Raw Shark Texts

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Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Information overload is a theme presented time after time in our technology driven age. Raw Shark Texts asks what is the balance between knowledge, power, identity, and insanity. Eric wakes up having no idea who he is, he tries to live this way, but finds that being nothing but a bag of skin and maybe some chemicals is not enough for him. Ward wants to transcend the bag of skin as well, and does so to an extreme. He is well on his way to acquiring an infinite amount of knowledge, but he loses his humanity along the way, and cripples everyone’s humanity who is a part of ‘the agreement’ as well. Hall places importance on human interaction. Ruth and the truck driver are given good portions of chapters, only because they represent humanity. Despite all of the coding and technology whirling around, Hall still takes the time to intimately describe the feeling of skin on skin interactions. The entire novel, Eric is trying to find his humanity. The book focuses on the human experience as the hero. It takes human connection and thought to an actual physical level, in order to accentuate it’s importance. If we thought of every word he read and said as a river, we would realize the power of each expression we created.

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The Raw Shark Texts

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Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Steven Hall’s novel, The Raw Shark Texts tells a perplexing story that asks the reader to reevaluate how they perceive words, concepts, and ideas. I found the conceptual fish and Mycroft Ward’s stories to be the most interesting throughout the text. Hall’s portrayal of the conceptual fish throughout the novel as creatures made of words and phrases reflects a very unique ideology. To relate it to the real world its as if Hall’s message is that when information or ideas are shared or created, while they do not become real physical creatures, they do almost take on their own life form, much like a conceptual fish, traveling from person to person or place to place beyond anyone’s control. Furthermore, Mr. Nobody’s explanation of himself as, “a concept wrapped in skin and chemicals” presents an interesting way of thinking about what a human life really is (178). Although Scout refutes this idea, humans really can almost be thought of as complicated concepts wrapped in skin, based on how concepts are defined in the novel.

-Matt Le

The Raw Shark Texts — Part 3

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Eric Sanderson, physical memory, physical sensations, Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Throughout the novel, Hall places a large emphasis on the relationship between the mental and physical aspects of a human being. In our discussion during class, the question of “what makes a person?” was brought up and whether we truly are just a “singular concept wrapped in skin and chemicals.” Scout assures Eric that humans are much more than that. Hall makes it clear that both the physical and psychological components are equally as important. One of the themes in the book points to the uselessness of a human body without memory as Eric Sanderson is said to have died and been reborn as a different person because he has no mental history. However, Hall points to the possibility of physical memory. When Eric and Scout reconcile, he notes, “The taste of her then, the touch and the warmth and the movement, all of it perfect, like the sweetest, saddest remembered note coming back through years of silence” (388). His automatic and almost innate attraction to Scout exemplifies the possibility that though the mind can be wiped clean, the body retains a sort of memory that acts more on intuition than any signal from our mental memory. We see this when he makes his way through Fidorous’ hideaway without thinking, just doing. Furthermore, Eric experiences moments of complete consciousness, moments in which physical sensations are altered enough to trigger memories. Eric describes all the “ordinary things carefully kept in place because the last person to touch them would never put a cup down on the edge of the table again, or ever leave a book half-read” (411). These objects, including the underwater pictures, though useless after Clio has passed, still affect him, reminding him of small details about her that he thought he had forgotten. This suggests the immense power that physical sensations have over the mind and body. It also makes sense why Hall focuses not just on Eric’s psychological process, but also on the seemingly insignificant objects around him. The objects – things like water, the feel of pictures in his hands, the smell of the air, the rocking of the boat – make him feel as if he is not just the walking zombie that is the Second Eric Sanderson, but a living, breathing and feeling human being in his full five senses.

-Jazmynn Vazquez

The Raw Shark Texts

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Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Information overload is a theme presented time after time in our technology driven age. Raw Shark Texts asks what is the balance between knowledge, power, identity, and insanity. Eric wakes up having no idea who he is, he tries to live this way, but finds that being nothing but a bag of skin and maybe some chemicals is not enough for him. Ward wants to transcend the bag of skin as well, and does so to an extreme. He is well on his way to acquiring an infinite amount of knowledge, but he loses his humanity along the way, and cripples everyone’s humanity who is a part of ‘the agreement’ as well. Hall places importance on human interaction. Ruth and the truck driver are given good portions of chapters, only because they represent humanity. Despite all of the coding and technology whirling around, Hall still takes the time to intimately describe the feeling of skin on skin interactions. The entire novel, Eric is trying to find his humanity. The book focuses on the human experience as the hero. It takes human connection and thought to an actual physical level, in order to accentuate it’s importance. If we thought of every word he read and said as a river, we would realize the power of each expression we created.

The Raw Shark Texts

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Eric Sanderson, Mycroft Ward, secret societies, Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, Un-Space Exploration Committee

The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall’s debut novel, is an unfolding plot line that is seems to be influenced by sci-fi and fantasy plots. Centered around the multiple lives of Eric Sanderson, Hall weaves alternate realities and secret societies together seamlessly to tell the story of how working with the Un-Space Exploration Committee after the death of the first Eric Sanderson’s girlfriend, Clio, led to a spiraling series of events. With clever plays on words – Mycroft Ward, an antagonist in the story, clearly playing with Microsoft Word; and the Ludovician shark which is reminiscent of a modern day computer virus; makes for an interesting fiction story with a surprising twist ending.

