aid the monk Tripitaka on his journey to India to bring the sacred scrolls of Buddhism to China. It provides a biting satire of Chinese society and bureaucracy as well as evidence of human need for the animal powers represented by Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy, a fish spirit, without whom Tripitaka’s striving would come to naught. Monkey has influenced generations in East and West as folk tale and literary work (novel and drama). “The songoku (the monkey in the novel) is a popular television series in contemporary Japan” (Ohnuki-Tierney 18n) and “For many years the Foreign Language Press in Beijing exported to Chinese-American children a thirty-four-volume series of comic books based quite faithfully on Journey, and in 1989 one reader who knew the series well, Maxine Hong Kingston, published ... a novel whose hero, Wittman Ah Sing, imagines himself to be ‘the present-day U.S.A. incarnation of the King of the Monkeys’” (Hyde 352).
1611 William
Shakespeare. The Tempest.
Peterson and Goodall offer convincing evidence that Shakespeare based the character of Caliban on contemporary travelers' reports--the first to reach England arrived in 1607--of encounters with the African Great Apes. Although recent critics have seen the character instead as an indigenous human victim of colonial power, there is now evidence that the effects of human encroachment on the Great Apes has much in common with the effects of colonial takeover on human primates. Peterson writes that
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." But these primates belong to an Aristotelian zoology, closed before the opening of Africa…, lacking any reference to the humanoid great apes of that continent: the chimpanzees, bonobos (sometimes called pygmy chimps), and gorillas. (15)
Consequently, Peterson asks Shakespeare's reader to consider that, instead of an animal-like human, Caliban be seen as a "humanized nonhuman, the despised ambassador from animal to man, the missing link seen and denied" (15).
He feels such an interpretation would make the play particularly relevant to late 20th and early 21st century readers and viewers because
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)
He writes
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)
Peterson's conclusion is that this attitude exactly parallels "The fundamental paradox of our treatment of the great apes in general and of chimpanzees in particular" (223). The final words in his Visions of Caliban are: "Prospero and Caliban are, we recognize at last, partners and twins, both slaves, both masters. Slavery violates equally the owner and the owned. By enslaving Caliban [the chimpanzee] we enslave ourselves. Only when we free Caliban will we free ourselves" (310).
1640 (China) Tung Yueh. The Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West. Berkley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1988.
“The Tower of Myriad Mirrors is cast entirely as a
dream of its protagonist Monkey. It
does not specify that Monkey has been bewitched into a dream world until the
plot is explained to him in the last chapter.
Prior to that, the sense of dream is maintained by invoking the surreal
logic familiar to dreamers” (Schultz 6).
The story, composed of 16 chapters is meant to be inserted between
chapters 61 and 62 of Wu Chen’eng’s 1596 novel The Journey to the West. Schultz sees it as key to understanding the
mental and spiritual growth that must underlie Monkey’s enlightenment as a
Buddha.
1741 Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbuthnot. Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.
Begun in 1713 as one of the first collaborations of the Scriblerus Club, Will Self’s chimpanzee narrator points to this “satire, [as] one of the earliest...to use the human [read ape] as a ‘motionless philosopher’.... Drawing heavily on Tyson’s [1699] work of comparative anatomy [The Anatomy of a PYGMIE Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man, which “marked the formal entry of the arthropoid...into Western consciousness” (Self 263)], the Essay was the precursor of the grand line of eighteenth-century satires, pitting evolved humans [read apes] against primitive apes [read humans]. A line that culminated in Swift’s Yahoos [in Gulliver’s Travels]” (273).
1805-1822(?) The Comical Adventures of a Baboon
Blount lists this anonymous tale among the many animal autobiographies that appeared between these dates, all revealing “how cruel, or moral, or amiable the humans are” and comments that “nearly all read like tracts written for spoiled children” (49).
A hanging scroll by Mori
Sosen (1747-1821) captures a family of macaques in a persimmon tree with
unsettling veri-similitude.
