Language of conciliation: A reading of Joseph O’ Neill’s Netherland

The present paper analyzes Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as a narrative of conciliatory engagement with the Other despite the presence of an Orientalist discourse in the post- September 11 world. This novel depicts a Western society disoriented by the anxiety generated by the intensified phenomenon of terrorism after September 11. Mostly Western characters find themselves anxious, fearful and discomforted due to the ubiquitous presence of individual and collective anxiety. The manifest intent in the novel is to bring these characters out from their pre-September 11 spaces of comfort into a post-September 11 world of discomfort in order to confront, engage and reconcile with people, events and phenomenon that have contributed to those discomforts. These undertakings force the characters to explore a whole plethora of strategies, some escapist and irrational, others more meaningful and productive. Like the conflict between the self and the other, and the West and Islam in most September 11 novels, Netherland too recognizes those differences. However, the distinct approach here is not to avoid, ignore or escape from those differences, but to look for a middle ground based on the principles of peaceful co-existence, mutual understanding, conciliation, forgiveness, humanism, tolerance and multiculturalism. The other is accorded recognition in an international and cosmopolitan space of less divisiveness as the new discourse discourages the binary divisions of nations, ethnicities, cultures and religions