In my new book The Warlow Experiment, set in late eighteenth-century England, an almost illiterate agricultural laborer lives underground without any human contact for 7 years. It’s an experiment set up by an obscure landowner eager to make his mark in the scientific world. The strange idea was based on a true story and for me the interest lay in exploring the minds of both the experimenter and his subject.
That anybody might exist underground surely seems extraordinary, because our first thoughts will usually be of darkness and death. In the beginning was Hades! While the Old Testament doesn’t deal with Hell (too many other brilliant tales), for the ancient Greeks it was real. In Hellenistic mythology, after death each soul was taken down below the earth. Ferried over the River Styx by the gloomy boatman Charon, the soul arrived at the gates of Hades, which is the name of both the underworld and its fearsome king, to be assessed.
There are many tales involving Hades but my two favorites are, firstly, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and then that of Persephone. For the Greeks both stories have particular meanings (for example, Persephone’s story is an explanation for the seasons); but for me, both tell of loss.
Orpheus goes down to the underworld to rescue his wife, Eurydice, dead from a snake bite. Singing to his lyre, Orpheus’s music charms the savage and usually pitiless king of the underworld who allows him to take Eurydice back to earth so long as he doesn’t turn to look at her. Up they go, through the dark and as they reach the sunlight, Orpheus turns. And loses her forever.
The young Persephone, whose mother, Demeter, is the goddess of nature and plenty, is abducted by Hades and taken down to the underworld to live with him. Eventually a compromise is reached whereby Persephone is allowed to spend half the year above ground with her mother before returning to Hades. Thus it is spring and summer when Persephone is on earth, autumn and winter when she is below. Demeter is distraught when her daughter disappears, her whereabouts not known for some time. Desperate, Demeter’s hair turns white overnight.
Both these subterranean stories are wonderfully re-told by Robert Graves in his The Greek Myths. And Louise Glück, that marvellous American poet, explores the Persephone story in her collection Averno.
The Greek underworld is already shadowy enough, but the greatest, most thorough, most terrifying portrayal of subterranean regions must be Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy which he wrote in the fourteenth century.The Greek underworld is already shadowy enough, but the greatest, most thorough, most terrifying portrayal of subterranean regions must be Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy which he wrote in the fourteenth century. In Inferno Dante himself descends into hell accompanied by the Greek poet Virgil who leads him to the nine circles of punishment, each circle lower and worse than the one before and each devoted to a particular sin: lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud, treachery.
Dante’s descriptions are detailed and extraordinary: the two men witness appalling torments perpetrated forever on the souls of sinners. Although we understand that the tortures are mental, Dante’s language is so precise and powerful that we see, hear, feel them as physical and they are all the more horrifying for that.
Inferno has been translated countless times and inspired numerous writings and pictures e.g. by Botticelli, Doré and Delacroix, whose great painting shows Dante and Virgil on a raft, in danger of being upset by heaving bodies. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art you can find Carpeaux’s sculpture of Ugolino and his Sons dying of hunger.
Both the Greek myths and Dante place the subterranean world within religious and philosophical systems. Dante’s is a Christian world, the lowest point in his hell occupied by Satan, bound. In the nineteenth century with the shift of culture and belief from the religious to the secular, possible worlds under the earth become subjects for science and adventure.
Perhaps the most famous novel of the subterranean genre is Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in which Verne’s hero, Professor Lidenbrock, and his nephew, Axel, believe that there are volcanic tubes leading to the earth’s centre. Verne is a great story-teller and the adventures of these two very different characters and their guide Hans, involve natural dangers like running out of water and deadly storms as well as encounters with creatures from a far distant past.
Although there’s no actual time travel, Verne’s underworld seems located in prehistory, where everything is gigantic, whether it be insects, mushrooms or petrified trees; where an Icthyosaurus wins a battle with a Plesioraurus. The travellers’ most terrifying experience is an encounter with an enormous prehistoric man, all of 12 feet tall, watching over a herd of huge mastodons.
Verne was inspired by the early 19th-century geological findings of Charles Lyell whose work caused people to reassess the age of the world and thus to question the biblical account of the Creation. His novel is much more than informative, however, providing thrilling adventure and terror.
The genre of underground writing grew considerably in the nineteenth century, and even more so in the twentieth. Arguably the most famous work of all science fiction is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which of course is an exploration of time as a physical dimension but also a parable of class division. Although set in the future, Wells, writing in 1895, points to contemporary society and suggests that the conditions of his novel might logically follow from the conditions of his day. Subterranean fiction has become political.
Above ground live the Eloi, the leisured class who have evolved to the point of being barely human. They live off the labour of the Morlocks, creatures living underground, based on the lives of the working class of Wells’ own time, employed in mines, boiler rooms, and even the basements of large houses (apparently his mother worked in a house with underground tunnels). Wells’ twist on this situation is to make the Eloi the main source of food for the Morlocks—overlords have become livestock.
