Tarzan and Helen Keller I’m thinking about Tarzan (Rice Burrows, 1912) how Rice Burrows gives him an introduction to the written word aged 10 having no context, language, visual language, never having heard human words or seen them written down, not hearing, speaking or reading language. Tarzan finds alphabets and primers intended for himself but lost in a jungle cabin and discovered a decade later by the curious child Tarzan, who tries to pick the drawings off the page and thinks words are bugs. P48, ‘of course he had never before seen print, or ever had spoken with any living thing which had the remotest idea that such a thing as a written language existed, nor ever had he seen anyone reading’ (Rice Burrows, 1912, p50) ‘his little face was tense in study, for he had partially grasped, in a hazy nebulous way, the rudiments of a thought which was destined to prove the key and the solution to the puzzling problem of the strange little bugs (writing)’ p56 It was a ...
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