Possibly I've raised this topic before, but I'm fascinated by it, and like a summer watermelon seed, cannot get a firm grip on it.

In fantasy and adventure stories, there is a frequent employment of a subterranean setting, and it establishes something very special that sets it apart from narratives that occur elsewhere. I feel that there are practical explanations for this reader response, but am unsure how best to characterize it.

Think about CAS stories like The Vaults of Yo-Voombis or Vuthoom. What part does the setting play in establishing the overall mood of the story?

[NOTE TO THE ANAL-RETENTIVES AMONG US: There's the clear danger that this thread could turn into a contest in which participants compete to name obscure works that feature subterranean settings. While a bit of this is acceptable, a surplus of it is counter-productive, and may cause us to resume discussing politics...]

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Gay symbolism.

On a more serious note, underground regions are (1) dark; (2) legitimately dangerous and scary; and (3) associated from our earliest myths with the realm and abode of the dead.

Platypus Wrote:
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> Gay symbolism.


Probably has been someone's dissertation.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Platypus Wrote:
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> On a more serious note, underground regions are
> (1) dark; (2) legitimately dangerous and scary;
> and (3) associated from our earliest myths with
> the realm and abode of the dead.


I agree with all of these. Here's one that I'm not sure of...

It can be hard to gain suspension of disbelief, especially if a story takes place in a supposedly "real" or realistic setting. But if one sets the narrative underground, that works as a quick dodge around overt and immediate disbelief.

I would point to HPL's shost-written The Mound as a good example. Contemporaneous Oklahoma, with a strange minor local legend that when revealed is an entire alternate historical record, a sort of crypto-history, as in Mountains of Madness (also underground, part of the time).

What? You don't believe in zombies walking the city streets simply because no one has seen any?

Well, what if they lived in a cavern, underground, that no one, or few, ever sees? They could be there *right* now--this very instant.

It enables implausible action to take place out of sight, in the present, and in doing so, makes it harder to say with certainty that it never, ever, happens, at all.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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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.

Ultimately it is the subconscious.

Sawfish Wrote:
> It can be hard to gain suspension of disbelief,
> especially if a story takes place in a supposedly
> "real" or realistic setting. But if one sets the
> narrative underground, that works as a quick dodge
> around overt and immediate disbelief.

Yes, definitely. There was a time, though, when the tangled forest, or the trackless desert, or the undiscovered island, or the blank spaces on the borders of maps, worked just as well as a setting for the fantastic.

Knygatin Wrote:
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> Ultimately it is the subconscious.

For most classic fantasy that is so. Exploring the dark recesses of the mind and soul.

But for the Nordic myths about being bergtagen, taken into the mountain of the trolls, it is something different, that goes beyond symbolism of Man's mind; it concerns something real and threatening outside of Man, the mystic forces of Nature that we are unable to grasp or control.

Knygatin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Knygatin Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Ultimately it is the subconscious.
>
> For most classic fantasy that is so. Exploring the
> dark recesses of the mind and soul.
>
> But for the Nordic myths about being bergtagen,
> taken into the mountain of the trolls, it is
> something different, that goes beyond symbolism of
> Man's mind; it concerns something real and
> threatening outside of Man, the mystic forces of
> Nature that we are unable to grasp or control.

Seldom does modern man stand in abject submission to Nature, but the recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, where we live, and where it is so mild in the summer that few homes bother with any form of cooling more aggressive than a box fan, was awe-inducing, let me assure you.

When it reaches 97, 107, 112, then 116 in a locale where 90 raises eyebrows and induces comments, it really gets your attention, and you feel that maybe you're not one of Wolfe's "Masters of the Universe", after all.

Similar to recognizing undeniable evidence of one's own mortality as one advances in age to the point that you meet or exceed statistical life expectancy.

Quite a feeling, that...

:^)

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Seldom does modern man stand in abject submission
> to Nature, but the recent heat wave in the Pacific
> Northwest, where we live, and where it is so mild
> in the summer that few homes bother with any form
> of cooling more aggressive than a box fan, was
> awe-inducing, let me assure you.
>
> When it reaches 97, 107, 112, then 116 in a locale
> where 90 raises eyebrows and induces comments, it
> really gets your attention, and you feel that
> maybe you're not one of Wolfe's "Masters of the
> Universe", after all.
>
>

HORRIBLE! I imagine that when the temperature rises above body temperature, a fan will not do any good either, but only make it worse.

Knygatin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sawfish Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Seldom does modern man stand in abject
> submission
> > to Nature, but the recent heat wave in the
> Pacific
> > Northwest, where we live, and where it is so
> mild
> > in the summer that few homes bother with any
> form
> > of cooling more aggressive than a box fan, was
> > awe-inducing, let me assure you.
> >
> > When it reaches 97, 107, 112, then 116 in a
> locale
> > where 90 raises eyebrows and induces comments,
> it
> > really gets your attention, and you feel that
> > maybe you're not one of Wolfe's "Masters of the
> > Universe", after all.
> >
> >
>
> HORRIBLE! I imagine that when the temperature
> rises above body temperature, a fan will not do
> any good either, but only make it worse.

If you sweated oe wet yourself down you were OK; the humidity was ~16% so it was OK in that regard.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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