Elizabeth A. Schultz
Elizabeth A. Schultz is Professor of English literature at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Lawrence, KS: UniversityPress of Kansas, 1995).
Narrated by the second mate, Peder Jensen, The Sharks is set aboard the Neptune, a British ship with a cargo of hemp and a secret cache of precious pearls, sailing from Manila for Marseilles, from east to west, in 1899, the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Relying on the conventional metaphor of the ship as a political state, Bjørneboe describes the Neptune's motley crew—"brutes of strange colours and races, full of rebellion, malice, and self-inflicted diseases"—Asians, Africans, Americans, Australians, Europeans; there are the strong, the weak, the young, the elderly, the innocent, the experienced, the sick, the well, the mad, and the sane. The captain is also accompanied by his wife—who, in a moment of need, crosses gender lines to prove her abilities as an accountant—and their two small children. Bjørneboe demonstrates that neither human dignity nor human brutality acknowledges the boundaries of class and ethnicity.
The diversity of the Neptune's crew suggests the possibility of its equation with a democracy; however, throughout The Sharks, Bjørneboe relates the hierarchy established by maritime law, which places a ship's officers over the men of the forecastle, to political and economic orders of power and oppression, especially those generated by nineteenth-century European capitalism, industrialism, and empire-building. As mutiny erupts on the Neptune, anticipating the revolution of 1917, Bjørneboe insists that his readers consider Marxist socialism and anarchism as alternatives to contemporary political and economic systems of inequity.
Mediating between the oppressed and their oppressors on board the Neptune are Jensen; Christian Hellmuth, the polyglot, mystic boatswain; and Tai-Foon, the Chinese cook, who reads Marx and makes the crew's impoverished food palatable through sauces and spices. Bjørneboe's situating of Jensen betwixt and between—as second mate, as educated European liberal comparable to his contemporary readership, as a man who "had no economic or social ambitions, but [who] knew the rules of the game and got along very well within this sick society where might makes right," who can therefore indulge in his "individual freedom . . . my experience of the music, the ocean, the stars—and of the spiritual forces which pervaded and sustained the world"—is central to the novel's antithetical positions and to its emerging vision of new social ideologies. In his narrator, Bjørneboe balances the skilled navigator and conscientious doctor with the musician, philosopher, and careful observer of nature and humanity. The depth of Jensen's independent, restless spirit is revealed in his adoration of no god or person, but of the beautiful, graceful Neptune, whose name he changes in his heart to Sancta Venere and to whom he feels married with a passion both physical and sacred.
From the beginning of The Sharks, however, Jensen serves as a healer to the crew. During the mutiny, when he must stand armed with the ship's officers, he nonetheless expresses respect and sympathy for the crew and goes among them administering drugs and attending to dressings. In his capacity as healer, Jensen comes to care for Pat, the crew's youngest member, who epitomizes to Jensen the innocent victim of ruthless capitalistic exploitation and whose ignorance and desperate emotional neediness force him to reconsider his cherished independence. As Pat grows in physical, psychological, intellectual, and even spiritual health under his adopted father's care, Jensen, to his surprise, discovers himself becoming responsible for another human being. Devoid of facile sentimentality, Bjørneboe's children in The Sharks—as diverse in their ethnicity and background as the crew—represent his poignant concern not only for the most helpless of human beings but also for the collective future of humanity.
Jensen's changing relationship with Pat anticipates his changing perceptions of other crew members and prepares the reader for The Sharks' stunning conclusion. Having judged the Neptune's captain as representative of the materialism, ambition, and aggression characteristic of capitalism's ruling class and the third mate as representative of a base cowardly brutality in humanity, Jensen comes to trust them during the mutiny. In the tumult of the typhoon, a natural cataclysm which surpasses in its furor the devastating human crisis on board the Neptune, Bjørneboe subsequently reveals the possibility that human beings, conscious of their mutual vulnerability and their mutual desire to survive, can sacrifice personal ambition and animosity to consider the well-being of one another. Thus, as the ship is battered by the storm, the leader of the mutiny and the captain join together to rig up a life-line, permitting everyone on the ship to be saved.
In his epilogue, Bjørneboe indicates that this once mutinous and sharkish crew, finding themselves stranded on an island, can create a utopian community: "Gradually we formed a society in which none were masters and none servants." They survive by caring for one another, by sharing the hunt, and by teaching the children. Thus, unlike Moby-Dick, whose philosophical, political, and narrative parallels with The Sharks are numerous, Bjørneboe's novel concludes with salvation, redemption, and the realization of a just community. With the ship, the love of his life, destroyed, Bjørneboe's narrator clutches at the end of the novel not a coffin but the hand of a boy as, with trembling hopes, they face the new century and a new life together.