On Monkeys and Japanese: Mimicry and Anastrophe in Orientalist Representation

A number of lines of investigation are presented from a current project into the implications of Orientalism in the stereotypical representation of Japan through the analysis of the discourses of the paradox and inverse civilisation, and the consideration of the animalisation strategies of the Other in the travel literature of Pierre Loti and the fiction of Pierre Boulle.

1. "It was a strange and eventually tragic happenstance of nature that the Negro's homeland was the habitat of the animal which in appearance most resembles man. The animal called 'orang-outang' by contemporaries (actually the chimpanzee) was native to those parts of western Africa where the early slave trade was heavily concentrated. Though Englishmen were acquainted (for the most part vicariously) with monkeys and baboons, they were unfamiliar with tailless apes who walked about like men. Accordingly, it happened that Englishmen were introduced to the anthropoid apes and to Negroes at the same time and in the same place. The startlingly human appearance and movements of the 'ape' -a generic term though often used as a synonym for the 'orang outang'-aroused some curious speculations" (W.D. Jordan, 1968, pp. 28-29). 2. A scientific context that it was felt had found in the idea of race a solid base for human classification. Linné, Systema Naturae (1735); Bufón, Histoire naturelle (1749); Blumenbach, De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa Liber (1775); Cuvier, Le règne animal distribué d'après son organisation (1816). 3. Tarde defines imitation as "celui d'une action à distance d'un esprit sur un autre, et d'une action qui consiste dans une reproduction quasi photographique d'un cliché cérébral par la plaque sensible d'un autre cerveau […] Le psychologique s'explique par le social, précisément parce que le social naît du psychologique […] J'entends par imitation toute empreinte de photographie inter-spirituelle, pour ainsi dire qu'elle soit voulue ou non, passive ou active" (G. Tarde, 1993, p. viii). 4. "Il y a imitation quand un acte a pour antécédent immédiat la représentation d'un acte semblable, antérieurement accompli par autrui, sans que, entre cette représentation et l'exécution, s'intercale aucune opération intellectuelle, explicite ou implicite, portant sur les caractères intrinsèques de l'acte reproduit." (E. Durkheim, 1930, p. 115). 5. It was in his study into body techniques where Mauss set out this idea: "Et je conclus que l'on ne pouvait avoir une vue claire de tous ces faits, de la course, de la nage, etc., si on ne faisait pas intervenir une triple considération au lieu d'une unique considération, qu'elle soit mécanique et physique, comme une théorie anatomique et physiologique de la marche, ou qu'elle soit au contraire psychologique ou sociologique. C'est le triple point de vue, celui de 'l'homme total', qui est nécessaire". In the imitative act, Mauss recognises a triple dimension : social, psychological and biological. "Mais le tout, l'ensemble est conditionné par les trois éléments indissolublement mêlés" (M. Mauss, 1993, p. 369).
(W. D. Jordan, 1968), the image of the monkey constituted a fertile metaphor for both justifying the colonial enterprise and denying its consequences. 1 Two fundamental elements supported this nuclear position: on the one hand, evolutionary primitivism as a symmetric and inverse characteristic to the civilising superiority of the coloniser; and on the other, its pedagogical potential in reforming and transforming the colonised. Imitation of the monkey was therefore an archetype of the natural immaturity of the Other and at the same time a first-class instrument for its correction, the medium whereby civilisation was possible even among the clumsiest and slowest of its beneficiaries.