1817 Thomas Love Peacock. Melincourt.
Self’s chimpanzee narrator in Great Apes (1997) comments that “Many writers have seen in the human [read ape] a paradigm for the gentler as well as the darker side of chimpanzee nature. From Melincourt to My Human Wife [Collier, His Monkey Wife, 1931], from King Kong to the Planet of the Humans films, writers have flirted with the numinous dividing line between man and chimp” (x-xi). Quite late in his efforts to “cure” a chimpanzee painter who believes himself to be human, Self’s narrator comments, “In Peacock’s novel [your cousin Sir Oran Haut-ton] is tutored by a Mr. Forester, who believes that all great apes, including humans, are part of the chimpanzee family” (281).
"Detective fiction, a distinct literary form originated by Poe," a "a dramatization of a reasoning process concerned with assembling and interpreting data to arrive at the truth that underlies the events of a crime" (Stein 32). "Poe's C. Auguste Dupin…appeared in only three short stories, beginning with 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841), followed by 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' (1842), and concluding with 'The Purloined Letter' (1844)…collected in Poe's Tales (1845)" (Penzler 105). Dupin, along with Sherlock Holmes, "set the tone for their [detective] successors…. Both uncovered and, in true psychoanalytic manner, exposed and left harmless the bizarre, the grotesque, the brutal, the ferocious" (Harper ). Although the homicidal orangutan of this story is not the only nonhuman to be demonized as bizarre, grotesque, brutal, and ferocious in these early detective puzzles, the murderer of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter Camille in the locked room of their residence in the Rue Morgue provides the genesis of much demonizing of the great apes in the literature and film produced by those influenced by Poe and Doyle.
18 Gustave Flaubert. “Quidquid volueris.” Three Tales. Trans. Robert Baldick. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961.
1892 Harry Prentice. Captured By Apes: Or, How Philip Garland became King of Apeland. New York: A. L. Burt.
a sequel to Prentice’s “successful Captured By Zulus.... The hero ...is a young dealer in animals who, after the creatures in his cargo stage a mutiny, finds himself stranded on an island ruled by apes. These primates are ruled by a despotic monarchy. They have a court of law, a simple language and, in rudimentary form, most of the institutions of human society, but, with a few exceptions, they are treacherous and brutal. The protagonist eventually escapes by putting on the skin of a royal ape that has been killed, thus fooling the other apes into obedience” (Sax “Parliament” 87).
A hardstone study of a chimpanzee by Carl Faberge, naturalistically carved
of striated brown agate, with
Diamond eyes set in gold
collets. St. Petersburg, c. 1900.
Height: 2 4/5" (7 cm).
1909 T. T.
Heine. Haeckel’s reverence for Charles Darwin (ill). Simplicissimus.
(“Beauty Beyond Belief: The Art of Ernst Haedkel….” Natural History 12/1998-1/1999:59).
1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs. "At the Earth's Core." All-Story Weekly A. C. McGrug, 1922.
"The Sagoths constitute Pellucidar's race of gorilla-men. Though the Sagoth's body is in proportion to that of a human being, he is covered with a coat of shaggy brown hair. The head is basically humanoid but with a gorilla-like face. The strength of the Sagoth is like that of the greatest of the anthropods" (Glut 52).
1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes. New York: Ballantine, 1963.
Actually Tarzan first appeared in a short story in 1912; 25 Tarzan novels followed. 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 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.
To be fair, Burroughs does differentiate these apes from 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. 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).
1915 Edgar Rice Burroughs. Jungle Tales of Tarzan. New York: Ballantine, 1963.
“Although Burroughs wrote many other stories about the fantastic and unearthly, his main claim to fame is the Tarzan series. First appearing in Tarzan of the Apes (1914), this 20th-century folk hero is depicted as the son of an English nobleman, abandoned in Africa in his infancy. He is brought up by apes, learns to speak their language (and that of other animals as well), and goes through a series of breathtaking adventures. Eventually Tarzan marries, has a son, and finally a grandson. Millions of copies of the Tarzan books have been sold, and they have been translated into fifty-six languages. Many films have been made of his adventures, and he has long been a comic-strip favorite” (Benet’s 960)..
1915 Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Son of Tarzan. New York: Ballantine, 1963.
