New York Underground

The subject of the New York Underground is connected to the subject of Blues People and their culture via the short story by Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground, which follows the actions of an African American male fleeing from the police accused of a crime he did not committ into the sewers where he begins to have a different kind of life in which his consciousness is altered and his fears cease to exist.

Of course, his plight is a tragic one. Studying this site constructed by National Geographic which gives lots of information and illustrations concerning the construction and the history of the distribution of power and water underground, it is not surprising that things don't turn out well for the underground man. Along with the wires and the pipes, he is part of the underbelly of the city. This is a great website providing a lot of information and illustration of how the underground of New York is currently constructed. A good thing to know should the need arise.

New York Underground, the page is called and sponsored by National Geographic at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/97/nyunderground/docs/nymain.html.

Top Ten Underground Walks

A site maintained by National Geographic on the Top Ten Underground Walks in the World, the list is enlightening concerning the importance of what goes on underground and as such good background for your reading of Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground."

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/top-10/cave-tunnel-walks/

Some of these underground locations are naturally occuring but some of the most interesting to me are manmade.  One of them is the "Cu Chi Tunnels" which provided access to an underground village composed of kitchen, dormitory, meetings rooms and hospital for the Viet Cong during the Vietnamese War (1954-1975) first with France and then with the United States.  The network of tunnels stretched over a length of 125 miles. Berlin has an underground radiation proof bunker built in 1971 to withstand nuclear attack for 14 days.  One of the most famous is the Paris Sewers, apparently a wonder of human ingenuity.  Also the Catacombs in Rome which go back to the early years of Christianity. There's the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt.  The Great Pyramid is apparently 30 times the size of the Empire State Building.

The Man Who Lived Underground

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleries/100720-london-sewer-fat-clog-flushers-weird-news-pictures/#/sewer-fat-cleaning-leicester-square_23690_600x450.jpg

Sewers and underground cities have become a topic of great fascination to me stimulated by my reading of Richard Wright's story.  I find it helps to have a more precise sense of what the world he was creating might have looked like since Wright was so given to realistic, precise detail and description.  He was greatly influenced by the great Russian writers, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy among them, and this fondness for detail may have come about through reading this prior work.

In any case, on to the interesting links that one will find in relation to issues of sewers and the underground, some of the best stuff is from National Geographic, which has done many shows on the topic.  The following link is to a story about a wall of fat having formed in the London underground.  A lot of people don't know what a danger it is to throw fat down the sink drain or the sewers but apparently it accumulates and blocks up everything.  I guess it does the same thing to the pipes that it does to our bodies.

  Sewers are extremely crucial to modern life and to concentrations of human population such as one will see in a city.  Without an effective sewer (which New York didn't have until less than a hundred years ago), the result of concentration of populations in one place and the accumulation of their untreated waste and disease on a massive scale.  Indeed some of the places in the world where particularly childhood disease remains at plague level it is because of the lack of adequate sanitation arrangements such as modern sewers.  Whether Wright intended it deliberately, the choice of the sewers as this young man's adventure has the impact of maximizing how important of everything that happens to him.

Below find a link to a story about the problem of cholera in London in the 19th century when untreated sewage was still getting into the drinking water supply of the city.  Can you imagine people not being willing to believe that combining waste and drinking water would cause death and disease but people continued to deny it even after it was known because the needed corrections would be expensive and time consuming.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0614_040614_tvcholera_2.html

Manhole Covers and The Man Who Lived Underground

Did some research on manhole images and came up with these stairs leading down to the Viennese sewer used in Orson Welles' The Third Man.  Apparently it is possible to arrange to tour the sewers in Vienna today, as opposed to the layout of the sewers in Wright's story.  It may be that these older cities in Europe and elsewhere have much more elaborate sewers, and or they may have sewers that become obsolete and therefore make good places to tour.  This one is certainly beautiful.


This is a shot of the manhole cover in Vienna, the same one used in The Third Man with the various leafs of the cover open.


This is the same manhole but closed.  If you wish to see the way the manhole figures in Welles' film, there is a clip on UTube linked via some of the sewer research sites.  This connection to Welles is interesting because it was he who directed the stage version of Wright's first novel Native Son.  Wright's story was published in 1942 several years prior to the making of The Third Man, which was very "noir," or in other word filled with night time images and expressive of cynical views concerning the possibilities for urban modern life.  On the other hand, so was "The Man Who Lived Underground."  But now we are crossing over into Movie Talk, which belongs on another blog.

It seems as though American manholes are somewhat less elaborate, although no less beautiful.  This is a lovely one in Minnesota.

This is a manhole in Washington, D.C. Couldn't find any in New York for some reason but there is a Manhole Group on Flickr with millions of images so its out there.  Have seen enough to guess that manholes are a fascinating topic, on their own merits.

