Photo of Guy the Gorilla by Wolf Suschitzky (1958)
When Georges Bataille visited London Zoo in the summer of 1927, he was overwhelmed to the point of ecstasy by the naked splendour of an ape's anal protuberance. In this obscene eruption of red raw flesh, smeared with excrement, he saw something that was not merely bestial, but radically opposed to all that is upright and human in a mankind whose own anal opening has secluded itself in a crack between the buttocks and seems destined never to bud or blossom.
As for me, I was delighted in a rather more innocent manner on my first visit to the Zoo as a young child by the sight of chimps taking tea with their keepers and thrilled most of all by the sounds and smells of wild animals caged at close quarters.
As for me, I was delighted in a rather more innocent manner on my first visit to the Zoo as a young child by the sight of chimps taking tea with their keepers and thrilled most of all by the sounds and smells of wild animals caged at close quarters.
For even in 1970, London Zoo remained a zoo in what is now thought of as the bad sense of the word: a place where big cats paced from side to side in cages with bars that you might stick your fingers through, sea-lions balanced balls on their noses whilst clapping their flippers together and elephants stood about in stone compounds with bales of hay, pissing and shitting, or waiting for a sticky bun to be thrown their way.
In other words, it was still a place where animals were openly on display for human amusement and no one cared too much about their welfare, nutritional needs, or positioning on the list of endangered species. Now, however, everything's very different: London Zoo prides itself as a site of conservation and the whole place feels like a moralizing and sentimental animal rehab rather than an animal madhouse.
Doubtless the resident creatures are better fed, better housed, and better looked after. But in subjecting them to the milk of human kindness and charity, they seem to have lost something which the earlier animals still managed to retain, despite being maltreated and often humiliated for our entertainment: something that I'm tempted to call their bestial authenticity and which Bataille thought of as their divine or sacrificial wonder.
And so, whilst Kumbuka may live the good life and make an excellent 'species ambassador', he's not a patch on Guy the Gorilla.
