APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD)

   The heading for this entry should be seen as no more than a rough short-hand designation for a subject whose nature is diffuse. As apes we include the great apes, chimpanzees, orang-utans and monkeys; by cavemen we mean to designate proto-human races, including Neanderthals, but without taking a particular stand in the debate on the evolutionary tree (or grove). We do not, however, refer here to Neanderthals or other cavemen in their natural habitat, which is the distant past (for which see ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN): our interest here is in survivors, Neanderthals thawed out of ice-floes or surviving in lost garden enclaves of our fallen world (like Bigfoot, the Yeti and other legendary humanoid creatures, who are also relevant to the discussion) or even immortal. Our reason for conflating apes and cavemen is simple enough: insofar as sf writers take them both to embody the same set of metaphors - whether as innocent Candide-like observers of our corrupt mores or funhouse mirrors of humanity to whom we respond with horror - apes and cavemen have almost identical functions in the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For there to have been a sustained imaginative interest in, and use for, apes and cavemen as observers or mirrors of the human condition, two conditions were probably necessary. The first is obvious: the human condition itself must have become an issue for discourse. Though the pre-18th-century literatures of the world are full of animal doubles, monsters and prodigies, the degree of kinship to us of these creations has nothing to do with any attempt to define Homo sapiens as a species; and, in the absence of any sense (or hope) that we are a species distinct as a species from other species, there is in traditional literatures an absence of any propaganda intended to distinguish between us and those others - except, perhaps, discourse designed to argue the presence or absence of a soul. Hierarchies of living things in earlier literature are various, and principles of exclusion and inclusion tend to cross species, but, before taxonomical thinking emerged in the 18th century, beings tended to be thought of as human (or not human) according to their location, actual and symbolic. It is because he is a cusp figure, a Janus monster facing the deep past and the exposed future, that the Caliban of Shakespeare's The Tempest (c1612) - who reappears as a kind of ape in Mrs Caliban (1982) by Rachel Ingalls (1941-) - is so terribly difficult to reduce to a stereotype. The second necessary circumstance was of course Time, or Progress. Moderns instinctively think of beasts and monsters as being prior. For there to have been an 18th-century Primitivist vision of the Noble Savage there must have been a sense that we had advanced - or retreated - from some earlier state. So it is no surprise that the first apes-as-human texts of interest to an sf reader are probably two works by a Primitivist philosopher, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), whose Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773-92) and Ancient Metaphysics (1779-99) contrast humanity's corrupt nature with that of the pacific orang-utan, a vegetarian flautist who may not have learned to speak but who was otherwise capable of human attainments. Monboddo's orang-utan was a potent and poignant figure, and soon entered fiction in Thomas Love Peacock's Melincourt, or Sir Oran Haut-ton (1817), where he saves a young maiden from rape, enters Parliament, and gazes wisely upon the human spectacle. But Peacock was an author of disquisitional SATIRES, a form of fiction soon swamped in the 19th century by the mimetic novel, where avatars of Sir Oran Haut-ton could not comfortably abide. The Monikins (1835) by James Fenimore COOPER features several captured specimens of an articulate monkey civilization who come from an Antarctic LOST WORLD; but they relate far more closely to that form of the imaginary-voyage satire brought into focus by Jonathan SWIFT in Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735), as do the intelligent race of monkeys discovered in Les Emotions de Polydore Marasquin (1857; trans anon as The Man Among the Monkeys: or, Ninety Days in Apeland 1873 UK; vt The Emotions of Polydore Marasquin 1888 UK; vt Monkey Island 1888 UK) by Leon Gozlan (1806-1866). The use of apes or yahoos or houyhnhnms as exemplary inhabitants of a UTOPIA or DYSTOPIA represents a very different - and ultimately more significant - tradition than the use of apes as illustrative examples embedded into our own human world. Indeed, it would not be until the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) that