Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
"Planet of the Apes" is a science fiction novel by Pierre Boulle, set in a future where humans have lost their dominant status and are subjugated by intelligent apes. The story follows Ulysse Mérou, a French journalist who embarks on an expedition to a distant planet that resembles Earth but is inhabited by advanced apes and primitive humans. During a journey that involves time dilation, Ulysse and his companions discover a society where apes have evolved to be the ruling species, while humans have regressed to a primitive state.
As Ulysse navigates this new world, he must contend with the hierarchical structure among the ape species—orangutans controlling scientific knowledge, chimpanzees being creative thinkers, and gorillas handling physical labor. Ulysse's intelligence captivates a female chimpanzee named Zira, who believes he comes from another world. His struggle for recognition and coexistence leads him to advocate for interspecies cooperation.
Boulle's narrative raises questions about evolution, civilization, and the nature of intelligence, while reflecting on contemporary societal issues. The novel culminates in a shocking twist that reveals the potential for similar degeneration on Earth, challenging the reader to reconsider the fate of humanity. "Planet of the Apes" has inspired various adaptations and critical analyses, making it a significant work in both literary and cultural contexts.
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Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
First published:La Planète des singes, 1963 (English translation, 1963)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Science fiction
Time of plot: 2500 to at least 3200 c.e.
Locale: Outer space, France, and a planet orbiting Betelgeuse
Principal characters
Jinn andPhyllis , a young couple space-surfing on holidayUlysse Mérou , an obscure journalistProfessor Antelle , a wealthy scientist and inventorArthur Levain , a brilliant young physicist, assistant to AntelleNova, a beautiful, naked young woman who is part of a band of wild humansZira , a female chimpanzee scientist performing experiments on humansZaius , the pompous orangutan in charge of experiments on humansCornelius , Zira’s fiance, a brilliant chimpanzee archaeologistSirius , the precocious child of Nova and Ulysse
The Story:
Some time after 3200 c.e., Jinn and Phyllis are on a recreational ride in their specially designed spacecraft when they notice a bottle drifting near them. Inside it they find a long message written in “the language of the Earth.” They are startled to find that it repeatedly refers to humans as intelligent beings. Ulysse Mérou, a young French journalist, wrote the message, which relates the story of his experiences.
In 2500, Ulysse accompanies the wealthy Professor Antelle and Levain on a privately funded expedition to a planet of the star Betelguese. The passengers on Antelle’s spaceship will experience the round-trip journey as taking two years in each direction. However—because of the relativistic effects of stopping at the destination planet and turning around to come home—when they return, about seven hundred years will have passed on Earth.
The travelers reach their destination safely. The atmosphere seems breathable. Exiting their craft, the men soon see a small human footprint on the shore of a lake. A gorgeous, naked young woman appears and dives into the water. The explorers name her Nova. She fears the men until they remove their clothes. Then, she frolics near them but seems unable to speak, and she kills their pet chimpanzee.
A band of wild humans peers furtively from the underbrush. Finding the earthmen’s clothes on the bank, they tear them into shreds and damage the explorers’ landing craft beyond repair. The savages do not harm the explorers themselves, but soon a hunting party of clothed, talking, civilized apes appears. The apes wantonly shoot many of the humans and capture others, including the explorers. The survivors are taken to zoos or to research labs.
Ulysse is placed in the same cage as Nova and eventually mates with her. He displays such intelligence that the lab director Zira is platonically drawn to him. They gradually learn each other’s language, and Zira comes to believe his claim to have arrived from another planet. On her planet, humans are bestial. Zaius, however, insists that Ulysse’s apparent cleverness derives from tricks learned by rote during an earlier period of captivity. When Ulysse addresses Zaius and Zira by name, Zaius insists that Ulysse is merely parroting what he hears.
Ulysse learns that each of the three advanced species on the Planet of the Apes has separate talents and functions. The orangutans rule “official science” as figureheads. They are pedantic, stuffy, narrow-minded, and obsessed with honors and distinctions. The chimpanzees are brilliant, sensitive, and creative. The gorillas perform jobs requiring brute strength, such as being hunters and guards, but they also serve as organizers, office managers, and businessmen.
