CONCEPTUAL FISH

"THERMO FISH. You went swimming in the Seas of Pitch. But now you're back on Earth and you're feeling slightly queasy. It can only get worse. Because the Thermo Fish of Pitch have invaded your system. Your blood stream is a river home for them. They love those passages. You're feeling the heat inside, the biting heat."
—page 15, Vurt by Jeff Noon

Even though I feel that the book ultimately fails, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall did give me one great thing: the conceptual fish. Then, I remembered that I had already read about conceptual fish in Jeff Noon's Vurt, back in 1993. There is only one mention of them—Thermo Fish—as an aside, to help establish the tone and background of Vurt's world; the term "conceptual fish" is not used; and they are one consequence of immorality. You obtain the dis-ease of Thermo Fish through illicit use of contraband feathers to enter virtual reality (vurt). Nonetheless, a "prototype" of Hall's "conceptual fish" is swimming around the realm of the human mind almost 15 years prior to the Ludovicians, Luxophages, and Glooms of The Raw Shark Texts.

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"The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self. Ludovicians are solitary, fiercely territorial and methodical hunters. A Ludovician might select an individual human being as its prey animal and pursue and feed on that individual over the course of year, until that victim's memory and identity have been completely consumed."
—page 64, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Although it is likely that Hall has read Noon, even if that is the case, Hall really has "created" something new. The Ludovician, and other conceptual fish, swim upon the information streams of human culture. They prey upon the thoughts of humans. And, it is likely, as is the case of Eric Sanderson, that their victims are randomly "chosen." There is no necessarily moral tone to the destruction that these conceptual fish wreak upon their victims. This is chance, accident, arbitrariness. Whereas one could fault the users of illicit feathers in Vurt, it is difficult to fault Eric Sanderson for the intrusion into his life of a predator that is destroying who he is, figuratively and literally.

The horror that I experienced early in The Raw Shark Texts of the Ludovician attacking Eric Sanderson in his own living room, as he "swims" in the floor of his living room, attacked by a predator that is glimpsed as patterns of information, is a sensation that emanates from the base of my brain. This is horror that makes my skin crawl, that kicks the reptilian survival mechanisms of my core brain into overdrive. For a brief moment, I am Eric Sanderson. The fear is real. It is this fear, this drive to "fight or flee," that each of us have experienced, that makes the first section of the book so riveting. It compels one to keep reading.

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"The something unwound itself carefully from the mucus and bile and slither-swam up into the air, coiling in loops around the vaporous remains of my thoughts and feelings of nausea. It was small—maybe nine inches, maybe the length of a worry that doesn't quite wake you in your sleep—a primitive conceptual fish. I backed away slowly."
—page 146, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Even "the conceptual crabs, the jellies, some of the simple fish" that invade Eric Sanderson's being revolt us. Once again, these are different than Thermo Fish. These are alien invaders that have entered the body, without an apparent invitation. They cause unexplained illness. They are like the creatures in Alien or the viruses that we are unleashing as we enter the dark recesses of untouched forest in Africa or South America. They are things that we are better ignorant of, lest our minds collapse into madness when we contemplate them. These are the odd primordial creatures and gods of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu Mythos conjured to life.

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"Bob was ebullient. Last night's hostilities seemed to have passed from his mind. He prattled at a manic clip on topics ranging from rumors of prehistoric, sixty-foot sharks living along the Mariana Trench to the claim of a Hare Krishna he had me that poor black Americans were white slave owners in their prior lives."
—from "Retreat" by Wells Tower, page 23 of McSweeney's 23

At the same time, they are not so distant. The fossils of prehistoric giant sharks, such as Megalodon, continue to capture the imagination. Considered extinct by mainstream science, they inhabit the realm of UFOs, Bigfoot/Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster. Even if they are not roaming the depths of the Mariana Trench as a relict community, giant sharks definitely do swim in the popular imagination. It is what makes a movie like Jaws continue to resonate, even decades later.

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"It is always possible that there's an animal so mean or large that even the sperm whale will not go near it, or an animal living so deep that the sperm whale cannot reach it."
—from "The Colossal Squid: An Interview" by Brent Hoff, page 97 of McSweeney's 11

The recent finds of carcasses of giant (Architeuthis) and colossal (Mesonychoteuthis) squid, as well as the video "capture" of an "attack" of a giant squid by Japanese researchers, could possibly change our understanding of the "outer space" of the world's oceans. These seas really are relatively unexplored. We know little about this vast expanse of the world's surface and its depths, including much of its deep water flora and fauna.

This lack of knowledge of what actually inhabits the depths, along with the sheer foreignness of sea creatures, helps to stir our fear. Don't go into the water. No, don't go near the water. It is this primal fear that initially drives the narrative of The Raw Shark Texts. It is only as Hall piles more narrative threads upon this primal fear that the book begins to stall, and, then, ultimately collapses. The ripoff of the final scenes of Jaws, as well as the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, cannot compete with the manic, cold, emotionless, unwarranted feeding frenzy of the Ludovician, yet they do manage to overwhelm and drown that fear.

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"Shall you perhaps lead Leviathan about on a leash? Or will he consent to play slave to your beck and call? Or perhaps you would carve the great armored creature in pieces, selling chunks of crocodile in a market, like pounds of fish? Careful; you sport with death..."
—pages 349–350, Job: And Death No Dominion by Daniel Berrigan

That doesn't mean there is no place for workings of myth in The Raw Shark Texts. Hall just needed to keep the proper myths as the core of his story. He needed to focus on the raw, primordial myths of the ancient sea beasts—Leviathan and Jormungandr—and the fear they strike into our hearts, along with their lesser spawn. He needed to focus on the loss of Eurydice by Orpheus because he disobeys the divine, rather than the love that drives the relationship.

He needed to tap into the base reptilian places of our brains and souls, and stay there. The fear of a Gloom, a school of conceptual fish, something I imagine akin to a school of pirahna waiting to devour my identity, soul, and being is truly terrifying. It strikes terror into me because of the sense of loss that it implies. This was the great potential that opens The Raw Shark Texts, but that disappears once Hall represses it and shifts to a more "comfortable" narrative.

I only wish he had stayed with the difficult and the dark.

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