Salman Rushdie’s Fury is a novel preoccupied with the politics of time, describing a city entranced with its own perception of having arrived in the future: “the unimaginable future that had just begun to begin” (2002: 4).
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The New York of Fury, with its meticulous description of the scene of American popular culture of 2000-2001 when Rushdie himself lived in New York, is refracted through a migrant’s gaze that marks a noteworthy contrast from the “broken mirror” through which the Bombay of his earlier novel Midnight’s Children (2006/1980) had been described.
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While Midnight’s Children attempts to provide what Rushdie has called a “broken mirror” of postcolonial South Asian history — many of whose pieces, as Rushdie describes in “Imaginary Homelands”, have been “irretrievably lost” (1991a: 11) — Fury turns its attention to the global city in transnational circuit in an attempt to chart analogous movements of promise and disappointment to those recorded in his earlier novels. This time, through, instead of the retrospective examination of “imaginary homelands” refracted and distorted by the experiences of exile and migration, Fury examines the contemporary scene of globalization’s metropolitan centres in extreme close-up. Compared to his previous works, Fury stands out as an aesthetic experiment, described by Rushdie himself as his greatest creative “risk” in interview with Rosemary Magee (2011). As Rushdie relates in the same interview, this close-up effect is closely connected to a sense of the acceleration of daily life that Rushdie denotes, with the sense of Fury having been written in the midst of a “golden age” that would prove to be “very short”. This sense of a future already in the process of arriving pervades Fury and is a central effect of its close-up aesthetics. In this article, I am interested in how the generalized speeding-up that Rushdie describes in Fury not only dramatically eliminates spatial and temporal distances, including the distance of aesthetic reflection, but also results in the enigmatic condition in which the future appears to have already arrived.
This aesthetic of acceleration in Fury appears all the more ephemeral due to the novel’s American publication date — September 11, 2001 — thus rendering the novel’s portrait of fin de siècle New York instantaneously obsolescent. But Fury is not simply a novel of the neuroses of the global city. New York in Fury is placed into a transnational circuit in conjunction with the postcolonial peripheries of globalization through the portrait of the Indian diasporic population of a fictional Pacific Island nation modelled on Fiji that Rushdie names Lilliput-Blefuscu. Rushdie’s critique of neoliberal globalization from within would not be possible without its inclusion of its postcolonial periphery — both in the fictional portrayal of Lilliput-Blefuscu, as well as that of the novel’s central character, the expatriate South Asian intellectual, Malik Solanka. Fury is an exhaustive account of the points of dehiscence of neoliberal globalization from the point of view of its excluded margins, both the migrant, exilic subjects of the contemporary global city and the postcolonial peripheries. Just as globalization seems to bring the spaces of the world into closer contact — as in the interrelation between the global centre of New York and the novel’s fictional Lilliput-Blefuscu — so too does temporal distance seem to collapse in the wake of a generalized acceleration of daily life: what some sociologists have referred to as “social acceleration” (Rosa, 2010; Scheuerman, 2004).
Describing the cultural politics underlying the rapid circulation of images from one destination of globalization to another, Fury emphasizes the drama of expectation and disappointment in contemporary market capitalism’s discourses of the privatization and personalization of risk and reward. What Pierre Bourdieu has described as “the neo-liberal utopia of a pure, perfect market” (1998: 96) underwrites the elevation of individual choice into the primary determinative for policies whose end result is to undermine the foundation of a public sphere invested in collective institutions and national sovereignty. This shift in the ideological foundation of late capitalism, often associated with the Thatcher and Reagan governments in Britain and the United States, respectively (Brennan, 2006: 137; Dean, 2008: 49), may also be understood in terms of what sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have called reflexive modernization or risk society (Beck, 1992; Beck et al., 1994). In these analyses, individual choice is posed as the determinative form for social life, no longer as the outcome of participation in a rational public sphere but as the natural result of individuals pursuing their own self-interest. Neoliberalism as a utopian fantasy of the free market promises the removal of market barriers as the privileged solution to personal and political dilemmas. As Jodi Dean has described in her reading of neoliberalism as ideology, “This is the definition of a perfect market — it will meet everyone’s needs and desires” (2008: 54). With Fury, then, Rushdie takes the neoliberal drama of risk and reward and uses it to plug a new set of variables into the postcolonial drama of expectation and disappointment that his more overt national allegories had analyzed.
