Ouha, King of the Apes Read online

  Ouha,

  King of the Apes

  by

  Félicien Champsaur

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Ouha, roi des singes by Félicien Champsaur, here translated as Ouha, King of the Apes, was originally published in Paris by Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle in 1923. It thus intermediate, in temporal terms, between the first publication of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and the release of the film King Kong (1933). It is also thematically intermediate between the two, and might be regarded, if the three texts are regarded as parts of an evolutionary sequence, as the “missing link” between the two.

  That thematic link might be more than merely coincidental. Although Tarzan of the Apes was not issued in French translation until 1926, the first (silent) film version, released in 1918 would have been shown in Paris, and Champsaur would almost certainly have been aware of the character and his burgeoning success in the U.S.A. Edgar Wallace, who wrote the original script for the movie that became King Kong—although illness and death prevented him from seeing the project through—spent a good deal of time in Paris and moved in the same social circles as Champsaur; even if the two were not acquainted, it is entirely possible that Wallace knew about the existence of Ouha. Although the common reference of the last lines of Ouha and King Kong could certainly be coincidental, following logically from the inclination of the common elements of their underlying plots, but even if that is the case, it is an intriguing echo.

  Ouha was a new departure in Champsaur’s career and was written at a pivotal moment therein. He had been a highly successful writer before the outbreak of the Great War, renowned for mildly salacious novels about Parisian high society, simultaneously celebrating and lamenting its decadence. The war interrupted his career decisively, although he was able to resume publication in 1916, when the government decided that the publication of new novels might be good for morale, provided that they were ideologically sound. After two propaganda pieces issued in 1916 Champsaur was able to augment a novel he was obviously written before the outbreak of the war, Les Ailes de l’homme (1917)1, with a new section set during the war in order to adapt it as propaganda. Once the war was over, however, he immediately moved in a radically new direction, producing the six-volume “social epic” L’Empereur des pauvres (1920-22) (The Emperor of the Poor)—clearly an attempt to establish himself as a serious literary writer rather than a shallow entertainer. It had some success, and was filmed in 1922, but it probably made less money than his pre-war works, and cannot have done much to restore the erosion of his fortune by the effects of the war and the several years when he had not published anything.

  In that context, Ouha seems like a blatant attempt to make some quick money. It is a slapdash novel, which obviously had no second draft and does not appear to have been proofread; characters’ names change arbitrarily, and there are several breaks in the continuity of the plot, the most glaring of which could easily have been fixed with the aid of a blue pencil. If the novel really was a response to the success of the Tarzan movie, Ouha’s relationship with Mabel Smith being intended as a parody of Tarzan’s relationship with Jane Porter, the project might—given that L’Empereur des pauvres had just been filmed2—have been originally envisaged as a film, but there is also a possibility that it was imagined as a different kind of book. It is possible, too, that Champsaur might have written it to commission; the book’s copyright notice is in the name of its publisher, Eugène Fasquelle. It advertises no less than three illustrators—Chimot, Jacquelux and Lorenzi—although there actually only four illustrations, confined to slick double endpapers, while the body of the text is printed on much poorer paper—an oddity that suggests in itself that the original plan might have been more ambitious than the eventual product.

  Champsaur and Fasquelle knew all three of the illustrators well; Jacquelux had illustrated several of Champsaur’s previous books from the publisher, including two of his pre-war best-sellers, and had worked in collaboration with Lorenzi on books published by Fasquelle. Édouard Chimot was then just reaching the peak of a career that would eventually prove by far the most successful of the three, and was becoming more significant as an editor of illustrated books than as an illustrator. It is unlikely that Chimot actually drew any of the four illustrations, but his involvement suggests that the project might initially have been pitched—unsuccessfully—to publishers as a more lavishly illustrated book. The passages in the book that relate to the four illustrations are superfluous to the plot, and were probably written around the pictures, and there are several other gratuitous passages that might conceivably have been included to support projected illustrations.

  If the illustrations had originally been intended to be more extensive and lavish, that inspiration could have been taken from either or both of Ouha’s most prestigious thematic predecessors in the French language: Léon Gozlan’s classic Les Émotions de Polydore Marasquin (1856; tr. in various editions as The Emotions of Polydore Marasquin, A Man Among the Monkeys and Monkey Island), and Albert Robida’s Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul (1879)3. The former, which tells the story of a human cast away on an island in the Far East populated by various species of primates, who improvises a means of becoming their king for a while, was abundantly illustrated in volume form by various hands, including Gustave Doré; the second, whose first part, Le Roi des singes (tr. as “The Monkey King”) tells the story of a castaway child raised by “orangutans” who becomes a kind of superman and eventually leads an army of apes on a Napoleonic conquest of Australia, was lavishly illustrated in its part-work version by the author. Champsaur, Fasquelle and Chimot were probably familiar with both works—Ouha reproduces motifs found in both—and recognized them as significant, if entirely accidental, antecedents of Tarzan.

