On Forbidden Knowledge: The Big Other and Social Censorship

I’ve been reading a lot of cosmic horror lately. Just last night, I finished A Lush and Seething Hell by John Hornor Jacobs. – a pair of novellas from a talent I’d been previously unfamiliar with. Jacobs writes cosmic horror, but tends to stay away from the tentacles-and-racism vibe of Lovecraft, charting out new territory (though, thankfully, most have dropped the racism; I also just recently finished the ninth Laundry novel, and wouldn’t have been able to get quite that deep into them otherwise).

In the course of this unintended reading project, I believe I’ve developed a new understanding of the genre. Allow me to lay out what seem to be the essential elements: someone discovers a book, document, record, or account that describes an uncanny or awful experience that cannot be wholly explained; the person who discovers the document then engages in some field work – trying to turn a secondary resource into a primary resource, in the parlance of the research writing class I teach; the narrator of the story encounters the same – or a similar enough – horror to that which broke the narrator of the story-with-the-story, and are themselves broken.

There are other tropes, but that’s essentially it. Largely, I feel that people are drawn to them because they are stories of individual disempowerment. They’re about what one person can’t do alone, and those where they heroic individual emerge triumphant but unchanged are, to a one, awful. This means that the individual disempowerment is part of the point of these stories, because when it’s removed it’s bad. Sort of like how I imagine someone would be disappointed to encounter a murder mystery without a dead body or pornography without coitus.

This makes cosmic horror an interesting genre – what we are looking for in it is something that we tend not to think of as anywhere near desirable: we are looking for someone to assure us that an individual person’s life doesn’t matter. This is not simply a way of understanding cosmic horror, but a way of using cosmic horror as a lens through which to read other events.

Consider: what’s the difference between someone who not only is convinced, but knows and can prove that there are parasites that take control of people, or that there are alien fungus-creatures that descend from the sky and harvest the organs from catatonic people, or something like that, and someone who knows that the CIA was randomly drugging people with LSD to see if it would work as a mind control drug or that the FBI, among other agencies, killed Martin Luther King, Jr., or similar?

To understand The Shadow Over Innsmouth, just take The Shape of Water and make the whole thing from the federal agent’s perspective.

The former, in the narrative, is largely treated the same way as the latter is, in reality: the claims, regardless of whether they are objectively true in the context that they are made in, are dismissed pro forma. It isn’t even a question of whether it’s true or not – admitting it to be true is unthinkable, behaving as if it is true is forbidden. The drunken sailor Zadok Allen, who describes the town in Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth as being controlled by immortal fish-monsters, is treated with the same disdain that meets people discussing COINTELPRO, despite both – in their respective contexts – being verifiable.

I’ve had my own experience of this: sitting at a bonfire with a friend and talking about how slavery is still practiced in the United States. He acted like I was crazy, so I looked up the Thirteenth Amendment, reading the text of section 1 from it to him: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

He simply blinked at me, and then said, “Yeah, well, that might still be on the books, but it’s not like they actually do that. Why shouldn’t prisoners have jobs? Surely they’ve got a right to say no.”

I tried to convince him that this counted as slavery, but after a time determined that this was not going to go anywhere, and changed the subject. Anything at all can be true if you dismiss evidence, but that’s not really the point. The point is that there are truths that – as Jane Austen says – are universally acknowledged, and there is another set that – in contrast – are universally disavowed.

Enter the big Other. Various “body snatcher” movies, in my mind, relate to anxieties about this concept.

In this repeated trope, we have a reflection of a real and recurring figure that we can point to: the person who would speak truth to power but fails in the process. This happens because of the previously mentioned phenomenon from the work of Jacques Lacan, “the big Other.” While this could certainly be treated as the title for something out of Ligotti or similar, this instead refers to the abstracted “everybody” that is referred to when it’s said that “everybody knows” something, or the company from who you are excluded when you do what “nobody” does. In short, it’s an illustration of social control through soft power: it isn’t really necessary for people to be disappeared into Room 101 when their closest friends and family members treat them as crazy for saying something – which isn’t to say that it doesn’t happen, but why commit a murder that needs to be covered up when you could just shame someone into silence, and have their shame dissuade others from looking into it?