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Rushdie’s Fury illustrates the politics of time in neoliberal globalization under which utopian expectations for the future are managed under the accelerated conditions of late capitalism’s boom and bust cycles (the period in which Fury takes place, that of the late-nineties dot-com bubble, offering one well-known example of this process). Just as Rushdie’s earlier novels such as Midnight’s Children and Shame (1983) poke holes in the promises of nationalist ideologies, Fury addresses neoliberalism’s utopian hopes for personal and political fulfilment despite repeated disappointment. In this article, I treat Fury in relation to Rushdie’s suggestion in his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered in 2002 under the essay title “Step Across This Line” (Rushdie, 2002a), that the networking together of the world’s spaces renders time as the last “frontier” to be overcome in global capitalism. Rushdie’s works may be seen to be articulating a consistent critique of neoliberal globalization, of both the transnational elites who maintain existing structures of exploitation, as well as the never to be fulfilled utopian expectations held out by neoliberalism itself. Yet, what distinguishes Fury from Rushdie’s previous work is a profound disenchantment with aesthetic ideologies that seek to ground, in the autonomous realm of the aesthetic, the possibility of unmooring the subject from fixed coordinates in time and space. This, then, is the creative “risk” that grounds Fury: the use of an extreme close-up aesthetics to attempt to capture the accelerated pace of daily life under neoliberalism at the same time as attempting to expose neoliberalism’s own disappointed expectations for the future. Fury turns, in other words, on the stakes of representing the politics of time between the intensification of social acceleration and the utopian expectations thereby unleashed. I begin then with an exploration of time as a limit-point for the depiction of globalization’s risk scenarios, and move on to the techniques of chronoscopy, or vision in motion, that Rushdie’s Fury offers in response.
Fury, utopia, risk
Among the fin de siècle spectacles that Rushdie packs into the frenetic narrative of Fury, the July 2000 crash of Concorde Flight 4590 stands out as a starred image of the novel’s drama of expectation and disappointment. The fantasy of unlimited mobility pervades the novel’s critical account of globalization, as the exiled, diasporic intellectual Malik Solanka’s air travel between New York and Lilliput-Blefuscu comprises the climax of the novel. As John Urry has pointed out, the failure of the Concorde flight demonstrates a dramatic limit point to globalization’s presumption of annihilating time and space through easily accessible air travel (2007).
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Both in Fury and Rushdie’s New York Times op-ed reflecting on the Concorde crash, titled “Two Crashes” (2002b), Rushdie describes this fantasy in terms of both personal and public horizons of expectation, that is, of personal possibility and perpetual progress. As he writes in Fury:
A Concorde crashed in France, and people imagined they saw a part of their own dreams of the future, a future in which they too would break through the barriers that held them back, the imaginary future of their own limitlessness, going up in those awful flames. (114)
What is remarkable about Rushdie’s treatment of air travel in Fury is the way the literal time travel of the Concorde, the ability to arrive at one’s destination before one has taken off, converges with utopian expectations of personal satisfaction precisely at the point of air travel’s greatest systemic risk — a reality of catastrophe experienced even more dramatically with 9/11. As Paul Virilio has noted, modernity’s expectation of unlimited progress dovetails with the reality of catastrophe: as the pace of progress accelerates so too does the scope of the catastrophe, what he refers to as the “global accident” that “integrates, one by one, the whole set of minor incidents along the way that once characterized societal life” (2007: 49). Similarly, in Fury, catastrophe’s material possibility is the other side of the coin of the hopes for progress articulated in neoliberal globalization.
