I Can’t Believe It

I was going to start this post by saying, “I can’t believe I’m actually writing about Edgar Rice Burroughs in a blog purportedly about Great Literature.” Then I did a quick search in the list of authors in the right column of this page and found that a new opening was warranted. So now I officially begin the post by saying this: “I can’t believe I’m posting about Edgar Rice Burroughs for the second time.” But a couple of things about Tarzan the Terrible have brought me to it.

At this moment in our history, I felt especially guilty about reading a book about Africa by a racist. As a white guy, I may only get myself into trouble here, but I’ll venture to say that Burroughs’s racism isn’t a hate-filled strain that, for instance, sees the native Africans as worthy victims of Tarzan’s homicidal rage; the ape-man’s creator lets Germans play that role. No, his racism is a more paternalistic type that says, “Bless their hearts, they do surprisingly well given that they have so little to work with.” Burroughs probably found justification for his views in Darwin; he talks about evolution frequently to explain differences in character (he loves calling criminals evolutionary reversions). In any case, I’m happy to say that the racist ideas totally surprised me when I started rereading the Tarzan books. Maybe because Burroughs is such a terrible scientist, they just didn’t make sense to me when I was 12 and so didn’t lodge in my memory.

But while I didn’t remember the racism in Tarzan the Terrible, I did remember it as perhaps the best of the Tarzan books I read as an adolescent. Tarzan’s obviously an appealing character to begin with; he’s like a superhero with a secret identity except that both identities have superpowers. Like all a young adult’s favorite literary heroes, Tarzan discovers a secret that makes him special and gives him strength: the boy raised by apes is also an English lord. So any book where Tarzan has to negotiate both worlds is interesting, and in Tarzan the Terrible, the ape-man uses all his jungle skills to survive and rescue Jane so he can give her the peaceful domestic life she wants and deserves. (I should say that Jane can throw a punch and doesn’t always need saving!)

Tarzan the Terrible also scores points for using one of Burroughs’s favorite devices: an isolated world where human evolution has taken a unique path. In this case, the people have prehensile tails and opposable big toes and use these appendages to travel networks of pegs on cliff walls. To which the twelve-year-old in me says, “COOOOOL!” But even more, this world comes complete with a map and (drum roll . . . ) a language. So of course a kid is going to love it: reading the book brings not only entertainment but a sense of accomplishment. “I know a new language now! I know how to say ho-don (white man), waz-don (black man), ja-don (lion man), jad-ben-lul (the big lake), jad-bal-lul (the golden lake), jad-bal-ja (the golden lion), jad-pele-ul-jad-ben-otho (the valley of the great god), and other useful, everyday phrases.” Naturally I responded by determining to construct my own language and to write a Tarzan book entirely in that language. I started with an alphabet, which went quickly. But as soon as I got to whole words, I suddenly realized this was more than a two-day job. I had the same feeling I got when I was five twenty minutes after starting my tunnel to China in the back yard.

I look at Tarzan the Terrible’s language now as nothing more than a clumsy glossary. I readily admit that I still had fun relearning the glossary! But, really now. The syntax is exactly the same as English? [Time travel from later in the year: I have just finished Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She says she believed when she was a child that foreign languages were like codes, so that chapeau doesn’t just mean the piece of clothing that goes on the head but actually stands for the English word hat. That’s exactly what Burroughs does!] This weak stub of a language doesn’t even have a single verb. But Burroughs does hint at one juicy detail of the language of Pal-ul-don, and it’s the one thing I remembered the clearest from fifty years ago. In a tantalizing footnote, Burroughs reports that he simplified the grammar of the “actual” language in presenting it to his readers and gave just one example of its redacted eccentricity. The plural of a noun, he explains, is formed by repeating the initial consonant of a word. If kor means “gorge,” then “gorges” is indicated in this language as k-kor. D-don = men, j-ja = lions, etc.

This footnote lit a warm spark in me. When I started learning Spanish in school, I was especially attracted to the places where its syntax and grammar differed from English. (The plural of sombrero is sombreros? Boring! Me gusta for “I like”? Fantastic!) I even started to think of English constructions as weird. Tolkien fanned that linguistic flame, and I’m upset that he didn’t leave more detailed notes about the grammar of Sindarin and Quenya.

I still toy with my own devised language but haven’t made it very far. Every few years I think about it again, but then I can't make any significant progress because I’m too invested in making things as different from English as possible. If, for instance, I’m deciding how to say in my language, “I fell in the river,” I want “river” to be the subject. But then I don’t know what to do with the verb. One thing I do know: I will never use this language to write a Tarzan book.