Wow, I didn’t know it was possible to lose the Game.
Some people don’t take well to being told they are wrong, do they? 
Actually, the idea that (scientific classification) great apes have thick lips is a myth of white racism; they actually have much thinner lips than humans. So if (Tarzan) Great Apes indeed have lips much thicker than humans, they must be a species of ape (or hominid) unknown to science.
Here’s my puzzle for the Game: how did Tarzan know how to spell his own name?
[ol]
[li]New tetrapod species are still being discovered.[/li][li]The story requires only that such a species have existed a century ago.[/li][/ol]
Tarzan was a hypergenius; he taught himself how to read, remember?
That said, by the rules of the Game, it’s clear that “Tarzan” is no more his name than “Clayton” is. You don’t think Burroughs woud be so foolish as to use the Duke’s real name withot permission, do you?
Interesting comment, and I agree. However, there is some overlap between the two types of inconsistencies – e.g., Watson thinking April 23rd was Saturday, when it was Tuesday. Or, in the “Adventure of the Speckled Band”, the idea that the snake would drink milk. Some players of the Game work with both inconsistencies within the canon and inconsistencies between canon and reality.
Interesting that, with Tarzan, it’s OK that he talks to animals, has superhuman strength and intelligence, deals with lost dinosaur realms and ant-men and whatnot… but no, such great-apes couldn’t exist. Actually, I think the existence of a subhuman ape-species is more possible than most of the rest of the fantasy.
I enjoyed the Tarzan series a few decades ago before switching over to Sherlock Holmes. (It was Dex’s report on Holmes that got me interested in the Straight Dope, for which I am eternally grateful. I never came across his Tarzan report before. Great!) My recollection is that the timing of the shipwreck was in the 1870s or thereabouts. Much of central Africa was still quite unexplored by Europeans and much was possible. It would have been written up after Tarzan was an adult.
In the context of The Game, I do not see where it is so difficult to believe that there was a troop of previously unknown intelligent ape-like creatures that have since become extinct or live on property fully owned and protected by Tarzan’s descendants and tribes that he protects. The statement “No such species can or does exist” cannot be proven. (Or at least it is very difficult to prove categorically that something does not exist.)
Milk snakes do. Okay, they don’t, but it was commonly believed in Holmes’ time.
ETA: Holmes’ speciality was cigar spoor, not herpetology.
OK so much of Africa was unexplored and many things seemed possible. Then it was explored, and such things were found not to be possible.
Next thing you’ll be telling me that you believe in the Yeti!
Anatomically modern humans were present in Africa 100,000 years ago. I’d say they’ve had plenty of time to get rid of some useless competitor.
Homo sapiens - plays well with others - NOT.
I sympathize with smarterthansome.
By way of background, two of my longstanding interests have been the Holmes stories and that period of US military history we call “The Plains Indian Wars” period, with a special fascination with the Battle of the Little Bighorn (a/k/a “Custer’s Last Stand”).
I was an enthusiastic player of the Sherlockian game until another Sherlockian, knowing of my interest in Little Bighorn, forwarded a Sherlockian paper to me. That paper argued (quite implausibly, IMHO), that Holmes and Watson were enlisted men in the 7th US Cavalry at LBH. Of course, they managed to escape (and join that long list of White Survivors of Little Bighorn–sometimes I think that list of alleged survivors is longer than the actual rolls of the 7th Cavalry on June 25, 1876, but that’s another story).
That paper served as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for me; it struck me as so wildly implausible that ever since playing the Sherlockian game has seemed to me to be nothing but a silly exercise. I still love the Holmes stories as stories, but I can’t bring myself to play the Grand Game anymore.
Cheers,
bcg
Smarterthansome, it seems as if your premise is that enjoyment of the Tarzan story is a problem because it involves suspension of disbelief. From your first post you mentioned “Perhaps I am missing something, but isn’t it immediately obvious that they are not apes, but … humans??” If you take this line of thought, then the whole premise of Tarzan communicating with animals and being able to live in the jungle falls apart. (Let alone getting into the later even more fantastic and hard to belief story lines.) Later postings do not seem to clarify your point beyond the fact that you don’t care to overcome this suspension of disbelief. OK, too each their own.
If a person has a problem with suspension of disbelief and requires accuracy of plots, I would think that person would have a problem with most fiction and many movies. Science fiction would have to be right out, especially anything involving faster-that-light travel. (“I didn’t like Orwell’s 1984 because that world didn’t happen in 1984. Same with Kubrick/Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. As for Star Wars…”)
I guess I’m glad I can enjoy fiction for the entertainment value.
Bluffcityguy, that’s too bad, and I can certainly understand. For those who don’t know, Sherlock Holmes stories written by other writers are called “pastiches” and there are lots of them. (IIRC, I saw a list with over 3,000 books and short stories.) Problem is that the vast majority of them are horrible. I’m glad I haven’t come across the Little Big Horn one. I had not thought of the Little Big Horn being a popular setting for writers. Thanks for sharing that insight.
So were underground worlds with inland seas surrounding islands of dinosaurs. Greystoke was delusional as a result of exposure to some tropical disease and Burroughs was only too happy to edit his delirious rants into exciting stories. Better?
Y’know, in a way, Trekkies have an unfair advantage over fans of The Game in that they can always say that X or Y event created an alternate parallel-universe timeline so the history we live and the one established in the Trek backstory need not coincide save in very broad terms.
This wasn’t a pastiche, though (I’ve been around the Sherlockian literature enough to know the difference). This was a paper which, in the tradition of the Grand Game, tried seriously to argue that Holmes and Watson were troopers in the 7th on that day.
