Speak No Evil
G.L. Trevelyan, Appius and Virginia
Abandoned Bookshop, 240pp, £15.00, ISBN 9781785632181
reviewed by Guy Webster
In the early 1900s, a chimpanzee named Peter toured the world as a vaudevillian performer. Peter would smoke cigars on stage, shake hands, dance, and even speak English. The only word he knew, or had learned, was ‘Ma-ma’. Advertisers soon declared him ‘a monkey [that] made himself into a man’.
Born in 1903, author G.L. Trevelyan would have been six years old when Peter’s performances became the subject of psychological study at the University of Pennsylvania. She would be 14 when, eight years later, Franz Kafka would publish ‘A Report to an Academy’, a short story written by an ape fluent in the English language and inspired by ‘the performing ape Peter’. In Kafka’s story, the act of writing is evidence of an ape that can ‘cast off apehood in five years and gallop through . . . evolution.’ Language illustrates his humanness; language is what affirms his human status and so separates him from his non-human origins.
Thirty pages into G.L. Trevelyan’s novel, Appius and Virginia, Appius says his first word: ‘Ma-Ma’. This word is important. Firstly because Appius is an orang-utan for whom such an expression would not come naturally. Virginia Hutton has adopted Appius with the sole intention of raising him as human, and language is the key through which she hopes to humanise him — to ‘force evolution’, she says. For Virginia, ‘Ma-Ma’ represents the first step in his development. For the reader, it also represents the maternal relationship between them.
Published in 1933, Appius and Virginia was Trevelyan’s much-lauded debut as a novelist. The Times Literary Supplement considered it ‘courageous’; the New York Times described it as ‘an absorbing study’. Yet it has been over 80 years since the novel was last published. Trevelyan died when her Notting Hill home was struck by a bomb in 1941; today, her eight novels are largely forgotten. In re-issuing Trevelyan’s debut novel, the publishing house Abandoned Bookshop hope to renew interest in her writing.
It is difficult to separate Appius and Virginia from the circumstances of its re-issue. Our encounter with Trevelyan’s text is informed, even restricted, by its origins. Perhaps this is why Patricia Beer once declared the ‘fashionable drive to exhume “forgotten women writers”’ a ‘dreary’ project. Do we measure the success of Appius and Virginia against its contemporary relevance? Or is it important to contextualise its value, considering it in relation to Kafka and the ‘performing ape’, or the life and tragic silencing of its author? Such complex questions certainly crowd one’s reading experience.
G.L. Trevelyan was acutely aware of the ways in which language, and our interpretation of it, can be informed by external influences. In Appius and Virginia, these influences stem from presumptions of difference between human and non-human communication. The binary of non-human and human, or human and animal, is used by Trevelyan to investigate processes of signification. Like her modernist forebears, she takes aim at meaning-making, using the communication between animal and human to highlight the gap that exists between a word and what it is presumed to signify.
Like Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’, Appius and Virginia is mainly told from the great ape’s perspective. Before Appius says ‘Ma-Ma’, we have already seen the world as he interprets it. To Appius, a fire is a set of ‘greedy red and yellow tongues’; a window is ‘a square of pale blue’. As readers, we inflict meaning onto these descriptions; we tether Appius’s perception to a signifier — window, fire, etc. It is difficult to imagine that Appius is not thinking in metaphors.
As we learn, Appius’s way of interpreting the world exists outside of the framework of language used to represent him. To Appius, ‘Ma-ma’ does not signify ‘mother’, at least not as we (or Virginia) understand it. The word is simply, and practically, another way to ensure Virginia responds to him. What the word signifies is not instinctual to Appius, nor to the processes of meaning-making with which he interprets the world around him. It is Virginia, and we as readers, that subsume the remark into a human framework of signification.
Appius and Virginia is littered with moments that reveal the disparity between the meaning Virginia intuits in Appius’s words, and the meaning — or even absence of meaning — intended by Appius. Often there is humour in this disparity. Appius, reciting words at Virginia’s instruction, is more interested in finding the most comfortable position to sleep in the nook of her arm. He is performing human language for Virginia, all the while falling into a dreamscape unburdened by the meaning-making she requires of him. Tellingly, Trevelyan’s writing is at its most experimental in describing these dreamscapes. In Trevelyan’s descriptions we see the pursuit of a form of language that pushes against the limits of human frameworks of signification.
The novel ends tragically, with a crisis of signification prompted by language. Appius learns a new word: ‘Ape’. Specifically, he discovers that the word refers to him. He is not human, as he was told. In fact, now he has the language to name what he is. It is a paradox: despite finally grasping human semiotics, Appius is no closer to being human. Rather, he is finally affirmed in his being an ape.
What this reveals to Virginia is her own loneliness. It is the acknowledgement that her relationship to Appius was not as she defined it — as ‘Mama’ and son. The relationship was between a human and a non-human; to Virginia, a human and an animal. Encountering this, Virginia discovers just how incomprehensible Appius is to her. She never attempted to understand the language he had been using. The language we had been reading him use.
In 2011, Project Nim, a documentary about an ape named Nim Chimsky, re-encountered the question of language acquisition in animals. Nim was raised as a human child during the 1970s. The documentary — serendipitously released in the same year as Rise of the Planet of the Apes — was praised for its affecting representation of his attempts to communicate. Yet what was most stirring about the film was not the moments when Nim communicated using sign language, but rather when he learned that his human companions could not understand him if he didn’t. Verbal language remained fundamentally inaccessible — an unbridgeable distance between his world and our own. As Trevelyan observes in Appius and Virginia, ‘words ha[ve] no meaning for him’.
