On Tarzan
A Glance Into the Symbolic Landscapes of Tarzan
By John David Ebert
Descent
If Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his earlier protagonist John Carter, Warlord of Mars, had in 1912 established the pattern of the superhero who arrives on the ground from the heavens above, then with his second creation — Tarzan, Lord of the Apes – he invented the idea of the superhero who emerges, Titan-like, from out of the earth itself. The narrative pattern in which Tarzan is raised by apes in Africa to become a literate, thinking man capable of walking the streets of Western cities is a disguised retelling of the Darwinian myth of human evolution from apes to civilization. For Tarzan, brought up amongst a tribe of African apes, is symbolically descended from beings of the earth, the same beings, no less, who have spent six or seven million years quietly constructing the human physical body beneath an enclosed canopy of African trees. By the time this body was ready, with Lucy and her people, to embark upon the traumas of the open savannah, it was simultaneously prepared for the descent of the human mind which took up its residence in this newly constructed body like a mother bird settling down to brood in her nest.
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