As for the the events of LBH being a “popular” setting for writers… Well, a lot depends on how you define “popular”, but Custer’s Last Stand does form the basis (or is at least a significant part) of a number of novels. Just off the top of my head, Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man (which was the basis of the Arthur Penn movie of the same title), and George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Redskins (which I would dearly love to see adapted into a movie) are just a couple…
Cheers,
bcg
Doyle made a typo, it was Bartitsu, quite well known at the time.
I think that a serious problem with the Holmes Game is that it’s gone on too long, so it’s hard to say something new. Consequently, there is a LOT of guff out there, and I mean a LOT.
I personally love the Barring-Gould ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES. For all its flaws, it’s just plain great fun. The more recent Klinger ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES is more scholarly and less fun (IMHO) and is mainly an encyclopediac reference for other works.
On Tarzan, smarterthansome, forgive me for asking, but have your read any of the books? They’re quite different from the movies and TV shows, which try to connect to some sort of reality. The books don’t, they’re their own fantasy world. I don’t know if you’re aware, but Burroughs also wrote a series of adventure books on the planet Mars (inhabited by green men with six limbs, among other races.) And please don’t get me wrong, I think your concept that Tarzan was raised by some human tribe and just pretended to be raised by apes could indeed be worked out. I’m only saying it would take a LOT of work, because so much of the story relies on these apes. Of course, that’s mainly the first book with origin story; the later stories just have Tarzan as king of the jungle, who can speak to animals and swing on vines. (BTW, I should reference Cecil on vine-swinging: Could a human swing through the jungle on vines? - The Straight Dope )
But it worthwhile, in some people’s eyes, to inquire into RL facts, or concepts which were not true to life but still current in the average person’s mind. I think by the time the books were written, naturalists had a pretty good handle on what the different types of apes were, the difference between monkeys and apes, and so on. But even today some people call chimpanzees monkeys, either because they don’t know, or they believe it is not necessary to be more accurate for the purposes at hand.
Go back 150 before Bourroughs’ time, and even the scientists weren’t all that clear on the topic. Because of fairly pronounced gender dimorphism in gorillas, some early explorers believed that females were a different species. I think these come very close to the idea of a generic “ape”, larger than human beings, but, not having such pronounced brow ridges and sagittal crests, more humanlike in appearance. Meanwhile, they have not been demeaned to the organ-grinder or tricycle riding level of chimpanzees in human culture.
Even further back, Carl Linnaeus, originator of our modern system of zoological taxonomy, may have considered the chimpanzee to be a type of human, Homo troglodytes, based on second and third hand reports. We don’t know for sure if it was the chimpanzee he was referring to, but it is likely. When later taxonomists gave the chimp his own genus, the specific name troglodytes was retained, although it seems odd in the first place, since chimpanzees do not appear ever to have lived in caves.
In my opinion, popularly current notions about nature and science tend to be a conflation of various things read and heard about. Given the limited knowledge of apes generally in Bourroughs’ time–nobody had yet made a systematic study of them in the wild–plus emotions stirred up through evolutionist-creationist controversy, I wouldn’t make any long bets that the everyday person knew jack about apes. Bourroughs may have known a little more, but wanted to keep his “apes” generic so his audience wouldn’t start with objections of the “But I’ve seen chimpanzees in the circus and they don’t do that” type. Or given the state of knowledge at the time, he may have believed he was writing an honest to goodness hard SF novel, no less based on reality than those of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories that don’t involve FTL spaceflight or other notions that run counter to physics as we know it today.
Sorry. I phrased that very poorly. I had not inteded to lecture you or others familiar with Sherlockiana on pastiches. I was just worried about using an uncommon word with others who might not be familiar with it.
Little Big Man (the film, at least) came to mind when you mentioned stories of whites surviving the Battle of the Little Big Horn. And you reminded me that I really need to get the Flashman books on my reading list.
As I mentioned in my original post, I came across the aforementioned Staff Report randomly. I have no interest in the Tarzan per se. I have not read any of the books, nor seen any of the movies. Unless you count ‘Carry On Up the Jungle’, and ‘George of the Jungle’ both I and II.
What interested me was the idea of The Game, that people think the stories might actually be based on fact, and the explorations of the ramifications of this assumption.
My post was prompted by the to-me curious proposal of a unknown ape or hominid for the species that raised Tarzan. Unless you can propose a realistic candidate that makes the story work, the whole idea of The Game becomes just a literary exercise, not one that is based in reality. And I didn’t think that was the point.
With my limited / absent knowledge of the stories, perhaps you can see why I tried to dig you out of that hole, by suggesting the most obvious candidate.
However, the players of The Game (for Tarzan, at least) find the hole very comfortable, and have no interest in leaving.
What seems abundantly clear is that the basic story of Tarzan is entirely a work of fiction, as far as any novel can be. Now don’t get me wrong - I love fiction. It’s one of my favorite forms of writing. I enjoy fiction that is ABOUT fiction, and even literary investigations, if it is clear that’s what they are.
But I must conclude that, for Tarzan, The Game has indeed been lost.
But not how to speak English. When he writes his first letter to Jane Porter, he can read and write English, but cannot speak or understand it at all; this is a major plot point. To him, English is only a written language. “Tarzan”, on the other hand, is a name of Great Apish origin, which he has often heard and spoken, but never seen in written form. So – how can he have any idea of how to spell it?
It doesn’t matter whether his real Ape name is “Tarzan”, “Grurmstipth”, or “Susie”. The issue is how he learned to spell any Apish word, when he has no understanding of any functional correlation between letters and phonemes.
Earl’s