The next two novels contain political dimensions, if quite different ones. The great writer Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man begins and ends underground. But there’s nothing strange or futuristic about Ellison’s subterranean world, for his protagonist is a nameless black man in 1950s America, his existence, in effect, one of invisibility.
The bulk of the novel relates the man’s experiences in irrepressible first-person narrative, from his life as a student in an all-black college in the South, through a variety of employments, a spell in a mental hospital, to Harlem where he joins the ‘Brotherhood’. His complex and conflicted relationship with black nationalism and Marxism help to reveal a deeper exploration of his identity.
The book opens and closes in the underground room. ‘My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light,’ he writes. He’s wired every bit of his ceiling with 1369 bulbs to a power line in the building above: an excellent symbol of how his invisibility to white authority is made to work to his advantage.
By the end of the book, the quiet and safety of his cellar enables Ellison’s nameless man to reach an understanding both of the world and his individuality, to be relieved of the futile quest for conformity. It also enables him to decide to emerge.
Roughly twenty-five years later, in 1976, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal produced Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is funny, surreal, satirical in a way that seems particularly Czech, madder than Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweik. No less political than either Wells or Ellison, Hrabal’s hero, Haňt’a works underground in what seems to be a police state or perhaps just post-war Czechoslovakia. For 35 years, he tells us repeatedly, he’s been operating a hydraulic press that compacts paper into bales which are then transported to a paper mill. In today’s climate of extreme recycling anxiety we should prick up our ears!
Through a hole in the ceiling of Haňt’a’s cellar all manner of paper is poured: bags, wrappings, theatre programs, ice cream wrappers, wallpaper, bloodied butcher paper, prints of old masters, newspapers, prayer books and even leather-bound volumes from the Royal Prussian Library. He reads every book before it is crushed and thus is ‘educated unwittingly’. Sometimes he buries whole books in the middle of a bale of compacted paper. Haňt’a smuggles choice books home, where three tons of them threaten to fall and smother him.
Hilarious though the book is, and occasionally luminously poetic, this is an underground horror story. No reader can truly enjoy reading about the destruction of books.
In Haruki Murakami’s 1994/5 novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, its dull, jobless anti-hero, Toru, experiences all manner of strange events, many of which appear to be dreams or workings of memory but are presented so that the reader is unsure whether they are real or not. Characters seem to relate to each other but perhaps don’t, may have psychic powers but maybe not. Interspersed are sections of graphically presented war experience which we do take as real and horrifying.
So, how does the subterranean figure in Murakami’s book? Just as the reader searches for explanation and enlightenment, so does Toru and where he finds it is at the bottom of a dry well.
From the earliest pages he’s told, cryptically, to ‘find the deepest well and go down to the bottom’. He also encounters Lieutenant Miyama, who, having been thrown down a well by brutal soldiers, has an experience which takes him into the core of his own consciousness. Toru finds he can lose himself in the darkness at the bottom of the well over which he pulls a cover to completely conceal himself and he, too, ‘draws a little closer to the core of things’. Under the ground there’s a certainty that’s missing in the deliberate ambiguity of Murakami’s world.
In contrast to all these fictions is Mick Jackson’s 1997 novel, The Underground Man. Jackson takes a real life English duke known for his introverted and eccentric behavior and writes his way into both mind and situation, making the Duke, if anything, more eccentric than the original.
Set at some unspecified point in the nineteenth century, we read the Duke’s thoughts from his journal, and occasional accounts from people who have worked for him, observed his appearance and behavior. From them we learn that the duke is certainly odd, possibly even hideous. In his own writing we hear a gentle, innocent man, puzzled by the world and often distracted, who still believes in things he was told in childhood, such as the existence of the frightening Berry Man whose wild powers might drag him into the wood.
At one point he dresses in his fur coat and beaver hat, takes his compass, handkerchief, pencil and paper and sets off to walk round his house, up and down corridors, in and out of rooms. He quickly becomes lost and, when he ends up in the kitchens where the maids scream at his sudden appearance, must ask his way back to his room. Another time, he wonders if he might move objects by willpower, in particular a jug on the table that he’s certain is looking at him with contempt.
Given his position and wealth he can indulge his whims and desires and the biggest project he determines on is the building of tunnels radiating out from his house and land into the outside world. These are not small, hidey-hole type tunnels but huge, brick-lined structures built by teams of 200 men, illuminated by sky-lights and gas lamps and wide enough for two horse-drawn carriages.
Jackson describes the tunnels and the building of them in considerable detail. But this is neither a novel of adventure nor of science: it’s a psychological portrait of a man whose behavior is often comically sad and eventually horrifying. A final twist transforms comedy into tragedy.
—Featured image: Jan Brueghel The Elder, Orpheus Sings for Pluto and Proserpina, 1594
