After reading Joseph Shannon’s incredibly affecting short-story, Submarine, my first associations were with Kafka’s The Penal Colony and the oddball 2000 sci-fi horror film The Cell. And on the surface, (does that count as a submarine pun?) the marriage of the two certainly seems to cover a lot of the same ground: psychologically driven virtual reality, the journey into the self, incarceration and punishment, and even a quasi-transcendent ending to provide a grim twist to the reader. But after sitting with the work a little longer, I think that a far better comparison would actually be Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Due disclaimer: H.P. “Steak Sauce” Lovecraft was a wildly racist dipshit, even by the standards of the time, and believed a lot of other witless fascist nonsense besides which, (fitting then that we’re bringing him up in relation to prisons) and was also, like all believers in such garbage, a fucking loser. That said, the piece of shit could write half decently, and despite himself managed to tap into a few actual truths about human nature. It is these elements that we’ll be focusing on, but if you want to explore more I strongly recommend one of the many authors who built off of or were inspired by his work, who are not fucking losers but, in fact, pretty cool.
Ok, with that settled, The Shadow Over Innsmouth: The short-story bordering on novella tells the tale of a seemingly random traveller, unexpectedly waylaid in a small harbour town called Innsmouth. While there, he’s immediately struck by the strangeness of the locals, and a sense of creeping dread starts to overtake him. That night, the locals come for him in his hotel, and what follows is a tense cat-and-mouse style pursuit through the town’s seedy, uncanny underbelly. The traveller eventually escapes, but only after getting a glimpse of Innsmouth’s true, inhuman nature, born from a generations-long pact with a godlike entity from the deep. However, the true horror comes in what follows.
After his escape, the traveller researches the town, obsessed by the seemingly impossible revelations he received there. He discovers that, through his mother, his own family line intersects with the town. A recurring dream soon follows, in which he is drawn down into the deep, amongst the creatures that had previously terrorized him. Only now, he isn’t terrified. Only now, does he realize the part of himself that has always been missing, and the murky, inhuman waters that might fill that hole in him.
He has seen his own true nature, and longs for the deep.
Innsmouth is by no means a perfect work, but the twist at the end, the revelation of the eldritch horror already inside is incredibly impactful. The realization that the inhuman machinery, invisibly at work beneath the visible world, which mindlessly feeds on our terror and exploitation and ruin, can, even after all it's done to us, become the thing that we embrace and find peace in. This realization is as terrifying as it is worryingly relevant in our current world. The things that break us, feed on us, use us up without even knowing of our existence, can in the end become the balm that we turn to in our trauma and pain; the ultimate surrender.
It wouldn’t be until a decade and a half later, with the final dark twist of 1984, that we would see this idea stated as clearly and powerfully as it is in Shadow Over Innsmouth. And Shannon’s Submarine manages to go even a step further with it. First, by distilling down the deprivation, destruction, and eventual darkly transcendent rebirth of its protagonist into the fewest possible moving parts; a couple of tubes and gears, strategically placed. Secondly, by panning back at just the right moment, and re-injecting the crushing mundanity of our world back into the protagonist’s euphoric final moment.
The submarine-dweller doesn’t require any of the elaborate staging and supporting cast of Innsmouth to reach their moment of euphoric surrender to the system. Instead, they arrive at it, at that eldritch potential within themself, through deprivation alone. And this is perfectly fitting, for while our contemporary, neoliberal world is by no means lacking in evil excesses, it is its austerity and deprivations which most define it. Where Lovecraft’s protagonists are obliterated by the elaborate machinations of beings too large to recognize their existence, those of us alive today are instead violently unmade by algorithmically-enhanced but ultimately very petty bureaucracies. Ones in which nothing at all lays at the center, and even the human cogs who profit from it are without any true authority or discretion.
Unlike Innsmouth’s traveller, we are denied even the dark freedoms of the beckoning deep. Instead, like our submarine-dweller, we can find our ‘freedom’ only by coming to welcome our own annihilation. But even that freedom is an illusion. Even in our most abject state of surrender, the system that broke us will continue its extraction, refining the grist it has made of us into finer and finer fuel for its machines. There are no depths left to disappear into, no obliteration total enough to break the contracts we were born into, and no degree of surrender that will ever see us spared.
What we, as its recipients, can only fathom as punishment, is actually just a paring down. A cutting away of those bits which add friction to the capitalist machine. We are constrained, and starved, and damned to suffocating eternity, and wiped clean from any surface over which money may flow. All so a line might go up, in the eldritch accounting of an inhuman world.
Phew. Needless to say, this most recent addition to the archive is a bit of a bummer; although a bummer of exceptional quality. If, like me, you have even a touch of claustrophobia, the experience of reading Submarine will be a visceral one, and all the better for it.
Until next time, take care of yourself, and try to keep your head above water.