Since the mid-19th century, imitation has been a key concept in the debate on cultural evolution, articulated at the confluence of the natural and social sciences. A century before, Linné's racial classification had established the bases of evolutionary study with the pioneering link between monkeys and humans. 2 Lamarck's evolution model being supplanted by Darwin's conception of natural selection would allow for the identification of imitation as a learning and adaptation strategy common to all animals. Following in the wake of evolution theses, works by Romanes from comparative psychology, the ethnic psychology of Letourneau or the psychology of peoples and the masses of Le Bon would contribute to the establishment of homologies between primatism, primitivism, mental underdevelopment and infancy (N. Dias, 2005). At the end of the century, Les lois de l'imitation (1890), by Gabriel Tarde, 3 would evaluate behaviour whose potential of conveyance would constitute a cause célèbre in the intellectual debate with Émile Durkheim 4 (1897). Only the genius of Marcel Mauss (1936), after the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, would achieve a complex integration of sociology, psychology and biology into the cultural reflection on imitative practices. 5 Yet the representational resorts of imitation had been deeply established in the imagination of colonial domination. The image Blai Guarné Iss. 10 | May 2008 iSSn 1575-2275 http://digithum.uoc.edu Universitat Oberta de Catalunya of the Negro, of the coolie, of the oriental, was called to carry out a process of reform in which the mimesis of the coloniser would be seen as the last of its consequences, when in reality it would constitute the first and most persistent of its threats.
In the colonial system, the universal dignity of the coloniser was only seen in relation to the natural inferiority of the Other in the civilising process. It was a relationship founded on the maintenance of the bonne distance (E. Saada, 2005), the manifest distinction between the reformer and the reformed, the officer and the subordinate, the original and the copy, as a means of making the latter an "authorized version of Otherness" (H. K. Bhabha, 1984). An impossible effort for "similarity", to "become another" (A. Memmi, 1971, p. 186-189), turned the colonised into a subordinate copy of the coloniser, rushing them into the imbalance of a "non-existence" (F. Fanon, 1993, p. 139) trapped in the constant renunciation of their own identity. 6 Paradoxically, the colonial discursivity contained the germ of its own subversion. Beyond its more proclamatory values, the reform of the colonised was only efficient on the surface, enclosed in a level of mechanicism that, avoiding their mutation into an equal, kept them in a state of "pure colonised" (A. Memmi, 1971, p. 146). 7 Yet the imitative practice implied an uncontrollable competence in use, diluting the difference between imitator and imitated. The trop bien imitation (E. Saada, 2005) of the coloniser by the colonised would then be revealed as a more worrying and disturbing effect than its own failure. If, on the one hand, it tested the eclosion of a system that denied the colonised the originality that they took on as their own, on the Other, it undermined producing a perturbing scenario: the dismantling of their privileges. Thus, imitation became in turn "un vecteur essentiel de l'assimilation des indigènes et une menace pour la reproduction des identités européennes outre-mer" (E. Saada, 2005, p. 29).
Beyond the untiring mimesis of the coloniser, the colonised, recognisable Other insofar as a "subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (H. K. Bhabha, 1995, p. 86), thus integrated a menacing presence in the mimetic tension with the Westerner. 8 A disturbingly close resemblance to similarity made him a subject of ambivalence between mimesis and mimicry, the reply and the replication, the copy and the parody. Ultimately, the imitation of the metropolitan meant a strange victory that presaged an inexorable defeat. 9 In this context, the image of the monkey would contribute to re-establishing the confidence of a discourse that found in "pantomime simiesque" (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 124) a fruitful means for reducing anxiety at the successful metropolitisation of the colonised.
Essentialising Japan in terms of a particular, unusual and paradoxical characterisation constituted a productive strategy 6. We can see in this exercise the violence that makes up the mimetic desire, in the sense put forward by R. Girard (1978). 7. As "être de carence" (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 148), "hors de l'histoire et hors de la cité" (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 129). "La véritable raison, la raison première de la plupart de ses carences est celle-ci : le colonialiste n'a jamais décidé de transformer la colonie à l'image de la métropole , et le colonisé à son image. Il ne peut admettre une telle adéquation, qui détruirait le principe de ses privilèges" (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 106). 8. An uneasy partial presence (H. K. Bhabha, 1995, p. 88) that plunged the superiority of the coloniser into the bottomless mimetic vertigo referred to by M. Taussig (1993, p. 237). 9. In a similar sense, B. Fuchs (2003) analysed how imitation eroded imperial power from the start of European colonialism: "By exposing the constructedness of homogeneity, challenging and ironizing narratives of difference, and effectively enabling subjects to cross boundaries, mimesis introduces or reserves cultural variance under the guise of similarity" (B. Fuchs, 2003, p. 166).