Born in 1903, author G.L. Trevelyan would have been six years old when Peter’s performances became the subject of psychological study at the University of Pennsylvania. She would be 14 when, eight years later, Franz Kafka would publish ‘A Report to an Academy’, a short story written by an ape fluent in the English language and inspired by ‘the performing ape Peter’. In Kafka’s story, the act of writing is evidence of an ape that can ‘cast off apehood in five years and gallop through . . . evolution.’ Language illustrates his humanness; language is what affirms his human status and so separates him from his non-human origins.
Thirty pages into G.L. Trevelyan’s novel, Appius and Virginia, Appius says his first word: ‘Ma-Ma’. This word is important. Firstly because Appius is an orang-utan for whom such an expression would not come naturally. Virginia Hutton has adopted Appius with the sole intention of raising him as human, and language is the key through which she hopes to humanise him — to ‘force evolution’, she says. For Virginia, ‘Ma-Ma’ represents the first step in his development. For the reader, it also represents the maternal relationship between them.
Published in 1933, Appius and Virginia was Trevelyan’s much-lauded debut as a novelist. The Times Literary Supplement considered it ‘courageous’; the New York Times described it as ‘an absorbing study’. Yet it has been over 80 years since the novel was last published. Trevelyan died when her Notting Hill home was struck by a bomb in 1941; today, her eight novels are largely forgotten. In re-issuing Trevelyan’s debut novel, the publishing house Abandoned Bookshop hope to renew interest in her writing.
It is difficult to separate Appius and Virginia from the circumstances of its re-issue. Our encounter with Trevelyan’s text is informed, even restricted, by its origins. Perhaps this is why Patricia Beer once declared the ‘fashionable drive to exhume “forgotten women writers”’ a ‘dreary’ project. Do we measure the success of Appius and Virginia against its contemporary relevance? Or is it important to contextualise its value, considering it in relation to Kafka and the ‘performing ape’, or the life and tragic silencing of its author? Such complex questions certainly crowd one’s reading experience.
G.L. Trevelyan was acutely aware of the ways in which language, and our interpretation of it, can be informed by external influences. In Appius and Virginia, these influences stem from presumptions of difference between human and non-human communication. The binary of non-human and human, or human and animal, is used by Trevelyan to investigate processes of signification. Like her modernist forebears, she takes aim at meaning-making, using the communication between animal and human to highlight the gap that exists between a word and what it is presumed to signify.
Like Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’, Appius and Virginia is mainly told from the great ape’s perspective. Before Appius says ‘Ma-Ma’, we have already seen the world as he interprets it. To Appius, a fire is a set of ‘greedy red and yellow tongues’; a window is ‘a square of pale blue’. As readers, we inflict meaning onto these descriptions; we tether Appius’s perception to a signifier — window, fire, etc. It is difficult to imagine that Appius is not thinking in metaphors.
As we learn, Appius’s way of interpreting the world exists outside of the framework of language used to represent him. To Appius, ‘Ma-ma’ does not signify ‘mother’, at least not as we (or Virginia) understand it. The word is simply, and practically, another way to ensure Virginia responds to him. What the word signifies is not instinctual to Appius, nor to the processes of meaning-making with which he interprets the world around him. It is Virginia, and we as readers, that subsume the remark into a human framework of signification.
Appius and Virginia is littered with moments that reveal the disparity between the meaning Virginia intuits in Appius’s words, and the meaning — or even absence of meaning — intended by Appius. Often there is humour in this disparity. Appius, reciting words at Virginia’s instruction, is more interested in finding the most comfortable position to sleep in the nook of her arm. He is performing human language for Virginia, all the while falling into a dreamscape unburdened by the meaning-making she requires of him. Tellingly, Trevelyan’s writing is at its most experimental in describing these dreamscapes. In Trevelyan’s descriptions we see the pursuit of a form of language that pushes against the limits of human frameworks of signification.
The novel ends tragically, with a crisis of signification prompted by language. Appius learns a new word: ‘Ape’. Specifically, he discovers that the word refers to him. He is not human, as he was told. In fact, now he has the language to name what he is. It is a paradox: despite finally grasping human semiotics, Appius is no closer to being human. Rather, he is finally affirmed in his being an ape.
What this reveals to Virginia is her own loneliness. It is the acknowledgement that her relationship to Appius was not as she defined it — as ‘Mama’ and son. The relationship was between a human and a non-human; to Virginia, a human and an animal. Encountering this, Virginia discovers just how incomprehensible Appius is to her. She never attempted to understand the language he had been using. The language we had been reading him use.
In 2011, Project Nim, a documentary about an ape named Nim Chimsky, re-encountered the question of language acquisition in animals. Nim was raised as a human child during the 1970s. The documentary — serendipitously released in the same year as Rise of the Planet of the Apes — was praised for its affecting representation of his attempts to communicate. Yet what was most stirring about the film was not the moments when Nim communicated using sign language, but rather when he learned that his human companions could not understand him if he didn’t. Verbal language remained fundamentally inaccessible — an unbridgeable distance between his world and our own. As Trevelyan observes in Appius and Virginia, ‘words ha[ve] no meaning for him’.