Cricket Field of Dreams: Queer Racial Identifications in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

Abstract

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is less a novel about a multicultural post-9/11 America than it is a wistful story of lost Orientalized interracial male love in which Hans van der Broek mourns for the dead Trinidadian immigrant Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans's memories of their shared passion for cricket casts the sport as a form of sexual pleasure (even as actual sexual pleasure threatens Hans's sense of self) and queers the narrative's heteronormative resolution.

Keywords::

• race
• sexuality
• 9/11
• cricket

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Alfred Lôpez and Aaron DeRosa, as well as to the anonymous readers for Critique, for their comments and suggestions on this essay.

Notes

Notes

¹ James Wood calls Netherland “one of the most remarkable post-colonial novels [he] has ever read.” Dwight Garner sees the book as “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.” Michiko Kakutani's believes that “O'Neill's stunning new novel,” like Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, “provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream” for the post-9/11 world.

² Rothberg's comments come in a formal response to Richard Gray's “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis” in the same issue of American Literary History. For Gray, the bulk of American 9/11 fiction has failed to address the trauma of the terrorist attacks because it retreats into domesticity and fails to engage the Other. Gray tries to imagine an as-yet-unwritten 9/11 fiction that would be fully multicultural. Rothberg suggests that Netherland might be a novel that does what Gray hopes for. In his subsequent book on American 9/11 literature, After the Fall, Gray repeats his argument about the general failure of American fiction but briefly turns to Netherland (66–72) to praise its cultural work.

³ Zadie Smith similarly feels that “Netherland is only superficially about September 11,” identifying its anxiety as “formal and revolve obsessively around the question of authenticity.” Ultimately, Smith identifies the problem as aesthetic—the catastrophe that O'Neill is anxious about “isn't terrorism, it's Realism” and a sense that “the world has changed and we do not stand in the same relation to it as we did when Balzac was writing.”

⁴ This is not to say that I want to throw whiteness studies' baby out with the bathwater, since I repeatedly find the challenges to white privilege posed by the work of David Roediger, Theodore White, and George Lipsitz illuminating. Wiegman's metacritical reflection on the limitations of whiteness studies, however, uncannily resonates with O'Neill's novel.

⁵ In order to portray Netherland as centrally about the post-9/11 condition, Gray must take at face value Rachel's subsequent critique of the Bush administration (After the Fall 67). However much the reader may agree with Rachel, when she tells Hans that their “personal relations” (Netherlands 98) do not matter in a world of U.S. global domination, her words become a melodramatic posturing intended to forestall any discussion of the status of their marriage. The political, in other words, simply papers over the domestic.

⁶ An alternative to Gubar's racechange, which largely sees all white borrowings of blackness as ethical failures, is E. Patrick Johnson's more hopeful performance theory conception of “appropriating blackness”; the questions he asks are germane to this essay: “What happens when ‘blackness’ is embodied? What are the cultural, social, and political consequences of that embodiment in a racist society? […] Indeed, what happens when blackness takes on corporeality? Or, alternatively, how are the stakes changed when a ‘white’ body performs blackness?” (2). While Johnson is willing to imagine that the “cross-cultural appropriation of blackness” need not result in “colonization and subjugation,” in Netherland, the possibility for “new epistemologies of self and Other” (6) are short-circuited by Hans's Orientalizing of blackness.

⁷ Reading Hans's narration is similar to reading Darl's (non)narration in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Darl's poetic way of seeing the world and his family is inconsistent with how he speaks but is Faulkner's way of showing that Darl, despite his lack of education, is the poet manqué with a rich interior life. In Hans's case, it isn't a lack of education but his operating in English as a second language that accounts for the gap between his spoken words and his narrative voice.

⁸ Hans's insistence on the aesthetics of cricket are consistent with C. L. R. James's belief that the game must be considered an art in chapter 16 (“What Is Art?”) of Beyond a Boundary, a book O'Neill reviewed in 2007. In particular, James elucidates the aesthetics of the strokes Hans describes (206).

⁹ One instance of Freud's belief that an absent father and a strong attachment to the mother contribute to homosexuality may be found in his 1922 essay “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality” (164).

¹⁰ Like Wood, Gray sees Netherland as a postcolonial novel and cites this same passage as proof that cricket in the novel is not a field of dreams but rather a “field of encounter” (After the Fall 73). Gray's reading, however, depends on straightforwardly accepting Hans's Orientalizing depiction of Chuck as “simple” (After the Fall 69) and on identifying Chuck as the novel's sole dreamer. As I argue, however, Hans is fully implicated in Chuck's dream of cricket.

¹¹ In this regard, Netherland is very different from Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land or Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, two post-9/11 novels that make racial and xenophobic prejudice visible. So that while Hans comes to see a more multicultural New York than he had previously been aware of, his immersion into this immigrant world seems to tell us as much about 9/10, the pre-9/11 New York multicultural condition, as it does about a specifically post-9/11 condition.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John N. Duvall

John N. Duvall is the Margaret Church Distinguished Professor of English and editor of MFS Modern Fiction Studies at Purdue University.