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Iss. 10 | May 2008 iSSn 1575-2275 http://digithum.uoc.edu Universitat Oberta de Catalunya to introduce its entity into the political order articulated by Orientalism "as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (E. Said, 1980, p. 3). An order based on the non-Western/Western, pre-modern/modern, particular/universal dichotomy (N. Sakai, 1988), 10 which configures the "non-Western" from the lack of something which defines it negatively compared with Western completeness (B. Turner, 1994). 11 Japan would therefore integrate an Orient that would be Orientalised "not only because it was discovered to be 'Oriental' in all those ways considered common place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be -that is, submitted to being-made Oriental" (E. Said, 1980, p. 5-6). In this political project, discussions on paradox and inverse civilisation (B. Guarné, 2007b) constituted seminal representational strategies 12 in the characterisation of Japan.

From Japanese paradox to Japanese oxymoron
The essential language of paradox was historically a unique means in the Western representation of Japan, covering the different levels that occurred between contradiction and antagonism. The first chronicles of the Jesuit missionaries already bear witness to the difficulty in accommodating their experience to the premises of the Savage/Civilised dichotomy that constituted the classification of the world in the 16th century.
The society discovered offered many of the elements attributed to the savagery of the infidel: geographical remoteness, strange customs, "aberrant" and, evidently, ignorant of the "true faith", but their presence was paradoxical in a culture sensitive to the arts and learning, divided into hierarchical forms of government, with religious institutions and a profound sense of honour. Elements of civilisation exclusively assumed by Christian Europe. The cultural complexity of the discovery and, fundamentally, the ability of its chroniclers to tell of it, presented the image of Japan as a paradox, or indeed, an oxymoron, going as far as establishing in its characterisation the particular forms of this discourse.
Traditionally used in the description of non-European peoples, 13 the resource of the counter position would therefore acquire specific characteristics in the idiosyncratic representation of Japan. Both the contrarieties highlighted by Alessandro Valignano 14 (1583, 1592 and the contradictions recorded by Luís Fróis 15 (1585) emphasised the idea of Japan as the opposite to Europe, but not necessarily "savage" or "barbaric". Beyond these notions, Japan was only decipherable in its antagonism with Europe. The structure of the counter position would therefore contribute to shaping "the Japanese" into a mirror image, the opposite of "the European". From that point on, Western imagination of the exotic would represent Japan as a cultural anastrophe, between the fascination for the peculiar and the unease at the equivalent.
It is significant that this discourse should be reproduced throughout time. Ultimately, the establishment of a template of formal correspondences between Europe and Japan implied the recognition of a relationship of equivalence, something that sensitively bordered on the weighing up of the central position of the West in the world. Following the forced opening-up of Japan in the 19th century, the homologies were difficult to combine with the geography of imperial domination in the spirit of "the West and the rest" (S. Hall, 1992). In this context, the impossibility of capturing a reality that stubbornly eluded the imagination of colonial domination would lead to absolute estrangement. The celebrated topsy-turvydom entry of the work Things Japanese (1890), by Basil Hall Chamberlain, demonstrated the intellectual consecration of this extravagant characterisation. 16 As it cannot be 10. "After all, what we normally call universalism is a particularism thinking itself as universalism, it is doubtful whether universalism could ever exist otherwise" (N. Sakai, 1997, p. 157). 11. B. Guarné (2007a). 12. Particular forms of representation set out in systems of truth, in the Foucaultian sense, involved in the stereotypical construction of the Other. 