Lieutenant Albert Werper, Belgian officer, traitor and murderer, represents corrupting civilization in this adventure yarn about colonial pillage and abduction.
Akhmet Zek, ivory and slave raider, is a toxic enough villain, having tortured a boy or two on his way over from Central Casting.
The Waziri warriors, that protect The Greystoke Bungalow, are noble tribal warriors who are morally superior to most European characters E.R.B. places in his Tarzan novels.
I have chosen The Jewels of Opar, of the 24 Tarzan books I have read, as the Tarzan book to review for this project, as Burroughs covers the devolutionary aspect of racial memory at many levels in this tale. For one thing Opar, is an ancient lost outpost of Atlantis, from the time when whites ruled a temperate Africa, which was such a common theme in occult writing at the time that it was quite tired and worn out by 1930.
Remembering the cinema Tarzan most of us fail to realize how shocking these tales were when first published. Tarzan of the Apes was a banned book for a while. As a character Tarzan is a superman similar to Conan, but is far less realistic. He is, in actuality, a Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde figure, closer to the Incredible Hulk than to any depiction of Tarzan in film. He eats raw meat, and holds civilization in more contempt than Howard’s Conan, even though he dresses up and plays civilized for his wife’s sake. In that sense Tarzan is the metaphor for the repressed civilized man who eventually cracks and commits some evil in the night.
E.R.B.’s narrative voice says of civilization’s true aspect, “The Rotten Core at the Heart of the Thing.”
Burroughs represents Jane—the most abducted women in all of fiction—as the metaphor for the woman who shackled Man to the stifling soulless society of toil and moral compromise. Tarzan must rescue Jane at least once in every novel she is present, as she is the enslaving tether that shackles him to civilization’s unholy order. If you think of it, our women are hostages as are our children, who keep us from lashing out at our evil masters.
“A woman’s love, which kept him even to the semblance of civilization, a condition for which familiarity had bred contempt.”
Civilization, which is a thing to be escaped in every Burroughs tale, is a thing of toxic contempt.
“Show me the fat opulent coward who ever originated a worthy idea.”
In every Tarzan tale the reader cannot wait for Lord Greystoke to shed the veil of civilization and start terrorizing everything that walks, crawls, swims and connives. The author evokes Man’s primal origin in the person of Tarzan’s adopted ape mother. Tarzan begins life as an orphan, just as every civilized man begins adulthood as a moral orphan, consigned to a life in a soulless boarding school of the mind. His rescue and adoption by his ape mother, and her eventual killing by men, represents the plight of the awakened man in the industrial wasteland of modernity.
“The call of the milk of the savage mother that had weaned him from infancy.”
The author even places the burden of Eve on the moon [which is a female deity in most cultures, and has an etymological link to the word mother in many languages], as Tarzan habitually challenges the moon—the reflecting eye of ordered civilization upon which ancient calendars depended to toll the trump of the agrarian laborer’s timeless dirge—after each of his savage kills.
“To scream forth his hideous victory cry into the face of Goru the moon.”
Tarzan is such a deeply fractured character as to be unbelievable as one sane protagonist. Rather he is a cautionary mythic figure that grabbed the working class world’s imagination even as it was crushed under the iron heel of nationalistic and global ideologies.
Opar was an outpost of ancient Atlantis occupied by degenerate ape men and a hot, ready Tarzan-yearning babe, La the High Priestess. So, if you want to have some fun at the expense of everything the liberal hierarchy holds dear, enjoy this savage tale told in a disconcertingly civil tone.