-Julia-Elise Childs

Mr. Nobody

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Mr. Nobody, Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Mr. Nobody terrifies me. Not just because he seems creepy, but the whole concept of “Nobody” is unnerving: Mr. Nobody functions on drugs which carry out different aspects of his so-called personality, and without these drugs, he is nothing but an empty husk. Mr. Nobody is basically a bunch of chemical processes in a container. What really bothers me is how this perfectly describes a human being (and all living creatures as well). What is really “human”? Are our personalities defined by our experiences, or is it all just the manipulation of biological processes? For instance, a person’s response to various stimuli is dictated by the amygdala, which plays a large role in anxiety, fear, aggression, etc. Interestingly, the size of the amygdala could be an indicator in whether or not an individual has the potential to being (or becoming) psychopathic. Regardless, the fact remains that much of what makes a person who he or she is has to do with biology, much like how Mr. Nobody’s whole character is determined by the drugs that give him “reasoning”, “sense of humor”, “powers of persuasion”, and so on.

Steven Hall’s Alternative Appeal

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Donnie Darko, Mycroft Ward, Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

With today’s youth consumed by video games and television, it seems unlikely that this generation might take up the habit of reading anything without being forced. The digital age has changed the way many people choose to spend their time. This is something Steven Hall had in mind when writing the bestselling novel, The Raw Shark Texts, published in 2007. The world he creates through the mind of a narrator suffering from psychotropic fugue is somewhere between frightening and comical; attaching a variety of references from modern day culture, ranging from films and television, to music and literature, making his characters and scenarios highly digestible to a vast audience. More so than paying homage to other literature in the past, the book becomes a sort of jambalaya of popular films with tastes of Jurassic Park, Jaws, The Terminator, The Matrix, Memento, Being John Malkovich and maybe even a little Donnie Darko. With that in mind, it seems Hall is onto something brilliant with his incorporation of so much relatable subject matter. Nothing really gives readers a kick more so than the feeling that they have made a connection and found some kind of hidden message or reference to something they were already familiar with.

The Raw Shark Texts

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Eric Sanderson, Scout, Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

The second part of Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts marks the point in which Eric Sanderson meets Scout and leads up to about the point where Dr. Fidourous finally starts to tell the Second Eric Sanderson about the First Eric Sanderson. We receive a much more detailed history of the Ludovician. What is interesting is the convergence of cultures used to define the Ludovician (i.e. Native American culture and Japanese culture). Throughout the book, I notice that there is a huge emphasis on being “zen” or completely in the moment both physically and mentally. For example, Sandersen needs to be free of a cluttered mind and atmosphere in order to stay safe of the Ludovician. This includes being fully involved in the moment and not messing with “live” materials that may trigger memories. The Dictaphone walls act as a place of meditation where he can focus on whatever he is doing without interruption, creating a barrier keeping out any outside streams of information. This could be Steven Hall’s commentary on all the information that is thrown at us on a daily basis, much of which has to be sorted and much of which is unfiltered(especially on the internet) and possibly meaningless. This point is also reinforced through the fact that many of the texts mentioned including Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the information about Ryan at the beginning are considered dispensable. As Eric and Scout travel through the tunnels built by Fidorous, he remarks that “What English I saw ran from complex to incomplete to meaningless.” It is just a jumble of information seemingly put together to mean something, but at the end, misused or misunderstood.

The Raw Shark Texts: Crazy Conceptual, but a Classic Maybe-Existential Work of Art/Awesome

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Eric Sanderson, Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

I believe that our ideas live on beyond our corporeal existence. Our ideas, in effect, are the ideas of those before us, and in this same way, their ideas—our ideas—continue beyond ourselves through their passage to other people, or their dissemination throughout the world by way of various mediums. In The Raw Shark Texts we encounter “Eric Sanderson one” and “Eric Sanderson two” whose ideas live on post-metaphorical death, and eventual literal death. However, Eric’s ideas, memories, feelings, and “self” exist by and by through himself—initially through printed or written text sent to himself by his first self (Eric Sanderson one) and finally as a conceptual self. The survival of his mind—however conceptual and tricky to grasp—is interesting to me because it is contained. While I wouldn’t say that our ideas are diluted as they pass through time to others, they are shared—tiny (non-aggressive), conceptual fish, if you will, that swim back into the stream of a collective human reality, if not consciousness. Eric’s course of, we’ll call it “self-preservation”, raises a question: is reality shared of personal? can people separate their own realities from the collective reality of humanity? All have wondered at one point or another in some form another if the secret truths or memories inside our heads mean anything at all if they’re only known to us– does a tree make a sound if no one is around to hear it, do we matter to the world if we’re heard only by a few? Eric seems to answer the question with his belief that only he and Clio Aames matter—with the conviction that she is all that matters to him, to his existence.

Raw Shark Texts – Ending

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Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

Upon finishing the book, I found the remainder of the story to be very interesting, though still slightly confusing. I especially enjoyed the illustrations throughout the text and felt like it added an important element. During the story when Dr. Fidorous tried to get Eric to believe that the words “water” was actually water, it is easy to relate that exercise to the readers. Readers believe (on some level) the story is true, or they see something in their head that is only words on paper. The illustration of the shark adds to that metaphor. The shark is literally made out of words, even when the Ludovician is mentioned, readers can clearly see the shark in their mind. This, I believe, is the overall concept of the story. Everything, real or not real lives in the mind. Mentally you can make anything real. The end of the story is still slightly confusing though. The relationship is never really explained between Cleo and Scout. It seems that Scout is more of a fictional representation in Eric’s mind so that he can come to grips and accept that Cleo’s accident was not his fault. The end of the story makes me wonder what part of anything was true, especially with the post card at the end. I think the author leaves it obscure so that the reader can come to their own conclusion to what is real and not real. Overall, this was still my favorite book of the quarter though it does leave some questions that I would have liked answered. But maybe that was the point, to find answers that are suitable, just like Eric Sanders did.