Power of Place: On George Orwell & Robert Macfarlane in the Mines

It’s been a while since I’ve written a conference paper. I enjoyed working on this short paper, and I thought it would be a shame if it didn’t have some sort of afterlife. As presented at the Association of Core Texts and Courses Conference, Notre Dame, April 2022.


This conference’s theme, Power and the Canon, prompted me to reflect on a new sense of power I noticed emerging in my courses: the power of place. My increasing concern with place is a response to the world in and after the pandemic. We were asked to “shelter in place.” Fairly quickly, I felt the absurdity in living out my several roles in that one place. I have since come to worry that we, enabled by video-conferencing technology, have shifted education to the internet, which has a non-place quality about it. Folks who, for reasons good and bad, prefer remote work tend to think of the place that we physically are. We work from home. Yet, I fear, we tend to miss that, when we login to a class or meeting, our attention divides between being in the private place of home and a public place. This dislocation affects our ability to be fully present in the experience. While I had been aware of the power of sacred places, I had not appreciated the essential power of being in any place.

This, in part, explains why I have recently turned toward nature writers. Their insights are crucial not only for reawakening our commitments to this world in the face of climate change, but also because their reflections on the irreducible and undeniable beauty of natural places can help reorient our relationship with every place we find ourselves. This relationship between self and place is captured by Robert Macfarlane when, in The Old Ways, his walking book, he writes, 

For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?[1]

I hope here to trace out this relationship between self and landscape (that is, place) through a comparative look at George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and Macfarlane’s “Dark Matter,” which is a chapter in his stunning recent book, Underland. I’ll begin by admitting that my initial impulse to teach these two texts together originated with the overly simplistic: they both go down English mines. But I trust both writers, and I believed that they would not take us there without good reason and purpose.

By comparing the texts, one is able to see how visiting a similar place can generate different knowledge in different people. Orwell shares a day in a coal mine in Wigan to better understand the working conditions of the miners as part of his effort to give a sociological account of life in the industrial north of England in the 1930s. The knowledge he gains in the mine extends beyond the facts of what he observes; it leads him to contemplate our interconnectedness as people in a society. Macfarlane, eighty years after Orwell, travels down a salt and potash mine in Yorkshire that also houses a dark matter laboratory. Macfarlane is curious about the reasons humans visit and inhabit underground spaces. He is drawn to the seeming paradox of understanding the universe, which we associate with outer space, by going underground. He emerges from the mine with a new perspective that locates humanity in the stream of “deep time,” the history of Earth itself.

To travel down a mine is, for nearly all people, a strange experience. Macfarlane looks at maps of the Yorkshire mine and realizes that the tunnel network of the mine bears no connections with the topography above ground. The coastline is merely “a surface irrelevance” with the mine’s drift extending far under the North Sea.[2] Both Orwell and Macfarlane feel disoriented as they enter the mine; their senses struggle to adjust to the new environment. Both comment on the stifling heat and the dust-heavy air. While Orwell’s coal mine is solid rock, Macfarlane’s walls of salt shift like a slow-moving liquid.

Orwell writes The Road to Wigan Pier in two parts. Part I is the sociological study of Wigan. Part II is a polemical essay that begins with Orwell sharing the evolution of his own class consciousness from “odious little snob” Eric Blair to the justice-minded George Orwell, and it ends with a reflection on what it will take to convince middle-class, British people to support democratic socialism and reject fascism. Taken as a whole, his experiences in Wigan – above and below ground – prompt Orwell’s self-reflection and urgent politics. But the portrait of Wigan he presents is only persuasive if Wigan matters to others. This is why Orwell goes down the mine; there he makes the mining community of Wigan visible to his audience. 

Underground, Orwell is at pains to communicate the intensity, discomfort, and difficulty of the work. However, this is not an exposé of the horrific working conditions in the coal mines. Orwell, instead, needs you to absorb a degree of the lived experience of working down the mine in order to awaken your sympathy. Every detail he shares is meant to enable you to imagine yourself in the mine with him. Orwell, himself a visitor, serves as our witness and representative. We share his confusion, aching body, and awe in the disorienting underground. And we also return to the surface with him.

