The primate in literature

Ever since Aristotle, in his Historia Animalium, drew striking anatomical correspondances between a human and a Barbary macaque monkey, man has had an ambivalent mental relationship with the other primates. Looking so much like us, they have been pictured in literature variously as clowns or demons. After TH Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce had already duelled bloodily over the problem of Darwinism (”a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather,” Huxley insisted), Disraeli summed up the problem of species pride thus in 1864: “Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels.”

For the cherished idea that man was made in God’s image, the ape or monkey had always been a hirsute, flat-nosed yet undeniably humanoid challenge. It followed, in the pre-Darwin era, that the ape must be Satan’s: a mockingly crass imitation or an evil familiar. “The diuell is Gods ape,” wrote Samuel Hieron in 1607, “and seeks to counterfeit Him almost in euery thing.” Even if apes were not devils themselves, they were nasty, brutish and short denizens of a moral or actual underworld. A fancied consequence of dying an old maid, for example, was to “lead apes in Hell”, as Kate laments to her father in The Taming of the Shrew.

Less horrible was the image of a clownish imitator of human poses. The painter Jacob Huysmans executed a portrait of Rochester which shows the louche Earl standing beside a monkey, over whose head he holds a laurel wreath: the monkey has written a poem. Stephen Jeffreys, in his play The Libertine (1994), has Rochester explain to Huysmans: “We laugh at the monkey’s tricks because they are so close to our own.” It became a great satiric game to dress up monkeys and apes (the PG Tips television adverts continue this tradition in a debased form). Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s 1740 picture, The Monkey Antiquarian, shows the animal swathed in academic robes, peering at his domain through a pedant’s magnifying glass. Thomas Love Peacock’s boisterous 1817 prose satire Melincourt, with its beautifully punning subtitle “Sir Orang Haut-Ton”, has an ape educated to become a charming gentleman flautist, who is bought a baronetcy and a seat in Parliament.

While the image of the ape as devil, a hangover from medieval bestiaries and fables, soon died out, the ape’s dark side lived on in its rutting, dumb sexuality. The ape-like island “savage” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Caliban, is nurtured and taught how to speak, but still tries to rape his master’s daughter, Miranda. Biology is incorrigible. The Yahoos of Gulliver’s Travels were the apotheosis of man’s absurd self-disgust: these filthy, grunting, incessantly shagging anthropoids were all too human. Only a few more enlightened thinkers imagined to rescue human sex by conferring upon it the potential for artistry. Balzac joked in his Physiologie du mariage: “The majority of husbands remind me of an orang-utan trying to play the violin.”

With Darwin’s revelation that humans are descended from apes, however, began a sea-change. Apes began in the 20th century to be thought of as inhabiting a secular Eden, especially after the discovery in 1929 of another great ape, the bonobo, which seemed blissfully pacifist. The work of Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, observing the complex and highly intelligent society of apes in the wild, began to intimate that we had lost something in our dominion over nature. Millions of years ago, the story now began to run, the apes lived together in a pastoral idyll, and the new secular Fall was the point at which we separated from our cousins and became tool-using, war-making humans, cursed with a rapacious intelligence that would be our undoing. King Kong was a parable of this fall, as the gentle giant of the jungle was driven to an orgy of destruction after his transplantation into the infernal city. Kubrick’s 2001 imagined the Fall as alien-engineered: a prehistoric ape touched the extraterrestrial monolith, thereby being infected with a genius for constructing weaponry.

After mankind’s nuclear self-destruction, according to Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948), or the Planet of the Apes films, our pongid cousins would pick up the pieces and take over the world. Peter Høeg’s recent jewel-like fable, The Woman and the Ape, comparably imagines a secret colony of highly evolved apes who visit London and warn men of the disasters lurking in their environmental alienation. Philip Kerr’s silly Esau, too, describes the discovery of the superintelligent Himalayan Yeti, who is finally left alone, safe in his snowy paradise.

Apes were close enough to humans biologically to be used increasingly by scientific experimentalists: sent up in space rockets or injected with prototype vaccines. But their very proximity to us as a species encouraged increasing dissent. In the sixties and seventies, as apes were shown to be capable of learning American Sign Language, radical philosophers such as Peter Singer could argue that chimpanzees should be legally defendable “moral persons”, being cleverer than newborn babies or brain-damaged adult humans. The discovery in 1984 that chimpanzees shared 98.6 per cent of their DNA with humans added fuel to this liberationalist fire. The International Primate Protection League only last week launched a campaign against grotesque plans to inject BSE-infected tissue into the brains of captive chimpanzees. It is the apes’ curse to be too much like humans, threatened with an extinction born of ancient fear.

But apes are not, after all, bucolic innocents. Within the past few decades, chimpanzees have been observed invading rival chimps’ territory to torture and kill their enemies — a symbolic shock to the primatologist community, cleverly explored in William Boyd’s novel Brazzaville Beach. Gorillas commit infanticide, chimpanzees batter their partners, and orang-utans seemingly commit forcible rape. However, as argued in Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s provocative and unsentimental new study, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Bloomsbury, £16.99), the violence of humans is not an ineradicable atavistic legacy but “arises partly from the very elaboration of their cognitive abilities”. Our viciousness is a product of reason, and so can be conquered by reason.

So we are back to our old ambivalence about the apes. And it is this very ambivalence which continues to be artistically useful. Great Apes (Bloomsbury), the exultantly hallucinogenic new novel by Will Self, a satirist of some moral seriousness, imagines a world like contemporary London, but subject to a complete species reversal. The artist-hero Simon Dykes wakes up to find that his girlfriend and everyone else have transmogrified into chimpanzees: his insistence that he is human is diagnosed as a psychotic delusion. The gleeful working-out of Self’s premise eventually segues from hyperinventive wit into something more naggingly thoughtful, and achieves the rare feat of temporarily altering the reader’s perspective.

A sense of perspective, indeed, is what contemplation of our simian cousins continues to furnish: a proof against hubris, a furry reminder of the fluke that is our evolutionary pre-eminence. We are still working it out, somewhere between the apes and the angels.

Leave a comment: