The Raw Shark Texts
by Steven Hall

There are two types of people in the world, Eric. There are the people who understand instinctively that the story of The Flood and the story of The Tower of Babel are the same thing, and those who don’t. — Trey Fidorous (285)

Fidorous’s binary distinction sums up reader reaction to this book. Those who don’t instinctively understand the equality between the two stories, such as a previous reviewer for Strange Horizons, declare that "at its best, it is an entertaining adventure yarn with a plot that doesn’t bear scrutiny too well, not least because of the many debts it owes to finer and more interesting writers."[1] Those who do understand that Babel is the Flood see it as a "captivating exploration of that which lives beyond the realm of established human cognition."[2]

This binary distinction is a fitting connection considering that the story deals intimately with the boundaries between word and reality, the conceptual world and the physical one. The telling quote near the end, "the view becomes the reflection, and the reflection, the view," draws heavily on theories of spectacle and spectator–one cannot be separated from the other. The reader’s relationship with the story is a formative influence on the text. For instance, in Steven Hall’s website forums, one reader suggests that Eric’s act of telling the story to us, the readers, establishes the connection that draws the Ludovician shark in the very beginning. Readers may assume a position of objectivity, but our take on any text is heavily autobiographically influenced. The pure abstract nature of The Raw Shark Texts‘ concept merely draws out that relationship explicitly, dividing along the binary line of those "two types of people in the world."

I belong to the type of those who do understand the Babel/Flood duality, because this book draws me into an impossibly vast, detailed web of themes and associations. Rather than a patchwork of "finer and more interesting writers" such as the creators of The Matrix, Jaws, and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, to me The Raw Shark Texts really is something new and extraordinary. The occasional typographical trickery and over-literary language may irritate some readers, but to focus on those superficialities is to ignore the darkness beneath the surface.

On the surface, The Raw Shark Texts is the simple story of an amnesiac searching for his lost past through the passages on the underside of the world. Eric Sanderson wakes up on the first page without a memory in his head, and through letters from his former self and a series of surreal encounters, learns that he has been the victim of a shark attack from a Ludovician, a conceptual shark that eats memories. The Ludovician swims through the streams of thought and communication, and has developed a territorial attachment to Eric. Eric also runs into the shark’s antithesis, a giant overmind called Mycroft Ward with an ever-expanding reach. His allies in the fight against the shark and Ward are Scout, a girl from the Un-Space Exploration Committee, and Trey Fidorous, a scientist who constructs language viruses.

Beneath the surface is the pitch-perfect match with what I believe is a certain type of schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher and literary scholar, writes:

The first schizophrenic evidence is that the surface has split open. Things and propositions have no longer any frontier between them, precisely because bodies have no surface. The primary aspect of the schizophrenic body is that it is a sort of body sieve. Freud emphasized this aptitude of the schizophrenic to grasp the surface and the skin as if they were punctured by an infinite number of little holes.[3]

This dissolution is precisely what The Raw Shark Texts invokes. To briefly dip into autobiography, the Deleuze quote jolted me when I first read it, because I instinctively made the connection to a recurring dream of mine. In one variation of the dream, an avalanche of tiny pieces just kept coming at me, in an endless, horrifying wave, surging and breaking like the tide. Even after I woke, the dream was still with me; I had to run into the lit bathroom before it finally receded. In another variation, the dream was words, an infinite avalanche of words that kept connecting one into the other until I finally stopped it by equating each word one-on-one with a French word. As Deleuze says, “The student of languages provides the example of the means by which the painful explosions of the word in the maternal language are converted into actions relative to the foreign languages.”[4] Once again, I was awake and sitting up at the time that I was finally beating the dream back.

Those are schizophrenic dreams, and that’s the instinctive rapport I felt with the description of events in The Raw Shark Texts. I recognize the feeling when the floor first breaks open under Eric, and he says, "My mind could only find the words, ideas, signs and attachments for these things, never anything solid at all… The world, my mind, the way these connected, whatever the root of the perception shift, I didn’t have control of it" (60). I recognize it in Part Two of the Light Bulb Fragment, where "the otherness just rolls in on me like angry clouds and there’s nothing I can do," and Clio pulls Eric back to the familiar, practical world (115). Even the more clinical descriptions of schizophrenia, where some patients report "thought blocking" as if words have been taken right out of their heads, matches up with the experience of The Raw Shark Texts.

This is not to say that the book is some giant convoluted variation of "I woke up and it was all a dream!" Rather, this book explores the reality of schizophrenic dreams, schizophrenic concepts–it plunges us into a world, or rather an un-world, where schizophrenia is not just a dysfunction or a disorder but real as well as true.

The evolution of Eric’s relationship to barriers and boundaries marks his progression through the book. As an amnesiac, his boundaries are those of knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. He takes a step further in separating his newborn self from his former self, whom he calls the First Eric Sanderson, but he still faces the common problem of amnesiacs–how much does he really want to know? Early on, he observes that, "the trick… would be in knowing which barriers could be kicked open for progress and which were defensive, structural" (21). In the beginning he overcompensates–he refuses to open any of the First Eric’s letters, enter the locked room, or explore his past. "I was a little robot, a machine for existing, just following all the looping programmes I’d set for myself, and nothing more or less than that" (29). While he lives within the barriers he has set up for himself, he is a clockwork machine, predictable but safe, protected within his routine. Everything in his life is a one-to-one equation, without the risk of escalation or fractalization.

However, he can’t live his clockwork life for long. He first breaks his boundaries when he opens the First Eric’s package and reads the Light Bulb Fragment Part One, then goes upstairs to open the locked room and read the description of a conceptual stream. With a classic display of schizophrenic enhancement, he becomes aware of chaos patterns all around him:

The three ice cubes had melted into round-edged lozenges, each with its own complex puzzle of faultlines, ghost planes, and fractures. Around each cube, the run-off water and the slightly thicker vodka curled together in miniature weather systems and storm fronts. I thought about fragile colour spirals of oil in water, about the sad rolling and dispersing of the galaxy, about cogwheel daisies on green grass driving the vast machinery of evolution, about a whirl of cream unwinding its spiral arms in a left-behind coffee cup… It was breathtaking, too clear, too much (57).

His mind flings outward in spiraling fractal patterns; his boundaries shatter and the free associations that he has kept locked up all rush in at once. In the next paragraph, the shark appears. A few pages later, the floor breaks, representing the last dissolution of his boundaries, and providing the impetus to set him in motion on his journey to find his past.

At this point, the reliability of the First Eric Sanderson as a narrator is still in question. The book could very well take the path of A Beautiful Mind, and spend the rest of the time rehabilitating Eric so he can rejoin civilized society. Our narrator Eric, the Second Eric, is just as clueless as we are, but we have to decide with him whether to believe the First Eric’s story. In fact, in the book as a whole, the only truly reliable character is Ian the cat; the motivations and narrations of every other character in the book are questionable at one point or another. However, the question of primary importance, whether or not we can trust the First Eric, comes to a turning point with the appearance of Scout.

With Scout’s appearance, and her report that Eric is an Untouchable to the Un-Space Exploration Committee, the First Eric’s narration is validated. This is the turning point where the reader can decide to trust the Second Eric, to commit that what he sees and narrates is real, or to reject the Second Eric’s story as another symptom of the same delusion the First Eric harbored. Everything clicks into place, and if you commit to believing in the Second Eric, the journey really begins–a mad flight through the back corridors, storerooms, and tunnels of un-space, to find the only man with a plan to defeat the Ludovician shark–Trey Fidorous.

To fully understand this book, you have to commit to the reality of this schizophrenic world. You have to trust that the Second Eric’s perceptions and narrations are not only true but also real. To fully immerse yourself in the book, you have to take a leap of faith. You have to look down into the water, past the surface to the point where the orderly mind become a trite lie and chaos rules. You have to look deep down to where it gets pitch black, where your clinical diagnoses and your disbelief will undergo equipment failure, and you have to take a deep breath, and dive.