Once above ground, the distance is readily felt, and it is tempting to make it absolute—to render the miners and their work fully other. It is too dangerous and strange to integrate into the world we know up here. Orwell recognizes the temptation: “Probably a majority of people,” he writes, “would even prefer not to hear about” the mines; he continues, “Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above.”[3] Orwell demonstrates this by connecting his writing that very paragraph to the need and use of coal. The world of the miners, hidden as it may be from our everyday experience, is present in everything we do, and, Orwell rightly believes, we must not let it slip out of mind. While it is impossible for every single person to travel down the mine themselves, we can, in a sense, be there through Orwell. What is hidden in the daylight is made evident when we go underground. We are necessarily connected with the miners. Though it feels like two different worlds, it is really one interconnected and mutual society, and justice demands we tend to their community’s needs because their needs are our needs.

Whereas Orwell cannot imagine his society without coal, we are, in the present, being called to think about our society after coal and fossil fuels. This is both a technological question and a moral one. In Underland, Macfarlane travels to a variety of underground places in which human beings have sought “to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.”[4] By visiting these underground places, he hopes to gain an understanding about humanity’s relationship with the Earth itself. This is the perspective of deep time, which we measure in “epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years.”[5] This radical perspective shift tempts us to the same forgetfulness and irresponsibility Orwell resists. Measured in aeons, what do our actions matter? Macfarlane argues the opposite:

When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.[6]

These “new responsibilities” have increased as our ability to shape the world, here in the Anthropocene, has increased because of the “long afterlives of that shaping.”[7]

Down the Yorkshire mine, Macfarlane visits both a dark matter laboratory and the potash mining operation. Macfarlane is a master of descriptive detail. His guides are a young scientist, Christopher, and Neil, the mine-safety specialist. Both are reflective and interesting people. The narrative is engaging, but Macfarlane does not put all of the pieces together for the reader. There is the laboratory seeking the “signature of a dark matter halo,” not even dark matter itself.[8] In the mining operation, Macfarlane thinks about several burials: the salt absorbing broken machines, something he read in Zola about horses in coal mines, and then his own sudden urge to sink into the salt walls himself. At that point, we are hurried back to the surface and emerge as Macfarlane puts it:

Out through the door and into the burning white day, blue billowing sky, sun glinting off windscreen and chainlink, tarmac and grass blade, dark matter nowhere and everywhere around me—and surfacing into this blinding light seems like stepping into ignorance.[9]

Reversing Plato’s cave, the light nearly erases whatever understanding we may have gained underground.

As Orwell does, Macfarlane takes us home, though not before he pulls his car over to walk up a moor where he begins to process the experience. He writes, “Time feels differently reckoned after the mine: further deepened, further folded. My sense of nature feels differently reckoned too: further disturbed, further entangled.”[10]

Macfarlane makes it home late that night. His young son is already asleep. While checking on him, Macfarlane is struck by that parental terror that something is wrong. He checks if his son is breathing. He is. As Macfarlane leaves the room, he notices the “Starlight silvering the fine down on the edge of his [son’s] skin.” He concludes, repeating something Christopher, the young scientist, said: “Everything causing a scintillation.”[11] The repetition in this new context is a lesson in deep time itself. Here scintillation, sending out light in flashes, connects the efforts to detect the halo of dark matter with the writer’s sleeping son. A truth learned underground changes what Macfarlane sees when attending to someone he loves. It suggests the deep time history of aeons is inseparable from the history of seconds as you wait for your child to breathe. Down the mine, Macfarlane found the deep past in the lab and our present at the mine’s drift, but their meaning only became evident in the face of our responsibility to care for others. It is difficult to imagine the afterlives of our actions on the full scale of deep time, but that imagining begins here and now with the future here embodied in his child.

Underground, in the landscape of the mine, Orwell recognizes the human community, connected to each other through need and work. Macfarlane reckons with deep time, our community with the Earth itself. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane also asks a second question of a landscape: “what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?” I don’t have an answer to this. What does the mine know about Orwell and Macfarlane that they don’t know about themselves? But I think they both sense that it does. They are both compelled to take us back into their private lives. Orwell, at his writing desk. Macfarlane, by his son’s bed. The power of the mine is brought home. The experience underground changes both what you know and how you relate to the world. After being in that place, things have to be, in Macfarlane’s words, “differently reckoned.”

[1] Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways, New York: Penguin, 2012, 27

[2] Robert Macfarlane, Underland, New York: Norton, 2019, 60

[3] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1958, 33

[4] Underland, 8

[5] Ibid, 15

[6] Ibid, 15-16

[7] Ibid, 77

[8] Ibid, 65

[9] Ibid, 80

[10] Ibid, 81

[11] Ibid, 83

*Picture: “Nether,” Stanley Donwood. Also used as the cover of Macfarlane’s Underland