Notes on the Underground, New Edition: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination

by Rosalind Williams
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
283 pp., illus. Paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-262-73190-8.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens



First published in 1990, Rosalind Williams’s book has been from the very beginning a classic study in the history of technology. A deeply humanist examination of the mutual shaping of science and culture in the 19^th Century (mainly), it has owned part of its rapid but lasting success to the strong environmental chord that resonated throughout its pages (although the author’s position is that of strongly engaged academic, not that of a political activist).

The questions raised in this book are threefold.

The first question is historical. How to describe man’s attempt to move beneath the earth’s surface, and how to analyze it on its two sides, the technological one and the cultural one, for the gradual discovery of the underground has never ceased to be interpretatively framed, whereas the basic landmarks of culture have also been displaced by technical inventions and scientific progress. Rosalind Williams’ impressive survey charts the evolution of both the gradual penetration of the underground and its permanently shifting interpretations.

In this regard, a crucial element has been the shift – initiated in the 17^th Century and dramatically accelerated two centuries later– of the religious meaning of the underground as hell to a geophysical interpretation linking space and time. Digging into the earth was the same as going back in time, and the space underground became so “deep time”. Speculations on time were however one of the many reasons that had fostered the exploration of the underground. Very soon, economic, philosophical, political, and ethical issues got intertwined with “pure” scientific reasons: the underground became also a place where truth as well as resources and wealth were to be found, just as it became the place upon which to project utopian and dystopian representations (the underground became a metaphor for underclass life and degeneration, but also for dreams of beauty and a classless society).

The second question is methodological. Although Rosalind Williams does not neglect other historical sources and resources, it is literature – French and British literature of the 19^th Century– that occupies the foreground of here analyses. Given that culture and science so strongly interact, what can be the role given one specific aspect of cultural life, namely storytelling, more specifically storytelling in literary texts? Williams follows here the ideas developed by Jameson on storytelling as “world-reduction”: the literary text is a scale model of the world, in which hypotheses are tested in order to see what may be the consequences of this or that premise. Literature is thus is special kind of “experimenting”, and in this regard its role is not so different from that of other types of science. This analogy enables Rosalind Williams to prioritize literature on other cultural materials, and the reader can only feel grateful for the “unearthing” of so many fascinating, but now often forgotten novels. Moreover, Williams’s reading is always very astute and clear, and she is not afraid of tackling issues raised by politically incorrect texts. A great historian, Williams is perfectly able to make the difference between the form and content of these books and what can be learnt from them today.

The third question is philosophical. What does it mean for mankind to live “outside nature”, in a built or manmade environment? Despite the vanishing of the religious meaning of the underworld, fear has never left the humans who attempted to leave the earth’s surface. In this respect, the underworld itself, Rosalind Williams argues, is nothing more than a tool revealing an even more hidden fear, that of the human destruction of nature. Underworld and millenarist catastrophism go often hand in hand. Despite the clear environmental consciousness and commitment of the book, Rosalind Williams refuses to follow the dystopian voices that are now so dominant in public debate. She strongly emphasizes the ambivalence of our “destruction” of nature (for we fear this destruction as well as we like to enjoy its effects), the illusion of a dichotomic separation of “pure” nature and “impure” culture (unspoiled “wilderness” is a problematic concept), the possibility of transforming a cultural space in a human environment (what matters for Williams is not the opposition cultural versus natural, but the question if we will manage to make our cultural space more human), and so on. As the new Afterword of the book almost two decades later reveals: the fact that in the first edition of the book the theme of the underground as burial space was totally absent, demonstrates the strongly optimistic viewpoint of the author.

The brief but inspiring Afterword, which can actually be read as a second preface, offers three new perspectives on the book. First a personal rereading by the author, who highlights a certain number of key statements. Second, a discussion of the critical reception of the work, which is also – given the importance of the book– a state of the art in the field of environmental history and science studies. Third, a critical self-interrogation of the political stances of Notes on the Underground and, more generally, of the activism in this domain. The Afterword offers Rosalind Williams the possibility to bring forth her conviction that environmental debates often miss the issue of power, whereas they frequently overestimate the importance of individual consumer choices.

One can only be delighted that Notes on the Underground is again available in print. Great books can only remains classics if they are reread by new generations of readers. It is now possible to put Williams’s book alongside other classics such as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden or Raymond Williams’s The City and the Country. Notes on the Underground deserves to be added to this prestigious list of studies that continue to inspire all those who defend a holistic, yet not necessarily homogeneous view of analyzing science and culture.