the apes-as-human topic became sufficiently ambiguous or threatening (EVOLUTION) to be of widespread imaginative use (the ape in Edgar Allan POE's The Murders in the Rue Morgue 1841 is more or less a trained animal). But now that humans and other primates - as well as the Neanderthals whose existence soon entered public consciousness - could all seem members of one family, then the observer became a mirror. Apes-as-human could be seen as literal parodies of our species (and the reverse); in an uncomfortably intimate sense, they could represent the brother or sister we locked in the cellar for their protection, or to prevent them from shaming us. The terror Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) felt whenever he envisioned the East (which he never in fact saw, but whose imagined inhabitants clearly represented a psychopathic self-image) turned into opium nightmares of being surrounded by apes. Mr Hyde, in Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), may not be a literal ape-as-human, but he surely fulfils the symbolic function of the brother-within-the-skin whom it is death to recognize. A perfectly understandable dis-ease therefore afflicted late-19th-century versions of the theme, from the frivolousness of Bill Nye'sPersonal Experiences in Monkey Language (1893) to the pathos and parodic horrificness of the animal victims of H.G.WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). Further examples are Haydon Perry's The Upper Hand in Contraptions (anth 1895), Frank Challice Constable's The Curse of Intellect (1895), and Don Mark Lemon's The Gorilla (1905). The 20th century saw a flourishing, and a routinization, of the apes-as-human tale, though it never attained the popularity of its close cousin, the enfant-sauvage-as-Noble-Savage genre, which featured intensely readable wish-fulfilment tales like Rudyard KIPLING's Mowgli stories (which mostly appeared in The Jungle Book coll 1894 and The Second Jungle Book coll 1895) and the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS (from 1914). Apes-as-human (or Neanderthals-as-human) appeared, variously emblematic, in the anonymous The Curse of Intellect (1895), in Dwala: A Romance (1904) by George Calderon (1868-1915), in James Elroy FLECKER's The Last Generation (1908 chap), in Gaston LEROUX's Balaoo (1912; trans 1913), in Max BRAND's That Receding Brow (1919), in Clement FEZANDIE's The Secret of the Talking Ape (1923), in Erle Stanley GARDNER's Monkey Eyes (1929), in Sean M'Guire's Beast or Man (1930), in Mogglesby (1930 Adventure) by T(homas) S(igismund) Stribling (1881-1965), in John COLLIER's brilliant His Monkey Wife (1930), in an evolutionary pas-de-deux with the Second Men in Olaf STAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), in G.E.Trevelyan's Appius and Virginia (1932), in Alder Martin-Magog's Man or Ape? (1933), in L.Sprague DE CAMP's The Gnarly Man (1939), in Thor Swan's Furfooze (1939), in Aldous HUXLEY's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939; vt After Many a Summer 1939 UK) (see alsoDEVOLUTION), in Justin ATHOLL's The Grey Beast (1944 chap), in David V.REED's The Whispering Gorilla (1950), in Hackenfeller's Ape (1953) by Brigid Brophy (1929-), in Philip Jose FARMER's The Alley Man (1959; in The Alley God coll 1962), in Robert NATHAN's The Mallott Diaries (1965), and elsewhere. Towards the end of this sequence, something of a new note could be perhaps detected - in De Camp's fine tale, or in Stephen GILBERT's Monkeyface (1948) - a lessening of the sense of latent or explicit menace, perhaps because the process of evolution no longer seemed quite so insulting to the race which was inflicting WWII upon itself and upon its cousins. But, in general, ironies or horror or condescension governed the presentation of the theme. It is possible to detect two very broad tendencies in more recent years. Articulate and wise apes-as-humans (streetwise Candides) can be used, as in Roger PRICE's J.G., the Upright Ape (1960), to present, more or less straightforwardly, a satiric vision of the contemporary world; other examples would be The Right Honourable Chimpanzee (1978) by David ST GEORGE and Hans Werner Henze's opera, Der junge Lord The Young Lord (1965). However, work of this sort tends not to be created by anyone deeply immersed in sf, where the concept now tends to be treated with troubled complexity; the ironic distance has been lost. No longer is it sufficient merely to posit an articulate cousin who looks us in the eyes: the contemporary sf writer is much more interested in the moral and speculative consequences (GENETIC ENGINEERING) of our capacity actually to implement the process of transformation. Stories like Joseph