America’s Signal Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury

Abstract

This article examines how Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) registers a signal crisis of American hegemony through its hyperreal production of an aesthetics of excess, constituted by fragmented subjectivities, a frenetic narrative form, references to the decaying years of the Roman Empire, and irruptions of violence against women. The text’s libidinal investment of personal anguish with public discontent, or a psychopathological fury, is read through Fredric Jameson’s account of third-world allegory as a symptom of the novel’s registration of America’s hegemonic decline. The scalping of several upper-class young women in New York City by their financier boyfriends is thus further examined as an aspect of the text’s aesthetics of excess and use of allegory, which frames the violent interrelation between public discontent and private hubris. The murdered women are read as symbols of American hegemony and class under threat by turbulent financial markets, and hoarding their scalps is represented as a crude and violent attempt by their boyfriends to halt the dwindling value of America’s cultural capital and financial markets. The destabilization of class structures due to turbulent financial markets breeds a semantic confusion between real and symbolic signifiers of class status, a process facilitated by the narrator’s comparison of these women to prototypically American symbols, such as “Oscar-Barbie” statuettes and dolls. Fury’s mapping of Solanka’s cultural products, dolls and masks, from New York to the peripheral nation of Lilliput-Blefescu further actualizes the flow of American cultural and economic power to peripheral regions. This, alongside the text’s problematic characterization of gender and race, is read as evidence of Rushdie as a writer in terminal decline.

Introduction

Fury (2001), Rushdie’s first singularly American novel, immediately takes on macro-economic and world-systemic significance by referring to New York City as a metropolis in its “third millennium” (Rushdie, 2001: 3) ¹ boiling “with money” (3), or credit capital, high property prices and demands for luxurious, “recherché” (3) products, comparable to a latter day Rome in its fin-de-siècle period. Indeed, the text’s setting and time of publication was marked by frenzied financial speculation from 1999 to 2001, especially the dot-com bubble, which Rushdie’s protagonist Malik Solanka opportunistically exploits through an online science fiction legend named “Kronos”. A puppet-doll maker, Solanka becomes famous for his popular history-of-philosophy programme “The Adventures of Little Brain”, about a blonde, spiky haired protagonist who travels through time to meet famous figures. The novel follows Solanka, after a rage-filled moment prompts him to flee his family in London, to New York City. But Solanka discovers that New York also boils with a libidinal rage or “fury” that emerges from the gap between the collective desire for greater prosperity and diminished expectations. This irrupts in a psychosomatic and allegorical rage that is attached to doll-like women. Several upper-class women, described by Solanka as appearing like “trophies” and “Oscar-Barbies” (73), are gruesomely murdered and scalped by their polo-playing, financier boyfriends. These violent and transgressive acts appear in Fury as an excessive reification of social status. The destabilization of class structures due to turbulent financial markets breeds a semantic confusion between real and symbolic signifiers of class status. Solanka’s narratives and fictional images are also reappropriated elsewhere during a moment of turmoil, with masks based on his Kronos sci-fi narrative appearing as the visual propaganda of the coup in Pacific island Lilliput-Blefescu (a pseudonym for Fiji).

However, despite its apparent contemporaneity, for one critic the novel’s “portrait of fin de siècle New York” (Frangos, 2013: 238) was “instantaneously obsolescent” because of the novel’s publication date on 10 September 2001, the day before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. I build on this observation by examining what it means when Fury is described as a fin-de-siècle work, understanding the term in its dual sense as signalling the end of an era and the end of a century. I do so by parsing the world-systemic implications of the novel’s account of the city and nation’s overheated economy, and secondly, the allegorical consequences of the text’s intertwining of personal ills with broader social shifts, or the psychopathology of material life.

However, it is not strictly accurate to describe Fury as a proleptic text in spite of the novel’s American publication date on 10 September 2001 (Frangos, 2013: 238) and the dust jacket’s suggestive depiction of a black and white picture of the Empire State Building shrouded by ominous storm clouds (Gonzalez, 2008a: 778; Frangos, 2013). Fury’s catastrophism is a registration of structural conditions emerging from the decline of US hegemony and its imperialist expansion, or a “signal crisis”, which makes future calamities, whether economic or social, appear inevitable. Signal crises are, according to world-systems theorists, events that herald the end of an accumulation cycle and the destabilization of hegemony, such as the Vietnam War or repeated financial crises. ² Similarly, for Rushdie a “sense of infinite possibility” was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks, which “underlined and dramatized” a profound geopolitical and economic change that was “happening anyway” (Rushdie and Weich, 2002: n.p.).

This article thus shifts away from analyses of the proleptic qualities of Rushdie’s Fury by exploring how the text registers a wider signal crisis of American hegemony, through its “hyperreal” aesthetics of excess and the allegorical significance of violence against women. It initially sets out a world-systemic account of America’s waning hegemony and its production of turbulent financial markets, and examines how economic decline produces the text’s frenetic literary mode and sense of a crumbling empire, through references to Rome’s imperial decline. The text’s investment of economic decline into personal anguish, or psychopathological fury, is framed through a reading of Jameson’s (2002/1981) theory of “libidinal apparatuses”, with the New York scalpings operating as allegories for the attempt to stabilize and hoard the cultural capital of women as symbols of American prosperity. The conclusion examines Fury as evidence of a writer in terminal decline, specifically how the text produces revolutionary Lilliput-Blefescu as a mirror for the cultural reproduction of Solanka’s work, and a despotic, rather than revolutionary, postcolonial nation requiring the intervention of the American military.

