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Jungle Tales of Tarzan by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Reader Reviews 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: JUNGLE TALES: ERB at His Best & Worst, August 13, 2003 Reviewer: martin asiner from jersey city, nj United States When Tarzan became a household world, readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs began to pester him to write about a more personalized, more gossipy side of the apeman. ERB obliged his fans by writing a dozen stories that detail his growing up in Africa during his teenage years. In JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN, ERB portrays a Tarzan that might have fit in well in any number of television sitcoms or domestic dramas. This Tarzan shows a side to his development that is only hinted at in the events of the first novel of the series, TARZAN ON THE APES, in whose events it runs concurrently. Many of the same themes and plot devices that run through the entire series are explored here, several of which show ERB at his literary best and worst. Plotting and pacing are ERB's strongpoints. He constantly captures the interest of his readers with exotic yet believable storylines. Yet, his insistence on coincidence to make his plots mesh combined with more than a touch of blatant racism intrude to the point that if ERB published his books today, a formidable array of political correctness would howl for his scalp. The first story, "Tarzan's First Love," describes a teenage Tarzan who has a love crush on a lovely gorilla female named Teeka. Tarzan declares his love for her, and battles a childhood chum for her favors. By the story's end, Tarzan recognizes the genetic differences and reluctantly gives her up. What is of interest here, is the psychological battle that he goes through. More than once, ERB mentions the impact that Kala, Tarzan's foster ape mother, has had on Tarzan, an impact that endures throughout the entire series. There is a strong Oedipal undercurrent as Tarzan compares the love for Teeka with that of his love for the deceased Kala. In several of the stories, ERB describes blacks in such a manner that he constantly harps on what he sees as their physical, emotional, and intellectual shortcomings. In "The Capture of Tarzan," the apeman singlehandedly fights off more than fifty black cannibals. In "Tarzan and the Black Boy," ERB is unabashedly racist as he notes, "Imagination it is which builds bridges, and cities, and empires. The beasts know it not, the blacks only a little." Tarzan often baits blacks in this book and others by killing them at random or playing gruesome jokes on them. In "A Jungle Joke," ERB explicity suggests the low intelligence of the cannibal blacks by making it seem as if Tarzan could metamorphosize himself into a lion at will. If racist themes turned off some readers, other more universal ones attracted generations of readers. When Tarzan was not involved in the day to day affairs of the reality of jungle life, his human side forced him into a philosophical contemplation of the mysteries of the universe. In "The God of Tarzan," the apeman attempts the age-old human quest for the meaning of life. He attempts to track down God in the same way that he would follow the spoor of a wounded deer. In "Tarzan Rescues the Moon," Tarzan sees a lunar eclipse and in his efforts to rescue the moon, shoots arrows into the moon until the moon re-emerges from the eclipse. In both stories, Tarzan goes through the same mental anguish that his human forebears must have endured. And like them, his conclusions about his place in the universe are tentative at best. It his Tarzan's reaching out to further distinguish himself from his anthropoid tribe that makes him as fascinating to today's readers as it was to past generations. --This text refers to the Paperback edition
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