Introduction
The Raw Shark Texts is broken into four distinct sections, each marked by a quotation. There are 36 chapters in the novel broken into the following sections:
- Section "ONE": Chapters 1 through 8
- Section "TWO": Chapters 9 through 17
- Section "THREE": Chapters 18 through 29
- Section "FOUR": Chapters 30 through 36
Quotation: Section One
The quotation from section One comes from Jorge Luis Borges and his text Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Borges' short story was first published in Sur magazine in Argentina in 1940. The first English translation appeared in 1961. The story is one part speculative fiction, one part futuristic detective story and one part parable. Even more relevant to The Raw Shark Texts itself, is the sentence that follows the in-book quotation: "In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then."
The last line of this Borges quotation reads “In the illusory depth of the mirrors”. Mirrors play an important role in The Raw Shark Texts: from Eric Sanderson first confronting himself as a reflection, to the notion of the two Eric Sandersons, to the refrain “the view becomes the reflection, and the reflection the view” in the closing stages of the novel.
A google search of Borges' other writing on mirrors turns up “The Fauna of Mirrors” from his “Book of Imaginary Beings”. There are some intriguing Raw Shark connections in The Fauna of Mirrors:
In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colors nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off. The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the color of this line will be like no other color. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle.
In opening The Raw Shark Texts with a Borges quote directly referencing mirrors, it seems possible that Hall intended careful readers/researchers to find their way to “The Fauna of Mirrors”. Could this be a clue to unravelling the novel?
Quotation: Section Two
The second section starts off with a quotation from American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver. From "At Night the Salmon Move," which is from a book of poetry of the same name, was published in 1976. That same year, Carver was hospitalized for acute alcoholism; and while growing up his father was an active hunter and fisherman, often regaling the author with his tales. Reference to the fish aside, another interesting fact to note is that in Carver's last book of poetry before he died, there was a "coda" entitled "Late Fragment."
Quotation: Section Three
Haruki Murakami lends his words from The Wind Up Bird Chronicles for the quotation that opens section Three. First published in 1997, one of the central characters in the novel is a man whose cat disappears, and one of the book's most important themes revolves around dreams and actions within dreamlike states.
Quotation: Section Four
The fourth and final section opens with a quote from Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The book is the published format of a series of six lectures the author gave at Harvard University. Published in 1999, Calvino had actually passed away before completing the sixth and final lecture even though the book reflects his original title selection. The lectures themselves discuss the work of many different writers, but as New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson explains, Calvino explains that "literature [becomes] a way to escape the ego and give speech not only to other humans 'but to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic...'."
Quotation: Book End
Note: There is a fifth and final quotation in the book from Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude. The book begins with this one simple line: "One day there is life...and then, suddenly, it happens there is death." Primarily a meditation on the death of Auster's own father, this is the book that the First Eric Sanderson reads while on vacation in Greece.
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