IX.

 

By the 1920s, these monuments were still largely under wraps. However, as the gorilla's genealogical proximity to man became more widely known and debated, and live gorillas were introduced into American zoos (the Bronx Zoo displayed two gorillas in the years between 1910 and 1915, both captured in the wild; they survived in captivity for only a short while—just long enough for O'Neill, an enthusiastic zoo visitor, to have seen them), their association with blackness, evil, and treachery slowly waned.52 Successors to Du Chaillu's sensationalism (primarily photographers, filmmakers, and zoological and museum curators), however, continued to outnumber more measured observers like Garner. It would take another half century for this received image of the gorilla—re-popularized by feature films such as King Kong (1933)—to transform itself fully. Inspired by George Schaller's 1959 field study of wild gorillas, the first of its kind, National Geographic "cover girl" Dian Fossey forcefully reshaped public opinion with her groundbreaking 1970 article "Making Friends with Mountain Gorillas," which revealed that gorillas were not only highly social and generally peaceful animals, but, in fact, strict vegetarians.53

 

In the meantime, stories of "great white hunters" like the American Ben Burbridge exemplified the contradictions surrounding the still mysterious figure of the gorilla. In his bestselling (and revealingly titled) 1928 memoir, Gorilla: Tracking and Capturing the Ape-Man of Africa (see Fig. 15)—which was preceded by his documentary film The Gorilla Hunt (1926), "reputed to be the earliest motion picture of great apes in the wild" (Hillman)—Burbridge recounts an early susceptibility to Du Chaillu's "realism," invoking his own "kindred primeval emotions sympathetic with these roving giant habitants of the African jungles" (186).

 

An enthusiastic participant in what has come to be known as the "camera-gun trope," Burbridge was, according to his own claims, the first man to capture live gorillas on film, a practice that transferred the violence of the hunt directly into the symbolic realm: "The wild man of the forest had been ensnared at last!" (214).54 He was also one of several hunters who professionally tracked and captured infant gorillas for eventual sale to zoos in Europe and the United States, providing these burgeoning public institutions with their first live specimens. While Burbridge fancied himself a dispeller of myths and advocate for the misunderstood primates, his reminiscences are fully ensconced in the melodramatic, imperialist language typical of such encounters. Here Burbridge describes his initial confrontation with a gorilla on Mount Mikenu in the Belgian Congo: "It was a strange introduction [. . .] white man and gorilla out there in the Congo forest. The ape, so manlike [. . .] impersonating the Stone Age in a meeting with steel. It was a vivid picture, tragic to a degree" (203). That "vivid picture" is nowhere more apparent than in the many photographs that accompany the volume. (Earlier works in this vein, such as Du Chaillu's, were illustrated by hand in a naïf style that masked their evidentiary quality.) Today, these images of a grinning, safari-clad Burbridge with his vanquished, scowling prey, positioned vulnerably for the camera (see Fig. 16) exude a nauseating similarity to the photos produced by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004.

 

Figure 15: The inside front cover spread from Ben Burbridge's Gorilla: Tracking and Capturing the Ape-Man of Africa (London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1928.

 

Writing about the myth of human origins in early twentieth-century American visual culture, Donna Haraway declares that "behind every mounted animal, bronze sculpture, or photograph lies a profusion of objects and social interactions among people and other animals, which can be recomposed" to uphold the fictions of western humanism (27). Apparent enough in the Thinker's bronze exterior or Burbridge's sepia frontispiece, these fictions were institutionalized on a grand scale by Carl Akeley, the adventurer and impresario who founded the African Hall of New York's Museum of Natural History in 1938, and whose fame rested on the many animals he hunted, killed, and taxidermied in order to create his staged dioramas, altars to the representative power of pictorial naturalism.

 

Akeley killed his first gorilla, now on display as "The Giant of Karisimbi" when he visited Africa in 1921, the same year O'Neill wrote The Hairy Ape. Just as the freighted exchange of looks between Mildred and Yank, and later between Yank and the gorilla, mobilized relations of power in the contact zones of oceanliner and zoo, Haraway explains how the "imperialist gaze" of the hunter/collector/scientist (re)enacted the drama of humanist creation: "Akeley and the gorilla first saw each other on the lush volcanoes of central Africa. The glance proved deadly for both of them, just as the exchange between Victor Frankenstein and his creature froze each of them into a dialectic of immolation. But Frankenstein tasted the bitter failure of his fatherhood in his own and his creature's death; Akeley resurrected his creature and his authorship in [. . .] the African Hall of the Museum of Natural History" (31). The visceral, adrenalin-inducing practice of game hunting was here transmuted into the visual pleasures of public display in a proscenium theater where gorilla effigies (now understood, in Bhabha's parlance, as "colonial objects" [88]) posed a fantasy of natural history that camouflaged the presence of the hunter and taxidermist, just as it supplanted the continent of Africa and its indigenous primate cultures (see Fig. 17).

