Pratt 1

James Pratt

Professor Riley

British Contemporary Literature

28 February 2023

Nipping at the Heels: Repetition and Realization in The Raw Shark Texts

Repetition is hardly new; from theoretical physics to musical composition, building on

the works of others is central to the development of human knowledge and innovation. In

“Straight to the Multiplex,” Tom McCarthy takes on Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, fins

and all. While comparing The Raw Shark Texts to his involvement with the The International

Necronautical Society (INS), McCarthy pokes fun at the committee’s oddly derivative

exploration and tries to corronate Mr. Hall into the corridors of “convention.” Instead of making

a splash, McCarthy posits that The Raw Shark Texts is languishing in unoriginality, failing to

provide anything new to warrant the crown of “classic.” But in reality, Hall stands on the

shoulders of giants, fitting the mold of a great contemporary author with different responsibilities

than his Greek predecessors. In his review, McCarthy creates an overly narrow definition of

“classic” that recognizes only the most innovative and high-brow works, dismissing The Raw

Shark Texts for its derivative plot mechanisms and over-the-top action. However, this paper

disagrees, and in this post-classic world, the great author must not be bound by “new” but instead

make something “compelling” out of that which already is, which Hall does to great effect in

crafting a gripping techno-thriller out of Greek tragedies and Matrix-style action.

 Pratt 2

The bulk of McCarthy’s objections to The Raw Shark Texts include some description of

Hall’s “direct transposition” of previous authors’ work. The largest portion of McCarthy’s article

is identification, and he quickly lays into Hall’s derivative plot mechanisms and aesthetic for

taking very few risks and rerunning well-trodden fantasy shells. Receiving letters from past Erics

and observing his kitchen arrangement as if on a house tour, Eric’s forbidden messages embody

“The necessity – and impossibility – of watching yourself from the outside,” but this same

sentiment also “drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David

Lynch.” For McCarthy, more problematic than any evil, cross-platform megamind is the familiar

feel of Hall’s central characters and story, and he makes parallels between Hall’s emphasis on

“negative space” and his art school’s “...very similar network of associations.” As a single case

study in transposition, Burrough is central to McCarthy’s criticism, modeling what risk and

reward look like for this cut-tape, digital scrapbook aesthetic, “Burroughs’s visions and

procedures came out of years of experimenting with reel-to-reel tapes, text, and images… and, as

a consequence, still come across, decades later, as interesting and original…” McCarthy then

throws Hall overboard, praising Burrough but saying that “for Hall they’re readymades, straight

transpositions… his project (Burrough’s) envisages a monumental investigation and subversion

of the whole symbolic order; Hall doesn’t aim so high.”

McCarthy’s next issue is with The Raw Shark Text’s derivative characters, ones that

mirror the classics while failing to add anything new. Hall’s conceptual shark takes the brunt of

the criticism, and McCarthy identifies many spooky creatures from fiction’s past and their

contributions to literature, “Frankenstein’s creation represents both the rise of industrial culture

and the Luddite machine-breakers who opposed it… Benchley’s shark… embodies both the

Communist threat stalking America and America’s own capitalist propensity for consumption…
 Pratt 3

And don’t get me started on Melville’s whale.” Hall’s apex predator, however, falls short, “All

these things are, according to the necessary pun, free-floating signifiers. Hall’s shark,

representing self-loss plain and simple, isn’t; held in the aquarium of one-to-one correspondence,

of allegory, it quickly grows tame.” With Eric’s girlfriend, Cleo, getting her own feature midway

through The Raw Shark Texts, “the book resets its mythical compass halfway through, and you

come to realize that the Greek story you’re reading is not Theseus and Ariadne’s but that of

Orpheus and Eurydice.” With its familiar central tragedy, Hall stumbles into the same mold that

McCarthy’s mom enthusiastically identified at the INS, “‘Greece!’ our mother… piped up.”

McCarthy does an excellent job of identifying The Raw Shark Texts’ component parts,

but his evaluation inappropriately narrows the scope of contemporary criticism. While it’s not

entirely clear, McCarthy’s definition of “classic” roughly refers to those works that present a

new kind of character, a new plot mechanism, or a new aesthetic. This presents a problem:

treading entirely new paths is challenging in a hardcover medium that’s existed for over 7000

years, and making “new” the eminent virtue leaves out swathes of excellent contemporary

works. While fiction isn’t quite “solved” like chess or poker, where the most effective moves are

definitive and determinable by new algorithms, literature is hardly a blank canvas, and the critic

should account for this in dispensing evaluation. But McCarthy’s standards make abdication

impossible for “the classics,” and following his argument to its logical conclusion, humanity has

reached the ocean floor. In McCarthy’s “post-classic” world, the constant search for “new” in a

medium with fewer and fewer undiscovered paths makes criticism overly narrow. In this

paradigm, hardly any stories become worthy of recognition: they’ve been done already, and

humanity has now crossed over into post-classic purgatory. McCarthy’s definition of “classic”

only allows room for new technologies, their accompanying cutesy new aesthetics, and slightly
 Pratt 4

different human reflections, but this narrow metric biases critics towards experimental works and

severely constricts fair evaluation of other great contemporary works.

