Grotesquely Becoming: Tarzan’s Queer Hominization

Abstract

The essay reads Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912) in the context of the tendency in Western thought to understand anthropogenesis as a process of going-astray or, to use a term that gets its contemporary connotation of sexual errancy around the time of Tarzan’s publication, of queering. The essay makes its argument by providing two interrelated discursive contexts for the novel. First, it explores Burroughs’s novel as an early twentieth-century text that illustrates the vocative ethics of Western thought. This tradition finds its most authoritative articulation in the concept of “calling” (Berufung) in Martin Luther’s theology; its twentieth-century elaborators include Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jean Laplanche. To situate Tarzan of the Apes in this history, the essay analyzes a series of scenes where the novel’s protagonists are variously solicited in the process of their development. The most important of such scenes is Tarzan’s discovery of his “fascinating avocation” as he begins to read the books that, unbeknownst to him, have been left behind by his dead human parents. The essay takes the two terms—“fascination” and “avocation”—as keywords not only in Burroughs’s novel but also in the longer genealogy of thought that the text develops.