In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula Heise makes the point that certain genres can often “override” the stories that “fit less well into existing narrative patterns”—in other words, uncomfortable stories.11 The particular genius of these storytellers is their ability to deploy “comfortable” genres to do uncomfortable work. The stakes could not be higher: stories can reveal and also shape the world, and stories about our fellow primates can contribute to saving them from extinction. But the disappearance of species and habitats constitutes only one kind of loss. It is sad to remember that there will be no more stories by Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, or James Baldwin, all of whom made their audiences uncomfortable.
Primatology field narratives have influenced the ways in which humans understand animals, but the stories change as habitat and field conditions change, and the impact of the stories is likely to wane as the genre changes; it may be a vicious circle. We humans require challenging stories. We consume them avidly in multiple forms and at all times. As long as there are apes, monkeys, and prosimians, there will be stories about them. But if these animals are confined in zoos, sanctuaries, and even small managed reserves because their species survival necessitates human intervention and manipulation, what a loss that will be for those of us who crave stories about animals, love, death, politics, and the wild!
There is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory.
—RICHARD DAWKINS, The Selfish Gene
I
Stories about apes and monkeys reveal our deepest hopes and fears, and for the last century and a half, the figure of Charles Darwin has brought these hopes and fears into focus. Both his theories and his numerous anecdotes about primates of all kinds illustrate the deep kinship between humans and our order mates.
To understand why Darwin’s attention to primates has been a flash point and an inspiration, it is helpful to begin a little before his time, with a glance at one of the last philosophers of the Enlightenment period, Immanuel Kant. Kant was no animal lover, and his work does not concern apes or monkeys, but it has a bearing on what those who came after him have thought about them. In 1781, with the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant challenged an Enlightenment article of faith: that since reason accounted for the success of human civilization, by fostering this God-given faculty, humans could be perfectible as social, political, and moral beings. Since the human infant’s mind was what another Enlightenment thinker, John Locke, termed “a blank slate,” education assumed central importance in the construction of human identity. Education, it was posited, could strengthen and train reason, one individual at a time, in order to bring about a more advanced civilization. You are what you’re educated to be, according to this branch of Enlightenment thought. Not so fast, said Kant: the infant mind is not a blank slate; humans are actually born with mental frameworks, or “categories,” such as an innate understanding of time and space, which determine in large part what we can learn, how we learn it, and how we deploy our knowledge later on. Furthermore, Kant added a few years later in the Critique of Judgment, every individual is entitled to a certain amount of irreducible “subjectivity” or uniqueness in perception and taste—another aspect of mind that lies outside or beyond reason.
These are hopeful thoughts if one values individual creativity, but they can also be terrifying, for they leave the door open for the crazies, monsters, and beasts that philosophers such as Locke had almost shut out from the definition of what it is to be human. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, saw the terrifying aspects of the new wave in Enlightenment philosophy. Kicking and screaming, he held on by his fingernails to the notion of reason. He wanted to believe in universal order and rationality, but he was afraid that disorder and emotion ruled human affairs. Think what will happen, he reiterated, if we let the beast in! What if the beast is already in? What if we can’t control it? Enter Poe’s progenitor of the fictional detective hero, the Parisian Auguste Dupin—aristocratic, refined, reclusive, abstemious, apparently devoid of all sexual feelings, and rational almost to the point of being a disembodied brain. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe’s first Dupin story, written in 1841, brain meets body, reason meets brute, and reason wins, but with a nasty surplus of nagging, unresolved suggestions about human and beast.
The tale begins with a discourse on analytical reason, which, according to Poe’s unnamed narrator, can be better demonstrated by playing cards than engaging in “all the elaborate frivolity of chess.”1 Although chess is complicated, it is mechanical; on the other hand, whist requires the successful player not only to calculate but also to observe and analyze the other players’ expressions of emotion as well as their method of play. Poe calls this kind of analysis “ratiocination,” the rational analytical approach of the successful detective, who must grasp both the rational and irrational behaviors of his fellow humans. Almost from the beginning of classical Western civilization, powerful stereotypes of apes and monkeys began to emerge. As Poe understood it, these figurative (and sometimes actual) apes and monkeys suggest interesting mirrors for human emotions and actions.
After Dupin reads in the evening newspaper about the grotesque and puzzling murder of a mother and her adult daughter in the Rue Morgue, he seizes the opportunity to demonstrate his own mental prowess, solving the case on the basis of newspaper accounts alone. One account reports that the murder occurred on the fourth story of an almost empty house; it describes the mutilated bodies, one shoved with brute force up the chimney, the other lying on the pavement below. Another news story contains interviews with witnesses on the street, who heard two loud voices—one belonging to a Frenchman and the other variously identified as Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, or Russian. Remarkably, every witness is from a different European nation, and each identifies the second voice as speaking a language he does not understand. That being the case, Dupin remarks to his friend, “You will say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic—of an African. Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris; but, without denying the inference, I will merely call your attention to three points. The voice is termed by one witness ‘harsh rather than shrill.’ It is represented by two others to have been ‘quick and unequal.’ No words—no sound resembling words—were by any witness mentioned as distinguishable.”2 Therefore, the detective concludes, the voice is not a human voice: this is the crucial insight that enables him to solve the case without viewing the crime scene. Although Dupin has the solution right away, he decides to visit the scene in order to develop a strategy for flushing out the murderer and proving his conclusion.
According to police reports, the door and windows to the apartment were locked from the inside at the time of the murder, but Dupin discovers a hidden egress from a window and measures the considerable distance between the window and a lightning rod that would have provided the only way down. Just as the voice had been bizarre, “there was something excessively outré—something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action”—about these killings: the height the perpetrator had to descend in making an escape, the superhuman strength required to shove the daughter’s body up the chimney, the decapitation of the mother with a few strokes of a straight razor, the strange disarray of heavy furniture, and the abandonment of money bags in plain sight.3