is still a living genre, and, as Vanessa Woods’s Bonobo Handshake (2010) demonstrates, new discoveries are still being made about primates in locations where they evolved. But the planet is in danger from deforestation, pollution, human overpopulation, loss of biodiversity and ecological balance, and climate change. Most primate habitat happens to be in environmental hot spots—that is, locations where these problems are expressed most dramatically. Unless the current economic and geopolitical trends that destroy primate habitat are reversed, most nonhuman primates may soon exist only in zoos, laboratories, and reserves. If that happens, field narratives such as those I discuss in this book will be replaced by other kinds of stories. As wild populations go, so goes the literary genre about them. The reverse may also be true.
Some environmentalists complain that it is easier to inspire concern for monkeys (and other charismatic megafauna) than for monkey habitat. It would be nice if humans were more farsighted. However, as Darwin suggested, sympathy for a being like oneself, which is written into human evolutionary history, may be the root of ethics and morality. So if apes, monkeys, and prosimians are saved in landscapes where they evolved simply because humans somehow identify with them, then the forests and forest fragments that serve as the lungs of the planet will be preserved; the fresh water that is its lifeblood will be in greater supply; and global warming can perhaps be reduced or stalled.
Any story that inspires action based on sympathy and understanding is, in practical terms, a good story. The rich narratives of field primatology have such potential. If recent literary and scientific theorists are to be believed, the telling of stories is encoded in human DNA, and, since primates resemble one another so much, it makes perfect sense that those who spend their time with our next of kin would write stories about them, in the same way that we humans tell stories about members of our own species. These stories are an important part of both modern science and contemporary literature.
The stories I examine here are only a sample of the available primatology narratives (indeed, many of them exist only within the extremely popular genre of wildlife documentary). I have chosen these books because they suggest how primatologists adapt existing literary forms to convey their particular experiences, which are as varied as the primates they study. Not surprisingly, the generic development of primatology narratives roughly parallels the development of narrative forms in Western history, from the classical to the postmodern. These story forms seem so inevitable that one is tempted to say that humans only had to develop speech in order to tell them, and they make powerful rhetorical statements by engaging and challenging their readers.
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