  At any rate, the version of Ouha that was actually published was a more downmarket product than either of those august predecessors; if it was intended as money-making exercise, however, it does seem to have achieved its object; the list of the author’s previous publications in Nuit de fête [Party Night] (1926) records the current printing of Ouha as “ninetieth thousand,” well in excess of all but two of his previous works. After that, however, the novel seems to have faded from view; it was never reprinted again and could not possibly have been translated into English at the time because of the flagrant obscenity of some of its passages. Indeed, while it contains significant anticipatory echoes of King Kong, it contains no fewer anticipatory echoes, albeit in a somewhat more caricaturish manner, of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Inevitably, the text has been largely judged on the basis of its obscene element and its slapdash nature, and dismissed in consequence as mere hackwork, but it is actually more interesting than that, both in the context of the evolution of Champsaur’s own work4 and the evolution of anthropological fantasies in general.

  Champsaur’s next publication after Ouha was a curious philosophical novel, Homo Deus, le satyre invisible [Homo Deus, the Invisible Satyr] (1924), on which he might well have been working simultaneously (and of which I hope to produce a translation in due course). Although it is much more earnest in its narrative method, Homo Deus does have strong thematic connections with the underlying argument of Ouha, which imply that some aspects of the latter were meant more seriously than might seem to be the case. It is worth noting, too, that Champsaur had a long-term fascination with the relationship between apes and humans and the notion of transitions between the two; his earliest short stories, written in the mid-1880s while he was still a struggling member of the Club des Hydropathes on the periphery
of the Decadent Movement, included a couplet entitled “Le Premier Homme” et “Le Dernier Homme” (translated in The Human Arrow as “The First Human” and “The Last Human”); both feature such transitions, as does his later novel Nora, la guenon devenue femme [Nora, the She-Ape Who Became a Woman] (1929), generally interpreted as a reference to Josephine Baker, in rank bad taste, although I can only rely on secondary sources in repeating that allegation.

  An interest in ambiguous fictitious individuals sharing or exchanging the characteristics of animals and humans was, however, by no means a unique eccentricity on Champsaur’s part, and Ouha fits, quite naturally and interestingly, into a whole series of fictions dealing hypothetically and symbolically with the relationship between humans and “apes.” The last word warrants being put in inverted commas here because there is a vast difference between actual apes and literary apes, rooted in, but by no means confined to, confusions afflicting early taxonomical attempts to locate humans and the apparent kin within the “great chain of being.” The question of human ancestry and filiation was, of course, very vexatious in the context of the long battle to establish the theory of evolution in the teeth of religious opposition.

  It is perhaps worth noting, as a brief aside, that sharp differences between “literary biology” and actual natural history are commonplace, and not at all exceptional. Not only does literature routinely feature a great many imaginary creatures (dragons, unicorns, etc.) and “semi-imaginary” creatures (e.g., giant octopodes) but routinely makes and conserves such mistakes as imagining that it is female nightingales, rather than males, which sing, for entirely fictitious reasons. If ever there were creatures liable to facilitate such inventions, embellishments and calculated misunderstandings, it is the great apes, which remained utterly mysterious until the mid-nineteenth century, at the earliest, and yet demanded urgent philosophical consideration in the light of their evident similarities to humankind.

  The particular role played by the orangutan in the saga of literary apes, especially in France, is deeply confused, primarily because the first French popularizer of the term “ourang-outang,” the great natural historian the Comte du Buffon, identified two species under that heading whose description can now clearly be seen to be slightly fanciful accounts of chimpanzees. The volume of Buffon’s epic natural history dealing with “ourang-outangs” appeared in the same year, 1766, as the volume of Carolus Linnaeus’ epic taxonomy dealing with the higher mammals. Unlike Buffon, Linnaeus realized that the Bornean “ourang-outang” described in 1658 by the Dutch naturalist Jakob de Bondt was not the same species as the African apes nowadays known as chimpanzees, but that only made the task of classifying the mysterious creature—reported by de Bondt to be known locally as “the man of the woods”—more difficult.

  Linnaeus, an evolutionist who dared not admit to it in print, took the bold step of suggesting that the orangutan might belong to the genus Homo, suggesting Homo nocturnus and Homo silvestris as potential appellations, but he was careful to hedge his bets by offering other generic alternatives. He said enough, however, to inspire the Scottish philosopher James Burnett, better known as Lord Monboddo, to speculate extensively about the nature of the relationship between orangutans and humans in his two six-volume treatises Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773-1792) and Ancient Metaphysics (1779-1799). These speculations, in their turn, gave direct birth to the first significant literary orangutan, in the character of Sir Oran Haut-ton in Thomas Love Peacock’s satire Melincourt (1817).