Consider now Rushdie’s writing on the Concorde crash in his “Two Crashes” op-ed of August 2000. Analysing what he calls the need to find an “Instant Message” (a technological metaphor) in current events, Rushdie writes that the Concorde “represents, as a thousand pundits have told us, the End of the Dream of the Future” (2002b: 304). He goes on: “In our airplanes, in our lives, in our fantasies of what we might be, we must give up the idea of breaking barriers” (2002b: 304). What is at stake in reading the Concorde, for Rushdie, is the possibility of “new hope”, a question of whether or not we can “reinvent the future as a potential Star Trek utopia in which technological marvels — safer, cheaper Concordes, perhaps Concordes for All — arrive hand in hand with a universalist, brotherhood-of-man philosophy of human relations” (2002b: 304-305). The “imaginary future” of one’s own personal “limitlessness” that Rushdie sees the Concorde representing is at the same time also joined with a utopian desire that is collective and public. What makes Fury remarkable, then, is the way the Jamesonian formulation of “national allegory” within which the earlier novels Midnight’s Children and Shame seem to function is now rearticulated against the backdrop of Rushdie’s New York at the level of the metropolitan centre of neoliberal globalization. Fredric Jameson’s by now well-known and much-debated formulation of “Third World” literature describes precisely this conjunction of private fantasies and public expectations: “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (1986: 69; emphasis in original). For Jameson, the future in “national allegory”, what he calls “the perspective of futurity” (1986: 71), is the terrain of utopian desire, which so-called “Third World” texts gesture to but cannot realize. Fury places at its centre precisely such a link between individual aspirations and the Utopia of collective political projects, glibly referred to in the novel as the “universalist, brotherhood-of-man philosophy of human relations” (2002b: 305), this time not in a text of the “Third World” but in the metropolitan centre itself. In its attempt to give a comprehensive survey of the scene of fin de siècle New York, Fury aims to construct a representation of social totality in order to expose the collective and public utopian desires latent in the private fantasies of metropolitan life.
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In this way, Rushdie’s gesturing towards the future in Fury functions as an explicit attempt to draw the Utopia of public political expectation and disappointment into the drama of individual disillusionment set in the metropolitan centre of globalization.
Fury’s opening pages set the scene against which the novel’s risk scenarios unfold — the Concorde crash, the serial murders and finally the uprising in Liliput-Blefuscu — and this scene is defined by the neoliberal drama of risk and reward. The novel opens with a catalogue of late twentieth-century New York’s culture of finance and speculation:
In spite of the recent falls in the value of the Nasdaq index and the value of Amazon stock, the new technology had the city by the ears: the talk was still of start-ups, IPOs, interactivity, the unimaginable future that had just begun to begin. (3-4)
Rushdie’s phrasing here (“just begun to begin”) suggests a collapsing of temporal distance characteristic of the culture of financial speculation in which the present is formulated in terms of a tantalizing but perpetually postponed future of profit and reward. The “unimaginable future” is posed here as an impossible limit point, always in the process of beginning but never quite begun. The future thus promises both the rewards of financial speculation and at the same time the risk of imminent crash, suggested by the foreboding warning provided by the “recent falls” in stock prices. This experience of the future as one of both risk and reward is signalled in the sentence immediately following: “The future was a casino, and everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to win” (4). Neoliberal ideology places the future on a horizon of expectation not only of rapid change, as throughout the history of modernity, but also suggests that the proximate immediacy of the future will open up new possibilities of experience and reward. With the metaphor of the casino in Fury, Rushdie takes a trope for modernity in use at least since Walter Benjamin’s (1968) writing on the figure of the gambler in the work of Charles Baudelaire, and extends it to neoliberalism’s utopian expectation of universal success. Thereby, Rushdie treats globalization’s risk scenarios by relating the culture of financial speculation both to neoliberal expectations for personal fulfilment and to the increasing likelihood of the catastrophes described later in the novel, Virilio’s “global accident”.
At a number of points in Fury, the novel’s main character Malik Solanka reflects explicitly on the ideology of neoliberalism, which he considers to be a characteristically American national formation. In the attempt to situate himself vis à vis neoliberalism, Solanka sees his past and future merge in the science fiction simulacrum he creates in the form of a digital media artefact. Solanka summarizes the American national ideology this way:
This was the only subject: the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at a time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before. (184)
The “cancellation of personal possibility” seems intricately tied to the “opening up” of the future. The very fact that the future is experienced to be “opening up”, in other words, its very proximity, indicates a paradoxical distance in the impossibility of realizing the “unimaginable, glittering treasures” that had once seemed assured. We might compare the way in which, in Midnight’s Children, when the powers of the magical children of midnight are removed through sterilization during the Emergency, it is as though they were “drained” as “hope, too, was excised” (2006: 505). The midnight’s children thus stand in for the utopian possibilities of the future of the new nation that are inevitably squelched or “drained” in the global system of transnational capitalism.
