Shark

by David Owen

  Less controversially, but asking similar questions of the human attitude towards ‘dangerous’ animals, British environment artists Olly and Suzi’s 1997 Shark Bite is a crude drawing, in blood and acrylic on paper, of a shark. The work was floated in water off the South African coast and a great white shark photographed biting it—the photo being part of the work, as was the recovered but torn original work. (Their animal interaction doesn’t always go according to plan, with instances of ‘a leopard dragging a painting away and destroying it, and a rhinoceros eating a whole piece’.16)

  The Headington shark, by John Buckley. (Stephanie Jenkins)

  Still in Britain—a country identified with eccentricity—the town of Headington near Oxford, many miles inland, has since 1986 had the most unlikely tourist attraction: an eight-metre fibreglass great white shark impaled in the roof of a suburban terraced house. This wacky sculpture has, in fact, a deadly serious reason for its existence—one that can be said to be avowedly political, while also concerned with the wellbeing of the planet. The work of art, called Untitled 1986, by English artist John Buckley, was commissioned by the owner of the house, Bill Heine, a cinema owner and Oxford radio presenter. Heine had it erected on the forty-first anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, explaining that ‘the shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation . . . It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki.’17 In keeping with such an unlikely use of a shark—although its massive ‘alien’ power is no doubt part of the statement—the sculpture has its own all-too-human story:

  It had been winched up by a crane overnight, and although the police were aware of what was going on they were powerless to do anything, as there is no law to prevent a man from putting a shark on his own roof . . . Oxford City Council tried to get rid of the shark on the grounds that it was dangerous to the public, but engineers inspected the roof girders that had been specially installed to support it and pronounced the erection safe. The council then decided that the shark was a development . . . and that as such it had to be removed. Their offer to display it in a public building such as a swimming pool was not, however, accepted by Bill . . . in 1990 he was refused retrospective planning permission by Oxford City Council. Undeterred, in 1991 he appealed to the Secretary of State for the Environment whose office came out in favour of the applicant, stating: It is not in dispute that this is a large and prominent feature. That was the intention, but the intention of the appellant and the artist is not an issue as far as planning permission is concerned . . . it is not in dispute that the shark is not in harmony with its surroundings, but then it is not intended to be in harmony with them. The basic facts are there for almost all to see. Into this archetypal urban setting crashes (almost literally) the shark. The contrast is deliberate . . . and, in this sense, the work is quite specific to its setting . . . The Council is understandably concerned about precedent here [but] . . . any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky. I therefore recommend that the Headington shark be allowed to remain.’18

  A shark in the roof of the house is one thing; a house that is a shark is something else altogether. Mexican architect Javier Senosiain, born in 1948 and taking inspiration from both Frank Lloyd Wright and Antoni Gaudi, specialises in organic domestic architecture. He lives in one of his more celebrated creations in Mexico City (that city founded upon Cipactli’s elasmobranch-related sacrifices):

  Senosiain’s home, which he shares with his wife, Paloma, and their daughters, looks like an enormous shark set into a hillside—the dorsal fin protruding from the roof eliminates any doubt . . . In the shark’s gaping jaws, the curved window of Senosiain’s upstairs studio overlooks the city. Another studio window, a small porthole, forms the shark’s eye . . . He finished the 1,800-square-foot interior in a smooth stucco made of white cement, beige mortar, and marble dust. For the floor, he picked beige wall-to-wall, inviting that intimate contact between flooring and bare feet. To reinforce the connection between man and his most elemental shelter, shoes must be removed upon entry. The ground floor of the shark functions primarily as a passageway. From here, a staircase ascends to the second floor—a womblike telephone niche built into the underside of the stucco-clad structure . . . Beyond the staircase, the ground floor of the shark offers access to a tunnel. At the far end of this mysterious passage—illuminated by an unseen skylight—bedrooms and living spaces are half-buried underground . . . In the master bedroom, cartoonlike cutouts framing closet niches impart a Flintstones air. A leather-cushioned cast-in-place ferrocement bench spirals outward, like a nautilus shell, and turns into the bed, nestled in a curving wall. ‘The idea is to recline,’ says Senosiain, ‘like an animal in a cave.’19

  Javier Senosiain’s shark house. (Francisco Lubbert)

  Sharks have their inevitable place in creative literature, as irredeemable adversaries to mankind. Five examples follow, each mirroring their time. The first is a breathtaking illustration of how popular literature (that is, read uncritically by lots of people) can capture and infect the popular imagination, in this case casually blending racism with woefully inaccurate depictions of sharks. The author, W.H.G. Kingston, an Englishman who spent most of his life in Portugal, was a prolific and successful author of tales for boys. His 1876 novel, The Three Lieutenants, includes this gem of a bad-taste scene set in the harbour of Kingston, Jamaica:

  Jack and Terence sailed up to Kingston with a fresh sea breeze a-blowing over the sandy shore of the Palisades.

  ‘Take care you don’t capsize us,’ said Jack to the black skipper, who carried on till the boat’s gunwhale was almost under water.

  ‘Neber tink I do dat, massa leetenant. Not pleasant place to take swim,’ answered the man, with a broad grin on his ebony features, showing his white teeth.

  ‘I think not, indeed,’ exclaimed Terence. ‘Look there.’

  He pointed to a huge shark, its triangular fin just above the surface, keeping two or three fathoms off, even with the boat, at which the monster every now and then, as he declared, gave a wicked leer.

  ‘What do you call that fellow?’

  ‘Dat, massa, dat is Port Royal Jack,’ answered the negro. ‘He keep watch ober de harbour—case buckra sailors swim ashore. He no come up much fader when he find out we boat from de shore. See he go away now.’

  The shark gave a whisk with his tail, and disappeared in an instant. The young officers breathed more freely when their ill-omened companion had gone. Almost immediately afterwards a boat belonging to a large merchantman, lying at the mouth of the harbour, ready for sea, passed them under all sail. Her crew of eight hands had evidently taken a parting glass with their friends.

  ‘Dey carry too much canvas wid de grog dey hab aboard,’ observed the black. ‘Better look out for squalls.’

  He hailed, but received only a taunting jeer in return, and the boat sped on her course. Not a minute had passed when Jack and Terence heard the negro mate, who was watching the boat, sing out-

  ‘Dere dey go, Jack shark get dem now- eh?’

  Looking in the direction the black’s chin was pointing, to their horror they saw that the boat had capsized, her masts and sails appearing for an instant as she rapidly went to the bottom, while the people were writhing and struggling on the surface, shrieking out loudly for help. Jack and Terence ordered the black to put the boat about instantly, and go to their rescue. Nearly two minutes passed before they reached the spot. Five men only were floating. The ensanguined hue of the water told too plainly what had been the fate of the others . . . Influenced by a generous impulse, and forgetting the fearful monsters in the neighbourhood, [Jack] was on the point of leaping overboard, when the black boatman seized his arm, crying out,-

  ‘No, no, massa, dat one shark, hisself.’

  Jack looked again, and the object he had mistaken for a seaman’s white shirt resolved itself into the wh
ite belly of a shark, the creature being employed in gnawing the throat of its victim.

  ‘Dat is what dey always do,’ observed the black coolly. ‘Dey drag down by de feet, and den dey begin to eat at de trote.’20

  Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, first published in 1851, is one of the great works of fiction, a huge and hugely ambitious novel that, in the guise of one man’s obsessive hunt for a near-mythical whale, questions the very meaning of existence. The power of the writing is everything that Kingston’s is not, not least because Melville relied on relative accuracy (in this case a dramatic feeding frenzy) to set the scenes for his intellectual embellishments. Here, as narrated by the book’s protagonist Ishmael, a captured sperm whale has been hauled alongside the whaling vessel Pequod, of which mad Ahab is the Master. Normally, the whale would be left lashed alongside the boat overnight:

  But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can at times be considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

  Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of the murderous jaw.21

  Edgar Allan Poe, whose legacy to world literature includes his prominence as an early modern short story writer and his invention of the modern detective story, was frequently drawn to the macabre. Certainly, he wrote suffering cloyingly well, as in this account of shipwreck survivors in his only novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, published in 1838:

  We now saw clearly that Augustus could not be saved; that he was evidently dying. We could do nothing to relieve his sufferings, which appeared to be great. About twelve o’clock he expired in strong convulsions, and without having spoken for several days. His death filled us with the most gloomy forebodings, and had so great an effect upon our spirits that we sat motionless by the corpse during the whole day, and never addressed each other except in a whisper. It was not until some time after dark that we took courage to get up and throw the body overboard. It was then loathsome beyond expression, and so far decayed that, as Peters attempted to lift it, and entire leg came off in his grasp. As the mass of putrefaction slipped over the vessel’s side into the water, the glare of phosphoric light with which it was surrounded plainly discovered to us seven or eight large sharks, the clashing of whose horrible teeth, as their prey was torn to pieces among them, might have been heard at the distance of a mile. We shrunk within ourselves in the extremity of horror at the sound . . . During the whole day we anxiously sought an opportunity of bathing, but to no purpose; for the hulk was now entirely besieged on all sides with sharks—no doubt the identical monsters who had devoured our poor companion on the evening before, and who were in momentary expectation of another similar feast. This circumstance occasioned us the most bitter regret and filled us with the most depressing and melancholy forebodings. We had experienced indescribable relief in bathing, and to have this resource cut off in so frightful a manner was more than we could bear. Nor, indeed, were we altogether free from the apprehension of immediate danger, for the least slip or false movement would have thrown us at once within reach of those voracious fish, who frequently thrust themselves directly upon us, swimming up to leeward. No shouts or exertions on our part seemed to alarm them. Even when one of the largest was struck with an axe by Peters and much wounded, he persisted in his attempts to push in where we were. A cloud came up at dusk, but, to our extreme anguish, passed over without discharging itself. It is quite impossible to conceive our sufferings from thirst at this period. We passed a sleepless night, both on this account and through dread of the sharks.22

