Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Jack London (1876-1916)
From A Son of the Sun (1912),
Chapter 16 -- Underground Rivers in English Fiction
Several times filling and emptying his lungs in diver fashion, Grief turned
over and went down through the water. Salt it was to his lips, and warm to
his flesh; but at last, deep down, it perceptibly chilled and tasted brackish.
Then, suddenly, his body entered the cold, subterranean stream. He
removed the small stopper from the calabash, and, as the sweet water
gurgled into it, he saw the phosphorescent glimmer of a big fish, like a sea
ghost, drift sluggishly by.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
Ulysses Rivers, Dublin
We attach Joyce because we cannot ignore a penultimate work that draws so explicitly upon four
of the five classical underground rivers. Joyce saw the Odyssey as literature’s most well-rounded
human portrait. That much said, Joyce's literary style is beyond most of us.
A few riverine quotations,
I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires.
I spoke to no-one; none to me.
From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan's office Poddle River hung out in fealty a
tongue of liquid sewage.
A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises hungrily from Liffey slime with Banbury cakes in their
beaks.
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