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, and 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 apptitude), 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 gutterals, 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 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 the similarities!
1917 Franz Kafka. “A Report to the Academy.” The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 213-225.
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)
Down the street he pointed out a war poster on a billboard. It was a picture of a gorilla making off with a white woman. It said in big black letters: "Save your sweetheart from the Huns! (description of WW I setting in Zane Grey's 30,000 on the Hoof [1940]. NY: Harper Paperbacks, 1990: 223.)
1918 Tarzan of the Apes
“The screen legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ jungle hero began with this faithful silent version, with Elmo Lincoln as the son of Lord and Lady Greystoke who, after his parents are killed in Africa, is raised by apes and learns to live by the laws of the jungle. Co-stars Enid Markey.” ” In response to a reader’s querry about the number of Tarzan films that have been made, Walter Scott’s “Personality Parade” (Parade 10 January 1999:2) notes: “The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) lists 81 theatrical releases featuring Tarzan, including foreign-language versions. The original…, a silent film, starred Elmo Lincoln. The most recent big-screen version…was Tarzan and the Lost City, a 1998 dud starring Casper Van Dien. At least two Tarzan films are scheduled for this year. The most famous Tarzan, of course, was the late Johnny Weissmuller, who swung through the jungle in 12 films.”
“...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).
1927 The Gorilla
Based on a play by Ralph Spence.
1927 The Wizard
Based on a play, “Balaoo,” by Gaston Laroux, the film “combined
a mysterious manor with a mad scientist and his gorilla-man”
(Clarens 57). Frank adds: “A mad surgeon grafts the head of a
man onto an ape’s body and employs the creature as a tool to
exact revenge on his enemies. The story is daft, although it
turned up again in 1942 as Dr. Renault’s Secret, but it is well act-
ed, particularly by Gustav von Seyffertitz as the surgeon, and the cinematography raises a few frissons” (143).
1929 Eden Phillpots. The Apes.
"an evolutionary allegory" (Stableford 271)
1930 Wyndham Lewis. Apes of God. Santa Barbara, CA: Black
Sparrow Press, 1981.
1930 Ferdinand A. Ossendowski. The Life Story of a Little Monkey: The Diary of the Chimpanzee Ket. Trans from the Polish by Francis Bauer Czarnomski. New York: E. P. Dutton.
A variation on the animal autobiography, the animal diary, undoubtedly because it takes the added step of assuming a nonhuman can write, is a rarer genre. Nonetheless, earlier example exist (perhaps even in Polish although I am unaware of any). The first I am aware of is Thomas Smith's The Life of a Fox written by Himself(1843), not specified as a diary, but very like Ossendowski's in its chronological recording of a nonhuman life; Jean Oliver Davidson's Blacky's Diary (1899), a sequel to her The Story of Blacky and the first of many cat and dog diaries; Edith Dunham's The Diary of a Mouse (1907); and Stanley reeves' Rhubarb: The Diary of a Gentleman's Hunter (1908). Ossendowski's novel seems to be the first nonhuman primate diary or autobiography before the great apes became frequent subjects in language experiments. Since, a number of authors have seen the advantage of making the ape's point of view the narrative perspective, but as far as I know, the only other diary is found in Gary Kern's The Snow Leopard (1996).
What is most significant here is that Ossendowski anticipates and refines Ishmael's theme of captivity. In Part I Ket elaborates on the leaver life of the young chimp in the wild, making the killing of her mother and the capture of Ket herself more affecting than is Quinn's version of Ishmael's capture. Ket (whose name in captivity becomes Katey) is cared for by loving and knowledgeable humans, pretty obviously the author and his wife, but through them encounters an old chimpanzee chained to a perch in his owners' garden who tells Ket, "'Men are good to me…. The only thing they do not understand is that I cannot live without liberty, and I do not want to.'" In Part II, after she has been lost and trained to perform, Ket learns about the legendary Moritz, also a performing ape, who grew gloomy as he matured, "sticking for hours in a corner and rocking." Though they sensed he "was longing for something" and that it might be "his motherland," his keepers don't really understand his despair. Foreshadowing Ket's own future, Moritz escapes while performing in a seaside town and is last seen swimming "away and away" (One wonders if the scene, and the parallel scene in the novel's afterword, influenced the conclusion to Richard Adams The Plague Dogs except like Quinn Ossenkowski offers no other possible fate for Ket. As Ishmael's student never understands, a human master would be just a kinder version of captivity).
