The sea has always been the scene of speculation on the part of humanity. And in those shipping speculations that had their foundation in trade, adventure and conquest, the stories that spoke of fabulous things that inhabited the seas were not absent.
The ocean depths were always inhabited by dangerous beings: tricking mermaids (Odyssey), unlikely whales (Jonah, Old Testament), Greco-Roman mythology with its sea gods, medieval cartography that showed hybrid beings located in the middle of the seas, the stories of Marco Polo's voyage, the travel diaries of Spanish navigators during the Conquest, just to name a few of the most obvious examples.
Once the republics were installed, this horror was monopolized by North America: Moby Dick (Herman, Melville-1851) and The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway-1951). In both novels we have the man fighting the Beast, simplifying things, of course. And I remember, now, as I pass by, the last lines of the poem Man and the Sea, by Charles Baudelaire: "You so love carnage and death, O eternal fighters, O implacable brothers!" referring to the brotherhood between humanity and the waters.
Another North American, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, well into the twentieth century, would make the sea his land of horror: the gods live there who conspire to reign over Earth.
And it is another American who now summons us: Peter Benchley. With Benchley return the sharks that had already been in Moby Dick with a minimal presence, then in Hemingway's work where they appear hungry, with greater prominence but with a character that did not position them beyond their natural nature: there was bait in the water , they were devouring that bait.
In Tiburon (1974) things change, there is a mixture between the evil of the Lovecraftian beings and the morphology of the sharks that attack the Old Man's boat (and the sea). Jaws is not just another horror novel, it is not just a scary story. He elbows his way into the backbone of universal literature (and the imaginary), the sea and its depths. You have to read Jaws beyond having seen the film, because -as always happens- the book narrates facts, events, situations that the film (which, on the other hand, is wonderful) must put aside.
Like all good works of the Jaws genre, it moves, swimming quickly between the always present binomial in the classics of the genre: where is the real predator? at sea? Or in Human Reason that can far surpass the intuitive "evil" of Beasts and Monsters, that can overcome it because it is a deliberately Instrumented Reason for evil? Who is the Monster? Who is the real soul-eating shark?