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(Thus, Rushdie concludes Midnight’s Children with the famous passage on the chutnification of history, in which the open-endedness of the future is maintained in the form of the one jar that “must remain empty” (2006: 532).)
In criticizing the wildly unrealistic utopian expectations of the culture of late twentieth-century New York, Rushdie is also explicitly critical of the economic system of neoliberal globalization that can be seen underwriting those expectations. Philip Wegner refers to Fury as “a scathing portrait of the neoliberal 1990s Manhattan” (2009: 161), exemplified in part by the novel’s critical treatment of Thatcherism. Though the novel deals with Solanka’s life as a diasporic intellectual in New York, mirroring Rushdie’s own, we learn that Solanka had begun his academic career in Britain and thus he refers his perceptions of the millennial culture of neoliberalism to his reaction to Thatcherism in the 1980s. Towards the beginning of the novel, Solanka reflects:
Thatcherite Conservatism was the counterculture gone wrong: it shared his generation’s mistrust of the institutions of power and used their language of opposition to destroy the old power-blocs — to give the power not to the people, whatever that meant, but to a web of fat-cat cronies. (23)
Solanka seems to consider the trend towards privatization and deregulation characteristic of neoliberalism as by-products of an ideology of individualism originally associated with the counterculture, but taken to the extreme and ultimately suspect to begin with (as indicated by the aside “whatever that meant”). If Rushdie describes in Fury a time when “human expectations were at the highest levels in human history, and so, therefore, were human disappointments” (184), then the playing out of the drama of disillusionment that the novel records may be seen as an exposure of the betrayal of the utopian fantasies fostered under neoliberalism. Fury’s treatment of disillusionment accords with Jameson’s description of the narration of subjectivity in “national allegory” as “an unveiling or deconcealment of the nightmarish reality of things, a stripping away of our conventional illusions or rationalizations about daily life and existence” (1986: 70). It is precisely this narrative of disillusionment, already a major trope of the realist novel since the nineteenth century according to Lukács (1974) that Rushdie places against the context of the accelerating pace of daily life in the global city.
In his discussion on the thematics of the “frontier” in relation to globalization in the Tanner Lectures, Rushdie acknowledges this same tension between open-ended expectations for the future and the possibility of catastrophe. As he writes, “The open frontier, created by the bringing down of walls, has been and remains a symbol of other opennesses” with the result that, as he puts it, “All of us now face the future with varying degrees of foreboding” (2002a: 366). In Fury, Rushdie explores this new sense of “foreboding” for the future’s openness in the context of neoliberal globalization. Indeed, Fury is filled with the language of the “frontier”, often encompassing it with “the idea of breaking barriers”, or the “limitlessness” of personal possibility, signified by the Concorde. In “Step Across This Line”, Rushdie elaborates on the frontier thematic in relation to contemporary globalization, describing the emergence of a “new, permeable post-frontier” as “the distinguishing feature of our times” given that we live in an “age of mass migration, mass displacement, globalized finances and industries” (2002a: 365). But Rushdie seems to be just as much interested in the “other opennesses” (2002a: 366) associated with the “post-frontier” as he is in the borders and boundaries drawn across the map of physical space. Rushdie devotes significant attention in “Step Across This Line” to the quest narrative, central to which is “[t]he idea of overcoming, of breaking down the boundaries that hold us in and surpassing the limits of our own natures” (2002a: 352). The openness of the post-frontier, in this sense, is internal rather than external, and refers to time rather than space. As Rushdie continues, describing the heroes of quest narratives such as King Arthur who are fated to disappear and await a future triumphant return, “these are our once and future kings, and the final frontier they are fated to cross is not space but time” (2002a: 353). Here, we can read Rushdie in the context of an analysis of global capitalism in which the conquest of space leaves time as the last frontier to be overcome in the maximization of profit.
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Rushdie’s version of the overcoming of the frontier of personal possibility involves the individual’s grasping towards an internal limit point defined by time and not space.
We are now in a position to understand Rushdie’s own characterization of Fury as his greatest creative “risk”, what he refers to as “a quite deliberate gamble”.
