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c h a p t e r t w o Brute Fictions It’s hard to determine what it meant for one of the thousands of men who bought Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Tarzan of the Apes when it came out in 1914 to actually sit down and read through this story of the young Lord Greystoke, the infant son of English aristocrats, who is raised in the African jungle by a family of apes and then, through the deadly combination of animal-like ferocity and human intelligence, becomes “king of the jungle.” Always one of the most difficult issues in literary history, readerly reception is all the more challenging with such a fantastic story as Tarzan. With chapters entitled “Jungle Battles,” “The Forest God,” “The Call of the Primitive” and its setting, plot, and lead character so removed from the personal experience of, say, a midwestern white-collar employee or factory worker, Tarzan may have become popular through its ability to place a male reader outside his workaday world and into an exotic environment in which a man survives or perishes by virtue of his wits, brute strength, and capacity to hunt and kill.1 And yet without diary entries or personal letters speaking of such an appeal, the novel’s primitivist meanings remain a matter of speculation. Some measure of historical specificity if not certainty can be achieved, though, by approaching Tarzan as a culmination of a popular masculine literary genre. If de-evolutionary masculinity is a habit of mind, then literary texts can be seen as multifaceted incitations to certain psychologies, with plot lines and character development helping to pattern a reader’s cognitive and emotional predisposition. With Tarzan and what will be defined here as the American genre of hunting and killing, we find a routinization of zoomorphic subjectivity—a calibration of male self-understanding toward man’s prehistoric past and, more specifically, toward his animal origins and their staying power in modern consciousness. One way to start piecing together the meaning of a story is to look at its critical reception. Book reviews can serve as a type of “rehearsal” of the reading process , divulging one person’s intellectual and emotional response to the story. And because some critics try to analyze the text in relation to popular literary tastes, reviews can add historical insight into the reading practices of a particular time.2 Unfortunately, few publications reviewed Tarzan upon its 1914 release. The New York Times gave it two hundred words: entitled “With Anthropoid Apes,” the review treats the book positively, commenting that Burroughs “has so succeeded in carrying his readers with him, that there are few who will not look forward eagerly to the promised sequel.” The Nation devoted the same amount of space to Tarzan: this critic enjoyed the story as well, remarking on how well Burroughs had managed to assemble so many “elements of mystery and thrill” within “a pale of book covers.” Or consider a more recent review written by Gore Vidal in a 1963 issue of Esquire magazine. In “Tarzan Revisited,” Vidal wondered how to account for the fact that “the Tarzan books have sold over twenty-five million copies in fifty six languages.” In part, he commented, the series is unambiguously written for men; Vidal had “yet to meet a woman” who “identifi[es]” with the ape man. Male readers, on the other hand, let themselves return to Tarzan’s “Eden, where free of clothes and the inhibitions of an oppressive society, a man can achieve in reverie his continuing need . . . to prevail as well as endure.” Most responsible for pulling readers in is Burroughs’s “gift” for creating “action scenes,” Vidal wrote, adding that this is a very difficult task for a novelist of any genre or brow level.3 Vidal put his finger on what had to be one key to Tarzan’s early twentieth-century success: its sequence of action scenes, actually lurid fight scenes, in which the hero kills anything and everything that crosses his path in the jungle—from lions and his fellow great apes to countless native African men. Another related method of getting at the meaning of a story is to place it within at the institutional history of literary culture during the time of its publication and reception. Tarzan was released amid what one literary historian has labeled “the new cult of masculine writing” during the Progressive Era.4 As many men found more...

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