13. As J. Bestard et al. (1987) explain, from the 15th century on, European seafarers and members of religious orders had used the anti-ethical formula of the us/them in their descriptions. The structure of the counter position allowed decoding in close terms of the peoples discovered by means of a dual distortion, which while condemning the differences as deviations tried to discover similarities, without ceasing to view these societies as "savage". 14. "Tienen también otros ritos y costumbres tan diferentes de todas las otras naciones, que parece que estudiaron de propósito cómo no se conforman con ninguna gente. No se puede imaginar lo que acerca de esto pasa, porque realmente se puede decir que Japón es un mundo al revés de cómo corre en Europa" (A. Valignano, 1954, p. 33). 15. "La gente de Europa se deleita con el pescado asado y cocido; los japoneses huelgan mucho más de comérselo crudo […] Nuestros cerezos dan muchas y hermosas cerezas, los de Japón dan muy pequeñas y amargas cerezas, y muy hermosas flores que los japoneses estiman […]Las [mujeres] de Europa trabajan con todos los medios y artificios para blanquearse los dientes; las japonesas trabajan con hierro y vinagre para hacer la boca y los dientes negros […] Nosotros enterramos nuestros difuntos; los japoneses en su mayor parte los queman" (L. Fróis, 2003, pp. 121-130). 16. "The whole method of treating horses is the opposite of ours […] They carry babies, not in their arms, but on theirs backs […] Japanese keys turn in instead of out, and Japanese carpenters saw and plane towards, instead of away from, themselves […] When building a house, the Japanese construct the roof first […] Japanese women needle their thread instead of threading their needle, and that instead of running the needle through the cloth, they hold it still and run the cloth upon it. Another lady, long resident in Tôkyô, says that the impulse of her Japanese maids is always to sew on cuffs, frills, and other similar things, topsy-turvy and inside out. If that is not the ne plus ultra of contrariety, what is? […] Strangest of all, after bath the Japanese dry themselves with a damp towel!" (B. H. Chamberlain, 1905, pp. 481-482).

Blai Guarné
Iss. 10 | May 2008 iSSn 1575-2275 http://digithum.uoc.edu Universitat Oberta de Catalunya adjusted to the classification order, Japan would be represented as a paradox as both the sublime and the grotesque seemed possible.

Between metaphor and reality
The work of French writer Pierre Loti 17 constitutes a paradigmatic expression of the literary conformation of this imaginary. 18 Loti, l'enchanteur du japonisme, is responsible for some of the longest lasting passages in the stereotypical characterisation of Japan.
In his works we find, among others, the image of the Japanese woman as a dragonfly and a butterfly, origin of endless subsequent adaptations. 19 The Japan described by Loti is the scenario of a continuous déjà vu, 20 a country "of enchantment and magic", of tea houses, lanterns, parasols and paper kites, smoking pipes and iced liqueurs of essences of flowers, the "surprising home of all the extravagancies" immersed in the intense "murmur of the cicadas". In his works Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and Japoneries d'automne (1889), 21 the images of "the West" and "the East" shape the sensualist description of a landscape dominated by the narcissistic view of the European. A view expressed in concrete narrative forms that would inscribe Japan in the imaginary categories of Orientalism. 22 As metaphoric resources, the obsessive articulation of the diminutive 23 and the sustained practice of animalisation will confine "the Japanese" to the "Oriental" pole of the West/East equation. This equation is represented in specific episodes as the «morganatic marriage» between Loti and Chrysanthème, an expression of the Modern/Traditional inequality in the Male/Female formula.
The Japanese female costume undoubtedly has its disadvantages in practical life (it hampers the gait), but it is infinitely more picturesque and becoming than a Parisian costume on a Parisian woman; and when the Parisian costume is transferred to a Japanese woman, the effect is usually deplorable -an utter absence of fit, style, ease, and naturalness (H. T. Finck, 1896, p. 251).
