This is a book that sanitation worker Ed Norton, Ralph Cramden's wisecracking sidekick, would love. Part of Norton's appeal on The Honeymooners was that he seemed to glorify in this subterranean world that the rest of us considered weird at the least. For American University literature professor David L. Pike in Metropolis on the Styx -- The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001, the underground world seems to have been a fascination since boyhood, when he explored his capacious, dirt-floored Kentucky basement, inhabited by daddy longlegs and other vermin. "...it inhabited a netherworld of its own," he writes. "It terrifies me to this day."
Pike writes that his study is devoted to "the myriad and overlapping ways in which the nineteenth century used, conceived, and imagined its underground spaces, and to the myriad and overlapping ways in which those uses, conceptions, and imaginings remain with us today, influencing the very different spaces that characterize the twenty-first century."
Pike visits London and Paris, in trying to get a fix on the underground pulse in the modern metropolis, and explores the role of literature in framing public conceptions of the world below. He walks his readers through a history of subterranean "threshold spaces: the arcades, arches, and other public spaces that brought classes, sexes and races together in new and unforeseen ways, culminating in the horror of trench warfare in the First World War and palliated through the fantastic space of the movie palaces of the 1920s and '30s."
