Tarzan and Sookie
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half-brother, and Henry is in love with his own sister; or because Henry is
himself in love with Bon? To which would their father Thomas most object?
Which most undermines the social order he has so painstakingly adapted himself
to? Which will most upset his design to evolve into a Southern aristocrat?
It’s hard for me not see something of Burroughs’ larger-than-life
Tarzan, something of his Darwinian American Adam, in Faulkner’s larger-thanlife Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen begins as a white trash boy from backwoods
Appalachia so far out of time and mind that he did not learn the South’s racial
hierarchy until his family moved to Tidewater Virginia. When a finely dressed
“monkey-nigger” butler refuses him entrance into a white plantation house,
Sutpen takes this as an affront to his very humanity, and spends the rest of his
life, like Tarzan the ape-boy after learning of his human origin, defining himself
against that image of the uppity monkey-nigger. In Haiti he puts down a slave
revolt by walking alone into their ranks and subduing them not by force but by
“some ascendancy or forbearance”—by the very white superiority by which
Tarzan comes to lord over African natives. (Haven’t you seen them kowtow to
him in the Johnny Weissmuller movies?). In Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, he
and his Haitian workers live together for years in the swamp from which they
drag the logs to build his mansion, and where a townsperson, stepping on one of
those workers, mistakes him for an alligator.
One of the novel’s great images is of Sutpen wrestling with his black
workers for sport—the two opponents shirtless, covered in the mud, verily
indistinguishable, “gouging at one another’s eyes as if their skins should not
only have been the same color but should have been covered with fur too.” Like
Tarzan. And like Tarzan, Sutpen always wins. My favorite chapter has Sutpen
telling his life story in parallel with his hunting down, along with white
townsmen, his Haitians, and the town’s hunting dogs, the fleeing French
architect who designed Sutpen’s mansion. Like Tarzan, the architect evades by
moving through the trees, until unlike Tarzan a miscalculation brings him back
to earth and the dogs and the workers trap him like a coon. All the while Sutpen
wonders aloud about his own miscalculation, the error in his life’s design, which
will eventually run him similarly to the ground and have his family line devolve
to a mixed race man of animal intelligence bellowing from the wilderness.
Abaslom, AbaslaomTs true plaint is not Quentin Compson’s protest of
the novel’s last line—“I don’t hate the south! I don’t hate the south!”—but
Thomas Sutpen’s unspoken I am not an animal! I am not an animal! Yet, as
Tarzan o f the Apes is a popular romance, its protagonist can in the end accept
both his aristocratic heritage and the evolutionary truth that “my mother was an
ape.”
Burroughs and Faulkner were great storytellers fully aware, as
Southern masters are, of the tallness of their tales. Tarzan himself loved practical
jokes, and as Burroughs continued spinning out the series he planted his tongue
visibly in his cheek. In Tarzan and the Lion Man, Tarzan auditions for a movie
role to play Tarzan but doesn’t get the part. The self-parody makes for much of