World-systems theory

World-systems theory defines hegemonies as being constituted by recurring long and short economic cycles of alternating ascending and descending phases (Gunder Frank and Gills, 1993: 3–4), which Giovanni Arrighi defines according to Marx’s theory of M-C-M’ cycles of accumulation. First money is acquired through primitive accumulation, then it is transformed or invested into commodities, which is succeeded by a phase of financial “rebirth and expansion” (2010/1994: 6), or a mature “autumn” phase in capitalism’s accumulation cycle (Arrighi, 2005b: 87). The final phase is a particularly volatile period in the world—economy: overaccumulation crises lead to the long-wave switching to finance capital, which circulates without reference to commodities or the mode of production. It takes approximately 175 years for a full cycle to occur (a “long-century”): we are now entering the end of the financial or “autumnal” years (Arrighi, 2005b: 87) and “‘terminal’” decline (Arrighi, 2005a: 57) of US hegemony (1860–2035); and the next hegemonic cycle (1980 onwards) is well under way (Baucom, 2005: 27).

However, while Wallerstein describes how the US’s hegemony was “over” as early as 1976 after the postwar period of cultural, military, and economic empire building, he notes that its decline was “scarcely precipitous” (1976: 461). End of long-wave or fin-de-siècle moments are often marked by the resurgence of apparent wealth as economies boil with credit capital, or the “belles époques” period of the transitional phase of economies, described by Arrighi as aspects of the Clintonian and even Florentine hegemonies (2005b: 88). Recent examples of such apparent prosperity include the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s, as a new accumulation regime dependent upon Wall Street financial mechanisms and Third World debt servicing programmes which initially provided quick returns, and the post-Soviet Union and Gulf War period from 1989 to 1992, as exemplified by utopian statements proclaiming that a “new world order” (George Bush, qtd. in Smith, 2003: 6) and American “‘capitalist revolution’” (Smith, 2003: 6) had arrived. But the US’s growing reliance on foreign finance capital throughout the 1990s and beyond, the exhaustion of speculative bubbles from the “collapse of Long Term Capital Management (1998) or the bursting of the dot.com bubble (2000–1)” (McNally, 2009: 41), and the US’s unsuccessful invasion of Iraq in 2003, are sure signs for Arrighi of the nation’s movement from a hegemony demanding tribute and ensuring protection to other nation-states, to a “hegemoney” (2005b: 112) reliant on foreign capital and in terminal decline.

Rushdie, like Wallerstein, similarly constellates his pessimistic global outlook as beginning in the late 1960s, stating in an earlier essay on Günter Grass that the summer of 1967, which immediately preceded the student protests of 1968, was a time when “the West was — perhaps for the last time — in the clutches of the optimism disease […] when unemployment was an irrelevance and the future still existed” (1992/1991b: 276). For Rushdie, future imaginaries have since been stymied by what he later describes as the failure of the post-Cold War era to “usher in a new era of liberty” (2002a: 301), leading to national and regional balkanization, and religious and ethnic fundamentalism. While the notion of the post-Soviet Union era as one defined by global capitalism’s expansion on an ever greater scale is not new, what is, in the case of Rushdie’s work and especially Fury, is its largely American focus and extremely pessimistic future outlook, augmented by the text’s oscillation between private anguish and national—economic disconsolation, and registration of hegemonic decline.

This conflation of individual trauma and economic distress is facilitated by Fury’s “hyperrealist” literary—historical method (Rushdie and Weich, 2002: n.p.), with references to then-contemporary headlines and movie references, and inventories of market goods and current events (6–7) producing an overly-detailed or “hyperreal” depiction of millennial New York. This informational overload is compared by Rushdie to the flattening effect of pointing a blazing “searchlight” onto a scene, in contrast to the depth of Johannes Vermeer’s seventeenth-century realistic works, to create a “dislocating mood without doing anything surrealistic, to show how you can use reality, itself, and just by staring at it intensely you can make it look very odd” (Rushdie and Weich, 2002: n.p.). The excessive historical detail in Fury, including references to then-popular movie stars, movies, and politicians, alongside overheard conversations, and rapid shifts in mood, tone, and subject, are all aspects of this hyperrealism.

Jean Baudrillard, the first to use the phrase “hyperreal”, defines it as a phenomenon produced by the constant reproduction of simulacra to generate “an equivalent representation” (2001: 148) of reality. Similarly, in Fury masks abound, destabilizing the boundary between reality and representation: masks based on Malik Solanka’s Kronos sci-fi narrative appear as the visual propaganda of the coup in Pacific island Lilliput-Blefescu, and masks are used by models pretending to be Solanka’s blockbuster doll “Little Brain”. However, for Baudrillard, art, cultural theory, and “material production” are divorced from material conditions, being rendered “abstract and nonfigurative” in a time of both “floating theories” (2001: 150) and “floating currencies” (2001: 150). Geographer and economic theorist David Harvey likewise states that the dissolution of the gold standard in 1971, which led to the emergence of speculative currency markets (2005: 12), together with late twentieth-century technologies of time—space compression, have produced a contemporary crisis of representation and value (Harvey, 1989: 298).

