Subject: Review: THE ORIGIN OF TARZAN by Sarkis Atamian (nonfiction)

From: "TMEP" <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Jul 1997 20:34:55 GMT

~Title:         THE ORIGIN OF TARZAN: THE MYSTERY OF
               TARZAN'S CREATION SOLVED
Author:        Sarkis Atamian
Publisher:     Publication Consultants, P. O. Box 221974,
               Ankorage, Alaska 99522-1974
               (www.alaskaconnect.com/tarzan.html), 1997
ISBN:          1-888125-12-8
Price:         A$14.95 (quality paperback) 128 pages

		Reviewed by Patrick H. Adkins
	Copyright 1997 Patrick H. Adkins.  All rights reserved.

Literary criticism of Edgar Rice Burroughs has a long and interesting
history, with a significant body of critical writings that has accumulated
over the past fifty years.  Because of his position as one of the
preeminent representatives of the pulp magazines, which were a primary
source of fiction for several generations of readers in the first half of
this century, Burroughs is of special interest to those who study popular
literature; and his continuing popularity nearly fifty years after his
death has begun to earn him grudging recognition in serious academic and
literary circles.  A consensus seems to be building that, flawed though
his writing may be, he was nevertheless an inspired storyteller and quite
possibly a genuine imaginative genius.  Burroughs' greatest importance,
however, may be extra-literary: Based on the number of scientists whose
love of science was first awakened by youthful reading of Burroughs'
interplanetary romances, Carl Sagan observed in _Mars and the Mind of Man_
that Burroughs may well turn out to be the most influential writer of the
20th Century.

The origin of the idea of a child raised by apes has been sought by a
number of previous scholars, including Rudolph Altrocchi (_Sleuthing in
the Stacks_, 1944), Richard Lupoff (_Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of
Adventure_, 1965), and Irwin Porges (Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who
Created Tarzan, 1975); in addition, several insightful articles on the
subject have appeared in various Burroughs journals.  Burroughs himself
credited his inspiration to the tale of Romulus and Remus, the legendary
founders of Rome, and to a nearly forgotten story about a man stranded
among apes on an island, which he had read years before.  It is this
question of what inspired Burroughs that Sarkis Atamian, formerly Head of
Department of Sociology and Psychology at the University of Alaska, in
Fairbanks, reopens and seeks to answer once and for all in THE ORIGIN OF
TARZAN.

In the course of his fascinating, discursive inquiry, Atamian examines
several topics, beginning with the question of how Asian tigers wound up
in the African jungle in the magazine version of _Tarzan of the Apes_, an
error corrected before book publication in 1914.  He ascribes the
generally unfavorable critical reception Burroughs met with during his
lifetime to Burroughs' outspoken political beliefs and worldview -- he was
anti-socialist, anti-Communist, and generally conservative, though
critical of Colonialism and the human race in general -- and suggests that
Burroughs' erroneous placement of tigers in Africa served as an excuse for
subsequent critics, including Kipling, to dismiss him as a bumbling
ignoramus.  Others have argued convincingly that much of the antagonism to
Burroughs was based on his open acceptance of Darwinian evolution.  By
searching through the early works of African explorers, Atamian
demonstrates that Burroughs' mistake was in fact a very understandable
one, since leopards were often referred to colloquially as tigers at that
time, a misunderstanding compounded by the inclusion of a picture of an
Asiatic tiger in one of Burroughs' primary sources.

Much of this volume is devoted to retracing the state of knowledge about
Africa, especially the West Coast of Central Africa, in 1911.  Atamian
convincingly demonstrates that Paul Du Chaillu's _Explorations and
Adventures in Equatorial Africa_ (1861) and J. W. Buell's _Heroes of the
Dark Continent_ (1889) supplied many of the details Burroughs incorporated
in his early Tarzan books.  He offers an eloquent defense of Du Chaillu, a
19th Century explorer whose works constituted nearly all that was known
about the African great apes until the second half of this century, and
finally locates the inspiration for Tarzan in a striking passage in Du
Chaillu's book -- a conclusion which, though certainly new and
interesting, it is hardly likely to be the last word on this topic.

On one level THE ORIGIN OF TARZAN is an entertaining personal homage to
the storytelling genius of an American original.  It is also a significant
addition to the growing body of critical work about Edgar Rice Burroughs
and an important book in the study of how popular literature shapes
perception.  The vast success of Burroughs' Tarzan books and their
adaptions in virtually every medium, especially film (which distorted them
greatly), has led some to attribute to Burroughs a primary role in shaping
the way Africa has been popularly viewed throughout much of this century.
Atamian's exploration of the works that molded Tarzan's Africa should be
of interest to anyone concerned with the role of popular culture in how we
perceive the world.