Although the novel contains some inaccuracies about chimpanzee behavior, it is clearly based on close observation both in the wild and in captivity. Her intelligence and emotions and sentience are clear in her responses and actions as well as in her words.
1931. John Collier. His Monkey Wife: Or, Married to a Chimp. Intro. by Paul Thoreau. Oxford UP, 1983.
“Written in the sardonic and fantastic vein that characterized his later work” (Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopaedia. 3rd ed. 201), this tale leads to serious thought about the intelligence and rights of the chimpanzee who seems superior in every way to the women she successfully schemes to replace in the male protagonist’s life.
"a depressed socialite, Marguerite Leonster, who seeks release from her condition in dreams conjured up…by a 'magician'--a scientist who send her consciousness back through time to experience other lives….has already visited Babylon and Atlantis, and now desires something even more remote and primitive. She finds herself incarnated as a tree-dwelling furry primate," Rita, who considers the "cave-people" a lower species" (Stableford 190).
“The film retained almost nothing of Poe...and instead borrowed its basic plot from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Lugosi was cast as Dr. Mickle, a sideshow mountebank who comes to Paris...with an intelligent ape named Erik on a chain. The sideshow masks his true activity--the attempt to mix the blood of a woman with the blood of an ape, and thus prove an evolutionary link. (The film is in many ways a crazy artifact of the Scopes trial era.) Erik enters the bedroom of Camille L’Espanaye like a simian version of Conrad Veidt’s Cesare, and carries her across the expressionistically distorted rooftops of Paris before killing his master and meeting his doom” (Skal 165). Clarens, too, sees the film as "closer to Caligari that to Edgar Allen Poe in its bizarre, Expressionistic set and camera work. The story had a very Hoffmannesque Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) going about his way in the Paris of Daumier and Murger, trying to prove a theory of evolution that would have staggered Darwin and that involved the kidnapping of women for unholy experiments conducted with a gorilla that Mirakle exhibits in the Boulevard du Crime. At the time of its release, the film was criticized for its unrestrained ferocity….[In] the most gruesome scene (the only one retained from the original tale)…the hero (Leon Ames) discovers the body of the heroine's mother (Betty Ross Clarke), dead and stuffed feet first up a chimney" (72-73).
1932 Tarzan,
the Ape Man
“Venturing into the dark depth of the African wilds, a scientific expedition searching for the Elephants’ Graveyard instead encounters the untamed Lord of the Apes who literally sweeps Jane off her feet and into his treetop lair. Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan co-star
1933 King Kong
“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 themselves 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).
“the purported offspring, a great white gorilla, is little more than an emasculated version of the great Kong--funny and endearing as a big teddy bear” (Clarens 95). Kinnard disagrees, calling the film "very entertaining…, and despite some opinions to the contrary, a worthy sequel to KING KONG" (36). In it Kong's friendly young offspring protects the main characters from Skull Island's prehistoric monsters, leads them to the fabled treasure that drew their expedition back, and, at the end, sacrifices himself to save them from the earthquake-induced flood that destroys the island (Kinnard 37-38). Animation was directed by Willis O'Brien and "handled by his KING KONG assistant, E. B. 'Buzz' Gibson" (Kinnard 40).
“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).
“Action packed Ape Man outing with Tarzan encountering stampedes and ferocious wild animals while tracking down his beloved Jane, who has been captured by hunters. Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, John Buckler and Cheetah the Chimp star.”
A woman (Dorothy Lamour) raised in the wild loves chimps but her interest in the apes becomes secondary pnce Ray Milland is stranded on the island and teaches her how to kiss.