One of the most common types of mutant epistemology is paranoia – the belief that there is an ordered, controlled universe that is aimed at persecuting you in particular. It’s often commented that this is actually an optimistic vision of the world: it means that there is an agency behind all of the random misfortune that fills the world. It suggests not just that there is a grand design behind everything, but also that you are important enough to be visible to the designer.

Despite how brutal his fiction could be, I don’t feel that Dick could bring himself to believe in a universe where good is absent.

This is really the commonality between Lovecraftian and Dickian fiction (the guys over at the Weird Studies podcast refer to this as “Love-Dickian” and I just can’t really get on board with that) – they both have a paranoiac energy to them, but Dick is a Gnostic and Lovecraft (for all of his atheism) was a Puritan: Dick could have a God of Evil and a God of Good, but Lovecraft could only invert the polarity of the already-awful god of the puritans and somehow end up with something worse, which became Azathoth, the blind idiot god at the heart of all creation, when dressed up in semi-scientific drag.

However, both are playing – to some extent – in the same sandbox (it’s up to you as to whether you think Dick has a horrific bone in his body), and both flirt with paranoiac thought processes. One of the side-effects of this is that they’re willing to entertain that the world is not as it’s presented, which is a prerequisite to breaking away from the consensus enforced by the big Other.

This paranoiac divergence is – to me – the essence of cosmic horror. The world is not made for you. Your own existence is an epiphenomenon of a system you can’t understand, and in a moment it can turn into what Thomas Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race describes as a “festival of carnage.” It’s only blind chance that it doesn’t.

To me, this sounds a lot like learning that you’ve been lied to by the education system. If you’ve read something like A People’s History of the United States, or more recent books that are variations on the same theme, then you understand what I’m talking about: a feeling like a splinter under your skin, gradually working its way out, as you digest an unpalatable fact that requires you shed a lot of what you’ve accepted previously. The sort of revelation that drives a cosmic horror story should feel like that: awful and unpalatable and impossible to look away from, but focused not on history but something even more basic – physics, or music, or mathematics, or even subjectivity itself.

Do you know how many times I’ve attempted to describe Libidinal Economy to people? It’s amazing that I still have anyone willing to drink a beer with me.

As you dive deeper into the topic, it becomes something like the “Wormword” from China Miéville’s short story “Buscard’s Murrain” – a topic that you compulsively find yourself returning back to and repeating, in the hope of getting others to understand it. However, instead of creating parasitic worms from the brain matter of those who hear it, it results in one of two responses: dismissal, or (more rarely) fascination.

(Of course, Edgar and I still occasionally refer to “brainworms” to refer to a sort of crawling, unpleasant feeling, a sort of slow-motion anxiety that comes upon us at times. We have excellent mental health.)

I hesitate to draw too much of a lesson for life from this. Simply because an idea is dismissed doesn’t mean it needs to be doubled down on. It means that evidence needs to be considered and analyzed and judgment needs to be withheld until it is. It means that the only grounds on which a claim can be dismissed is the evidence.

It also means that, anyone who wants to write cosmic horror – or things in that vein – should consider, just once or twice, maybe starting a conversation on prison reform or the minimum wage or similar. You’ll either get dismissed in a way that allows you to write the experience more effectively, or you might accidentally make a better world.

Or you’ll encounter that weird figure: the person who acknowledges that you’re right but simply doesn’t have the mental energy to come along with you. I’m imagining something along the lines of, “Yes, of course the world is a never-ending festival of carnage and there’s a deep flaw in human consciousness that makes life not worth living, but can you wrap it up? I’ve got work tomorrow morning and need to do the dishes before I go to bed.”

Which is, itself, a reaction that we don’t see much in Cosmic Horror. Possibly an interesting addition.

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