Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 29 -- The Underground River as Metaphor
In The Dark River (2008) by John Twelve Hawks, all citizens are pawns in a game where only the
bad side knows the rules (or, for that matter, that there’s even a game on). The First Realm, hell,
is replete with its own River Styx, which Maya, who's on the good side, must negotiate.
She knelt on the floor and lowered her head beneath the water. Lying flat, she moved toward
the opening in the wall. Maya could hear her own breath, the bubbles coming out of the
regulator, and a scraping sound from the edge of her pony tank and she dragged it along the
limestone floor.
When she reached the opening, she extended her arm and pointed the flashlight into the
darkness. Over the years, the flowing water had cut an underground tunnel through the rubble
of the past. The walls of the tunnel were an aggregate of stones, Roman brick, and chunks of
white marble. It looked fragile, as if everything would crumble, but the real danger was created
by the present era. In order to support the collapsing foundations of the building, someone had
driven steel rods deep into the ground. The tips of the rods jutted into the tunnel like the tips of
rusty sword blades.
The plot is much the same as most of the genre -- lots of close calls, etc., future film rights in the
writer's mind -- but the underground river flowing through past eras, endangered by the present
"like the tips of rusty sword blades," evokes the imagination of the reader.
To harvest similes, we need only peruse liberal arts journals. There are too many.
Herbert
Shore
Walton
Hamilton
Remembering
Eduardo, Reflections
on the Life and Legacy
of Eduardo Mondlane
English Social History,
A Survey of Six
Centuries, by G.M.
Trevelyan
Jay Winter Film and the Matrix of
Memory
Judith Adler Travel as Performed
Art
Robert K.
Martin
Hercules in
Knickerbockers: Class,
Gender, and Sexuality
in The Landlord at
Lion's Head
Africa Today
Winter-Spring
1992
American
Economic
Review
March 1944
American
Historical
Review
June 2001
American
Journal of
Sociology
May 1989
American
Literary
Realism
April 1988
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
The resurgence of interest in
Mondlane among Mozambicans is
LIKE AN UNDERGROUND RIVER
rising to the surface.
The current scene holds all the ages;
the stream of causal events, unfixed by
positive dates, "flows on LIKE AN
UNDERGROUND RIVER"; a culture in
all its confused contrariness is
adamant to the keen tools of logical
analysis..
Bodnar takes issue with work on
traumatic memory, understood AS AN
UNDERGROUND RIVER of
recollection, likely to erupt unbidden
when triggered by some external
stimulus
LIKE AN UNDERGROUND STREAM,
they gather force before they are
noticed, disappear only to resurface
again in modified guise, or, taking
hidden turns, give an appearance of
novelty while drawing on enduring
sources.
That dream of a boyish, egalitarian
love ran LIKE AN UNDERGROUND
STREAM throughout the art of the
nineteenth century, emerging in the
works of Whitman or Eakins or even
Twain, and bubbling up one last time in
E.M. Forster.
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