 

Masterful "recompositions" such as these, continues Haraway, reliably "produce a story that is reticent, even mute, about Africa" (27). Is it any surprise that O'Neill ends his "drama of protest" by emphasizing this very absence and the performances it engenders, dropping the entire problem like quarry at the unsuspecting feet of his audience, who must survey the silenced word, still under erasure in the text, as the curtain falls? Just as a theatricalized (and for the audience, now thoroughly visible) "Africa" becomes The Hairy Ape's defining absence, so too did it shadow American culture between the wars, when evolutionary theory threatened to reposition the "dark continent" as the sanctioned site (actual and symbolic) of human origins.

 

Figure 16: "The Author and a Captive Gorilla," frontispiece from Ben Burbridge's Gorilla: Tracking and Capturing the Ape-Man of Africa (London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1928).

 

Remnants of these associations are still discernable in Bogard's interpretation of the play's final scene, where, he asserts, "O'Neill drops his hero back into darkness by suggesting that he can only belong to a force of simian brutality" (252). The darkness Bogard invokes stands in not only for the "simian brutality" he misattributes to the gorilla (a description more fitting for the various human beings in the play), but also for western (mis)perceptions of Africa and racist implications of blackness, which O'Neill repeatedly deconstructs by framing them in theatrical terms and linking them with the discourses of class and species.

 

It is clear that The Hairy Ape, with its intricate and provocative finale—perhaps the first time a gorilla was represented on stage in any context other than humor or horror—premiered during a crucial moment in America's quarrel with evolutionary theory, a time when science, entertainment, and politics conspicuously overlapped, and mention of "Africa" conjured powerful visions of both seduction and dread: the theatrical effects of a hidden and disavowed kinship. Reading O'Neill's play in the context of this history offers the same kind of illuminating perspective gleaned from public debates surrounding the initial reception of Rodin's Thinker. Just as the bronze statue came to represent romantic humanist ideals of immanence, its controversial, beastly origins buried beneath the gathering force of widely disseminated castings, the genus Gorilla suffered numerous (mis)castings of its own, accruing a reputation as monstrous as it was unfounded.

 

"Hunter, scientist, and artist all sought the gorilla for his revelation about the nature and future of manhood" (31), concludes Haraway. This was as much the case for O'Neill (and certainly Yank) as it was for Du Chaillu, Garner, Burbridge, or Akeley, though the playwright carried out his (re)search within the very fields of representation he was calling into question. What better place to enact this "revelation" than the theater, and what better setting than the zoo?

 

X.

 

In 1938, the Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice offered the following definition: "The zoo is a cross between a music hall and a museum; it bristles with pathetic fallacies and false analogies. One never goes to the zoo without hearing someone say that something is almost human" (29, emphasis mine). Clearly, the authority of the "almost human" claim had varying consequences depending on the discipline in which it was enunciated. In the realms of positivism authorized (in part) by the increasingly market-driven research of the American university, Robert M. Yerkes's provocatively titled 1925 study, Almost Human, had, for better or worse, heralded the creation of the modern primate laboratory. "Few persons would be likely to argue that the exhibition of primates," writes Yerkes, "either trained or untrained,

is comparable in theoretical and practical values with scientific study. Nevertheless the zoological parks, circuses, menageries, and variety shows of the world have in the past fifty years spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to satisfy human curiosity, whereas only paltry sums have been devoted to the disinterested study of our nearest kin. (262)55

Figure 17: "The specular commerce between man and animal at the interface of two evolutionary ages is completed. The animals in the dioramas have transcended mortal life, and hold their pose forever" (Haraway 30). "The Giant of Karisimbi," Photo #330585, American Museum of Natural History Library.

 

For those institutions that fostered intimacy across the "infrahuman" spectrum (as Yerkes called it) rather than insisting on an objectifying distance, the "almost human" claim rested rather delicately on a sensational activity called performance, or "display." MacNeice's offhanded commentary on the zoo complicates Yerkes's earlier claim by proposing speciation as a public, performative practice, carried out behind the bars of both zoo and laboratory as a theatrical effect of humanist ideology, a place where those animals who are "almost human" demonstrate, by the very architecture of their cordoned copresence, the epistemological power of human categorization in the company of "our nearest kin" and its instrumentality in the production of (self-) knowledge (see Fig. 18).

 

If Mildred, therefore, visited the stokehole with a nostalgic desire to discover her familial ancestry but was shocked when she found a "filthy beast" in the place of her grandfather, Yank visits the zoo with the hope of encountering a fully authorized version of the "hairy ape," both evolutionary ancestor and theatrical kin. And just as the scene of recognition between Mildred and Yank was framed by "asymmetrical relations of power," the bond between Yank and the gorilla, staged in the multifaceted contact zone of the zoo—a site organized by the "spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, whose trajectories now intersect" (Pratt 7)—is similarly freighted, and shifts precariously as the misrecognitions resolve and congeal.

