Rorotoko

In a nutshell

On Tarzan is the only book-length study of this pop culture icon. Historically, the book moves from the momentum of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first. It aspires to account for the life and death of Tarzan in the collective imagination across that period.

On Tarzan also explores a particular mode of literary and cultural scholarship. I would revise the term “personal criticism,” vogue in the 1990s, to “familiar criticism,” a distinction analogous to the connoted difference between the personal essay and the familiar essay. It renders the issue one of voice and style rather than “personal” content. In terms of the content, this mode encourages playful engagement that can openly entertain subjective responses, take serious the silly, and refuse to plod .

Thus a passage on John Dereks’ 1981 film Tarzan, the Ape Man ends with the line: “But the spectacle of the spectacle is exactly the point of the film’s metaphorical critique of Hollywood culture specifically and modern U.S. media culture more generally.” Followed with a one-sentence paragraph: “Perhaps I give this film too much credit.”

(Cultural interpretation is always a risky venture, and trafficking in the ridiculous is a staple of popular culture studies, as Don DeLillo famously lampooned in White Noise.)

On Tarzan wants to see if the pursuit of dilettantism and trivia can be intellectually fruitful. Each chapter attempts to present an array of curiosities and observations without sacrificing narrative momentum or authority. The book seeks the pleasure in tangents.

The wide angle

One potential audience for On Tarzan is the American Studies classroom. Undergraduate scholars might enjoy the early discussion of the “juvenile” nature of the Tarzan narratives, the post-Darwin idea of adolescence, and the massive turn-of-the-century influx of immigrants that also informed its reception. Like fellow orphan-hero Harry Potter, Tarzan bears a forehead scar from a nearly fatal childhood battle that throbs when danger nears. As I write in the first chapter, I hope that “scholars already well acquainted with Tarzan’s place in cultural history” will find plenty of new, “provocative perspectives.”

Writing the book was a learning process, and not just in terms of the universe of narratives and artifacts I call Tarzania. Books such as Rudi Bleys’ The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918 and Reinhold Wagnleitner’s Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War proved delightful and invaluable finds.

The late chapter on the incestuous subtext of the many Tarzan narratives is hardly a thoroughgoing Freudian analysis—a task for which I am eminently unqualified. It instead takes advantage of the coeval work of Ed Burroughs, Sigmund Freud, and Otto Rank, and employs this historical conjunction toward organizing information and ideas into what aims to be a provocative story behind the stories.

The chapter also, I fear, misses an opportunity to propose a clear hypothesis concerning the coinciding of this incest discourse with the swan song of Western colonialism, the rise in the United States of the New Negro, and the invention of heterosexuality. Namely, that as the old signals of savagery and the uncivilized—skin color and sexual “perversion”—were rapidly losing their power, incest became the imagined litmus.

I am not, and never was, a Tarzan aficionado. In childhood I occasionally watched Tarzan movies (or parts of them) on television, and I think I may have caught a few episodes of the Filmation animated series from the 1970s. But, up until I decided to include the original novel in my course on American Literature and the Environment, I had never read any of the books, or any of the comics, or made any effort to see the films.

In the process of preparing for class, and through leading class discussion, I began to realize how incredibly the book transports us to early twentieth century America. As I began to muse about Tarzan’s persistence over the course of the century, I discovered to great surprise that no single book-length study of Tarzan existed. I wondered if perhaps I might be able to write that book.

So, I was pleased to read the following in one peer reviewer’s commentary on the manuscript:

Tarzan, the book argues convincingly, is sometimes Jane, and sometimes Jane is Tarzan; what looks like bestiality is often racism and homophobia in disguise… Part of the book’s appeal is that it makes clear that without understanding the galaxy of versions of Tarzan, of incarnations in narrative and non-narrative form, one cannot appreciate the multifarious uses to which Tarzan has been put. Tarzan the racist is here, but so are Tarzan the gay icon, Jane the masculine role model, and Kala the animal that radically calls the boundary between humans and animals into question. Even the imperialism that Tarzan (of British nobility born, to US liberal individualist sentiments inclined, and “Lord” of African territory made) has been argued to represent and to extend is reframed in On Tarzan in the context of the international success of the character… The phenomenon of Tarzan, the book argues, which seems so solid, simple, and reassuringly unified, derives its power instead from its paradoxical qualities—its ability to serve as a vector for different, even competing, cultural and political desires.

Not to mention this recent review in the Mooresville Tribune: “There's an urge to say, leave my icon alone. For the bold speculator, the book is fascinating.”

While Tarzan’s cultural significance demands a serious approach, his inherent ridiculousness heckles such efforts.