YZUR (1)
By:
September 11, 2025
Inspired no doubt by Richard Lynch Garner’s widely publicized 1900 study Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language, Lugones’ proto-sf story about the secret of chimpanzee intelligence (and the cruelty of science) was first published in the author’s 1906 collection Las Fuerzas Extrañas (Strange Forces). Translation by Carlos Costa and Georges Dodds for ERBzine.com. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize an excerpt for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
I bought the ape at a circus’ bankruptcy sale.
The first time it occurred to me to attempt the experiment committed to posterity in these lines was one afternoon while reading — I do not recall where —, that Java’s natives attribute monkeys’ lack of articulate language to abstention, not incapacity. “They do not speak,” they say, “so that we do not make them work”.
Though nothing very profound at its origin, this concept preoccupied me until I enounced the following anthropological postulate: monkeys were men who for some reason or other stopped speaking. This resulted in the atrophy of their organs of phonation and the brain’s language centers, virtually suppressing the link between the latter and the former, fixing the species’ language to an inarticulate cry, and resulting in the descent of the primitive human into animality.
Of course if one went and demonstrated this, one would have explained all the quirks that make monkeys such singular creatures. There could be only one possible demonstration: to restore monkeys’ capacity for speech.
In the meantime I had gone ’round the world with mine, drawing close to him through our shared travels and adventures. In Europe he drew attention, and had I wished to I could have provided him the social exposure of a Consul; but such a burlesque scene would have ill-suited my businessman’s sense of etiquette.
Working on the basis of my fixation regarding monkey language, I exhausted all the bibliographical sources concerning the question, with no appreciable results. All I knew — and that with great certainty — was that there was no scientific reason why monkeys do not speak. It took five years of ruminations to convince myself of this.
Yzur (a name whose origin I never could discover, as his previous owner had not known it either), Yzur was certainly a remarkable animal. His training by the circus, while reduced almost entirely to mimicry, had significantly developed his faculties; and this was what most strongly incited me to use him as a testing ground for my — in all appearances — crazy theory.
On the other hand, it is well known that among the monkeys the chimpanzee (which Yzur was) carries the best brain and is one of the most docile, which increased my chances. Whenever I saw him walking on two feet, with his hands to his shoulders to keep his balance, with the look of a drunken sailor, the conviction of his lengthy humanity invigorated in me.
Truly there is no reason why the monkey cannot have fully articulate speech. Their natural language, that is to say, the set of shouts through which they communicate to their fellows, is sufficiently diverse. The monkey’s larynx, while quite distinct from that of the human being, is not as much so as that of parrots, which clearly can speak. As to their brains, the comparison with that of the latter banishes all doubts. It is important to remember that while the brain of the mentally challenged is also rudimentary, some cretins can pronounce some words.
Regarding Broca’s convolution, it clearly depends of the total development of the brain; besides which it has not been absolutely proven that it houses the centres of language. While it is the location established as likeliest through anatomical studies, the contradictory facts are of course incontestable.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
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