Tarzan at 100 Years Old
Tarzan Radio Shows
Stardust, 2008 (re-released from original 1930s shows)
A museum in Paris has opened an exhibit that celebrates the legacy of Tarzan. The character was created in 1912 by the American author Edgar Rice Burroughs in a series of novels. Tarzan, the son of British aristocrats, was orphaned while his parents were marooned on the coast of Africa and then raised by apes. He learned the ways of the jungle, slinking amongst the wild cats and giant serpents, behaving more animal than man until he met the lovely girl Jane (who, incidentally, was also marooned). The couple began a sultry love affair in which the devoted Tarzan protected Jane against the perils of the forest — and against the basest European men. Anyway, I’m sure you know the story.
Tarzan was popularized by the Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller in film. There is an undeniable appeal to the character: a man who harmonizes himself with the most brutal forces of nature and harnesses them along with a ‘modern’ wife.
A BBC article suggests that the perceived anti-African stereotypes that make people squirm today were overstated in Hollywood, and that Burroughs was surprisingly tolerant for his day. I won’t dispute this.
But here’s what I will say: I bought the re-released radio shows from the 1930s, which Burroughs co-wrote. The shows offer some creative sound effects but a horrifically plotted storyline in which the characters spend perhaps ten episodes locked in the cabin of a boat. The Africans pound their drums while making cannibal soup and Tarzan learns how to read in a few minutes. Tarzan also seems to wage war with every beast in the forest. He does not, in other words, toot a kazoo with the parrots like Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. He kills the parrots.
The N-Test
The Tarzan radio shows score about a 25 on what I call the ‘N-test’. That is, the amount of time it takes a pre-civil rights story to call a person of African descent a ‘nigger’. 25 minutes. Given that the episodes were quite short, this is not a horrific score. Admittedly, Tarzan doesn’t use this word because he merely grunts and ullulates, but neither was Burroughs a bastion of tolerance. (Just to show my tolerance, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was my favorite novel for decades, and it received a much lower score on the N-test.)
If you’re in Paris right now, check out the exhibit at Musee du Quai Branly. And please have a bit of quiche for me. I like quiche.
–Deji Olukotun