In light of the above, Fury’s hyperrealism is an aesthetic form that registers the speculative frenzy of an overheated moment of credit capitalism. Despite periods of hegemonic transition being characterized by historical and economic decline, such moments are experienced as periods of excess, as bursts of financial capital briefly stave off over-accumulation crises (Arrighi, 2005b: 88). Fury’s rapid shifts in tone, breathless and banal inventories of fleeting cultural trends, emphasis on the commercial and creative opportunities offered by web technologies, and the violent murders of several wealthy young women in New York City, are all interrelated and dialectical elements of an aesthetics of excess that emerge, not contradictorily, from the cultural experience of America’s hegemonic decline.

Rome and imperial decline

Fury makes several references to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), a blockbuster film set during the reign of the dissolute Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius, who is regarded in Edward Gibbon’s canonical tome The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (1909/1776), as symbolizing the end of the “Age of the Antonines”. At Fury’s time of publication, and in the period following the US’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, references to the Roman Empire operated as a byword for civilizational decline. Vilashini Cooppan describes how commentators were quick to compare the United States to Rome immediately preceding and following its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (2005: 82–3), in terms vastly different to those expressed in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) Empire, with its account of a new imperialism constituted by deterritorialized, global institutions modelled on Rome’s constitutional powers.

Fury diverges from Hardt and Negri’s account in its assertion that the American nation-state is a central unit of hegemonic power. But it emphasizes the contiguity between millennial New York and the Roman Empire by describing the young men surrounding Mila, Solanka’s young muse, as “satraps” (4), an archaic term for provincial Persian governors; and “Praetorians” (4), a phrase for the personal guards of Roman emperors. Mila’s boyfriend is a “quarterback centurion” (40), mixing the muscular bravado of American footballers with the principal officers of Roman armies; and Jack Rhinehart, Solanka’s gossip columnist friend and former war correspondent, calls the city’s wealthy populace, “petulant, lethal Caesars”, and compares his journalism to the Roman author and biographer Suetonius (56), suggesting that “‘these are the lives of today’s Caesars in their Palaces’” (56). Finally, Solanka states that the discontent poisoning New York results from the actions of Erinnyes (123), or the “ferocious deities” and malcontents of Roman myth which haunt the city; and briefly subtitles his science-fiction Kronos legend the “‘lives of the Puppet Caesars’” (139).

In interview Rushdie notes that he wanted Fury to have the feel of its millennial moment, an “evocation of an age” (Rushdie and Weich, 2002: n.p.), comparing it to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work and its vivid ventriloquizing of the 1920s Jazz Age. Solanka also compares his career revival in New York to Jay Gatsby, a figure who briefly lived “that brilliant, brittle gold-hatted, exemplary American life” (82). The Great Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald, 1925), like Rushdie’s Fury, also references the Roman Empire to constellate its critique of the brief and opulent lives of 1920s financiers. An earlier version of The Great Gatsby was published in galley proofs in 1924 as Trimalchio (West, 2002: xvi–xix), after a wealthy and crude protagonist in first century AD Roman text the Satyricon by Gaius Petronius, who throws an extravagant party complete with musicians, acrobats, and lavish courses (MacKendrick, 1950: 308), just as Jay Gatsby organizes a series of opulent soirées. Fury’s comparison to Gatsby, like its evocation of the Roman Empire, is fuelled by similar economic circumstances: the desire to register, in aesthetic form, the cultural sensorium of brief instances of economic hubris before they dissipate, albeit by suggesting an undifferentiated landscape of imperial rise and fall. Put world-systemically, a structural homology exists between both texts given that each emerges from peak financial “autumn” phases of capitalist accumulation, with the 1920s and the late 1990s both eras of unusual financial liquidity and speculation which produced extreme prosperousness as well as troubled existential angst about future economic collapse. Stephen Shapiro calls this comparative method a “periodic” one, which compares works based on their registration of similar moments in capitalist economic long waves (2008: 35).

An important difference between Fury and Gatsby, however, is that the latter acts as a parable against the excesses of the nouveau riche, drunk as they are on the promise of wild stock market speculations and endless accumulation, while Fury’s objects of study are the pathological effects of economic decline. Another text that registers national—political allegory in terms of serial violence and bodily transformation is Rushdie’s 1983 text Shame, a fictional account of “Peccavistan” or Pakistan, which imagines a female character called Sufiya Zinobia as a panther-like succubus emerging from a disenchantment with post-independence Pakistan and its culture of nationalistic military braggadocio. However, Fury is concerned with the downturn of core nation narratives of prosperity, as opposed to the violence of partition which produced Peccavistan’s failures. Indeed, Fury’s most polemical scenes are those that link individual malaise and disaffection with America’s macro-economic decline. For Solanka, while Rome fell because “Romans forgot what being a Roman meant” (87), America risks being “more provincial than its provinces” and incapable of excavating the “deep quarry-work of the mind and heart”; specifically, because of the sordid decay of American culture in reality television shows and celebrity fantasies, the replacement of democratic values for the death penalty, and the crass political debates between the dreary Bush and verbose Gore (87). Musing on the interrelated failures of American culture and politics, Solanka is simultaneously enraged at the decay of American values, and vexed at his seduction by the nation’s “brilliance” (87) and “vast potency”, especially its role as “the world’s playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball” (87–88). Notably, Solanka describes his interest in America as a kind of sexual awakening: he is “aroused” (87) by the US’s “potent” economic, cultural, and military might, and recalls the autocratic language of the late stage Roman Empire in describing himself as a “supplicant” (88) to the nation’s global influence, with his desire magnetized towards its epicentre, New York.

