Re: What, exactly, is the narrative function of a subterranean setting?
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 18 July, 2021 01:46PM
Well, these settings are alien to us surface-dwellers. We put our dead in the ground, in catacombs, etc.
Sometime take a look at Edmund Burke's treatise on the beautiful and the sublime. In literature and the arts, the beautiful is that which pleases us by its harmony, its shapeliness and soothing or arousing color, its good order and proportion, its never-failing capacity to delight, while the sublime is that which evokes a pleasing sense of awe or even terror, as when we stand at the edge of a great precipice looking down, or when we see and hear the storm-frenzied ocean, or contemplate depths of darkness or echoing emptiness.
In myth and legend, underworlds are places of the deprived dead, or places of the Underground Folk, and one may be (as the Scandinavians put it) bergtagen, taken into the mountain, there to consort with them.
Underground places may be refuges for us, but not desired residences.
So the underground realm is a place that is not suited to us and might be threatening to us, but choice or necessity might guide us there. The underworld is the place from which precious metals and gems are mined, so there's that attraction. Entrances to underworlds may, then, combine a degree of attraction with fear. That combination is often found in folklore, high fantasy pulp fiction, etc. A cave, etc. is a way into "another world" that doesn't require machinery or magic.
One may also pass through a tunnel of some kind in order to leave the familiar for something more wonderful -- see Rachel Maddux's "obscure work" The Green Kingdom -- a novel that, by the way, I warmly recommend as a work of the poetic consciousness. I think there are people here at ED who would really like it.
One of the best underground journeys is in Alan Garner's "children's book" The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Has anyone here missed it?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 18 Jul 21 | 01:51PM by Dale Nelson.