Rewind: What lies below
The nether world, the underground, has been a space of curiosity, myth and imagination, whether cast as Hell or as a site of adventure
By Pramod K Nayar
Deep Sea explorations and mining are now routine matters with the advent of efficient technologies, and, of course, the ceaseless, relentless human greed for natural resources. But there was a time when the regions below the surface were a source of considerable curiosity, myth and imagination. The underground served the purposes of fantasy, the space of adventure and the testing ground for the current technologies. 2024 marks a celebration of the first, and most enduring,undergound novel, as Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth turns 160.ÉdouardRiou’s magnificent illustrations, on par with Gustav Dore’s for Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and John Tenniel’s for Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland only adds to the power and charm of the novel.
- While not a clearly environmental text, there are hints that humanity has been over-using the natural resources, and that these resources, obtained by extraction, will run out
Verne is best known for three adventure novels: A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (serialised in 1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). Verne remains a global bestseller even now — Wikipediatells us he is the most translated author in history, below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. Journey as the title indicates is a travel novel. Professor Otto Lidenbrock, a scientist, accompanied by his rather reluctant nephew, Axel (reluctant because he has to leave behind his love interest, Lidenbrock’s niece, Gräuben) and an Icelander, man-servant, Hans, embarks on the journey after they decipher an old inscription in an Icelandic saga narrative. The inscription, by a chemist, Arne Saknussemm, tells them how to get to the centre of the earth through an extinct crater in Iceland. The perilous journey takes them deeper underground where they encounter a vast sea, forests and prehistoric animals. They run out of water, but the ever-faithful Hans discovers a fresh water source. While attempting to proceed deeper into the earth, their raft on the underground sea is violently spewed out by a volcanic spout. They land in Sicily and eventually make their way home to fame and fortune.
White Men, Black Materials
Although mining is not the focus of the novel, coal figures prominently in the work (Verne’s mining novel is lesser known, The Black Indies, 1877, with some stunning illustrations by Jules Férat).As they move deeper into the earth, they discover coal seams, which, of course, give them paroxysms of delight, and Axel says of the place: the ‘wondrous coal mine in the very bowels of the earth’. And again:
When I took my hand away, and happened to glance at it, it was quite black. We had reached the coal strata of the Central Earth…
“A coal mine without miners,” responded my uncle,.“I am perfectly certain that this gallery through successive layers of coal was not cut by the hand of man.”
Verne uses the opportunity to educate his readers about fossil fuels:
only herbaceous plants, immense turfs, briers, mosses, rare families, which, however, in those days were counted by tens and tens of thousands.
It is entirely to this exuberant vegetation that coal owes its origin. The crust of the vast globe still yielded under the influence of the seething, boiling mass, which was forever at work beneath. Hence arose numerous fissures, and continual falling in of the upper earth. The dense mass of plants being beneath the waters, soon formed themselves into vast agglomerations.Then came about the action of natural chemistry; in the depths of the ocean the vegetable mass at first became turf, then, thanks to the influence of gases and subterranean fermentation, they underwent the complete process of mineralization.
- Verne’s text follows the convention of the discovery narrative where the European man is a pioneer, but also combines it with themes of scientific secrecy and the experience of wonder
And then, as early as 1864, Verne predicts the crisis of fossil fuels when he writes:
In this manner, in early days, were formed those vast and prodigious layers of coal, which an ever—increasing consumption must utterly use up in about three centuries more, if people do not find some more economic light than gas, and some cheaper motive power than steam.
The world will run out of coal — andof course, other fuels — in time, due to excessive consumption, says Verne. Now, although Verne’s novel is not about mining, the references to coal in the novel seem to imply that it is a dominant force in the imagination of the time. In other words, Verne here indicates that the events underground, such as the natural processes that produce coal, are the driving force of events on the surface (industry) even as the surface processes push humanity deeper underground, questing for more resources. Axel, however, is hopeful:
coal is scattered over the whole surface of the globe, within a few yards of the upper crust. As I looked at these untouched strata, therefore, I knew they would remain as long as the world lasts.
The only hope, a form of veiled early environmentalist thought, is that at least the deeper strata remain ‘untouched’.
Secret, Discovery, Wonder
Professor Lidenbrock calls himself ‘the Columbus of these underground regions’, and this clearly repeats the white-man-as-discoverer image so inextricably linked with European colonial enterprise.
The discovery process begins with Alex interpreting the strange inscription, which he describes thus:
I had discovered the secret!
It came upon me like a flash of lightning. I had got the clue. All you had to do to understand the document was to read it backwards … By a mere accident I had discovered what he so much desired.
The discoverer, here, is the man— and discovery is a masculinised moment in colonial writing — who uncovers a secret meaning, mine, place, river, etc. But the discovery of an underworld is predicated on the discovery of a text’s secrets. And this discovery itself must be kept a secret, for as Lidenbrock warns: ‘you must keep the whole affair a profound secret. There is no more envious race of men than scientific discoverers. Many would start on the same journey. At all events, we will be the first in the field’.