Libidinal apparatuses

A central feature of Fury’s hyperrealism is its disjunctive shifts in focus, with Solanka’s account of his grovelling relation to America, alongside the decay of its democratic values, dwindling global power, and unequal distribution of wealth, collapsing personal trauma into national discontent. For instance, Solanka makes references to his “secret sadness” (7), or his sexual abuse in Bombay as a child (222–3), and in the following breath redirects and represses it “into the public sphere” (7), and to questions of “power” and the recent “complaints of abused women”. Fury’s eponym is the rage emanating from the pathological irruptions of repressed fears and deferred wealth promised by the “American Dream” (55), with strident assertions of national success exacerbating bottled-up fears about an uncertain future on the verge of post-bubble melancholia. The worst affected are the “young, the inheritors of plenty” (115), soon to be the inheritors of debt, who lash out at women and struggle to police the norms of sexual behaviour. Solanka’s young Yugoslavian lover Mila Milo (a trite play on Milosevic), complains that her wealthy peers can no longer police their sexual aggression, and that “‘Guys don’t really know how or when or where to touch girls anymore, and girls can barely tell the difference between desire and assault, flirtation and offensiveness, love and sexual abuse’” (115). Likewise, walking the streets of New York, Solanka overhears a man’s admission that he nearly punched his wife and concludes by stating that the man’s narrative is an allegory for the nation, “for wife, read America” (89). Eventually Solanka discovers that the recent deaths of several young women are connected to an exclusive S&M club, created to pacify the insatiable desires of wealthy youths who “‘have to travel further and further in search of kicks, further from home, further from safety. The wildest places of the world, the wildest chemicals, the wildest sex’” (152). The sexualization of violent behaviour by the city’s financial elite corresponds with the frenzied speculation and erotic language surrounding financial capitalism’s penetration into new commodity frontiers.

Fredric Jameson’s account of “libidinal apparatuses” theorizes precisely these links between private affects and wider material conditions, or the psychopathological means through which desires are always informed by and invested in socioeconomic “preconditions” (2002/1981: 11) and “narrative structures”. ³ The phrase “libidinal apparatus” refers to the text as a machine for “ideological investment” (Jameson, 2002/1981: 15), or what Franco Berardi describes as the psychopathological affects of emotive descriptions of markets as “depressed” or “panicked” (2008: 23, 27). In Fury, Solanka makes clear the correspondence between his fitful anger and a generalized national malaise, stating that the world is “burning on a shorter fuse” (129), expressed in Solanka’s body as insomnia and bubbling skin (69), a consequence of his “boiling thoughts” (129) and frequent rage black-outs, and in the emergence of national “psychological disorders and aberrations” (115), despite the US’s economic and geopolitical success. The cause, Solanka states rather prosaically, is the “Jitter Bug” (184) of “dashed and thwarted hopes”, as America’s recent inability to fulfil endless promises of wealth and aspiration leads directly to bodily afflictions, psychological maladies, and acts of extreme violence, including pyromania, random shootings, and a series of femicides.

This account of libidinal apparatuses as the sharp investment of material conditions in narrative, ideology, and affect speaks to wider issues regarding form and the world—economy. In his essay on “Third-World” literature, Jameson describes libidinal apparatuses as a necessary feature of peripheral texts which must be read in “political and social terms” (1986: 72). Allegory, for Jameson, is an important principle of third-world texts, in which 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). A spatial proximity to structural violence in peripheral zones illuminates the totality of capitalist relations to those labouring under the worst excesses of free trade zones and cheap labour. But this enlivened and totalizing class consciousness is, for Jameson, unavailable to core (read “postmodern”) regions because of the emphasis on individuality and schizophrenic, fragmented subjectivities (1986: 85), which eschews the world as its referent or structural thinking as its process. Solanka identifies his fragmented identity in terms similar to Jameson’s account of core regions, describing the schizo-paranoiac maladies produced by the “contradictions and impoverishment of the Western human individual”, which are most visible in New York, a “city of fiery, jeweled garments and secret ash, in this time of public hedonism and private fear” (86).

But world-system theory’s account of America’s terminal decline, and Fury’s triangulation of public excess with private ills, necessitate a reconfiguration of Jameson’s account of “Third-World” allegory to better map the literatures of the contemporary world—economy. As explained, the instability of financial markets is a symptom of the decline of American economic hegemony. Fury signals its use of allegory in Jamesonian terms as the conflation of public and private inequity through an estranging literary mode (hyperrealism). This brings to light the dreadful conditions of capitalist reality through “physical illness or psychic crisis” (Jameson, 1986: 70), which exceeds the psychological to become a figure of wider social contradictions. Leerom Medovoi argues that Jameson’s “politicolibidinal forms of allegory” are relevant to an emerging body of “[w]orld-system literature about America” which is, of necessity, “a literature of terminal crisis” (2011: 657). I build here on Medovoi’s account of Jameson’s allegory as a form which, in a moment of hegemonic change and world-systemic turmoil, finds application in works that register unequal “geopolitical relationships” (Medovoi, 2011: 657), which exceed national framing. However, the utopian future imaginary of Jameson’s thought is absent from Fury, which is more precisely an American text about world-systemic decline that fails to imagine collective action beyond the US’s geopolitical power, notably in the text’s American focus and representation of embattled American youth in terms that refuse the international class consciousness and collective political action imagined by Jameson.