  It is generally believed that Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952 and the last of his works published before his self-inflicted death, was instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The storyline is simple. Santiago, an ageing Cuban fisherman, after a long period of poor luck, hooks a huge 5.5-metre marlin while fishing in his skiff, far out in the Gulf Stream. He then has to contend with sharks. Hemingway, a noted big game fisherman, wrote the story as an allegory of the human condition, with religious overtones—Santiago being a Christ-like individual, suffering the ‘natural’ cruelty of defeat hard in the wake of triumph (a complexity perhaps matching the author’s then state of mind).

  Given the single-minded power of this work of fiction, and its place in the canon of western literature, it may be considered regrettable to reduce it here to a Reader’s Digest-like mauling of a few hundred words. But this is, after all, only a book about sharks, and Hemingway knew a few in his time:

  He was a very big Mako shark, built to swim as fast as the fastest fish in the sea and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws . . . all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. They were not the ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man’s fingers when they are crisped like claws . . . The shark closed fast astern and when he hit the fish the old man saw his mouth open and his strange eyes and the clicking chop of the teeth as he drove forward in the meat just above the tail. The shark’s head was out of the water and his back was coming out and the old man could hear the noise of skin and flesh ripping on the big fish when he rammed the harpoon down . . . the old man hit it. He hit it with his blood-mushed hands driving a good harpoon with all his strength. He hit it without hope but with resolution and complete malignancy . . . He could see their wide, flattened shovel-pointed heads now and their white tipped wide pectoral fins. They were hateful sharks, bad smelling, scavengers as well as killers, and when they were hungry they would bite at an oar or the rudder of a boat . . .

  They came in a pack and he could only see the lines in the water that their fins made and their phosphorescence as they threw themselves on the fish. He clubbed at their heads and heard the jaws chop and the shaking of the skid as they took hold below. He clubbed desperately at what he could only feel and hear and he felt something seize the club and it was gone . . . When he sailed into the little harbor the lights of the Terrace were out and he knew everyone was in bed . . . he shouldered the mast and started to climb. It was then he knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a moment and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street light the great tail of the fish sta
nding up well behind the skiff’s stern. He saw the white naked line of his backbone and the dark mass of the head with the projecting bill and all the nakedness between.23

  Career journalist Peter Benchley, like countless other young would-be novelists with a dream, earned money to buy writing time: ‘I sat in the back room of the Pennington Furnace Supply Co. in Pennington, New Jersey, in the winters, and in a small, old turkey coop in Stonington, Connecticut, in the summers, and wrote what turned out to be Jaws.’24 He had grown up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, and developed an interest in sharks. A direct spark for the novel came from his reading an account of a huge great white shark hooked off Long island. So significant was the manuscript of what became the 33-year old’s first novel, published in 1974, that ‘within eight weeks, it had leaped to No.2 position on the New York Times bestseller list. Before the book was even off the presses, it had already earned over $1 million, including $575,000 for US paperback rights alone, and from sales to book clubs, foreign publishers and the film’s producers.’25

  Even without the subsequent film adaptation, it was a significant literary achievement, combining the thoughtful luck of rendering original an old storyline concept—monster terrorises innocents—with a well-paced plotline and above-average writing. Then came the movie, and the novel surfed a gigantic wave, selling over twenty million copies. Benchley’s view of the novel: ‘Completely inadvertently, it tapped into a very, very deep fear . . . If I had done it on purpose, it would be one thing. But I didn’t know for years what was responsible for the enormous phenomenon of Jaws.’26

  The mystery is not entirely solved, except to say that both book and film belong in a fictional genre that has mass appeal, extending as far back as the legend of Jonah and the whale (possibly a whale shark or basking shark) and contemporaneously to such influences as Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851), Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People (1882), the films The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and Psycho (1960), the King Kong movies and the documentary Blue Water, White Death (1971). The true tragedies of the New Jersey attacks (1916) and the USS Indianapolis shipwreck attacks (1945) were also horror stories waiting to be dramatised.