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Journal of Modern Literature 25.1 (2001) 115-120



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For the Record

Deeper Realms:
C.S. Lewis' Re-Visions of Joseph O'Neill's Land Under England

Marijane Osborn
University of California—Davis


C.S. Lewis wrote two novels in which there is a significant journey underground, concluding with a confrontation with an evil antagonist, Perelandra for adults (1943) and The Silver Chair for children (1953). 1 In both novels, Lewis makes significant use of Joseph O'Neill's Land Under England, 2 as he draws on contemporary anxieties, ancient literatures, and his own nightmares in ways that allude to and supplement O'Neill's already allusive story. Pertinent to this indebtedness is Lewis' statement that for him the material of a story "invariably begins with mental pictures." 3 O'Neill's ability to describe the underground world of his hero's adventures with extremely vivid images is one of the outstanding features of his writing in Land Under England, and I believe that the visual impact of this work upon Lewis' imagination considerably enhances and may even have inspired the spiritual dimension in Lewis' novels, a dimension that O'Neill's novel lacks.

Land Under England concerns the adventures of a young engineer named, with resonances of ancient Rome, Anthony Julian. Stumbling upon the entrance to an underground world by Hadrian's [End Page 115] Wall, Anthony descends into this land of family myth that proves to be true. He is on a quest to seek his father, who had found the entrance years before and disappeared. After many adventures, Anthony finds him, but his father has been sadly changed by the totalitarian neo-Roman state there, and Anthony himself is threatened with the same fate. He escapes, only to be pursued by his father, now mentally deranged, who wants to suck Anthony's knowledge of modern munitions out of his mind in order to lead his "Roman" troops to recapture their above-ground land. Anthony makes it back to the surface, but his father is slain by giant spiders. When Lewis discovered this novel soon after its publication, he wrote to his dear friend Arthur Greeves on 23 April 1935, "The most interesting story I have read recently is Land Under England by one O'Neill: you should try it." 4 This "interesting story" belongs to the genre that, as Lewis says in an essay on Orwell, "may be called 'Dystopias' . . . nightmare visions of the future," 5 although in this case the dystopia is not a future society like that in Orwell's 1984, but an alternative society secretly existing under contemporary England. O'Neill's representation of that society is an adversarial response to Plato's Republic, 6 and in order to create his society he brings together themes from the Republic (including, obviously, the cave metaphor) and contemporary fascist threats of the 1930s, resulting in an adult fiction that—although not so multiply-voiced as Lewis' novels—is interesting from moral, psychological, and political points of view.

Proof that Lewis remembered this novel many years after reading it comes in his preface to the 1950 edition of his long poem Dymer (first published in 1926). 7 In this preface, written when he was also contemplating The Silver Chair (completed March 1951 8 ), Lewis says, "Some may be surprised at the strength of the anti-totalitarian feeling in a poem written so long ago. I had not yet read Brave New World or Land Under England or The Aerodrome." 9 The list form suggests that all three novels, like his own poem Dymer—to which he is giving renewed attention—may be read as allegories of totalitarianism. Not long afterwards (in his 1955 Orwell essay), he refers to the Spanish Civil War in remarking that "all totalitarian rulers, however their shirts may be coloured, are equally the enemies of Man." 10 While these contemporary conflicts are reflected to some degree in Lewis' two novels, both Perelandra and The Silver Chair place so much emphasis upon the individual struggle against an...

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