Gendered violence and cultural fixing

Fury’s account of violent femicides in New York by the city’s wealthy financier elite offers a striking instance of the libidinal irruption of national—economic anxieties through violent acts, with scalping a form of hoarding and “cultural fixing” designed to halt changes in the gendered and class positions of the city’s most affluent denizens due to hegemonic decline. The murders of several young women by a panama hat-wearing suspect dominate the city’s headlines, and Solanka, an “old-world, dandyish, cane-twirling” (4) man in a “straw Panama hat and cream linen suit” who suffers frequent rage blackouts, suspects himself as the murderer. But Sky, Bindy, and Ren are murdered by their boyfriends, polo-playing Bradley “the Horse” Marsalis III (72), famous restaurant owner Anders “Stash” Andriessen (73), named after a minor character in Bret Easton Ellis’s (1991) American Psycho, and Keith “the Club” Medford (73), the son of a wealthy developer who is a “bête noire” of local unions (199).

Sky Schuyler, Bindy Caudell, and Ren Klein are likewise all members of New York’s social elite. Solanka begins an extended meditation on the women by celebrating their beauty, achievements, and “training”, before quickly moving to the sadness and horror emerging from their dreadful deaths — by a blow to the head, followed by scalping — and their “stunned menfolk” who are adrift without their women, “personae of their clans — their style, their class” (72). Solanka concludes that given Sky, Bindy, and Ren’s Barbie-like qualities, including their blonde hair, slim frames, and “behavioral” programming, they wanted to be “doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys” (74). The three women are thus

mere totems of their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the world, so that an attack on them was also, if you cared to see it that way, an attack on the great American empire, the Pax Americana, itself. (74)

I quote at length from this section because Solanka’s rapid causal connection from Sky, Bindy, and Ren’s murders, to women as objects of social status, to the subsumption of their humanity and representation as doll-like allegories for American empire, is deeply troubling. The women are denied voice or agency in the text, and their brutal murders are quickly glossed as examples of the violence attending the objectification of women as dehumanized and allegorical “Oscar-Barbies” (72).

This subsumptive tendency is due in part to the aesthetic qualities of Fury’s hyperrealism and Solanka’s narrative in producing a rapidly moving, disjunctive text. But it is also a marker of wider representational confusions emerging from the cultural economy of late capitalism. For Baudrillard, the hyperrealism of simulation derives from the confusion between the real and imaginary, which emerges from economic conditions, of speculative currency markets, and “abstract” (2001: 150) theorizations. Representations and equivalences of reality abound, and are indistinguishable from reality itself. This has consequences not just for reality, but also for value. Harvey states that questions surrounding what representations of “social labour”, or capital, are most “‘real’” (1989: 107) emerges most sharply at times of accumulation crises. The flexible accumulation of post-1970s neoliberalism, along with changing currency prices, has made value especially unstable by bypassing material bases for production (1989: 297).

Arguably, this context has several important effects on the figuration of women in Fury. First, Solanka’s account of the murders emphasizes the transfiguration of upper-class women as allegorical symbols of America’s decaying hegemony. This move is symptomatic of Fury’s hyperreal overfocus on questions of simulacra and representation, and the collapse of individual malaise with national decline, or psychopathologies, without attendance to the ethical omissions of its representation of gender. Solanka’s hyperreal narrative perspective takes on greater significance when we consider Fury’s layering of fictional and real referents. In describing his narrative method while writing the online sci-fi Kronos legend, Solanka is “intoxicated” by the “shadow-play possibilities” (187) of enmeshing fictional and real events in his tale. On one level, the Kronos legend is about the war between Akasz Kronos, a puppet-maker and “great, cynical cyberneticist” of the “Rijk civilisation” on the planet Galileo-1 and his revolting Puppet Kings, led by the beautiful Zameen (161). Yet each major Kronos figure also has a counterpart in the world of Fury. Akasz Kronos the puppeteer is modelled on Solanka the doll-maker, a cypher for the narrative puppeteer Rushdie; Kronos’ love Zameen is modelled on Neela, Solanka’s lover, but also on Rushdie’s then partner Padma Lakshmi; the Kronos continent “Baburia” is based on Babur, not the Mughal emperor, but the Lilliput-Blefescu revolutionary, whose story is a reworked version of Fiji’s then coup (194). While the novel dramatizes and critiques the processes through which narratives take on new meanings during times of turmoil, a critical difference exists between this reflexivity and the unexamined propinquity between Solanka and Rushdie’s narrative perspectives. Solanka’s allegorizing objectification of women as sites for anxieties about cultural hegemony and changes in value is a process inherent to the novel as a whole.