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As I have suggested, the novel’s American publication date — September 11, 2001 — intensifies the immediacy of Rushdie’s documentation of fin de siècle New York. In interview with Rosemary Magee, Rushdie gives an account of how Fury “on the day of its publication turned into a historical novel, describing a city that no longer was like that” (2011: n.p.). Fury’s afterlife as a nostalgic document of pre-9/11 New York becomes, then, another instance of Rushdie’s texts’ unpredictable encounters with history. Fury’s drama of disappointment appears nostalgic after the fact, just as, for example, the defeat of the children of midnight in Midnight’s Children seems “romantically optimistic” in light of the history of India since its publication, specifically the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
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Describing the late 1990s New York documented in Fury as a kind of “golden age” and acknowledging that he “didn’t realize … how dramatically that golden age was going to end” (2011: n.p.), Rushdie also describes his feeling that, “one of the things, if you’re a student of history, you know about golden ages is that when you’re in them they seem eternal, but actually, historically, they’re always very short” (2011: n.p.). Indeed, Fury exudes the sense of prefiguring the catastrophe that would bring a sudden end to the “golden age” of pre-9/11 New York, and perhaps even participates in the tradition of preparing individuals for a future disaster that Richard Grusin (2010) refers to as “premediation”.
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The narrative of disillusionment that Rushdie offers in Fury, then, speaks to the risk that at any moment global catastrophe would overshadow the novel’s own publication and erase the portrait the novel was attempting to provide of New York at the turn of the twenty-first century — a risk in fact realized precisely on the date of its publication.
Rushdie and the aesthetics of the future
On the brink of his dramatic trip to Lilliput-Blefuscu towards the end of the novel, Solanka thinks, “The speed of contemporary life … outstripped the heart’s ability to respond” and “such an acceleration of the temporal flow was almost comically overpowering” (228). The intensity of affect that the characters of the novel experience, the “fury” of the novel’s title, results from this outpacing of response to the “overpowering” effect of the “acceleration of the temporal flow”.
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In the novel, the result of this acceleration is an aesthetic achievement: the placing of reality and fiction into proximate dialogue such that the one begins to resemble the other. This discourse of plane travel figures again in Fury when Solanka travels to Lilliput-Blefuscu in the midst of an armed insurrection inspired in part by the global media spectacle of his Puppet Kings virtual world. At this point, plane travel appears as a kind of time travel to the future: “To fly east was to hurtle toward the future — the jet-propelled hours rushed by too fast, the next day arrived on wings — but it felt like a return to the past” (236). The image of spatial history being constituted geographically from West to East has its own long patronizing and imperialist history from Hegel onwards, which Rushdie partially reverses by positing “the East” as the future. In Fury, then, jet travel to the East marks the culmination of the acceleration of daily life in the global city, and hence the “hours rushed by too fast”.
Rushdie’s description of acceleration and its social effects in Fury is once again quite close to the views articulated in the “Two Crashes” article. Reacting to the simultaneous crash of the Concorde and the Middle East peace process in the summer of 2000, Rushdie uses language quite similar to that of Fury: “The speed of life is now so great that we can’t concentrate on anything for long” (2002b: 305). In the same New York Times editorial, Rushdie describes how, as a response to the acceleration of daily life, “We need capsule meanings to be attached to news events instantly, explaining and pigeonholing their significance, so that we can move on, secure in the illusion of having understood something” (2002b: 305). Rushdie critiques a tendency towards “emotive, often politically slanted, inevitably shallow” news media he refers to as “News as Metaphor” (what he also calls the “Instant Message”) and critiques the “Government as Metaphor” that develops in response, similarly characterized by “its preoccupation with spin over substance, presentation rather than reality” (2002b: 305). Here, Rushdie is not far from the position he takes in his 1984 article “Outside the Whale”, in which he suggests among other things the necessity of “political fiction” because in politics “what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth” (1991b: 100). Literature intervenes in the series “News as Metaphor” and “Government as Metaphor” precisely because literature is authorized to produce fictions that can intervene in those fictions proliferated by dominant institutions, just as much by postcolonial nation-states as well as the neoliberal governments of the former imperial (and neo-imperial) powers. In the conclusion of the “Two Crashes” article, though, Rushdie gestures back to an idealized period when “old-fashioned journalism” might resist the temptation “to spin the news the moment it happens until it becomes a dazzling, hypnotic blur”, in order that “we might see more clearly through the political spin doctors’ smoke and mirrors” (2002b: 305). Indeed, Rushdie’s nostalgic conception of “old-fashioned journalism” might be read as an attempt to shore up the traditional institutions that could resist the hollowing out of the public sphere represented by neoliberalism.