In creating such a narrow criteria for what can be considered a “classic,” McCarthy

discounts the merits of rerunning the greats and shows his bias in evaluating the low-brow source

material. Hall makes meaningful use of the Greek tragedies that McCarthy describes as the

primary inspiration for The Raw Shark Texts and the INS alike, which McCarthy acknowledges

in his evaluation of Cleo (the new Eurydice), “What saves this book, and in fact makes it really

quite good, is the most conventional thing in it: a love story.” In a tale as old as time, McCarthy

then goes on to dismiss it for being too conventional, precluding The Raw Shark Texts from

being eligible for any greater considerations. But this skepticism of the old is relatively new, and

creatives throughout history have made a point of recycling old stories to spectacular effect.

Hamilton is a contemporary theater classic, and it doesn’t do anything groundbreaking.

However, mixing hip-hop music and a diverse cast with the oddly relatable story of America’s

forgotten founding father, Hamilton quickly became a darling of critics and metropolitan elites

the world over. In White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi uses old African folklore and Victorian

ghost stories to reflect on race and class, creating a critically acclaimed work of contemporary

literature. While the high-brow source material of Oyeyemi’s work made it an easy winner for

critics, this paper suspects that Hall getting inspiration from the low-brow panels of Watchmen

or The Matrix kept McCarthy from taking him seriously, a bias that likely permeates the greater

LRB critic class.

 Pratt 5

Nonetheless, McCarthy’s post-classic purgatory is a wasteland. As literature drifts further away

from the discoveries of Naxos, this desperate search for the “new” will continue to prejudice

critics hungry for only the most experimental works and ruthlessly narrow the titles eligible for

“classic” consideration.

McCarthy next takes issue with The Raw Shark Texts action and adventure, implying that

the splashier inclusions preclude Hall’s work from any high-brow considerations. Bashing Hall

right on the nose, McCarthy starts one paragraph with “The most damning thing one could say

about The Raw Shark Texts is that it reads like a movie treatment – a rather good one, but, post-

Matrix, a rather conventional one too.” McCarthy then weaves a whole pastiche of films,

describing the book’s continued callbacks, “Reading a sequence in which Eric’s vomit mutates

into swimming ‘Luxophages’ (little techno-fish with sucker mouths composed of 8s and zeros), I

found myself thinking: ‘Oh yes: Cronenberg.’ As he speeds off on a motorbike with a sexy

woman a few pages later, dynamiting the pursuing shark with a typewriter-key bomb, I saw

Keanu, and then, inevitably, Arnie.” For McCarthy, the issue isn’t that classic titles can’t have

some action, “but rather that film seems to be his (Hall’s) writing’s mode, medium and magnetic

north.”

In this post-classic world, evaluations must move away from what is new and instead

explore what is compelling about a text, or what in a text elicits emotion, joy, or introspection.

McCarthy, however, is quick to dismiss what makes The Raw Shark Texts compelling: its

combination of action and aesthetic with meaningful reflections on trauma. Instead, he focuses

on the action and thrill of The Raw Shark Texts, letting that distract him from Hall’s touching

love story.
 Pratt 6

This paper disagrees, and toothy-USPs and compelling heart-felt narratives can coexist

and indeed compliment each other, as Hall does in using the shark to reflect on trauma. While

the shark itself is reminiscent of Frankenstein but in a Matrix-style tank, it helps convey the great

mystery of subconscious repression, as outlined by Freud. Chomping away at Eric’s memory and

pulling him deeper into the consuming delusion that trauma too often elicits, the Shark plays a

bigger role than just chasing Eric and Cleo on a motorcycle. The shark has a clear job description

and carries a high pay-grade, and its inspiration from past works does not detract from its impact.

Hall sets his ambitions above that of The Da Vinci Code or Bourne Identity, using the action as a

delivery device for serious reflections as opposed to action and aesthetic for the sake of it. For

this paper, this artful use of fantasy makes The Raw Shark Texts more compelling (i.e., eliciting

emotion and introspection) than many of the post-2000s action dramas that came before it, and

the cutesy “letter bombs” and hidden bookstore passages serve a great (and greater) purpose.

Hall creates something exciting and solemn when he places buzzing modems in conversation

with trauma and mourning, but McCarthy lets the buzzing get the best of him. Unfortunately,

McCarthy waves around “sellability” and the book’s “unique selling point” (the shark) to distract

us from making any greater considerations, and fair evaluation is jettisoned en route.

While “Straight to the Multiplex” brings up valid criticisms, McCarthy’s narrow

definition of what constitutes a "classic" limits the scope of contemporary criticism. McCarthy's

argument that only books with entirely new elements can be considered “classics” leads to an

overly narrow and restrictive evaluation of contemporary literature, releasing droves of worthy

works back into the sea of mediocrity. Instead, in the post-classic world, new paths are harder to

come by and great authors must make something compelling out of the vast catalogs available to

them. In this regard, Steven Hall's work stands on the shoulders of giants, taking inspiration from
 Pratt 7

the Greek classics and 2000s action movies to craft a gripping and emotional techno-thriller.

Regardless, contemporary literature will keep swimming onward, but Hall and the authors of

tomorrow should be able to thank their predecessors in their well-deserved coronation into the

halls of “classic.”