Philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia’s Memories From the Jungle, newly translated from the French by Christopher Beach, is a profoundly sad novel about a civilized chimpanzee who must return to nature. While Garcia does at times plumb the comic potential of this setup, the book is mainly a bleak exploration of the faithlessness of masters over those they dominate. In his own language, the protagonist and narrator Doogie is “faithful to the human,” but as the story progresses it becomes clear that humans have betrayed that faithfulness. The novel succeeds in spades at what it sets out to do. Unfortunately, in getting there, it ventures into malignant racial territory in ways that a contemporary novel about an African ape ought to be more self-aware about avoiding.
Originally published under the title Mémoires de la jungle in 2010, it is the second of eight novels written by Garcia and also the second one to be translated into English. Structurally, each of the novel’s chapters is subdivided into two sections. In the sections headed “From the Jungle,” Doogie narrates his adventures in the Congo Basin following the crash of a spaceship. In the sections headed “Memories,” Doogie recounts his youth at a zoo near Victoria Falls, where he was raised as the surrogate child and sibling of a family of ethologists. The main body of the novel, meanwhile, is bookended by chapters narrated by Doogie’s surrogate older sister and primary caretaker, Janet, reflecting on the experiments she and her family performed on Doogie and on the chimpanzee’s ultimate fate. Both Doogie and Janet, then, are unreliable narrators in different ways: Doogie is an ape with a point of view that is different from a human’s; Janet dissembles and self-justifies.
Garcia makes interesting choices to show that Doogie’s consciousness and command of language is different from that of a human. For example, Doogie’s narration slips between first, second, and third person and between past and present tense. Sometimes these shifts occur multiple times inside a single sentence. Oftentimes Doogie forms phrases in an idiosyncratic or childlike way. The effect can be entrancing.
Language is also used to explore the novel’s overarching theme of civilization versus nature. At those times when Doogie gets closer to nature, for example, his syntax and vocabulary decay, as do his abilities to recall and articulate memories. Indeed, a dialectic between civilization and nature is at the center of Doogie’s thinking across all the years during which he is able to think in complete sentences. For Doogie, civilization is desirable and nature undesirable. At the beginning of the novel, his views on this are so extreme that he feels guilt even when he eats a piece of jungle fruit he wasn’t trained to consume in the zoo. To Doogie, the sine qua non of civilization is being “faithful to the human.” This faithfulness compels Doogie to walk on two feet and wear a tattered button-down shirt and a dirty pair of XXL underpants for most of his adventure in the jungle. He tries to keep clean and longs for shampoo.
As a child, Doogie’s reward for being civilized is proximity to, and being cuddled by, Janet. Janet teaches Doogie most of his sign language and conveys to him much of the other knowledge he has about the world. His obsession with her borders on Oedipal. Doogie fixates on Janet’s smell, Janet’s clothes, and Janet’s red hair. Janet programs Doogie to believe that civilization means that there is always a “good behavior camera” on him and that she can always see him. In actual fact, for most of Doogie’s adventure in the jungle, he is wearing a watch that unbeknownst to him contains a camera through which Janet does indeed observe his activities.
Doogie strongly associates civilization with humans being masters. Indeed, he views some of this masterfulness to have rubbed off on him. One of his less flattering traits is that he believes being civilized means he can dominate other animals. At various points, he refers to a dog, monkeys, and less civilized apes as “slave” animals. The reader learns Janet has repeatedly chided Doogie not to be “racist” against macaques and other monkeys. Ironically, the animals in question have no human masters and it is Doogie with his ideology of faithfulness who has a slavish mentality. Doogie goes as far as to think that what God is to humans, humans are to him. Echoing Christ on the cross, Doogie’s statement of abjection is: “Janet! Janet! Why have you forsaken me?” (p. 159).
This brings us to the theme of masters and their faithlessness. Janet’s knowledge of Doogie’s whereabouts is a betrayal. Doogie spends the whole novel struggling to return to Janet and until the watch is destroyed near the novel’s end, she could have rescued him at any time. The reason that she did not is that she and her family intentionally bred and raised Doogie with the intent of renaturing him to see if an intelligent, civilized ape could thrive in the wild. As a result of this experiment, Doogie faces a grave fate.
Though Memories From The Jungle is unquestionably science fiction in the sense that it is a story about an intelligent ape who speaks sign language, and is set in a future where most of humanity lives on space stations, it is not apparent whether the novel is in explicit conversation with the Anglophone speculative fiction tradition. Nevertheless, fruitful comparisons between the novel under review and some canonical works of the genre can be drawn.
The theme in science fiction of humans experimenting on animals in order to civilize them is as old as H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which the eponymous mad scientist psychically and ideologically tortures beasts into simulacra of men and women. A more benign take is Lester del Rey’s short story “The Faithful,” first published in the April 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, in which artificially evolved Dog-People and Ape-People rebuild civilization following a world war. Like Doogie, these Dog-People and Ape-People imbue their late human masters with semi-divine attributes. We’d be remiss here not to also mention the six novels comprising David Brin’s Uplift Universe and, of course, Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel Planet of the Apes.
