The Ape

by Nathan Gale

Russell Edson (1935 -) has and still confounds his poetic audience with both the content and form of his prose poems. His language combines a whimsical fabulist prose with often Freudian content, that lends to the subconscious dream-like scheme the poems seem to follow. The background of each poem is based in a parallel reality to our own where fantasy and imagination seem to be the base for reality. Like in a dream state nothing is for sure or seems to be solid, yet everything in your dream is perceived as being real; the same occurs in Edsons poems. In which nothing is real yet everything is recognizable, making them quiet surrealistic in quality and theme. Indeed, like a dream each poem begins from some sort of middle ground, never truly from any solid beginning or introduction.

In the poem “Ape” we are immediately shoved into the story with the intro line: “You haven’t finished your ape, said mother to father....” We are given no narrative background or backstory of the characters in question, we are just dropped or parachuted into the story where we must gather from what Edson shows us rather then tells us. In the “Ape” most context is perceived in a series of images that are arranged like events, the dialog follows this rhythm as well, yet again like in a dream we are never really sure where the story’s point of view is originated from. In the poem we are seeing it from the child it seems as the characters are described as “mother” and “father”, the experience of the narrator itself seems not to be the focus but rather what the viewer is narrating.

“Ape” is a detail of a Freudian slip, where the dialog of the father never prompts any response from the mother about her relationship outside of eating and cooking the ape, but rather she lets slip the true nature of her relationship with the Ape. As she sates:” How dare you insinuate that I see the ape as anything more the simple meat, screamed mother....Are you saying that I am in love with this vicious creature? That I would submit my female opening to this brute?” Edson is relating to us how a commonplace act “simple meat” becomes something the mother has grown fond of in a way that is both carnal in the way that she has perverse desires towards it and relishes in its taste. The ape has become more then meat, yet still remains meat in her sexual delinquency. A Freudian take on how simple objects, like the poker in Robert Coover’s story The Magic Poker, it becomes a symbol of our own subconscious lust. How everything becomes a facade simply for carnal identity that is masked by its common appearance in our civilized lives.

Again the poem acts like a dream where the subconscious overtakes out ability to control ourselves in our dream-state. The ape symbolizes two things in the poem, the wives civilized monogamy of serving the husband the same meal each night, as well as the strange choice of meat, could symbolize the instinctual primitive side of human evolution, the Id. In which the wife reduces herself to a sexual encounter with the animal itself, as it resembles a part of her self that is instinctual and primitive in nature. This nature seems to be her Id surfacing amongst her civilized distinctly “human” aspects of her Ego, and is symbolized by the ape and the pleasure she receives from it.