The Upside Down – Monkey Magic

What is it about monkeys that
makes them so compelling?

I recently recorded a podcast about the late 16th Century Chinese classic novel by Wu Cheng’en, usually translated into English as Monkey King: Journey to the West. The new Penguin translation by Julia Lovell is lively and action-packed and was clearly written with an eye on the cult Japanese TV show Monkey, which appeared in the UK in a dubbed version in the early 1980s and led to an epidemic of children leaping around and hitting one another with poles. As the series voiceover solemnly intones, “the nature of monkey was irrepressible!”

What is it about us and monkeys?

Anyone who’s taken children to a zoo will know the tractor beam-like attraction they exert. A monkey enclosure is like a 12A movie – scenes of mild peril with some sexual content.

Children like monkeys because they feel a direct connection with them, and they are right to: only the apes are closer relatives. It’s interesting that, within a few decades of the word ‘monkey’ first being used (1530, although its origin is obscure), we had already begun to use it as an affectionate nickname for children.

Wherever they are found in the world, monkeys live in big groups. Their relatively large brains, and the intelligence they confer, have enabled them to cope with the complex interactions required to keep a social order going. The more we learn about monkey societies, the more they seem like us.

It’s obviously going to delight seven-year-olds to discover that among Angolan black-and-white colobus monkeys (Colobus angolensis), a burp is counted as a friendly greeting (like many monkeys, they’re leaf-eaters, so wind is a constant in their lives). Also, the widespread use of grooming to suck up to the dominant male has a definite playground logic to it, although most school children stop short of removing dead skin and lice to placate their tormentors.

More grown-up human behaviour also finds its monkey equivalent. Monkeys plan ahead: grey-cheeked mangabeys (Lophocebus albigena) make decisions based on the weather, remembering the location of particularly good fig trees and waiting for the sun to shine before setting out on fruit-picking expeditions.

Vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) display a very human attitude to booze. On the Caribbean island of St Kitts, they have learned to hang out near bars and finish the cocktails people leave behind. The majority are social drinkers who imbibe in moderation with other monkeys. They prefer their alcohol to be diluted with fruit juice and never drink before lunch. Others refuse to drink at all, but 5% are serious binge drinkers, who consume as much hard liquor as they can, make a lot of noise, and start fights, before finally passing out.

Drunkenness is not the only vice we share with our simian simulacra.

An experiment with rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) revealed that they would ‘pay’ to look at pictures of the faces and bottoms of high-ranking females by forfeiting their usual reward of a glass of cherry juice. With low-ranking females, however, the researchers had to bribe them with an even larger glass of juice before they’d pay any attention.

Some species have even taken the law into their own hands. Pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) ‘elect’ senior monkeys to break up fights and keep order. Their authority rarely requires the back-up of force, but as soon as the police monkeys are removed, cliques rapidly form and social cohesion breaks down.

For all the similarities, there is a gulf between humans and monkeys that only our imaginations can fill. Macaques, smart as they are, know if we’re imitating them but can’t make the leap and imitate us back.

A deep bond remains, nonetheless, and may even be hard-wired. A Canadian research team recently found that, up to the age of three months, newborn humans respond as positively to the calls of rhesus monkeys as they do to human speech.

But there’s a darker side to the relationship. In mythic terms, and certainly in Wu Cheng’en’s novel, the irrepressible Monkey is the perfect embodiment of the Trickster archetype.

In Nemesis, My Friend, the writer Jay Griffiths defines Trickster thus: “He crosses all the boundaries of ethics, he is neither good nor bad but is amoral. He is a change-maker, moving the story forward. He bends the truth till your head hurts. Trickster is shameless. The quiet, inner voice of conscience, or of honour or truth has no place. Trickster lives entirely in an amoral world … although he disturbs the status quo, arse over tit, bouleversé, crucially, the mythic Trickster is never in power. Rather he is on the edge, marginal, outside the tent pissing in. Because he doesn’t have power, we are sympathetic to him. But never give the clown a gun.”

Remind you of anyone? The clowns now have guns.

Welcome to the Age of Monkey. ✺