The Man Who Lived Underground

Today school really went the way it should with two classes
discussing The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright.

I see the story as a metaphorical somewhat surreal treatment of the New York City  sewage
system as an allegory of modern urban culture.  The story is obviously influenced by Dostoevsky's Underground Man, concerned with some of the same issues of alienation and injustice in an urban bureaucracy although Dostoevsky's Underground Man isn't actually underground and he also has an obviously repugnant personality.  It is less clear in that story that the UM's condition isn't his own fault.  Yet his problems are structural as well, built into a bureaucracy which forms the outer layers of a hierarchy in which the Czar and his family are at the summit.  Conditions in Russia at that point might be considered predictive of the subsequent Russian Revolution, although the Revolution which actually followed many decades later did little to make things better for the not well connected individual.

Whereas in Wright's story,   you can readily imagine that much of the hero's problems stem from his race as black but he is also poor and friendless, marginal in terms of caste as well as present condition, which he has in common with Dostoevsky's hero.  Where he differs is that he is running from the police who have beaten him into confessing to a crime he didn't commit when he sees a manhole that has popped slightly off its fitting.  He flees down under the manhole cover to find himself in the sewer systems of New York.  He narrowly escapes
being flushed and finds a series of hidden tunnels that allow him to
peak into the world's of a nearby church and  a nearby jewelry store.
He steps in and out of these worlds and has some impact on what
happens there. He robs a safe full of money and returns to see the
custodian being tortured by the same police who beat him in an
attempt to extract a confession from the custodian who did nothing.

Later our underground man is stamping diamonds he stole into
the ground and papering the wall with the money, which has become
meaningless to him.  Finally, he becomes so disoriented that he
transcends his physical hindrances and begins to believe that he knows
the secret truth which he now wants to share with the church members,
who ejects him because he is so filthy. 

Suddenly he realizes that who he really needs to talk to is the police who beat him. Not clear how long he's been underground but it takes a while for them to remember
him and what crime they associated him with. They have since found
someone else to take the rap. He begins to tell them about the money
and tries to lead them back down into the sewer to show them the
money and diamonds whereupon one of the police shoots him. The other
police man asks him why he shot him to which his partner answers, when
they get like that, you have to shoot them. He falls down into the
sewer and is pushed down the drain into the flow of water, and to his death presumably.

Wright's story is littered with obvious symbols--money, a dead baby, the police, the sewer itself.  But I suppose it is also significant where you are personally when you read this story.  The first time I read it was maybe 20 years ago and at that time I think I imagined that the sewer to be more like the subways, and was less preoccupied by the idea of the hero standing in untreated sewage, or that there were cave-like pockets in the wall, or the relative probability of his being able to see into businesses on the streets above.
Since it is an allegory about truth and freedom, you see your own life
reflected in it, certainly the life of the city.

So the discussions among the master's student was wonderful and
helpful to me because I found myself constantly comparing his
treatment of the sewers to how I imagined the subways. I googled
sewer and found some materials on sewer systems and manholes, and some
stuff on combined sewer and rain water drainage systems.

As some of my students mentioned, homeless people live in the subway
system.  Reference: The Mole People.

http:poopthebook.com/blog/2007/10/19/the-great-stink/

Further having looked into some various sources

http://www.sewers.org

http://www.sewerhistory.org

National Geographic's New York Underground Site.

 Ideally, there was once the notion that waste disposal should go in a cesspool in the backyard, and then the British began with the flush toilets (in order to perpetuate the bourgeois notion that some people didn't actually have waste), which multiplied the volume of waste exponentially.

In the time that Wright is writing about specifically this would have begun to be a deep but largely concealed problem resulting in much untreated sewage going into the rivers around New York, rivers that poor children swam in.  More than likely there were dead animals if not a dead baby or two.

Later in the M.A. class we got into a discussion of revolutionary times, and whether or not the 1850s were inherently revolutionary in Russia and what that might mean. 

I wanted to stress that there had been little freedom for the poor people of the world at this time, even when there was revolutionary fervor as there would be in the French Revolution and the American Revolution (and much much later in the Russian Revolution). The serfs who were nominally freed from serfdom were far from free. They were peasants, which has nothing to do with a state of freedom, however you may definite it.  

Even the ideologues of the Russian revolution saw the peasant as hopeless. Their vision was for the elevation of the proletariat (urban workers) not the peasant. The Russian Revolution largely continued the exploitation of the peasant class as did every previous regime. There has never been much freedom for those who are tied to the land, which seems to me a great shame since our need for the fruits of the earth is likely to continue forever. Can such need co-exist with freedom?  What is freedom?  I think perhaps freedom is being a child but I don't know.

Anyway it was interesting.