Second, this subsumptive move by Solanka, of women as trophies and national allegories, is one attached to a specific doll, the Barbie. Barbie is often cast as an exemplar of the late capitalist American consumer, while in turn commodifying a certain representation of femininity. For Solanka, Sky, Bindy, and Ren’s Barbie-like “‘dolled up’” personas follow a similar logic by making them, along with the murderers, complicit in their “dehumanization” as dolls (74). The women’s reduction to objects or “totems” is gruesomely confirmed by their scalping, which is loaded with settler-colonial era connotations of trophy gathering. ⁴ Taken to its extreme, the commodifying effects of women as dolls aids in the production of the female body as an object. But it also confirms that Sky, Bindy, and Ren are, given their similarity to a prototypically American toy, sites for the hoarding and petrification of cultural capital. This, alongside the world-systemic context of Fury, speaks to the actions of the murderers as an effort to stop the cultural-economic unwinding of American empire by reifying the symbolic cachet of the three women.

That the transgressive behaviour of Bradley, Anders, and Keith derives from wider economic processes is akin to the representation of murderer Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 satire American Psycho. Bateman is a New York financier and serial killer who commits violent acts in response to the profound alienation generated by 1980s Wall Street financial hubris and consumer culture. American Psycho intermixes Bateman’s grotesque acts with inventories of purchases and “designer clothes and fashionable furniture, beauty products and audiovisual equipment, videos and CDs” (Jarvis, 2007: 330), imagining consumption in its widest sense as the ingestion and pleasure derived from acts as varied as murder, buying, and eating (2007: 330). Each act and object is made infinitely exchangeable in Bateman’s extreme realization of exchange value and suspension of moral laws.

Likewise, Fury’s three murderers confuse the symbolic value of Sky, Bindy, and Ren, with exchange value. ⁵ The harvesting of these women’s scalps is described by Solanka as the gathering of “coveted medallions” (72) in an attempt by their killers to take excessive possession of their social status. This signifies a wider pathological semantic aberration linked both to changes in American hegemony and to disruptions of value. Bradley, Keith, and Anders mistake hoarding the signifier (hair, scalps) for the eternal possession of the women’s cultural capital: being scalped was to “remain a trophy even in death” (153). Significantly, Solanka notes precisely this confusion, stating that the men prized the symbolic value of “the signifier above the signified” (154). Marx describes hoarding as occurring during “times of upheaval in the social metabolic process” (2009/1859: n.p.), in a desperate attempt to acquire and retain the value of commodities. Hoarders yearn to petrify exchange value, thus illuminating the commodity’s symbolic and libidinal attraction as “eternal treasures”, which become “celestial and wholly mundane” in their promise of future material wealth. During periods of excessive financial liquidity, as an overheating system “boils” with cheap credit, capital is also often “spatially fixed” or invested in land and the built environment (Harvey, 2005: 141, 152), because of the desire to capture future wealth. The New York scalpings derive from a similar process, as an attempt by the murderers to cling to their victims’ cultural capital during a moment of economic turmoil, class changes, and psycho-semantic disruption — in effect, “fixing” their totemic force in a primitive attempt to ensure an infinite supply of capital. As Solanka notes, these three girls “were property” (73), and in death, their scalps provide tangible instances of value, or cultural capital, during a period in which questions abound about what representations of value are most “‘real’” (Harvey, 1989: 107).

The New York murders, within the logic of Rushdie’s text, are symptoms of the anxieties surrounding the end period of a speculative financial boom. The murders, serving as brutal efforts to petrify allegorical meaning, are also a form of “cultural fixing” in an endeavour to establish durable gendered class relations throughout the reproduction of Gramscian “hegemony” (Shapiro, 2014: 1261–62). The three perpetrators, Bradley, Anders, and Keith, are the scions of the city’s wealthiest figures, and even dismantle the city’s unions in the service of neoliberal strategies of flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1989: 147). Brash and lewd, their emboldened masculinity is threatened both by an anticipated economic collapse, and by the hypersexualized behaviour of Sky, Bindy, and Ren. All three women are described as exceptionally talented and beautiful, Amazonian figures who organize charity balls and carouse on yachts, parodies of millennial or third-wave feminists, who balance their oversexed image with business acumen while belonging “to no man, whether father or lover or boss” (74). Sky in particular was known for her sexual appetites and “masochistic excesses” (201), but her activities threaten her partner, Bradley, who conspires her murder, as well as those of Ren and Bindy, who also threaten to expose the licentiousness of the group. Sky’s activities challenge the patriarchal heterosexual normativity of the group, and her murder is a form of biopolitical disciplining, designed to maintain the gendered—economic bases for capital accumulation. The murders thus contain the sexuality and accomplishments of the three women through the re-establishment of the hypersexualized patriarchal relations of macho financiers.

The role of women as status symbols in Fury is further explained by Solanka’s ex-wife Eleanor, who describes her thesis on Othello as uncovering the eponymous antihero’s real crime as an Islamic honour killing. Repeating the language used to describe Sky, Bindy, and Ren, Eleanor states that Othello covets Desdemona too much as a “trophy-wife” (11), an “Oscar-Barbie statuette”, and a “doll”, stating that “‘Othello loves only himself, himself as lover and leader, what Racine […] would have called his flamme, his gloire. She’s not even a person to him. He has reified her’” (11). Marrying Desdemona is a means of upward mobility for Othello, but once her reputation is smirched according to Othello’s “Islamic moral universe, whose polarities are honor and shame” (11), her execution or “honor killing” is necessary. Although a comparison between Othello as an Islamic honour killing and the New York murders in Fury is seemingly perverse, it operates through the same structure of moral transgression and narrative excess that characterizes femicide as a means of patrolling class structures and sexual behaviours.