"…a blend of allegory and fantasy with a cast including a talking pterodactyl and bands of apes interested in metaphysics, philosophy, and evolution. The fable ends with a revolution: one of the apes, who fought 'like a god…with a science and ferocity such as we had never seen before,' is finally subdued. The oldest ape examines the 'panting creature' and finds the sight overwhelming: his backside is 'bare and hairless--he had no tail…."It is a man!" we cried. And our stomachs turned'" (Short Story Criticism. Vol. 14:271).
Although a minor event in an otherwise typical Marx Brothers' film, the escape of a Gorilla lends suspense to efforts to save the circus from bankruptcy.
Disappointing comedy-whodunit with the Ritz Brothers as fumbling detectives prowling around old-dark house in search of a murderer....Filmed before in 1930. (Maltin 507)
“Well, the Hollywood censors wouldn’t let Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O’Sullivan have a child out of wedlock, so the jungle-dwelling pair rescue an orphaned five-year-old from a plane crash and protect him from greedy relatives after his inheritance. Fourth entry in MGM’s Tarzan series also stars Ian Hunter and Johnny Sheffield as ‘Boy.’”
“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).
“The treasure is a fortune in gold located deep in the bush, and to find it some rapscallions resort to holding Jane and Boy hostage in order to coerce Tarzan into helping them. Want to bet Johnny Weissmuller will deliver some ‘jungle justice’ before too long? With Maureen O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald and Johnny Sheffield.”
“about one more mad scientist who succeeds in giving human appearance to an ape” (Clarens 102). “J. Carrol Nash’s performance as the Ape Man adds considerable impact and even a measure of pathos to this otherwise standard mad-scientist story” (Frank 48). Remake of 1927’s The Wizard.
“When Boy is kidnapped by circus owners and taken to America, Tarzan and Jane follow, and the Jungle Lord’s first encounter with skyscrapers, traffic jams and suits make a humorous, exciting film. The final MGM entry in the series stars Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan (her last appearance as Jane), Johnny Sheffield, Charles Bickford; look for the first screen Tarzan Elmo Lincoln in a cameo.”
“A scientist turns himself into a simian, complete with facial hair, a doubled-up appearance and furry hands through injections of spinal fluid and murders to get more fluid to effect a reversal of the effect. The curse of Monogram [the film company] strikes the unfortunate Lugosi in an entirely uninteresting ‘Z’ picture.
‘Monogram’s writer didn’t have to wipe the dust from Lugosi’s Ape Man; he had to rake the mould off’. Daily News’” (Frank 14)
“Young woman fashioned by plastic surgery from a female gorilla who periodically reverts (usually when sexually aroused) to her simian ways and looks” (Clarens 102). Frank, who wrongly dates the film 1942, finds it “Rather more enjoyable than the story line might suggest and short enough not to outstay its welcome. The movie inspired two sequels, Jungle Woman (1944) and Jungle Captive (19[4]5)....(Incidentally, the animal training sequences are [Clyde Beaty] footage from The Big Cage (1933)” (28).
1944 Cobra Woman--though certainly not the focus of this
fascinating film (a female werecobra is!), a chimp rescues a human from a life
threatening encounter.
1944 Gildersleeve's Ghost--another escaped gorilla
sequence.
1944 Jungle Woman
“A doctor attempts to turn an ape into a woman. Lurid but enjoyable shocker, a reworking of 1943’s Captive Wild Woman.
‘Apparently Universal couldn’t leave bad alone when it turned out a little nuisance called “Captive Wild Woman” about a year ago.... What’s Universal doing to us--trying to make monkeys of us all? New York Times’” (Frank 84).
Plane-crash survivor (Julie London) makes friends with
local gorilla. Retitled Gorilla.
“Two scientists attempt to bring a frozen prehistoric ape to life: one of them murders his partner and transfers his brain to the ape which then turns nastily homicidal. The sequel to The Ape Man which is uncalled for: dreary and uninteresting and too long at 60 minutes” (Frank 118).
“A biochemist attempts to bring the ape woman back to life. Universal visits the same well for the third time...and comes up dry.
‘Vicky Lane plays the brainless woman with monosyllabic finesse and, in her role of primitive savage, she grunts and growls as though she though the whole business to be as stupid as it actually is. New York Times’” (Frank 84).