Perhaps the most sensitive work in this intelligent animal subgenre, however, is the 1944 novel Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Garcia’s fellow philosopher Olaf Stapledon. The titular long-lived, talking sheepdog has a lot in common with Doogie. Stapledon captures what a wonder it would be to be able to interact with the mind of an intelligent dog and how that dog would be ultimately doomed as an outsider to both human and canine society. Similarly, at his most astute, Doogie realizes he has been undone by humans civilizing him. Rhetorically addressing humanity, he pleads, “Why did you put me all by myself into language, on the threshold of the door of the human but not inside it?” (p. 183).
This questioning follows an episode in which Doogie lives among a bonobo colony he calls “Heaven,” and in which his memory temporarily decays. There he discovers love and sex with a female bonobo he sometimes calls “Doogette.” Because Doogette lacks speech, Doogie is never quite sure if he is making love to the same bonobo or a series of bonobos. When Doogie recovers his memories, he feels no choice but to leave Heaven and continue on a mission he believes Janet has communicated to him via a talking parrot. He feels instant remorse for what he considers an unavoidable decision. He narrates (referring to himself in the second person), “In the forest you have love and happiness, and in civilization you have faithfulness. Why do you have to decide to leave and say farewell to Heaven?” (p. 182).
The mirror image of Doogie is his surrogate human brother of the same age, Donald. Donald was also experimented on by his parents. The details of this come out murkily, because Doogie doesn’t quite understand it and Janet’s narrative doesn’t cop to it. What is clear is that as result of the experiments Donald has a limited vocabulary, a speech impediment, and a limp. In some ways Doogie is like a changeling for Donald, soaking up the love and attention from Janet and their father that is not granted to the human boy. Indeed, as a child Janet expresses that she considers Doogie, not Donald, to be her real brother.
Where Doogie strives to become civilized, Donald embraces nature. It’s here that we must get into the novel’s racist baggage. In so doing, it’s unavoidable for us to get into a major spoiler. So proceed forewarned.
Some background worth noting before diving into this is that, in the centuries before the main narrative of the novel, Africa became depopulated in a world war. The continent has been allowed to become, as the novel repeatedly puts it, “fallow.” Every human in the novel has a European or Asian name. The result is a novel set in Central and Southern Africa in which no explicitly Black people appear. Moreover, both Doogie and Donald interpret Blackness using its historic racist associations with primates and ugliness.
As a child, Donald’s descent toward nature and ever-present animalistic qualities are symbolized by him painting his face black. Doogie remembers, “The little old human has covered the front of his beautiful white face with black” (p. 231). A turning point in Doogie’s childhood comes when Donald becomes very ill and their mother takes him to a space station to receive treatment. On the journey back to the zoo, the spaceship crashes and Donald flees into a gorilla preserve. Their father goes into the preserve to retrieve Donald and reports that a beast simply called “the Animal” has violently killed Donald.
In the following months, the Animal begins liberating his fellows from the zoo. He is able to organize them in intelligent attacks against the zoo, ultimately causing the ethologists to abandon it. At the end of his adventure, Doogie returns to the fallen zoo and encounters the now adult Donald, again with his face painted black, “on all fours, his feet painted black and black like an ape, his hands pink and his mouth red” (p. 232). The Animal was Donald’s blackface alter ego all along. Doogie observes, “He’s big, he’s white, he’s redheaded and handsome like a Donald. But he’s been painted and repainted: he’s black … His face is like wiped-off coal” (p. 234). Doogie concludes, “Donald is trying to look ugly” (p. 235).
It may be tempting to excuse Garcia’s use of blackface because he is not an American. This does not bear up to scrutiny. Like the United States, France has a long and vile history of white performers in blackface demeaning Black people. In the seventeenth century, this took the form of blackface court ballet that justified colonialism and slavery. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, as in the United States, it was common for white minstrels in blackface to belittle Black people as uncivilized characters of fun. Controversies around blackface in France have abounded even into the twenty-first century. Garcia did not write the scenes of Donald “the Animal” in blackface in a vacuum, innocent of a foreign racist tradition. Having the white boy-turned-ape wear blackface is a wilful, self-inflicted wound on what ought to be a good book. It doesn’t seem right to laud or recommend a recent release that carries on like this.
It speaks to Garcia’s craft at building up the surrogate brothers as emotionally resonant characters that the struggle that ensues after their final meeting is powerful reading despite this. Doogie’s faithfulness is such that he is prepared at first to let Donald take his life. Moreover, he realizes their roles ought to have been reversed. In his colorful turn of phrase, Doogie thinks, “I would have liked to live as just a monkey, and for you, as a man, to be the human. Donald, take back my you” (p. 237).
This isn’t to be. Donald is undone, much like Doogie, because he doesn’t fit into either nature or civilization. Donald’s own animal followers rip him apart when they hear him speaking to Doogie like a human. In Memories From the Jungle, there can be no synthesis between civilization and nature. They must be kept totally apart. Humans must live on space stations and animals on the Earth. Otherwise they must destroy each other. Beings such as Doogie and Donald who live in an uncanny borderland between the two are foredoomed.