Zira obtains permission to take Ulysse out into the city, but he must go naked and wear a muzzle, leash, and chain. He is impatient to be free, but Zira warns him that Zaius is extremely powerful and wishes to send Ulysse to the brain lab, where experimental operations would transform him into a cripple or a vegetable. Ulysse’s only hope is to unmask his rational nature in a formal speech, in ape language, when the national biological congress meets in a month. Members of the public and many journalists will attend, and the power of public opinion alone can defeat Zaius.
Zira helps Ulysse prepare by slipping him a flashlight and several books in ape language, which he conceals in his cage. On a trip to the zoo, Ulysse encounters Antelle, who has been reduced to a subhuman state by his captivity and is unable to speak or recognize his former friend. At the congress, Ulysse delivers a humble, impassioned, persuasive appeal for interspecies cooperation. Afterward, he faints from the strain but is freed, clothed, and accepted into the ape community.
Now a lab assistant, Ulysse tries in vain to teach captive wild humans to talk. Cornelius takes him to an archaeological excavation, which shows evidence that a civilization as advanced as the ape’s own once existed there more than ten thousand years earlier. A doll in human form, which is clothed and which talks, suggests that the ancient civilization may have been human.
Ulysse learns that Nova has become pregnant. If the baby seems to have intelligence superior to that of an animal, it and Ulysse will be seen by the apes as highly dangerous: Such intelligence in his offspring would be an indication that it is possible for Ulysse to breed a human super-race to challenge ape supremacy. Father and child would surely be killed. Meanwhile, Ulysse is taken to see gruesome experiments in the brain surgery lab. One female subject, however, has recovered ancestral memories. She recites them in a trance, telling how humans gradually degenerated until their ape slaves took over and the humans fled into the jungle.
Nova gives birth. Because all humans look alike to the other apes, Zira and Cornelius arrange to save Ulysse and his family by secretly substituting them for other human experimental subjects who are to be sent aloft in a space shuttle. Cornelius’s friends have detected the location of Ulysse’s mother ship and programmed the shuttle to rendezvous with it. Zira is strongly moved at Ulysse’s departure, but cannot bring herself to kiss him good-bye because she finds him so unattractive.
The escape succeeds. On the voyage home, Nova learns to talk, and her child Sirius displays extraordinary intelligence. However, when the family reaches Paris and lands at Orly airport, the officer who meets their craft is a gorilla. Evidently, humans on Earth have degenerated also, as they did on the Planet of the Apes, and Ulysse must again flee into outer space.
Jinn and Phyllis finish reading Ulysse’s narrative. Jinn persuades Phyllis that the idea of intelligent humans is too absurd to take seriously. As the couple returns to their home planet, Phyllis takes out her compact and powders “her dear little chimpanzee muzzle.” Capable only of imitating human inventions on the Planet of the Apes at the time of Ulysse’s visit there, the chimpanzees have now become capable of creating inventions of their own, and apes may have conquered the entire galaxy.
Bibliography
Greene, Eric. “Planet of the Apes” as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. Analyzes the American film adaptation of Boulle’s novel, as well as the film’s four sequels, television spin-offs, and further episodes published in Adventure Comics. Compares these various American texts to the original French novel.
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. Written by a leading theorist of the construction of the human/nonhuman dichotomy. Chapter 7, “Apes in Eden, Apes in Space: Mothering as a Scientist for National Geographic,” and Chapter 16 “Reprise,” discuss interspecies communication; the issues it raises concerning human sexual, gender, and racial identity; and animal rights.
McHugh, Susan Bridget. “Horses in Blackface: Visualizing Race as Species Difference in Planet of the Apes.” South Atlantic Review 65, no. 2 (Spring, 2000): 40-72. An alert, broadly based cultural critique, focused on how the American film version problematizes and blurs the boundaries between genders, species, and races.
Porter, Laurence M. “Text of Anxiety, Text of Desire: Boulle’s Planète des singes as Popular Culture,” The French Review 68, no. 4 (March, 1995): 704-714. Focuses on the French novel, while contrasting it with the American film, and emphasizes how Boulle, without being himself a racist, exploits France’s anxiety over losing its colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia between 1954 and 1962 by surreptitiously representing people of color as various species of apes.