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Ultimately, though, what is interesting in Rushdie’s articulation of the neoliberal politics of speed is the way in which the “dazzling, hypnotic blur” of “News as Metaphor” that emerges from generalized acceleration dovetails with the aesthetics of Rushdie’s Fury.
Much of what makes Fury seem anomalous among Rushdie’s works is the way the novel seems to be impelled to respond to the accelerated rush of information in contemporary life. In comparison with Rushdie’s other monumental texts of the order of The Satanic Verses (1988), Fury seems to be a fragment. As Bishnupriya Ghosh describes Rushdie’s later works: “As his tenure as migrant increases, Rushdie’s own ‘mega’ projects become less ambitious and he moves to the etching of Indian fragments — the biographies of a few ‘minority’ ethnic communities” (2004: 129). This sense of fragmentation of which Fury is the clearest example among Rushdie’s recent novels seems to be an effect not only of migration but also of the proximity of information brought about by acceleration. Thus can we also understand Neil ten Kortenaar’s reaction to Fury’s lack of ironic distance between the narration and character when he points out, “In Fury, Rushdie’s most recent novel … the free indirect discourse is entirely without irony: what the protagonist, Professor Malik Solanka, thinks is what the novel thinks”, in contrast to Midnight’s Children where “the distance between writer and narrator is both palpable and unstable” (2004: 8). This collapsing of distance seems to be central to Rushdie’s project in Fury, a result of the attempt to capture the structure of feeling of a city in transition. It is precisely this elimination of distance that Rushdie himself describes when he speaks of Fury as a “gamble” or creative “risk” in interview with Rosemary Magee. Rushdie’s discussion of Fury in this interview occurs immediately after an elaboration on a theme closely related to the aesthetics of the “broken mirror” he describes in relation to his earlier work, namely, the exile’s inability to represent the experience of the homeland other than through diffractions and reflections:
the closer you get to the screen, the image begins to break up … The image becomes a series of dots … [a]nd when you’re actually close up, really close up to the screen, you can’t see the big picture at all … What you see are the dots. So you actually literally can’t see the picture … What you see … is this distortion, which is not what you’re supposed to see. You don’t have the distance to judge it properly. (2011, n.p.)
This dissolve into extreme close-up also entails the collapse of the distance of aesthetic reflection, the distance that allows the observer to “judge” his or her experience “properly”. So, when Rushdie describes Fury as his greatest creative “risk”, it is because that novel takes this technique to its limit in the frenzied description of New York during its “golden age”. The distortion caused by getting too close to the screen that Rushdie describes is also the “dazzling, hypnotic blur” of the news media’s insistence on the “Instant Message”. The creative risk that Fury represents for Rushdie is structured around a contradiction — on the one hand, an attempt to keep pace with the accelerated pace of the contemporary information environment, and at the same time, an attempt to organize this information in the shape of an aesthetic artefact, both a resistance to the “hypnotic blur” and an embrace of it.
In this way, the desire to capture a moment before it passes by way of exhaustive documentation, as in Fury, seems to result in a collapsing of the distance between aesthetics and daily life. Similar to Midnight’s Children and Shame, Fury emerges from a cultivated proximity to current events, what Sara Suleri has described as the way in which “postcolonial narratives are forced to engage in a dismayed revaluation of their status as fiction, or the conjunction between narrative and newsprint that creates a context in which the news behaves like history, and does not happen in order that it may disappear” (1992: 176). Rushdie’s novels, then, in attempting to match the pace of daily life, thereby turn the news into history precisely as an aesthetic object. The second half of Rushdie’s Fury describes Professor Solanka’s creation of a digital media artefact, a virtual world of cyborg dolls. A dollmaker, Solanka models the figures of his virtual world on people in his own life; the images from the virtual world are then adopted as masks and icons by the revolutionary struggle in Lilliput-Blefuscu. In the creation of global spectacles, the fabric of daily life in the metropolitan centre appears to blur into the world of mediated images. While he is working on the Puppet Kings, the virtual world he creates, it appears to Solanka that the real city existed as material for the virtual world:
New York faded into the background; or, rather, everything that happened to him in the city — every random encounter, every newspaper he opened, every thought, every feeling, every dream — fed his imagination, as though prefabricated to fit into the structure he had already devised. (170)
The serendipitous happenings and spectacles of the city seem “faded into the background”, as though blurred in the effect of high speed chronoscopy, or vision in motion. This levelling of boundaries between art and life, reality and fiction, is a precondition of aesthetic perception and the circulation of images in a global economy. In Fury, if the metropolitan centre of globalization could fuel a media spectacle that would be consumed and reappropriated at the postcolonial margins, it is because life has started to imitate art.