Here you saw how Western civilisation had eaten into them. Every tenth man was attired in Europe clothes from hat to boots. It is a queer race. It can parody every type of humanity to be met in a large English town. Fat and prosperous merchant with mutton-chop whiskers; mild-eyed, long-haired professor of science, his clothes baggy about him; schoolboy in Eton jacket, broadcloth trousers; young clerk, member of the Clapham Athletic Club, in tennis flannels; artisans in sorely worn tweeds; top-hatted lawyer with clean-shaven upper lip and black leather bag; sailor out of work; and counter-jumper; all these and many, many more you shall find in the streets of Tokyo in half an hour's walk. But when you come to speak to the imitation, behold it can only talk Japanese. You touch it, and it is not what you thought. (R. Kipling, 1988, p. 169).
This view would take on a unique entity in specific episodes of history such as the Russo-Japanese war or during the conflict on the Pacific. American war propaganda articulated the most baneful images of the strangeness of the enemy, portraying the Japanese as animals, primarily "yellow monkeys" hiding in the jungles of Burma 27 or raping white women in a characterisation that put them in the category of the subhuman (J. W. Dower, 1986)  Waldo Browne (1901), Japan: the Place and the People; Sir Henry Norman (1908), The Real Japan. 25. The Orientalist view of Finck allows him to recognise surprising similarities: "In Kyôto even more than in Tôkyô, I was struck by the fact that, when Japanese girls are very pretty they greatly resemble Spanish beauties in their sparkling black eyes, dark tresses, olive complexion, petite stature, and exquisite grace, at least from the waist up. The resemblance would be greatly heightened if they would copy Spanish ways of arranging the hair and give up their stereotyped style of combing it back from the forehead -the most trying and least becoming of all modes of coiffure" (H. T. Finck, 1896, p. 262). 26. In his correspondence with B. H. Chamberlain, Lafcadio Hearn wrote: "The country is certainly going to lose all its charm, -all its Japanesiness; it is going to become all industrially vulgar and industrially common-place. And I feel tired of it. In short, the pendulum has swung the wrong way recently" (E. Bisland (ed.), The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Boston / New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910, p. 132.). 27. In films such as Objective, Burma!, by Raoul Walsh (1945), or Bataan, by Tay Garnett (1943, and Back to Bataan, by Edward Dmytryk (1945). 28. "The variety of such metaphors was so great that they sometimes seemed causal and almost original. On the contrary, they were well routinized as idioms

Blai Guarné
Iss. 10 | May 2008 iSSn 1575-2275 http://digithum.uoc.edu Universitat Oberta de Catalunya pedagogy of hate that had permeated North American popular culture for centuries in the shameful image of the black monkey was thus adapted to the portrayal of the Japanese in the formulas of the yellow monkey and the Japes (Japs & apes), reproducing the White/Black racist structure in the White/Yellow opposition (R. Slotkin, 1992).
The implications of the visual dehumanisation of the Japanese would be profound and its consequences devastating for millions of people. In a historically popular imaginary fascinated with the extravagant description of Japan, the systematic and deliberate repetition of these images would contribute to exceed the limits of the myth shaping reality itself. As has been shown, despite the fact that in reality no one believed that the Japanese were monkeys, "once the metaphor is accepted, it becomes that much easier to erase the line between image and reality" (I. Littlewood, 1996, p. 17).
