Underworld

Underworld is a novel about garbage. In the novel, garbage is portrayed as the symbol of social decay and waste. The alienated capitalist society produces nothing but mountains of garbage, so men like Nick emerge to ensure that this production is handled in the most efficient way possible. Nick is a wealthy man, and he comes to appreciate the complicated, nuanced world of waste management as the key to a productive society. Without the means to get rid of its waste, he understands, a society cannot thrive. In other sections of the novel, however, society is not successfully ridding itself of waste. The garbage-collector strikes in New York mean that bags of rotting junk pile up in the streets. Manx Martin’s friend makes money by filling his car with restaurant garbage and dumping it illegally. Even Nick and his colleagues struggle to find a way to dispose of the most toxic waste. As such, Nick and his relationship with garbage symbolize the self-delusion of American society. Nick and the rest of the characters have deluded themselves into believing that their society is happy, thriving, and successful. In reality, as symbolized by their inability to manage their output of garbage, they are ignoring their own misery. They are paranoid, deluded, and alienated, producers of nothing more than rotting junk that piles high and attracts rats. They have created an elaborate infrastructure to manage their own misery without addressing any of the roots causes at all.

The most toxic garbage described in the novel is nuclear waste. The waste produced by bomb tests and nuclear power plants is a threat to the environment. The waste contaminates people and hurts them, even long after they have come into contact with radioactive materials. The desire to deal with this toxic waste becomes increasingly paranoid and desperate. A ship supposedly loaded with toxic waste is refused entry to every port. It sails listlessly around the ocean, representing the unwillingness of the world to acknowledge its own toxic problem. Instead, people come up with elaborate theories about the ship to distract themselves from the reality of what is on board. They would rather speculate about murder, drugs, and organized crime than entertain the idea that society is producing too much toxic waste. Similarly, the Epilogue portrays Nick and Bill’s travels to Central Asia to find a new and illegal way of managing toxic waste. By paying Viktor enough money, they will be able to blow up their waste in a nuclear test site. They are removing the problem from America, but, as Viktor shows them in the sick and deformed local people, they are not eliminating the problem altogether. They are simply paying to remove the issue from their own proximity and dump it on someone else. The Cold War was won by America, and the prize for this victory is the opportunity to dump nuclear waste on the citizens of the former Soviet Union.

Klara is one of the only figures with a different view on garbage. Rather than eliminate it from her mind, she actively seeks it out. When she is young, her quest to find garbage leads to the nickname Bag Lady; she then repaints the garbage as part of her art projects. This reaches a symbolic culmination later in her life, when she ventures out into the desert to paint the abandoned planes. The planes are the discarded detritus of the Cold War, the garbage produced by a war that was never fought. She recontextualizes these planes, refusing to allow them to vanish into the vastness of the desert and forcing people to acknowledge their existence. She uses art to drag society’s worst excesses into focus.