 

The scene commences upon Yank's entrance with a prolonged exchange of looks:

 

The gorilla turns his eyes but makes no sound or move. [. . .] Yank walks up to the gorilla's cage and, leaning over the railing, stares in at its occupant, who stares back at him, silent and motionless. There is a pause of dead stillness (160-61).

Figure 18: "Attitudes of a Young Gorilla," from Alfred E. Brehm's Thierleben [Life of Animals], 1864-69, reprinted in Robert M. Yerkes, Almost Human (New York: The Century Co., 1925), image following page 220. Note the relation of these "attitudes" to theatrical modes of representation that sought to associate actors' physical poses and facial expressions with corresponding emotions. The visual rhetoric of this curious portrayal links the gorilla to a long tradition of codification common to both theatrical and scientific pursuits, complicating Yerkes's call for a "disinterested" scientific study of great apes.

 

Almost as soon as Yank sets eyes on the gorilla (though the stage directions tell us the animal is seated in the Thinker pose—hardly a combative stance) he casts the caged primate as a powerfully masculine, racialized, and animalized type of human performer: a boxer.

Say, yuh're some hard-lookin' guy, ain't yuh? I seen lots of tough nuts dat de gang called gorillas, but you're de foist real one I ever seen. Some chest yuh got, and shoulders, and dem arms and mits! I bet yuh got a punch in eider fist dat'd knock `em all silly! (This with genuine admiration. The gorilla, as if he understood, stands upright, swelling out his chest and pounding on it with his fist. Yank grins sympathetically.) (161)

An ethological reading of the gorilla's actions in this scene (were we able to rely on naturalist dramaturgy) would reveal his upright stance, swelled chest, and pounding fists as elements of a "display" brought on by sustained eye contact with a conspecific male, suggesting a challenge to the animal's social standing. The nine-step "chest-beating sequence" of the mountain gorilla, believed to be "one of the most complex ritualized displays among mammals" (Schaller 234) is performed by silverbacks responding to a threat (perceived or actual) to their status as alpha male.56 This "King of the Jungle" behavior has been restored so often in human cultural contexts that it functions, by now, as a cliché (humorous and/or horrifying) of masculine power, brutish and territorial—the opposite, perhaps, of the Thinker cliché as it has come to be understood in its own cultural contexts.

 

But if one primate's pose unfolds, subtly, from cliché to gestus as the action develops, might not the other's as well? While Yank's Thinker "attitude" resisted representation within the dramatic narrative, signifying only to the audience, the gorilla's pose offers itself up to Yank's newly sharpened sensibilities within the world of the play, presenting spectatorship itself as an ethical act in which the viewer (in this case, Yank) must acknowledge his own perspective (or lack thereof) in the creation of meaning. The kinds of "animal motives" the theater audience deduces from the gorilla's actions in this scene are as influenced by the terms the play itself establishes as they are by other, more familiar modes of animal representation, which range from realism and naturalism to comedy and caricature.

 

But because Yank's understanding of animal behavior (and natural history) is mediated by the zoo, "a site," argues Chaudhuri, "of boundary-blurring and identity crises, which facilitate[s] the demeaning classifications and oppressive identifications by means of which cultural power is wielded" (144), his interpretation of this initial encounter with the gorilla has more to do with his own preconceptions and desires than it does with any kind of scientific or dramatic knowledge. "The zoo," Chaudhuri explains, "inherits and extends the culture's double-coding of animals as objects of knowledge and objects of fantasy" (147) and, as we will see, Yank is just as susceptible to these humanist imperatives—replete with the "pathetic fallacies and false analogies" (MacNeice 29) that constitute this "double-coding"—as "de white-faced skinny tarts and de boobs what marry 'em" (161):

Sure, I get yuh. Yuh challenge de whole woild, huh? Yuh got what I was sayin' even if yuh muffed de woids. (then bitterness creeping in) And why wouldn't yuh get me? Ain't we both members of de same club—de Hairy Apes? (They stare at each other—a pause—then Yank goes on slowly and bitterly.) (161)

Tempted to cast the gorilla as "almost human," Yank chooses a model of primate kinship based in the confraternity of violent protest he had hoped to find and enjoy in the "brotherhood" of the IWW. His question, simultaneously pleading and cynical—"Ain't we both members of de same club—de Hairy Apes?"—when reread in the context of Bird's announcement of a new theatrical species (the hybrid "monkey-man"), anticipates the desperate performances with which this final scene will culminate.57 Through the "dead stillness" of their mutually interpellative gaze, Yank now perceives the gorilla's power (physical and cultural), and thus begins to contemplate his own, as a performative practice—one framed by the recently legitimized (and highly theatricalized) drama of the boxing ring.

 

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