COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader
with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions
that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled
from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneouswith the work,
letters written by the author, literary criticism of later
generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s
history.Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to
filter Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes through a variety
ofpoints of view and bring about a richer understanding of this
enduring work.
Comments
NEW YORK TIMES
As a result of a mutiny aboardship, an English
nobleman and his wife are marooned in a jungle inhabited by
anthropoid apes. Here a child is born; a year later the mother
dies. A great ape kills the father, but the baby boy is adopted by
a female ape whose own child had just been killed in a fall. The
subsequent adventures of Tarzan, as the boy is named by the tribe,
make a story of many marvels. An ape in his agility and his
prowess, heredity asserts itself; the boy tries to clothe himself,
and, without ever having heard any save the ape language, without
any conception of the sound of English, he teaches himself to read
and write from books found in his father’s cabin. With adventures
and perils the book is replete, nor is a strange love story
wanting. It closes with a great renunciation, but with the promise
of another Tarzan book, which leads the reader to hope that the
renunciation was not final. Crowded with impossibilities as the
tale is, Mr. Burroughs has told it so well, and has so succeeded in
carrying his readers with him, that there are few who will not look
forward eagerly to the promised sequel.—July 5, 1914
—July 5, 1914
THE NATION
It is hard to imagine how more elements of
mystery and thrill could be assembled between a pair of
book-covers. We have heard of human children reared by beasts, but
Mowgli is a feeble fancy compared with this hero. Tarzan is not
only adopted by a she-ape, he is heir to an English title. He not
only travels by preference through the treetops, with or without
passengers, but he kills lions by jumping on their backs and
carrying the double Nelson to its spine-breaking finish. He teaches
himself to read and write English without ever having heard a word
spoken, and learns to speak it clubmanly in the course of a week or
two. In his character of naked savage he wins the love of the
American maiden, and shows the result of Norman blood by his
chivalrous treatment of her. He also finds a treasure chest for her
indigent popper, rescues her from a forest fire, and performs other
feats too numerous to mention in this place. The crowning bit of
ingenuity with which the author is to be credited is the means of
his identification as the true Lord Greystoke. At six weeks of age
he has left infant finger-prints upon a page of his father’s diary,
and the diary has survived! Only persons who like a story in which
a maximum of preposterous incident is served up with a minimum of
compunction can enjoy these casual pages.
—October 1, 1914
BOSTON TRANSCRIPT
Tarzan, although an impossible character, is
most fascinating for a few hours, but no longer. His return has
been most satisfactory; but we trust he will not have as many
farewell appearances as our other friend, Sherlock Holmes!
—March 20, 1915
E. H. LACON WATSON
There is an age-long struggle always in progress
between the critic and the patron of art. Now and again, in the
world of books, it grows acute. There are some who cannot endure to
see false gods triumph. When a bad book sells in its tens of
thousands they raise despairing hands to heaven, and ask vainly
what the reviewers are doing that such things are permitted to
happen....
Here, for example, is Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs,
author of the “Tarzan” series, with which he appears to have reaped
one of the greatest successes of modern times in the world of
books. A short time ago it was difficult to get away from Tarzan:
he pursued you on the railway bookstall, in the cinema palace, even
(occasionally) in the Law Courts. I believe the name was
registered, like that of a patent medicine. To call a performing
chimpanzee Tarzan constituted a gross infringement of Mr.
Burroughs’s copyright....
In the annals of fiction I confess that I have
never seen a more high-spirited disregard for the probabilities
than is displayed by Mr. Burroughs in these books, and especially
in the later volumes. Tarzan of the Apes is itself pretty steep in
parts, but it is a mere nothing to some of those that follow. The
author has quite clearly said to himself something like this: “That
jungle stuff of Kipling’s was all right, but Rudyard did not know
when he had a real good thing. The public will lap up any amount of
that dope, strengthened a bit and with plenty of human love
interest.” ...
Mr. Burroughs ... builds up his story by a series
of short, sharp hammer-blows. And it is precisely this series of
shocks that his public want. They are easy to assimilate—as easy as
the pictures on a cinema reel. They startle: their appeal to the
emotions is direct, and almost brutal. Unless something pretty
violent is supplied there is a real danger of the reading public
falling asleep over your book. Those old qualities, upon which the
critic of old used to set some store—delicacy and restraint—are now
worse than useless. If you desire to write a “best seller,” keep
your wit and wisdom (if you happen to possess any) well in the
background.
—from the Fortnightly Review ( June 1,
1923)
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
I was not writing because of any urge to write
nor for any particular love of writing. I was writing because I had
a wife and two babies....
I wrote [Tarzan of the Apes] in longhand
on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper. I did not
think it was a very good story and I doubted if it would
sell.
—from Open Road (September 1949)
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
I did read many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
earlier works, but I developed a dislike for his Tarzan even
greater than my distaste for spiders.
—as quoted in Richard A. Lupoff’s Edgar Rice
Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965)
RAY BRADBURY
Kipling was a better writer than Burroughs, but
not a better romantic.
—from his introduction to Irwin Porges’s
Edgar Rice Burrougbs: The Man Who Created Tarzan
(1975)
Questions
1. Does the theme of a hero or heroine who
escapes the confinements of civilization still have a wide appeal
among Americans?
2. If you were a movie producer who wanted to do
a Tarzan film, how would you change Burroughs’s character to make
him more appealing to contemporary audiences?
3. Similarly, how would you change Jane?
4. How is it that so many decent, peaceful
readers loved the violence in the Tarzan books? Is it true that
many—or most, or all—humans are full of surprising violence and
that a book like Tarzan of the Apes siphons it off into
their imaginations, where it does no harm? If this suppressed
violence exists, is it instinctive, or is it encouraged by our
human societies?