Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 29 -- The Underground River as Metaphor
But where was that free money coming from that these tubabs kept pulling from their pockets?
It was like there was a money spring welling up in that cold country. Like a RIVER
UNDERGROUND washing up all the money from the world out onto the flood plains of the old
River Thames... The River Gambia never worked like that; it washed people out to other lands
and sometimes it brought villagers from upcountry to Baku looking for a new life in the tubab
hotels. But not money. No, never money. -- Richard Tromans, The River Underground (2003)
And Tromans' closing line, the protagonist being handcuffed. Hus felt like he was floating,
floating up from an UNDERGROUND RIVER.
Notwithstanding the silencing of the Legal Realists in the course of the Second World War, the
resonance of their critiques of conceptual and rule formalism continued like a
SUBTERRANEAN RIVER. -- Brian Z. Tamanaha, "How an Instrumental View of Law Corrodes
the Rule of Law," DePaul Law Review 469, 2006
Margaret Atwood's factual allusion to underground rivers (see Chapters 40, Sinkholes, and 64,
Minewaters) provides metamorphic correspondence.
I think of those towns built on UNDERGROUND RIVERS, where houses and whole streets
disappear overnight, into sudden quagmires... Something like this must have happened to her,
once she saw the true shape of things to come. -- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaiden’s Tale
(1986)
Although it's a bit longer, we can't leave out Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and
Lost, 1934-1961 (2011) by Paul Hendricksonis.
Here's another example of the UNDERGROUND RIVER of Hemmingway fatalism:
Not so long after Arnold Samuelson knocked at is door -- about three months later, by my
calculation -- in Cuba, with his boat,
remembering Africa,
remembering Spain,
remembering a car wreck and fractured arm out West,
remembering a forward listening post on the Piave front in World War I when he was a
teenager,
the mentor wrote:
"I did nothing that had not been done before me. I had been shot and I had been crippled
and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing or another and I, truly, did not
mind any more."
Influence
[Astrology's] impact on history and on the history of ideas, an UNDERGROUND RIVER through
human affairs. -- Benson Bobrick, The Fated Sky (2005)
Yet the more one reads Beckett, even late Beckett, the more one realizes that the intensity of
emotion is still there, only in a new form, albeit formless, but there nevertheless, like an
UNDERGROUND RIVER rippling the stylized surface of the written page. -- Corina Martin-
Jordache, "Modernity, Urban Semiology and the Beckettian Cityscape," Journal of European
Studies, December 2002
Inspiration
Like an UNDERGROUND RIVER flowing through Western culture, the Greek gods have sent
up springs and fountains, inspiring and fertilizing the Western imagination for more than twenty
centuries. -- Arianna Huffington, inside flap, The Gods of Greece (1993)
Art is an act of tuning in and dropping down the well. It is as though all the stories, paintings,
music, performances in the world live under the surface of our normal consciousness. Like an
UNDERGROUND RIVER, they flow through us as a stream of ideas that we can tap down into.
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
Uppddaatteess aatt hhttttpp::////www. .uunnm. .eedduu//~rrhheeggggeenn//UnnddeerrggrroouunnddRi ivveerrss. .hhttml l
382