Pierre Boulle
1912–1994
“A different language is a different vision of life.” — Federico Fellini (Boulle's thematic concern)
The Argument
Pierre Boulle is known primarily through the films made from his novels — The Bridge on the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes — and this is slightly unfortunate, because the novels themselves are more theologically complex than their adaptations suggest. Planet of the Apes is not primarily a science fiction adventure. It is a sustained Swiftian satire about what it means to be human, what distinguishes human beings from animals, and whether the distinction is as secure as we assume.
The novel's central conceit — a planet where apes are the dominant intelligent species and humans are the animals — uses the reversal to ask what the human claim to dignity actually rests on. If intelligence is the criterion, the apes have it. If language is the criterion, the apes have it. If society and culture are the criterion, the apes have them. The novel forces the reader to articulate what, exactly, makes human beings different — and the answer it implies is not one that materialist anthropology can provide.
For literary apologetics, Boulle is the writer who used science fiction's capacity for radical defamiliarization to ask the question that Christian anthropology has always asked: what is a human being? The apes' treatment of humans is a mirror held up to humanity's treatment of animals, of other races, of anyone defined as less than fully human. The mirror is uncomfortable. That is its purpose.
The Literary Apologetic
New essays from the long tradition. No noise. Just letters worth reading.