Re-reading "Jaws"
In the latest edition of the Double Take series, I take the 50th anniversary of Peter Benchley's "Jaws" as a chance to revisit the novel.
Welcome to the The Double Take, a semi-regular series in which I re-evaluate books and films that I first encountered long ago.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jaws, and Spielberg’s adaptation remains one of my favourite films of all time, so I wanted to take another look at the novel that started it all, which I first read as a child.
Is there much going on beneath the surface of this thriller, or does it stay safe in the shallows?
“I had no interest in writing a one-note horror story.” This is Peter Benchley in the introduction to his most famous novel, Jaws. Despite this, horror is where Jaws originated, in the prepubescent mind of the author who, as a child fishing with his father, would “see the dorsal and tail fins of sharks crisscrossing the oil-calm surface” of the ocean, a sight that “spoke of the unknown and the mysterious, of invisible danger and mindless savagery”. It’s in that mindless savagery that the horror emerges, the product of fear and the unknown.
Horror is also what made me, as a young boy, fly recklessly and breathlessly through the novel, unable to look away. I picked it up out of curiosity in a library, and the opening pages so disturbed me that, on re-reading those pages today, I feel the same cold finger trail up my spine and send shivers through the synapses holding memories and phobias together. I vividly remember the opening scene, in which a young woman swimming in the ocean at night thinks she’s snagged her foot on some seaweed. Reaching down into the inky blackness, she cannot find her foot. “Her groping fingers had found a nub of bone and tattered flesh.” The shark had struck, and I was captivated.
Like all life-long readers, I read many books that thoughtless grown-ups often snatched away, deeming me too young for what they contained. Thankfully, no one robbed me of the chance to continue reading Jaws. I devoured it in a single sitting. I remember how disturbed I was by a particular detail, and I remember exactly what that detail was: a young boy is paddling in the sea when — wham! — the shark ploughs into him from below, gulping most of the boy down in one bite, except:
“The boy’s legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom.”
I never got over that image of the child’s legs cartwheeling through the water, spiralling dark clouds of blood behind them, before settling on the ocean floor.
What I had forgotten was all the other stuff Benchley is up to with his novel, the stuff he put in to prevent his book from being a “one-note horror story”. There’s a sub-plot about an extra-marital affair (which grinds the few gears of plot to a total stop halfway through the book), a sub-sub-plot about the mafia and corruption of local government, and a lot of interiority that constantly reminds us that our protagonist is a dick. (That’s a fancy lit-crit term for you.) I wish I could remember what I made of all that stuff as a child. I must have skimmed it until the next shark sighting.
If my dismissive tone didn’t give it away, I’ll make it clear: on my recent re-read of Jaws, I grew quickly and extremely impatient with the stuff Benchley obviously intended to elevate his book. And it seems to me that the author had a similarly conflicted view of those elements. In his introduction, Benchley tells a nice little anecdote about how Fidel Castro reportedly thought Jaws “was a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism”. Some critics “described it as an allegory about Watergate”, while others saw it as “a classic story of male bonding”. And Benchley describes these rather pedestrian readings of his book as “delightfully overboard”.
If those interpretations are overboard then what, I have to wonder, would be an “appropriate” interpretation? And didn’t he write, just a few paragraphs earlier, that he wanted to tell a story with multiple notes, with layers? As I see it, Benchley is revealing that his intent was for Jaws to sit comfortably in between a schlocky beach-read and so-called “literary fiction”. The result is a novel that’s thoroughly middlebrow, the kind of middlebrow Punch magazine once claimed “consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like”. In Jaws, we get an otherwise galloping story that evokes primal emotions, weighed down with meandering, lifeless attempts at something that appears — though isn’t — intellectually meaty.
In a letter intended for the New Statesman magazine, though never posted, Virginia Woolf defined “highbrow” as a person “of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea”. Let’s put aside the ugly connotation of breeding, which reminds me, incidentally, of an unusually brilliant line in Jaws about the upper-class summer visitors of Amity: “Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty.” What matters here is that Benchley is not galloping after any one idea; he’s gesturing broadly at the suggestion of ideas too far in the distance to bother moving towards.
For instance: I’d intended to write this essay around the idea of scapegoats, and how in Jaws blame is cast onto the outsider, whether it’s the shark, or the summer visitors, or the interloping Matt Hooper. There’s a paragraph where Hooper chastises Brody for the folly of “trying to get retribution against a fish”. Brody’s response is that “the fish was an enemy”, its death was demanded by the people of Amity, and Brody himself needs it dead, “for the death of the fish would be a catharsis for him”. Later, Brody’s wife sees that he believes “killing the shark will make everything all right again”.
Unfortunately, what I’ve written above is all there is to say on the subject. The book just doesn’t offer enough material to chew on. There’s a gauze-thin layer of class commentary that begins to flesh out how the shark endangers the town beyond eating people, but that’s usurped by a ridiculous and inconsequential storyline about the mayor being in debt to the mafia. And there’s some racial undertones in the novel that a smarter writer could have played with to highlight the in-group/out-group mentality of small towns, or to comment on the recent civil rights movement. Instead, it reveals (at best) a blind spot in the writer or (at worst) an ugly bigotry. Benchley’s aspiration towards the highbrow is revealed as mere affectation.
Elsewhere on the brow spectrum, there are two kinds of middlebrow. There’s the kind exemplified by the books of Michael Crichton, which switch between storyteller and didactic modes while never integrating one with the other. Crichton is particularly prone to this, veering from page-turning plots to plot-stalling lectures about science and technology. Then there’s the kind of middlebrow that is typified by Jonathan Franzen (much as I’m sure he’d hate my saying so) or the films of Bong Joon-ho, in which the two modes are intricately braided, so the ideas move the story forwards while the story and its characters flesh out the ideas.
Jaws is the former kind of middlebrow. Benchley doesn’t seem to have written the stuff about marriage and class and community because he was deeply interested in those ideas, but because he feared that without them, his novel would be seen as “lesser”, as a “one-note horror story”. This isn’t the reason to write about such subjects; it reads like the author is feeding us the sensible cruciferous vegetables of theme and social commentary, when we just want the dessert of a gripping story.
The irony is that, in his effort to avoid seeming “lowbrow”, he gave up the opportunity to be the best kind of lowbrow. In her letter on the subject, Woolf defines (and actually defends) the lowbrow person as someone “of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life”. The lowbrow novel is fundamentally concerned with the primal, the visceral, the exciting. And what achieves this better than a classic page-turner? The value of a lowbrow novel is specific and fleeting, but there is value. That breathless lurch through a well-choreographed plot while convalescing during an illness or avoiding profundity on a hot beach — that kind of escapism meaningfully colours in the edges of the Good Life.
If Jaws is to fulfil the role of the page-turner on a future reading, I’ll have to skip Part Two of the novel, which squanders its pages on half-baked interpersonal drama. If I want an examination of class or marital fidelity, there are countless other novels that take those topics seriously. And — I made it this far without mentioning Spielberg’s adaptation — if I want an adventure story about three men hunting a shark, the film serves it up so much better.
Still, the one thing I’ll always have and that my re-reading hasn’t nullified in Jaws is the joyful horror I felt as a young boy reading it for the first time. I guess that’s the latest lesson I’ll take away from this re-reading series: the value of a thing is sometimes found in what it once meant to you, long ago.
Further Reading:
• Jaws, Peter Benchley (1974)
• Letter to the editor of the New Statesman, Virginia Woolf (written 1932; posthumously published 1942)