Discovery entailed, as the critic Stephen Greenblatt argued about Columbus, the documentation of the experience of wonder. In Verne, everything about the caverns, paths and topoi they traverse is a source of wonder, which Alex repeatedly documents. While on the one hand, there is the distanced, focused and blind-to-all-else scientist, Lidenbrock, on the other is Alex, all wonderstruck, in the correct tradition of a discoverer.
Discoverers name the lands/water bodies they discover after themselves, their sovereigns or their beloveds, and Verne is no exception to this rule. So they name the features ‘Lidenbrock Sea’, ‘Port Gräuben’ and even a river after their loyal servant, ‘Hansbach’.
‘Discovery’ is also the discovery of human tenacity, courage and strength of character. Alex at one point wonders whether his uncle is a madman or a ‘discoverer of rare courage and grandeur of conception’. As in the case of the celebrated 19th century European travellers, the man has to demonstrate endurance and courage. In the process of the journey, he discovers his own qualities.
- Verne’s fantasy proposes an equal if not more biodiversity underground, made up of lifeforms that no longer survive on the surface
Verne complicates the idea of discovery by suggesting that these explorers are also aesthetes. He first calls the seams and pools of solidified lava a ‘gallery’. In the underground, far from human eyes and hands, the works of nature present, at least to Alex, the fount of all artistic beauty:
Sometimes we gazed through a succession of arches, its course very like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral. The great artistic sculptors and builders of the Middle Ages might have here completed their studies with advantage. Many most beautiful and suggestive ideas of architectural beauty would have been discovered by them.
Verne implies that surface natural beauty is matched by the beauty underground. Or, the underworld mirrors the world above in human perception or resembles the world humans aspire to.
The Technological Frontier
Early in the tale, there is a list of devices and apparatuses that the discoverers will carry with them:
A centigrade thermometer …, a manometer worked by compressed air…, A first-class chronometer…, Two compasses…, A night glass…, two Ruhmkorff coils…a voltaic battery
Mixing the historical with futuristic fantasy, Verne like others, underscores technology as the principal instrument of human triumphalism, especially when combined with the willpower and courage of the European man.
In many ways, from discovery to extraction, the planet’s frontiers are coterminous with the technological frontiers of human ingenuity. In his Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Verne would repeat this theme of technological triumphalism. Technology will enable conquest and governance of the new worlds. Verne describes this triumph in the following words in Journey:
Never had mineralogists been in such perfect circumstances for studying nature in situ. The drill, a brutal and unintelligent machine, could not bring the internal texture back to the surface of the globe—but we were going to examine it with our eyes, touch it with our hands. Through the layer of schists, coloured in wonderful green shades, there meandered metallic seams of copper and manganese, with traces of platinum and gold.
- 2024 marks a celebration of the first, and most enduring, undergound novel, as Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth turns 160
Biodiversity Underground
Verne’s explorers encounter prehistoric beasts and birds. First, Alex has this dream where he meets a ‘whole tribe of antediluvian creatures’, who populated the earth well before the advent of man. ‘Antediluvian’ is Verne’s term for ‘prehistoric’.
Underground, the explorers meet a biodiversity that is astonishing. It is, says Alex, a ‘hothouse of all the antediluvian plants’. The world underground is a pristine world untouched by humanity and thriving on elemental forces beyond human intervention:
Here we have the complete flora of the Second Era of the world, the Transition Era. Here we have those humble garden plants which became trees during the first centuries of the Earth…
The underground is a history of the planet, then, inscribed in the rock strata and when the humans proceed underground, they are ‘climbing up the scale of animal life, of which man forms the peak’, in Verne’s words.
They even witness the battle between two such ancient creatures:
The first of these hideous monsters has the snout of a porpoise, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile; and it is this that has deceived us. It is the most fearful of all antediluvian reptiles, the world—renowned Ichthyosaurus or great fish lizard.
…The two monsters only disturbed the surface of the sea!
At last have mortal eyes gazed upon two reptiles of the great primitive ocean!
The other was the mighty Plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical trunk…
Was this wonderful combat to end in the depths of the ocean? Was the last act of this terrible drama to take place without spectators?
Verne, like Stephen Baxter in Evolution, maps the ancient world in the form of a fantasy of animal instincts and battles for survival among giant predators. Distanced in time and place, the underground is the final exotic space.
Underground is also tropical and subtropical, for some obscure reason. Alex observes:
Vegetation was exaggerated in an extraordinary manner. I passed like a shadow in the midst of brushwood as lofty as the giant trees of California, and trod underfoot the moist and humid soil, reeking with a rank and varied vegetation.
The descent of the hero into the depths — called katabasis— is an old vision that informs myth and literature from the very ancient times. The descent, marked by dangerous encounters, is preliminary to his ascent — to fame, fortune and success.
For the critic Karen Pinkus in her book, Subsurface, the underground is the site of both exploitation and potential. She asks:
What are the consequences of thinking about the subsurface as choice, as home? Can it represent a space where we might renounce control of all resources and simply wait for the surface to return to what it was?
She adds: ‘To get at fantasies about what lies below the surface is also to think beyond the time of now on the surface’. If the underland, as Robert Macfarlane writes in his book of the same title, is the storehouse of our ‘memories, myths and metaphors’, works like Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, remain popular because they include all three: the myths of conquest, the metaphors of discovery and the memories of the planet before us.
(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)