As I have described, the novel charts the migration of a digital media artefact created by Professor Solanka from the metropolitan centre of New York to the postcolonial periphery of Lilliput-Blefuscu, a fictional stand-in for Fiji, whose political turmoil Rushdie also covered in his journalism at that time. The arrival in Lilliput-Blefuscu of the science fiction simulacrum of the “Puppet Kings” that Professor Solanka creates encapsulates the attempt to link past and future through a global spectacle that would at the same time be a realization of personal possibility for Solanka himself, marking his return to creative endeavour after a period of chaos. The instantaneity and ubiquity of digital media make the figures of Solanka’s virtual world accessible for appropriation anywhere in the world. This capacity for synchronicity is what attracts Solanka to digital media in the first place: their capacity to unite past, present and future into a global real-time:
Links were electronic now, not narrative. Everything existed at once. This was, Solanka realized, an exact mirror of the divine experience of time. Until the advent of hyperlinks, only God had been able to see simultaneously into past, present, and future alike; human beings were imprisoned in the calendar of their days. Now, however, such omniscience was available to all, at the merest click of a mouse. (187)
Digital media with the capacity for hyperlinking disrupt linear chronological sequence, as new media theorists have pointed out.
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The hyperlink seems to allow all possibilities for the branching of temporal sequence to inhere in a single media artefact. If Fury seems to be a much more compacted novel than the expansive, digressing text of Midnight’s Children, the aesthetics of the hyperlink may well account for this difference, as Rushdie’s narrative attempts to compress even more intertextual and cultural material into a single narrative.
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Yet the terms by which Rushdie does so change dramatically on the accelerated cultural landscape of contemporary consumerism. Rushdie refers not just to the aesthetic possibilities of hypertextuality, but also to its easy availability, the fact that the ability to create one’s own hyper-mediated spectacles is now available for mass consumption. As objects of global media, these artefacts can be consumed and appropriated anywhere in the world.
The near instantaneity of digital media is essential to the ability of culture to travel around the world. Cultural theorists of space and time have emphasized that what is at stake in this instantaneity is not the flattening out of local differences but instead the new forms of openness resulting from the destabilization of traditional configurations of global space.
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This destabilization may be included in what Rushdie refers to in the Tanner Lectures as the “other opennesses” (2002a: 366) of globalization’s post-frontier. When Solanka travels to Lilliput-Blefuscu, he offers to trade his cultural capital as creator of the Puppet Kings for his own safety as he attempts to intervene on behalf of hostages taken by the Indo-Lilliputian revolutionaries. When Solanka makes his offer, he uses the terms of digital media in the metaphor of the “link”: “We can give you a link to a mass global audience, to win hearts and minds” (244). But he offers the Indo-Lilliputians what they already have, and what they did not choose to begin with, the “link” to the global consumer spectacles that was already the effect of globalization. But as Rebecca Walkowitz (2007) points out, what is interesting in the depiction of globalization in Fury is the cultural “mix ups” that this condition creates. At the beginning of the novel, Solanka marvels at the lack of perspective on history and culture evidenced by his neighbour who pitches an advertising slogan for American Express: “THE SUN NEVER SETS ON AMERICAN EXPRESS INTERNATIONAL BANKING CORPORATION” (35). His neighbour wonders if Solanka would be offended by the slogan as “a Britisher” (36), ignoring what Solanka considers “the postcolonial, migrational niceties” (35). Thus, globalization itself may be understood as a compression of past, present and future into a singular time and space. On the one hand suggesting the neo-imperialist hegemony of “American Express”, Rushdie’s fictions also emphasize the openness to future reappropriation and co-optation of all images and slogans. The reappropriation of the imperialist slogan “THE SUN NEVER SETS” suggests that neoliberal globalization appears to offer a static condition of simultaneity with a godlike perspective, similar to the timeless aesthetics of the hyperlink. In Fury, though, this condition is undermined by an aesthetic unpredictability by which all media artefacts are susceptible to co-optation and hence open to an as yet undetermined futurity.