This link between honour, shame, and gender also develops Rushdie’s earlier account in Shame of Sufiya Zinobia and her monstrous transformation as an allegory for shame or “Sharam” (1983: 38 emphasis in original) as a national, gendered, and familial structure “containing encyclopaedias of nuance” (1983: 39), that produces violence against women, military aggression and censorship, and its extreme opposite “shamelessness” (1983: 115). Recalling an honour killing in London, the narrator notes that a “diet of honour and shame” (1983: 115) legitimizes and normalizes such behaviour. Likewise, Ren, the first from the New York trio to die, is killed because she threatens the S&M club with the “shame of a public exposé” (201). Yet, as argued, the hoarding of Sky, Bindy, and Ren’s scalps suggests that “shame” in Fury emerges from different conditions, specifically from anxieties surrounding the decline of empire due to changes in value and class, whereas Shame’s account of national—political violence is tied to a critique of post-independence Pakistani nationalism.

Additionally, Fury’s appeal to Othello’s account of retribution is linked to a secularized form of violence, as evoked in a 2002 lecture by Rushdie. Here he describes Shakespearean theatre’s dramatization of excessive moral transgressions as according ethic responsibility to humans rather than divine agents, despite conspirators’ retrospective investment of omens with supernatural meaning to “justify, even necessitate, their crime” (2002b: 439–40). For Shakespearean theatre, human evil is excessive without recourse to the divine. Fury’s reference to the classical trope of the Erinnyes is a secular form of address that firmly locates agency and blame in the actions of humans, not despite, rather because of, wider macro-economic processes. This comparison is also exemplary of hyperrealism’s forceful juxtapositions, with Othello operating as a transhistorical and cross-cultural intertext for Fury through its shared depictions of the reification and “fixing” of women as totemic status symbols (76), and classical definition of “fury” as muse and destructive force (30–31; Shakespeare, 1982/1622: 3.4. 69–72).

The Shakespearean references that recur throughout Rushdie’s oeuvre (Mendes, 2013: 85), and in Fury, often refer to scheming female protagonists, or to principal characters like Othello and Hamlet who act out vengeful fantasies against women. At one point Solanka’s ex-wife Eleanor ponders the “inexplicables” of Shakespearean tragedy, asking why Hamlet destroyed Ophelia, and Lear murdered Cordelia (10). Likewise, while Sky, Bindy, and Ren have all the desirable qualities of American female empowerment — “emancipation, sex appeal, cash” (74) — they fail, like their Shakespearean counterparts, to overcome male fury’s disciplining of female sexual freedom, becoming the victims of allegorical figurations of power rather than their manifestation. Solanka’s ex-wife, Sara Lear, similarly accuses him of making strong, female puppet figurines because it is a world of docile women that he can manipulate and control, women “‘who don’t answer back, women you don’t have to fuck’” (30).

Even Solanka’s last lover, the luminous film producer Neela Mahendra, never overcomes her role as a sex object and foil to other male characters. She eventually dies while “distracting” (254) the despotic countercoup leader Babur in order to spring Solanka from prison. ⁶ She also conforms to the dehumanizing politics of representation through which women mediate their identities through doll-like figurations in Fury. As mentioned, the visual politics of the revolution on Lilliput-Blefescu is based on Solanka’s Kronos legend. Malik Solanka uses his own image to create the fictive leader Akasz Kronos in terms that recall Rushdie, with his long, silver hair framing “wild eyes and dark-lipped Cupid’s bow mouth” (239), while Neela is the model for the fictional Zameen of Rijk or the Goddess of Victory in Solanka’s Kronos legend (235). ⁷ On Lilliput-Blefescu, the “Filbistani Resistance Movement” (216) organize a coup while wearing masks based on the Kronos legend (226–7). But after arriving on the island, Neela is compelled by Babur, the tyrannical leader of the revolution, to wear a mask of Zameen, the Kronos heroine, thus obscuring her own identity with a fictional approximation of her own face. ⁸

Likewise, Solanka’s first product, the spiky-haired time-traveller puppet “Little Brain”, becomes a blockbuster success, leading to spin-offs like films, video games, music videos, a talk show, memoir, and cover girl appearances, which bizarrely require that a woman’s face is “concealed inside the iconic doll’s” (98). Masked “Little Brain” actors employ a form of double-think, speaking of themselves as the doll in the “third person” (99) while arguing that “‘Little Brain is not some plastic-fantastic Barbie Spice’” (99). These masked models comically incite critics in Fury to compare the performance of Little Brain to ancient mask theatre, and to extol the performative freedom of mask-art forms (100). Baudrillard’s definition of hyperrealism as the frenetic reproduction of simulacra and the representation of reality is exaggerated to its logical extreme, with form, or the simulacra of masks and dolls, completely subsuming content, or the appearance of reality. Masked women in Fury are synonymous with puppets and the doll-like qualities of perfectly groomed women like Sky, Bindy, and Ren. During times of financial turmoil and psychopathological distress their symbolic value is violently reified, as financiers, troubled by the floating abstractions of capital, seek out “real” but gruesome totems of value.

A writer in terminal decline?

