Storytelling Apes. Mary Sanders Pollock
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Goodall and the children’s literature that shaped her can be conceptualized as carriers of a very old and powerful meme complex. In addition to her important discoveries, it is perhaps Goodall’s participation in the quest romance memeplex that seems to strike such a powerful chord in contemporary culture. Nonhuman animals need a hero, and in this time of awful environmental challenges, so do the rest of us. Goodall is not simply an adventurous scientist but also a model of kindness to and respect for individual animals. That interest in individuals and belief in individuality in nonhuman species determined Goodall’s deliberate reinvention of primatological field protocol and has remained a key component of her thinking during the second part of her long career, as she has shifted from science and natural history to environmental activism and animal advocacy.
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle is a naturalist, teacher, and leader who saves humans and animals from disease, ignorance, and natural disasters. In this fictional character, the figure of Darwin as a hero of science intersects with the tradition of the questing hero of romance. And it is not surprising that Lofting’s stories prefigure the present-day cultural phenomenon of Jane Goodall, not only as she presents herself in her writing but also as she has appeared in various media representations: a tall, blond, youthful woman with a ponytail, dressed in khaki and sturdy shoes, making her way through the forest and touching, following, or exchanging glances with the animals she studies and serves (or more recently, in a lab coat, comforting caged primates used for biomedical research). So powerful is this new recombinant meme (recombinant partly because the hero of primatology is a woman) that, in popular primatology and sometimes even the scholarly literature, many scientists who have come along since Goodall have had to position themselves as followers and imitators, or to deliberately and explicitly distance themselves from this model.
To reconstruct the Darwin-Dolittle-Goodall hero genealogy, it is useful to glance back briefly at the history of the quest romance, one of the oldest literary forms in Western culture. The best-known quest romances are those of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, characters who came into cultural prominence a little before 1200, when their exploits were described in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. These characters and others like them dominated the popular imagination in Western Europe for about four centuries. In her history of the English quest romance, Helen Cooper argues that after the romance plays of Shakespeare, such as The Tempest (1610), the meme of the lonely questing hero dropped out of mainstream literature for a while, but it did not die out. It was simply transferred into a different alembic—folk culture and stories for children. It also appeared in an occasional religious allegory quest on the model of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and, in the last century or a little more, science fiction.3
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