Notes from Coney Island: Summer 2002

By Julia Jarcho

1. The relationship between the thing’s name and the thing named is activated by danger, like adrenaline. The word “shark” becomes an entire communication by itself; this communication at once announces a threat and describes the threat: the name of the animal is the name of the nearby human’s situation.
The two are inseparable, since every time we name the shark we speak a warning.
The shark is therefore not only a dangerous animal, but the predicament of endangeredness; more specifically, of vulnerability, edibility, an awkwardness that might be fatal. When children at the aquarium shout “shark! shark!” they act out the process of this connotation.

2. Since “shark!” shouted at the aquarium is rhetorical, not functional, the abbreviation (from “there is a shark in the water” to just one word) draws attention to itself. As a result it is impressed upon us (listeners and speakers) that the shark almost “speaks for itself”; language about (“about” also meaning here literally “around”) the shark seems momentarily extraneous.

Just as “shark” both names only and precisely an animal body (it is a noun, not a clause) and tells a human situation, the phrase “shark!” suggests that the human situation with respect to the shark—indeed the whole history of humans in a world with sharks—is the same as the physical, instantiated animal. This connotation is especially strong when small children repeat the word “shark,” or when we see their parents teaching them the word: the childrens’ small bodies and small experiences suggest “shark!” as a kind of miniature container of all narrative possibilities. (Shark!” contains the archetypal Shark Attack story aurally as well: the “sh” of the silent predator moving through water, the “arr” of fiercenesss, of the pirate or the tiger, the sharp final severance of the “k.”) The historical participation of humans in shark attacks is swallowed up by the thing, the animal in front of us. Contingency and economics both disappear. Recurrent bull shark attacks on people wading in the Ganges, for instance, become precisely examples of Shark, not results of economics. “We can see all the disturbing things which this felicitous figure removes from sight: both determinism and freedom” (Mythologies 151).

3. More than anything else, people at the aquarium talk about the sharks’ teeth (which are visible since sandtiger sharks swim with their mouths open). Here the shark provides an image of danger being tangible and easy to locate: not only does the shark have a solid body, but within that body the threat is empirically distinct. The teeth complement the shark’s supposed will-to-eat (see “That shark wants to eat me”): rather than positing a shark subjectivity, the focus on the teeth anatomizes the attack story: the shark’s wicked teeth are the event. Is this some kind of eugenics fantasy (bones teaching a hierarchy of morality or power)? It is certainly a fantasy of intelligibility.

In “The World of Wrestling,” Barthes describes how “the physique of the wrestlers... constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight” (Mythologies 18). The shark’s teeth are seedlike in the same way, and although in the aquarium the “fight” never actually takes place, its image is already familiar. At the site of the shark’s mouth, there occurs what Barthes calls the “exhaustion of the content by the form,... the very principle of triumphant classical art” (18). Whether or not this particular shark is actually violent is immaterial; what matters is our “intellectual pleasure in seeing” (19) the violence we know about from movies in the jaws of the animal. At the aquarium, of course, the two terms of an “algebraic” equation (19) are reversed: the teeth, the mask, are observed when the story is already known, so that the teeth do not predict, but rather explain, the shark attack.

4. “Sharp as razor blades.” “Cuts like a knife.” “Ooh they’re so sharp they’re like pins!” The seed-site of the shark’s danger is imagined in terms of familiar sharp things so the experience of the attack becomes more accessible. These similes belong to the “killing machine” shark, who is “designed,” assembled, presumably by some knife-grasping consciousness. Here, the shark’s teeth are equivalent to human tools; like any equivalency, this one goes both ways, with the implication that our razors, knives and pins are like sharks’ teeth. Quotidian instruments become laced with active violence, a sewing basket fills up with ferocity. For if the shark’s teeth contain its violence then, these similes suggest, our razors and pins contain ours, and the designing mind contains both.

5. In the shark’s multiple rows of teeth— “rows and rows and rows and rows and rows”— there is something indulgent. This is an image of excess, of completeness: each row is a unit in a dimension only sharks occupy, a dimension in which the certainty of harm is measured. Not only can the shark do greater injury than, say, a person, but the injury it does is of a higher mathematical order. The shark is thus transcendent in its dangerousness, and no matter how many times we are told we are more likely to be killed by a falling coconut than by a shark, the shark’s threat is infinitely greater.