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The critique of what Rushdie had termed in Midnight’s Children the “draining” of possibility in the postcolonial nation-state comes down to analogous terms in Fury as well. The dramatic narrowing of possibility on both personal and public registers in Midnight’s Children is ultimately the same tale as the narrative of disillusionment in Fury. While Fury eschews narratives of aesthetic redemption, it is pervaded with a vocabulary of sky, weightlessness, and falling that signifies the capacity for instantaneity and ubiquity to provide both means of terror and escape. Philip Weinstein has described how in Rushdie’s exemplary postmodern narratives, “modernist anxiety about subject orientation is replaced … by a variety of ‘flights’ — escape from Newtonian gravity” (2005: 5). Fury ends with the reuniting of Solanka with his son, whom he had not seen since entering voluntary exile to New York — one source of the personal anxiety out of which Solanka is inspired to begin the “Puppet Kings” project. The name of Solanka’s son is Asmaan, the Urdu word for “sky”; Solanka also chooses Akasz for the name of the dollmaker figure in the world of the Puppet King, taken from aakash, which is “sky” in Hindi. In the final image of the novel, Asmaan sees Solanka jumping in a “bouncy castle”, a technology of consumer pleasure that seems perfectly suited to Rushdie’s aesthetic sensibility as both an object of kitsch and sublimity.
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The novel radically shifts perspectives away from free indirect discourse focalized through Professor Solanka in order to relate what his son Asmaan sees: “His only true father taking flight like a bird, to live in the great blue vault of the only heaven in which he had ever been able to believe” (259). “Heaven” here is nothing more than “the great blue vault” of the sky, the secular and literal heaven that is also the medium for the transmission of signals and the migration of travellers in contemporary globalization. In Rushdie’s aesthetic mapping of contemporary globalization, the future, “heaven”, is both secular and sensible, the literal heaven of the sky that provides no longer a horizon but finally a medium for global media transmission.
The secular gesture of disenchantment that Rushdie performs here, viewing the sky as nothing more than a physical medium, also suggests a final disillusionment. Not only do the utopian narratives of personal and public fulfilment of neoliberal globalization fail by the end of Fury, so too do narratives of aesthetic redemption. Solanka realizes that the “Puppet Kings” world is just another consumer spectacle out of his control, one that will not provide him with the satisfaction he is looking for. In contrast to the brilliantly apocalyptic endings of Midnight’s Children and Shame, Fury seems to turn deliberately away from the apocalyptic in order to stay within the worldly. If Fury represents for Rushdie his greatest risk, the image of the sky as physical limit is a deliberately unsatisfying one on which to conclude. Sarah Brouillette suggests that Fury is written out of Rushdie’s exasperation with the attention he received after The Satanic Verses affair (2005: 152-153), which perhaps explains the at least partial retreat from the aesthetic at the end of the novel. But this failure also participates in the process that John Su describes in his reading of Midnight’s Children, by which the exposure of the disappointment of utopian expectations holds up those expectations in a way that “preserves the possibility of alternative aesthetic and political visions” (2001: 559). In this way, the failure of aesthetic redemption in Fury may also offer a preservation of aesthetic promise — as only a promise — in the face of the accelerating pace of contemporary culture. Fury concludes: “‘Look at me!’ shrieked Professor Malik Solanka, his leather coattails flapping like wings” (259). The novel therefore ends with an incitement to look, a freeze-frame image of the gravity defying feats that characterize both public and private life in a world of perpetual acceleration and escape velocity. If the rapidly approaching future offered by neoliberal globalization is merely a staging ground for gradually intensifying global risk scenarios, Rushdie’s aesthetic manoeuvres seem to be oriented towards capturing an extreme close-up of precisely that scene, if only to call attention to the deeply ambivalent forms of flight thereby enabled.
