The Great White Man-Eating Shark

As I have already indicated, an initial incident, true in the most literal sense of the word, began to hook itself into many others, some past, some present, some fantastic, some commonplace, but all a part of personal reality. The imaginative process involved is not so much an instantaneous flash of inspiration as an act—a series of acts—of synthesis, the ideas and associations forming a network, rather than a linear account, a network in which the spaces between the cords are as important as the irreducible knots that hold the whole thing together.

Fantasy writers are not noted for their adherence to truth. In fact often their books are seen as being ways of deliberately escaping from what is true into what is not true. However, to quote Angela Carter, imagination severed from reality festers, and writers of fantasy are often anxious to demonstrate that they are tied into real life in some way and to claim that they have a part to play there too. We may claim to deal with abstract truths rather than mere facts, or perhaps that we deal in metaphor. But behind the printed page crouches the story, looking out at us between the lines that have temporarily page 21 caged it, making it stand still so that it can be considered. First stories were approximations to history and science, though nowadays science and story are seen as separate and maybe even antagonistic, science being an outer adventure while story is an inner one, if I may anticipate something Walter de la Mare said about story which I will quote later.

As I thought about my temporary sharkness, it suggested a simple story which I would find entertaining to write. There are a lot of different sorts of sharks, many of them quite harmless, but I wanted to evoke the most sinister of all ... the great white man-eating shark. I wanted there to be no misunderstanding about just what sort of a shark it was. This reminded me of a piece in Russell Hoban's novel Turtle Diary.

One of the narrators, Neaera, herself a writer for children, has read of an attempt by a rich man to photograph a great white shark.

Eventually they found a great white shark which they attracted with whale oil, blood and horse meat. It was truly a terrifying creature and they very wisely stayed in their cage while the shark took the bars in his teeth and shook them about.

She then goes on to say that socially the rich man was out of his class.

The shark would not have swum from ocean to ocean seeking them. It would have gone on its mute and deadly way, mindlessly being its awful self, innocent and murderous. It was the people who lusted for the attention of the shark.

Well perhaps by reading and writing stories I too am guilty of trying to attract the attention of wonderful sharks. Locked in the cage of words I have stared out entranced while wonderful sharks took the bars of my cage in their teeth and shook it, and as I have already indicated I am capable to some extent at least of being a shark myself and worrying at other people's bars. Thinking of my own temporary sharkness I wrote a short story entitled The Great White Man-Eating Shark.

Like most stories I write, I intended it primarily as a story to be told aloud, but it has been produced as a picture book, and tells the story of a villain, a plain boy who happens to be a very good actor and who dresses up a great white man-eating shark (a creature he resembles), frightening other swimmers out of the sea so that he can have it all to himself. He acts the part so well that a female shark falls in love with him and proposes something page 22 approximating marriage. He flees from her in terror. His duplicity is revealed and he is too scared to go swimming for a long time after. This is obviously didactic (but, I hope, ironically didactic), and seems far from true, since we all know that in real life firstly people do not dress up as sharks and secondly that the figurative sharks often go undetected because they don't allow people to see their dorsal fins. But in another way I have told the children all the truth I know from personal experience. Kurt Vonnegut says in the introduction to Mother Night, 'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful of what we pretend to be.' That turned out to be the hidden truth of my New Mexico swimming pool experience, but would that have been its hidden truth if I hadn't already read books like Mother Night, or if I didn't already know in a personal way that we become what we pretend to be? I did not learn to talk the language of the animals through eating leaves and drinking out of puddles, but I was chased and herded and treated like an animal for all of that.

But the story of the shark is a joke and that is how I expect it to be enjoyed, as a joke and only as a joke. It is only in the context of this occasion that I am bothering to tell of the experience compacted in it, offering it as a joke at my own expense and also as a part of a network, to a child who may one day read Mother Night or other books whose titles I can't guess at, and appreciate the truths in those books because they already know them. My own experience was real, funny, momentarily sinister and salutary, all at once, but someone else in that swimming pool on that day might have seen a different, a more anguished truth, might have realised that the lovers were saying goodbye, or that they were meeting after a long separation, or that they were honeymooners, or that the thought of being together without touching was unbearable to them. A thousand other stories were potentially there in the swimming pool with me, but my story was about the person who chose to become a shark.

Oddly enough, as I sat with Turtle Diary open in front of me seeing tenuous connections between my own childhood memories of sharks and my New Mexico fantasy, and Tolkein [sic: Tolkien]'s speculations about desire, and the rich man lusting for the attention of the shark, I glanced at the opposite page where I was absentmindedly reading these lines:

People write books for children and other people write books about the books written for children, but I don't think it's for the children page 23 at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is a world. Each new generation of children has to be told, 'This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say, 'This is not a world, this is nothing, there is no way to live at all.'

I can believe this but I think Hoban has told only half the story. After all we don't simply tell children what is and is not true. They demand to be told. When children write and ask me, 'Do you believe in supernatural things?' they may be asking me to confirm that a story like The Haunting is literally true. But mostly they are asking, 'Just where am I to fit this story in my view of the world?' They want to be told what sort of a world it is, and part of giving them the truest answers we can give, also involves telling stories of desire ... once there was a man who rode on a winged horse, once there was a boy who spoke to the animals, and the animals talked back to him, once there was a girl who grew so powerful that she was able not only to overcome her enemy but to overcome the base part of herself. Beware or the wolf will eat you and then you will become part of the wolf until something eats the wolf and so on. It is a gamble because we cannot tell just what is going to happen in the individual head when the story gets there and starts working. We can only predict statistically as we tell our children about hobbits or atomic fission, or that the earth fell off the sun, or about photosynthesis or that there was a loveable old archaeologist called GUM who once adopted three little girls. Perhaps that is why I was so fascinated, long before I began to think on these subjects, by a line in Borges' story 'Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius'. He writes about a land brought into existence by a sort of assertion. 'The metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, nor even an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.'

I also believe that what I am looking for is truth, which by now I confidently expect to be more amazing than anything else.

These days it seems to me that when I look at the world I see many people, including politicians, television newsreaders, real estate agents and free market financiers, librarians too at times, dressing as sharks, eating leaves and drinking out of puddles, casually taking over the powerful and page 24 dangerous images that the imagination presents, eager to exploit the fictional forms that haunt us all, and sometimes becoming what, in the beginning, they only pretended to be. I once read that subatomic particles should not be seen as tiny bits of matter so much as mathematical singularities haunting space. I believe that inner space is haunted by other singularities, by stories, lines of power along which our lives align themselves like iron filings around a magnet defining the magnetic field by the patterns they form around it, and that we yearn for the structure stories confer, that we inhabit their patterns and, often but not always, know instinctively how to use them well.