  Sir Oran, introduced as a guest at Melincourt Castle by the naturalist Sylvan Forester, has been captured in infancy and brought up among humans, so profitably as eventually to earn a baronetcy. He is mute, but has learned to play the flute, and not only has perfect manners but a strong sense of gallantry, twice exerting his physical prowess to rescue the lovely Anthelia Melincourt—with whom the timid Forester is in love—from more brutally-inclined humans. The sections of the text featuring Sir Oran are abundantly footnoted with justificatory references to Lord Monboddo and various works quoted by the Scot, including Jean Delisle de Sales’ Philosophie de la Nature (1778), but one of the most interesting observations in the story comes from Sir Telegraph Paxarett, who tells Forester that: “This wild man of yours will turn out some day to be the son of a king, lost in the woods, and suckled by a lioness:—‘No waiter, but a knight templar’:—no Oran, but a true prince.”5

  It is, of course, exceedingly unlikely that Edgar Rice Burroughs ever read Melincourt, but Sir Telegraph’s approximate anticipation of the character of Tarzan is perhaps even more significant, given the number of other precursors of the idea of a feral child who becomes a kind of “noble savage.” Rudyard Kipling might have read Melincourt before inventing Mowgli in the stories assembled in The Jungle Book (1894), just as Ronald Ross probably had before producing The Child of Ocean (1889), but they are very different developments of the theme. Burroughs is unlikely to have read either of those intermediaries, and, if he needed any prompting for his own invention other than the myth of Romulus and Remus, he is far more likely to have obtained it from H. Rider Haggard’s Allan’s Wife (1889), which features a female feral child of a slightly more realistic sort. Given the importance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as an influence on French Romanticism, however, it is not surprising that the French tradition of such fantasies, and their toying with the concept of uncorrupted primitivism, is even more adventurous than the English-language tradition, including, in addition to the work by Robida already cited, Jules Lermina’s To-Ho le tueur d’or (1905)6. The most significant literary predecessors of the imaginary apes who rear Tarzan are those featured in Jules Verne’s Le Village aérien (1901; tr. as The Village in the Tree-Tops) rather than Gozlan’s.

  Champsaur had, of course, sources much more recent than Lord Monboddo to draw upon in imagining his orangutan culture, but it is not obvious that he borrowed from anyone more recent that Buffon’s most important successor, Georges Cuvier, who reclassified the primates in 1798 into “bimanes” and “quadrumanes,” including the orangutan in the latter category and thus drawing a clearer line between the great apes and humans. It was, however, Robida who popularized the use of the term “quadrumanes” in the context of French anthropological fantasy, and it seems likely that Champsaur borrowed the term from Saturnin Farandoul rather than from any treatise on taxonomy. The character of Ouha definitely owes his origin and development to the literary tradition that branched off from the scholarly one in the late eighteenth century rather than to the march of science, and the physical anthropologist featured in the story, Dr. Abraham Goldry, seems to be a hundred years behind the development of his science.

  Criticism of the story of Ouha on the grounds of its infidelity to known science is, however, largely irrelevant, because the narrative is a hypothetical exercise of a very different sort. If Rousseau would have found it amusing—as he surely would—so would Carl Jung, who would have recognized it as a attempt to delve into the depths of human psychology rather than human evolution per se. There is an archetypal quality to the character of Ouha, as there had been to Tarzan and would be to King Kong; if he is no more plausible as a guest in human society than Sir Oran Haut-ton, he is no less relevant as a specter at the feast of civilization and modern morality. He is, in essence, a player in an absurd melodrama, but his very absurdity raises questions about the sanity that rules him ridiculous, and the sheer extremism of the melodrama—especially its spectacularly overwrought climax—has a peculiar magnificence that transcends mere logic.

  This translation is taken from a copy of the 1923 edition published by Charpentier and Fasquelle. I have unified the names of some of the characters, especially where minor errors seems to have been introduced by the typesetter, and have corrected a few obvious typos, but I have left most of the text’s inconsistencies in place, adding footnotes where it seemed appropriate.

  Brian Stableford

  OUHA, KING OF THE APES

  I. Ouha Will Interest Y
ou...

  Harry Smith Lauwer7 to Dr. Abraham Goldry in Philadelphia

  Borneo, Riddle-Temple, via Ambang

  My dear friend,

  When I left Philadelphia on your specific orders, it was, for me, a question of life or death. Neurasthenia, arrived at its extreme point, would inevitably have driven me to suicide. While making an immense fortune by means of enormous overwork I had conceived such a disgust for humankind that we searched together for a country that civilization, or at least what we call by that name, had not yet penetrated, and one in which the great scenery of nature would offer my mind a new interest—in brief, an encouragement to live.

  I yielded to your reasoning, my dear doctor, and left with my daughter Mabel, your goddaughter, for Borneo, the largest island in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. The description of that island, two-thirds Dutch and English in the northern part, had not deceived me. On the coasts and in the towns proximal to the China Sea, and Java Sea and the Celebes Sea, rice and tobacco are grown, but the rest of Borneo is nothing but an immense forest of mangroves, coconut-palms, sago-palms, areca-palms, gum-trees, resin-trees and gigantic bamboos: a forest ideal for me, as a misanthrope, delightfully populated by orangutans, rhinoceroses and elephants.

  As I tap the keyboard of my typewriter to write this epistle, I have a true contentment in my soul and at my fingertips. It’s a salvation that you have wrought; you may consider it as one of the best of your medical career. Since we left—which is to say, in the last five and a half months, many changes have occurred. First of all, in spite of Major Bennett’s very cordial hospitality, in need of more solitude, I found that of which I dreamed a few hundred miles away from him.