1945 White Pongo
“A policeman goes undercover with a group of British biologists to capture a mythic white gorilla believed to be the missing link. A camp jungle classic with silly, cheap special effects, but too much talk. Surprisingly, this is not the only albino ape extravaganza—the even sillier (and cheaper) White Gorilla came out two years later, perhaps only to make use of Ray Corrigan’s dyed-white monkey suit again. Double feature anyone? [Richard] Frazer was also in…Gorilla Man. [Maris] Wrixon enlivens…The Ape. We may just have discovered the makings of a Karloff-Fraser-Wrixen-Corrigan marathon here!” (Video Hound’s 293)
1947 White Gorilla--unrest among wild gorillas
1948 Aldous Huxley Ape and Essence. New York: Harper & Row.
“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.
1949 Mighty Joe Young
Clarens comments that although the film “won...an academy award for...special effects,” the film “is most charitably described as King Kong for children. Like Kong, Joe Young is a gorilla, albeit only ten feet tall. But unlike King, Joe is the household pet of an orphan girl (Terry Moore) raised in an African ranch, and as docile and housebroken as a Great Dane. Both the girl and her ape are discovered by a showman (Robert Armstrong, of course) and his cowboy safari and brought to a temple-sized Hollywood nightclub where Mighty Joe holds his mistress and a grand piano aloft on a platform while she plays ‘Beautiful Dreamer.’ The incongruous look of Texan cowpokes scouring the African veldt points to the source of Mighty Joe Young’s most spectacular trick effects” (95).
Like King Kong, Mighty Joe Young was produced by Cooper,
directed by Schoedsack and feature the "stop-motion animation by O'Brien
[who "received a well-deserved Oscar for the film"] and Ray
Harryhausen" (Kinnard 33).
1951 Bedtime for Bonzo
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).
1952 Bonzo Goes to College
1952 Monkey Business
A chimp rejuvenation serum affects a scientist (Cary Grant), his wife (Ginger Rogers), secretary (Marilyn Monroe) and boss (Charles Coburn. Explains a lot, I think.
1953 Phantom of the Rue Morgue
“In nineteenth-century Paris a gorilla is trained to murder girls at the sound of a bell. Poe would never recognize it, but in its own way, aided by crisp 3-D cinematography, the movie is good fun” (Frank 113).
“…stars Karl Malden as Dr. Marais, who hypnotizes an ape and sends him out to kill all the women of Paris who have spurned his romantic advances(the doctor’s, not the ape’s). With Steve Forrest, Patricia Medina;…a young Merv Griffin as a student.”
1954 Gorilla at Large
Offbeat murder mystery at amusement park, with an
exceptionally able cast (Cameron Mitchell, Ann Bancroft, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond
Burr, Peter Whitney, Lee Marvin, Warren Stevens). (Maltin 507)
1956 C. S. Lewis. The Last Battle. Ill. Pauline Baynes. New York: Bodley Head/Penguin, 1969. Carnegie Medal Winner.
“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)
1957 The Bride and the Beast
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.
“‘...will need lurid advertising to pay off....an odd and unconvincing mixture of hypnotic regression and big game hunting in Africa’. Variety” (24).
1958 Tarzan and the Trappers
“Enforcing the jungle’s code of justice, Tarzan (Gordon Scott) tries to impede the actions of greedy trappers capturing animals for zoos and save a noble chieftain (‘Scatman’ Crothers) along the way. Also stars Eve Brent.”
1960 Konga
“A crazy biologist uses serum from carnivorous plants to turn his pet chimpanzee into a giant homicidal ape. Genuinely silly monster movie apes King Kong to the extent of leaving Michael Gough [Dr. Charles Decker] clutched in the giant simian’s paw at the climax--just like Fay Wray! Strictly, I Was a Teenage Gorilla.
‘Crude, spine-chiller which sometimes verges on the
farcical. Naive script and acting; but
effectively eerie camera trick-work’. Daily
Cinema” (Frank 87).