It would not be until the imminent end of the war that the need to prepare the American administration after victory would rehumanise Japan in its antithetical relationship with the West. Again, the discourses of the paradox and of the inverse civilisation would permit an interpretation of a disconcerting culture, of aesthetes and warriors, as refined in the cultivation of chrysanthemums as brutal in the forging of katanas. 29 In this project, the relativist twist introduced by R. Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) would have the virtue of shaking the cultural certainties of the West, 30 completing a circular and autopoietic discourse that would end up being implied in the self-characterisation of the Japanese themselves. 31

Cultural anastrophe and inverse civilisation
Half a century after the first edition of Madame Chrysanthème appeared, another French writer, Pierre Boulle, 32 was to publish a no less fantastic travel journal. Boulle would describe an "inverse civilisation" where chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans enslaved of everyday discourse, and immensely consequential in their ultimate functions. At the simplest level, they dehumanized the Japanese and enlarged the chasm between 'us' and 'them' to the point where it was perceived to be virtually unbridgeable" (J.W. Dower, 1986, pp. 81-82). 29. In this sense, R. Benedict (1946) wrote: "All these contradictions, however, are the map and woof of books on Japan They are true. Both the sword and the chrysanthemum are a part of the picture. The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. They are terribly concerned about what other people will think of their behavior, and they are also overcome by guilt when other people know nothing of their misstep. Their soldiers are disciplined to the hilt but are also insubordinate" (R. Benedict, 1946, pp. 2-3). 30. As has been pointed out, in the Benedict monograph "a mesura que els japonesos van deixant de ser éssers estranys i erràtics, són els nord-americans els qui comencen a semblar-ho" (T. Aoki, 2006, p. 83), to the extreme that "What started out as a familiar sort of attempt to unriddle oriental mysteries ends up, only too successfully, as a deconstruction, avant la lettre, of occidental clarities. At the close, it is, as it was in Patterns of Culture, us that we wonder about.
The stunning episode of the archaeological discovery of a human doll that could speak, pronounce "a simple word, a twosyllable word: 'papa'" (P. Boulle, 1968, p. 182), the exclusive Japanese advertising of the film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the first sequel in the film series

Blai Guarné
Iss. 10 | May 2008 iSSn 1575-2275 http://digithum.uoc.edu Universitat Oberta de Catalunya cultural skill of the monkeys, would reveal a terrible truth: the appropriation of human technology by their natural Other, apes, going so far as to surpass them and make the old dominator the dominated; the coloniser becomes the colonised.
Donna Haraway (1989) pointed out the historical development of Western primatology as "colonial knowledge" that defined "the human" according to "the simian", in a project similar to the Orientalist construction of the "West" in relation to the "East". For Haraway, the study of primates, as "simian orientalism" (D. Haraway, 1989. pp. 10-11), constituted scientific knowledge in that the dramatisation of the differences between "the animal" and "the human" was shaped in the broadest scenario of the oppositions of power: Nature/Culture, Woman/Man, Savage/ Civilised, East/West. 34 The society described by Boulle confronts us with a totalitarian system, where a profound sense of honour and a deep respect for hierarchy and traditional values run parallel to the unease about identity that arises from the encounter with human civilisation. 35 Contrary to the film adaptation directed by Franklin J. Schaffner 36 (1967), Boulle describes an ultra-futuristic civilisation where simians dress like humans, drive motor vehicles and live in skyscrapers. 37 Boulle's works enjoyed publishing success in a world, which, still persuaded by the positive nature of Western/ Eastern classification, expectantly observed the Japanese miracle. The recovery of a country historically shaken by "modernity" that now relocate the desire to achieve political equality with the West, projecting itself into a technological future as an economic equal or superior.
Almost a decade before the La Planète des singes was published, Boulle had come to the public attention with a novel that reflected his experience as an Allied prisoner during the war against Japan. Entitled Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï 38 (1952), Boulle would capture his memories as a combatant in China, Burma and Indochina through the moral experience of the captivity of a group of British soldiers condemned to forced labour in a Japanese POW camp. 39 What would eventually become his most famous work, situated the reader in a position of unease when confronted with their own brutality in the escape from the Other -faced with the abyss of discovering that the absolute difference with this Other is simply one of the multiple expressions of a shared reality.
