Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001 (review)

Metropolis on the Styx sets out to explore the significance of the underworld in modern urban culture and its crucial role in the physical and ideological construction of that culture. David L. Pike shifts the topography of the conventional cultural studies argument—which puts what is culturally marginal at its center—from a horizontal axis to a vertical one, bringing what has been buried, or positioned underground, to the surface. Mirroring the work of Sigmund Freud's unconscious, a work that Pike allows us to see as a by-product of the nineteenth-century urban imaginary, modern culture has consigned its excesses (the injustices of capitalism, the horrors of warfare) to the space of the underground. If we are to understand fully the contradictions of the culture created by global capitalism, he argues, we must excavate its subterranean spaces and examine their incriminating skeletons. Pike's book presents us with both a new way of spatializing capitalist modernity and a truly impressive archive of texts about the city and its underground spaces. The carefully chosen epigraphs dotted throughout each chapter speak volumes on their own, and the astonishing range of works and phenomena analyzed within each chapter (from journalism to panoramas to the trench cities of World War I) are illustrated by many rare and wonderful images (110 in total). Thanks to its encyclopedic range, the book itself seems to enact the kind of all-encompassing overview of urban space that it argues was the privileged view of the devil in the nineteenth century.

Metropolis on the Styx's ambitious purview makes the density of material it analyzes necessary, for its argument reaches across space (from London to Paris) and time (spanning two full centuries). Its meticulously researched cornucopia of material pays off not only in range of reference. By showing the uneven development of urban space across national contexts, Pike makes good on his promise to add more historical specificity to the critiques of urban capital upon which he builds, such as those of Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre. By moving across two centuries with the alacrity of a time traveler, he supports his claim that the nineteenth century, the modernist era, and the present can only be properly understood in dialectical relation. All this breadth and depth makes for a work that is profoundly interdisciplinary, bringing together the interests of urban studies, English and comparative literature, history, art history, architecture, and geography as if to propose a new field—subterranean studies—and provide enough material to keep it going for some time.

In an introductory chapter, Pike knits together the key strands of his argument. The material and metaphysical underground converge in the nineteenth-century city, he contends, when the industrial revolution led to a large-scale capitalist appropriation of subterranean space in the form of railways, mines, drains, and storage space. Correspondingly, words related to the idea of the underground began to take on both moral and physical connotations, so that by the twentieth century, "the Western city had taken over from Christian Hell as the space inhabited by that myth" (10). Urban space, while sprawling outwards horizontally, became ever more vertical imaginatively; texts ranging from the Victorian fallen woman narrative to the pioneering films of George Méliès relied on underground space and Satanic imagery to bestow order upon (or mock, as Méliès does) the bourgeois world in which they circulated.

Three subsequent chapters focus closely on the main ingredients of the underground imaginary: the figure of the devil, the genre of the urban mystery, and the threshold spaces that bring the underground and aboveground worlds together (such as the Parisian arcade, the London archway, and the modern cinema). These various constructions of the underground have facilitated a bourgeois distance from the socio-economic realities of capitalism. In the Victorian period, for instance, the discourse of hell...