The "Indecent Postures" of Island Cricket: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

Oscar Wilde mocks and celebrates cricket in a single, swift decree as he observes, "It requires one to assume such indecent postures." Indeed, the game of cricket has placed many an Irishman in such questionable positions. Joseph O'Neill's contemporary account of the Irish Atlantic world as imagined in a displaced, wounded, post-9/11 New York rests upon the Irish island imaginary of James Joyce and particularly his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. O'Neill shows that the very circularity within the Atlantic world represents not simply the imaged geographies of Ireland, New York, and Trinidad but that all of these locations function as a psychic Netherland and, in fact, as nether-islands. All of these locations in both Joyce's and O'Neill's works host cricket matches that reify and question respective island identities. Joyce and O'Neill specifically shape metaphors, allusions, and the critical settings of their narratives habitually in terms of the propinquity of the sea on their cricket pitches to highlight the vulnerability of the home island. Such unlikely geographic affiliations exist not simply within O'Neill's work but also reach back to a fundamental trope, evident in Joyce's writing particularly, of water (and the sea) as a dominant metaphor for history and the island as a wounded geography in Ireland's globalized imagined community.