L'ABIME infranchissable que certains regards voient creusé entre l'âme occidentale et l'âme orientale n'est peut-être qu'un effet de mirage. Peut-être n'est-il que la représentation conventionnelle d'un lieu commun sans base solide, un jour perfidement travesti en aperçu piquant, dont on ne peut même pas invoquer la qualité de vérité première pour justifier l'existance? (P. Boulle, 1958, p. 9) If we consider La Planète des singes in the light of the biography of its author -French colonist in Southeast Asia and combatant against the Japanese-the dystopia that he proposes is revealed as the backdrop on which are projected both the terrors of the colonial experience 40 and the anxiety for a colonised who overcomes the coloniser with their own weapons. 41 In this sense, Ulysse Mérou, the protagonist of the story, bitterly agrees: A bien réfléchir, pourtant, je ne sais si je dois m'enorgueillir de cette découverte ou bien en être profondément humilié. Mon amour-propre constate avec satisfaction que les singes n'ont rien invente, qu'ils ont été de simples imitateurs. Mon humiliation tient au fait qu'une civilisation humaine ait pu être si aisément assimilée par des singes. (P. Boulle, 1990, p. 154) 34. "The Orient has been a troubling resource for the production of the Occident, the 'East's' other and periphery that became materially its dominant. The West is positioned outside the Orient, and this exteriority is part of the Occident's practice of representation […] Simian orientalism means that western primatology has been about the construction of the self from the raw material of the other, the appropriation of nature in the production of culture, the ripening of the human from the soil of the animal, the clarity of white from the obscurity of color, the issue of man from the body of woman, the elaboration of gender from the resource of sex, the emergence of mind by the activation of body" D. Haraway (1989, pp. 10-11). 35. Common places that find a surprising expression in the visual reference to Japanese culture, eg in the recreation of the image of the San Zaru, the three monkeys of Nikko (Mizaru, Kikazaru, Iwazaru), during the trial scene. Also added to this is the fact that to mould the simian prosthesis, make-up artist John Chambers used an Asian face. 36. Born and educated in Tokyo -son of American missionaries-and a combatant in the War of the Pacific, Schaffner's biographical link to Japan is an interesting element when we look at his work. It is this feature that he has in common with Boulle, in whose work the Oriental theme will be a constant from his early novels, such as Le Sacrilège malais (1951). 37. In this adaptation for the cinema, the first in an extensive film and television series, budgetary reasons were a determining factor in the decision to set the simian civilisation in a caveman society. 38. The Bridge over the River Kwai. P. Boulle (1952). New York: Vanguard, 1954. As the author himself says in Aux sources de la rivière Kwaï. P. Boulle (1966), My own River Kwai, New York: Vanguard Press, 1967. 40. European colonialism, the historical experience of slavery and the slave trade, segregation and racial conflict, are themes present both in Boulle's work and in the film adaptation by Schaffner. For more information on these subjects, see the study by E. Greene (1996)  The words of Mérou resonate in those of Memmi when he writes: Un colonisé conduisant une voiture, est un spectacle auquel le colonisateur refuse de s'habituer ; il lui dénie toute normalité, comme pour une pantomime simiesque. (A. Memmi, 1966, p. 124) When with the benefit of hindsight we link La Planète des singes to the works of Loti, a strange tension is established in the Western tradition of narrating Japan as a paradoxical and inverse civilisation. A tradition in which its representation as cultural anastrophe finds in the image of the monkey a metaphor of polysemic nuances, both in the definition of "the Japanese" 42 and in the characterisation of "the Western".
Finally, the stories of Boulle and Loti confront us with the representation of an absolute Other, natural or cultural, simian or Japanese, inverse copy of human civilisation or of Western civilisation. With the challenge of a mimetic, grotesque and threatening presence, which -beyond the denotated-inquiries us about the sense of "the Western" and "the human" as identical and exclusive categories in the representation of the world.
42. E. Ohnuki-Tierney (1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1991 has identified in the monkey the figure of the trickster or clown in Japanese cultural tradition: "Macaques are uncannily similar to humans -at least the Japanese thinks so-both in their bodies and in their behaviour. No other animal has figured more prominently in deliberations about who the Japanese are as humans vis-à-vis animals and as a people vis-à-vis other peoples. The meanings and tropic functions assigned to the monkey therefore enable us to tap essential dimensions of the Japanese conception of self. The monkey provides us with a strategic window into the Japanese world view and ethos" (E. Ohnuki-Tierney, 1990, p. 91).