The cover art for Alex Vernon's slim cultural biography "On Tarzan" is a photo of winding green tendrils and vines, vines being the equivalent of the cross-town bus for the Lord of the Apes.
But the photo is also a warning of the thicket we are about to enter: a rampant, root-bound tangle of a book in which the author muses upon Tarzan as, among other things, a kind of prefiguring Colossus of American modernity, a Leopold Bloom in a loincloth.
Seriously.
In Vernon's gaze, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Ape Man is the most protean character since . . . well . . . Proteus, both a product of 19th century literary naturalism and a rejection of that naturalism. Here, Tarzan is a tonic to the creeping emasculation of urbanism (cf., Prufrock); there, he's a homoerotic analogue, a smooth-skinned catamite in a leopard singlet (cf., Village People).
What's jungle-speak for "whiplash"?
Everywhere, Tarzan epitomizes Americanism -- never mind that he was born to English nobility. In Vernon's view, Tarzan is Horatio Alger wrestling with a crocodile. He is an immigrant, a dual citizen, an orphan, an adolescent, a language refugee: all states of being that roughly correspond to the fresh-off-the-boat culture of early 20th century America. (Burroughs' first Tarzan story appeared in 1912.)
But wait, there's more. Tarzan is an avatar of both nature and nurture, Rousseau and B.F. Skinner, of Haeckel's ontology-phylogeny recapitulation theory, of post-racial harmony and violent white neocolonialism. Writes Vernon: "The Tarzan tales' argument for inherent and essential gender and racial roles and traits self-deconstructs. Cultural relativism rears."
Uh-huh. Sure it does.
No one enjoys an overdetermined cultural analysis more than I do, and to his credit, Vernon cheerfully acknowledges that the vine from which he's swinging can't always bear the weight.
"Sometimes I want to throw up my hands and say: None of the above," he writes. "[Tarzan is] just an escapist action hero. Readers and viewers lose themselves in Tarzania, and wallow in their lostness."
But then it's back to the library stacks for more research. This 177-page book is appended with 22 pages of notes, a bibliography and an index. Even its title is preciously, even hilariously academic.