H.DELANEY's Brainchild (1982), Leigh KENNEDY's Her Furry Face (1983), Judith MOFFETT's Surviving (1986) and Pat MURPHY's Rachel in Love (1987 IASFM; 1992 chap) are dark fables of that transformation, the last three importing a FEMINIST agenda through metaphorical identifications of caged primates and women. Further tales with similar burdens include Deutsche Suite (1972; trans Arnold Pomerans as German Suite 1979 UK) by Herbert Rosendorfer (1934-), Experiment at Proto (1973) by Philip Oakes (1928-), Ian MCEWAN's Reflections of a Kept Ape (1978), Paddy CHAYEFSKY's Altered States (1978), Michael CRICHTON's Congo (1980), Maureen DUFFY's Gor Saga (1981), Stephen GALLAGHER's Chimera (1982), Douglas Orgill's and John GRIBBIN's Brother Esau (1982), Bernard MALAMUD's God's Grace (1982), Peter VAN GREENAWAY's Manrissa Man (1982), Michael BISHOP's Ancient of Days (1985), L.Neil SMITH's North American Confederacy series (1986-8) (intermittently), Justin LEIBER's Beyond Humanity (1987), Peter DICKINSON's Eva (1988), Harry TURTLEDOVE's A Different Flesh (fixup 1988), Michael STEWART's Monkey Shines (1983), about the genetic transformation of a monkey (the film version is discussed below), and the same author's less sophisticated Birthright (1990), about the exploitation of a Neanderthal survival, Ardath MAYHAR's and Ron Fortier's Monkey Station (1989), Isaac ASIMOV's and Robert SILVERBERG's Child of Time (1991), Daniel QUINN's Turner Fellowship Award-winning novel, Ishmael (1992), whose searching simplicity of idiom returns us all the way back to Peacock, Niall Duthie's The Duchess's Dragonfly (1993) and Monkey's Uncle (1994) by Jenni Diski (1947-). Generally less seriously, perhaps, the cinema has always been fond of the theme, at least since the archetype of ape-as-innocent-in-the-human-world appeared in KING KONG (1933) and again in MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949). One aspect of the theme perhaps more nakedly apparent in films than in books is the religious subtext of ape/caveman/Yeti/Bigfoot as, even if savage and dangerous, untainted by the Fall of Man. Such innocents discovered by a corrupt humanity, and usually envisaged sentimentally, are the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon survivors in TROG (1970), SCHLOCK (1973) - a parody of Trog - ICEMAN (1984) and Encino Man (1992), the Yeti in The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957), and the Bigfoot in many low-budget films and one rather good big-budget film, HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS (1987). Something rather different seems to be happening in ACOLD NIGHT'S DEATH (1975), in which experimental apes experiment on scientists; in Link (1985), in which an experimental ape becomes homicidal; and in MONKEY SHINES (1988), based on Michael Stewart's 1983 novel, in which an experimental ape injected with human genetic material gets more lethal the more human it becomes. However, in all these films, although the apes are a source of horror, it is suggested that it is human contact that has infected them; only in PROJECT X (1987) do the experimental apes remain decent, despite attempts by the military to teach them to fly nuclear bombers. It is also, indeed, an increase in INTELLIGENCE, catalysed by an alien monolith, that teaches the apemen of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) how to use weapons. While most of these films show apes behaving like humans, a persistent subgenre going back to Stevenson's THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE shows humans becoming apes (DEVOLUTION). Such, with cod seriousness, is the theme of ALTERED STATES (1980) and, a great deal more amusingly, James Ivory's Savages (1972), in which primitive Mud People become human guests at a sophisticated country-house party only to revert again, and Howard Hawks's MONKEY BUSINESS (1952), the only sf movie to star Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and its sequels have apes replacing humans, initially to complex satirical effect, eventually - with ever increasing simplemindedness - as a metaphorical stick with which to beat people; however, because they are set deep into the future, they escape the natural confines of this entry, as did L.Sprague de Camp's and P.Schuyler MILLER's Genus Homo (1941; rev 1950) in an earlier generation, and as does David BRIN's Uplift sequence more recently. Similarly, Robert Silverberg's At Winter's End (1988) and The Queen of Springtime (1989 UK; vt The New Springtime 1990 US) place into the FAR FUTURE the revelation that the surviving inhabitants of Earth are in fact transformed primates. But none of us has survived in that world. The ape-as-human story, at its heart, is a tale of siblings.