This article has examined how Fury’s use of allegory, hyperrealism, and aesthetics of excess can be read as symptoms of America’s signal crisis. But James Wood rightly queries whether Fury is “the mark of a writer in terminal decline?” (2001: n.p.). The “glamorous congestion” (Wood, 2001: n.p.) of Fury certainly produces a wearisome reading experience, compounded by frequent references to time and change (over 200), banal references to then-contemporary headlines, paranoid interconnections, the vexing sing-song qualities of euphony, and forced analogies that produce what Madelena Gonzalez terms “an undignified techno mix of Disney, science fiction, and Shakespeare” (2008b: 124). Although generating interesting shifts in tone and mood, the text’s “hyper”-dense melange of literary forms is jarring, and includes elements of Rushdie’s autobiography in Solanka’s Künstlerroman, Grimus’s (1996/1975) oddball sci-fi narrative in the “Kronos” sci-fi intertext, and Shame’s demoniac allegorization of Pakistani politics in Fury’s libidinal rage. That these elements sit uneasily next to each other is exemplified in the text’s slippages in voice and characterization. Consider the clumsy racial clichés employed in the narrative’s depictions of African Americans: in one scene an “African-American” woman loudly murmurs “mmms and uh-huhs” (149) as she eats a sandwich; in another, Solanka’s friend Jack Rhinehart slips into a pastiche of “Eddie Murphy–meets–Br’er Rabbit” (56), ostensibly “for emphasis or fun”. Or the narrative’s uncomfortable account of female characters like Mila and Neela, their euphonic doubling signalling their roles as sexual foils to Solanka’s creative development (62). Meeting Neela, Solanka describes his desire in exalted and adolescent terms of wonderment, noting her “smoky eyes” (61), “richly cushioned” lips, “slender” neck, and “interminably long” legs, but his rhetorical strategy employs a lingering gaze that echoes the violent dehumanization and dismemberment practised by the New York murderers.

Contrarily, Rushdie’s definition of hyperrealism as a form of writing that intently focuses on a short period of time in largely one location to make reality “look very odd” (Rushdie and Weich, 2002: n.p.), draws from the language of an earlier postcolonial magic realism. Discussing Gabriel García Márquez, Rushdie describes how magic realism drew from a surrealism that expressed a “‘Third World’” society marked by extreme public and private inequities, in which reality is deformed by “thick layers” of historical colonialism (Rushdie, 1992/1991a: 301–02). But Fury’s “surreal” hyperrealism differs in temporality, form, and politics from these magic realist works, with a shortened historical focus on the present diagnosing the ills of imperium, and a hyper-frenetic realism producing an aesthetics of excess and over-abundant detail that exhausts the possibilities of mapping utopian future action in terms that would challenge the malaises of the city. As further evidence of the novel’s imperial rather than postcolonial qualities, the revolution in Lilliput-Blefescu quickly collapses into a pessimistic, despotic tyranny which can only be resolved by British and American intervention. ⁹ That a coalition of powers is required to police world geopolitics is a given in Fury, likewise that the revolution takes its visual cue and energy from Solanka’s Kronos legend which is fomented in New York, thus actualizing the flow of capital and cultural production from New York, a world city, to marginal and peripheral Lilliput-Blefescu. While masks are potential sites for resistance in The Jaguar Smile’s (Rushdie, 1987) account of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, in Fury cultural products are magnetizing sites for socioeconomic violence. ¹⁰

For the editors of n+1, such literature is part of a post-Cold War “Global Lit” (Blumenkranz et al., 2013: 14) trend in the postcolonial literary marketplace, with anti-colonial postcolonial texts giving way to polite works of ethical “universal relevance” (2013: 2), devoid of anti-imperialist sentiment. Closely bound up with the vagaries of the global postcolonial literary marketplace, works such as Fury reflect the dynamics and ideologies of global capitalism with its magnetizing centres and marginal peripheries. Indeed, Solanka is shy of conflict and suspicious of left-wing movements, worried by the crassness of American pop culture and the inequality of its economy, but drawn to its most powerful and wealthy city. He notes the plight of Lilliputians, even becomes enamoured by one, but is only a touristic spectator and admirer of Lilliput-Blefescu’s women. In Lilliput-Blefescu, Solanka becomes a mouthpiece of American sentiment, reframing Neela’s revolutionary zeal in childlike terms and denying her political agency by describing her as an “‘idealist trying to be an extremist’” (248) who becomes caught up in the “‘illiberalism’” of war because of her anger with Solanka. Considering her possessed of a ruinous romantic “fury” born of “disappointed love” (249), Solanka states that Neela’s fury is the creation of a “psychic feedback loop” (248) between Solanka’s former young lover, Mila, and his ex-wife, Eleanor. Neela’s anger is not even her own, being bound up with the strands of Solanka’s liaisons in New York and London, a triangulated counterpoint that saps the political urgency of her actions, trivializing her flight to Lilliput-Blefescu as a jealous reaction to Solanka’s romantic past. She dies in the American-led bombing campaign, but such is, apparently, the cost of freedom.

Medovoi argues that motifs of world empires are “partial expressions” (2011: 652) of an emergent world-systems literature that explores the “terminal crisis” (2011: 657) of American hegemony. While Fury gestures to a wider socioeconomic totality in its account of the global circulation of cultural products and peripheral politics, its use of allegory, libidinal excess, and even its account of Lilliput-Blefescu, are rooted in the mapping of American cultural influence and psychopathologies, rather than an authentic engagement with the representation of a properly global or world-systemic literary imagination. Fury is thus more correctly defined as an American text about world-systemic decline, which does not imagine the world beyond American cultural and political might.