1960 Roger Price. J. G., The Upright Ape.
“By chance, when I was buying Quinn’s book (Ishmael) at Powell’s Books in Portland, I first spotted Roger Price’s J. G., The Upright Ape. This 1960 novel also employs the device of the gorilla as the protagonist. J. G. is a member of a fictional high-elevation subspecies called the silver gorillas. His search for his abducted mate, Lotus, in America becomes a vehicle for sharp, witty satire of contemporary culture. ‘For the first time in his life, J. G. was unhappy. It required great concentration on his part, because it isn’t easy to be unhappy when you have such a tiny brain.’
“Neither author can challenge Schaller’s and Fossey’s gorilla scholarship, but their fictions point to a conclusion that the researchers might recognize: gorillas—gentle, cooperative, environmentally benign—are in some ways better than humans.” (Pyle 311-312)
1961-62 The Hathaways--a
T.V. series about a couple who own and exhibit performing chimps.
1963 Pierre Boulle. La
planete des singes (Monkey Planet).
“combined speculative fiction adventure with Swiftian social satire” (Greene 2). Source of idea for the film series.
1963 King Kong Vs. Godzilla
"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).
1963 King of Kong Island
1965 The Beast that Killed Women.
“Colonists at a sunny Florida nudist camp have their beach party interrupted
by an escaped gorilla that sneaks into the camp every night to kill women and push guys into the pool. Director [Barry] Mahon (Rocket Attack, USA), in his first color effort, stretches these panicky moments into an hour of fleshy fun and games, with long stretches of dialogue between heavily accented topless women. Mostly told in flashback to provide convenient narration. One of the worst ape costumes in movie history” (Video Hound’s 32).
1965 A Monkey's Uncle.
In which a college student performs a sleeplearning
experiment on a chimpanzee.
1966 Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN
Downed pilot and astro-chimp in a labored Disney comedy unworthy of VanDyke, who plays a modern-day…Crusoe, a navy pilot who drifts onto a deserted island, [and] becomes involved with a pretty native girl (Malton).
1966 Monkeys Go Home
1966
Rat Pfink a Boo-Boo
“Features a special guest appearance by Kogar the gorilla” (VideoHound’s 219).
1967 King Kong No Gyakashu (King
Kong Escapes) Japan
“King Kong is found on his island in the South Java Sea and ends up battling a robot replica, Mechni-Kong, on the top of Tokyo Tower. The story barely carries things along but the Toho monsters are an engaging bunch with Kong getting to fight with a dinosaur and a sea monster before dispatching his mechanical rival...” (Frank 86).
1968 King Kong Escapes
A Japanese KING KONG-esque monster is electrified, and "sadly moth-eaten" (Kinnard 89).
1968 Planet of the Apes
Leonard Maltin described the film as “Intriguing, near-classic sci-fi. [Charlton] Heston leads a group of surviving astronauts in shocking future world where apes are masters, humans, slaves. Only liabilities: somewhat familiar plot, self-conscious humor.... Michael Wilson and Rod Serling scripted from Pierre Boulle’s novel, spawning four sequels and two TV series. Won a special Oscar for make-up...” (1011).
1970 Beneath the Planet of the Apes
1970 Trog
"Horror film starring Joan Crawford, which concerned a surviving prehistoric ape man discovered by a scientist" and containing "memorable dinosaur scenes" (Kinnard 78).
1971 The Barefoot Executive
Maltin calls this comedy about a chimp, able to pick what will be the top t v shows, who becomes a network vp, "routine Disney slapstick."
1971 P. L. Travers. Friend Monkey. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
"The Linnets, a family much like the Banks [in the five Mary Poppins' novels]; Miss Brown-Potter, a woman very much like Mary Poppins; and a cast of incongruous and endearing characters and creatures--especially Monkey, the all-compassionate, over-loving hero of the book--seem to lose but finally find themselves and each other in a community of love" (Cott 200). "The Indian monkey god Hanuman…is the inspiration for Friend Monkey" (Cott 216). "Friend Monkey is all about freeing things from cages," so its essential theme, like Ishmael's, is captivity (Cott 229).
1972