American Alternatives / Alternative Americas: Irish Association for American Studies (IAAS) Annual Conference

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"America as Joseph O'Neill's Netherland"

Richard Gray describes the story of America after 9/11 as an “old story, then, but also a new one,” one requiring alternative novelistic structures to reflect a world where “everything has changed.” In this context, Netherland, by the Irish-born Joseph O’Neill, has been described by Michael Rothberg as “one of the finest novels of the post-9/11 condition,” exemplifying the “strategy of deterritorialisation” which Gray has called for in the post-9/11 novel. Both Rothberg and Gray praise the novel for its presentation of “multivocality,” of “the heterogeneous terrain of New York City,” “a deterritorialized America,” “a fully globalized terrain,” and “a hybrid territory,” a presentation perhaps unsurprising for someone born to an Irish father and a Turkish mother and who grew up in Mozambique, Iran, and The Netherlands.

Surprisingly however, neither Gray nor Rothberg discusses the novel in terms of the “kind of alteration of imaginative structures” for which Gray also calls. What this paper argues is that O’Neill’s novel of cricket in New York City doesn’t just follow Gray’s directions in terms of deterritorialisation, but also in the way it presents an altered novelistic form to accommodate a comprehension of America after 9/11, telling the story “by stealth,” as Gray would have it. In particular, its chronologically disordered structure means the effects of 9/11 are absent from, but also present in, the novel, haunting it in a way which both marks the disruptive, discontinuous nature of the trauma and also negates it by denying it a singular, linear story to disrupt.

The associative process which weaves together the past, present, and future in the novel, relates also to its account of identity, of history, and of nation. As Stanley van der Ziel argues, “Netherland pushes back the boundary of nationality,” but it does so in a way which asks not what is “beyond a boundary” (the reference is to C. L. R. James’s book on cricket, also cited by Gray), but what is beyond the idea of “boundary.” The beyond of boundaries would complicate Gray’s “premise that Americans are living between cultures” by complicating exactly that idea of “between.” Indeed, by invoking not only the events of 9/11 but also the Boxing Day 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, O’Neill’s novel of the global citizen complicates also the commonly employed concepts of witness and trauma to suggest an alternative perspective on America.

Period	2012
Event type	Conference
Location	Cork, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International