Abstract
This article examines the science-fictional aspects of Rushdie’s 2002 novel Fury, focusing on the cyberspace narrative at its centre. I suggest that Rushdie engages with the enabling potential of cyberspace, only to finally reject it in favour of a return to the “real”. Fury questions the science-fictional or cyberspace option as a vehicle for previously unimagined artistic freedom. The protagonist, Malik Solanka, finds he cannot overcome personal and collective “fury” by “living in the electricity”. The science-fictional cyber narrative he creates collapses into the “real”, leaving Solanka disillusioned by his dream of artistic freedom and total control. Rushdie presents the allure of cyberspace narrativity as a seductive but dangerous means of artistic escape, and questions cyberspace’s offer of total artistic freedom. Solanka’s disillusionment thus mirrors Rushdie’s sceptical stance towards cyberspace and its possibly redemptive potential. The novel’s ending signifies a qualified return to the “real” and a rejection of the dream of an ultimate “elsewhere” in cyberspace. Solanka’s return home to London and to his son, Asmaan (sky), envisions a different form of futurity, to be found in the next generation. This promise for a possibly better future is represented by Solanka’s estranged son, whom he longs to reencounter in person, rather than in the disembodied technological realm of cyberspace.
In Fury, published in 2002, Salman Rushdie employs science-fictional narrative devices and themes as a means of engagement with the redemptive nature of cyberspace. Set in New York of the new millennium, the novel explores cyberspace as a possible locus for utopian imaginings. The protagonist, Malik Solanka, a philosopher-turned-puppet maker, is caught up in this new world, creating a narrative of cyborgs and their puppet master entitled “Let the Fittest Survive”. Not only does this cyber tale become a big commercial success, but it also eventually influences the “real” world by inspiring a bloody postcolonial revolution in the fictive island of Lilliput-Blefuscu. Solanka’s virtual world infringes on the “real” world, creating a site of multiple boundary confusions. The novel questions the artistic “newness” offered by cyberspace narrativity. Solanka becomes increasingly disillusioned by the internet, which he initially believed might have the potential for reinvention and the reinvigoration of creativity. The novel’s ending offers a bizarre return to the “real” world, culminating in Solanka’s attempt to reunite with his abandoned son, Asmaan.
This article argues that Rushdie represents the new form of narrative which cyberspace offers, a form seemingly free from the shackles of linearity, as unable to avoid the “real” world as it is both shaped by events in the world and shapes them in turn. What Solanka first sees as the boundless possibilities of this new narrativity with “its formal preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterest in linear progression” (Rushdie, 2002: 186), 1 and its “electronic” instead of “narrative” links allowing for “omniscience…at the merest click of a mouse” (187), is nevertheless unable to avoid being implicated in the world which it seemingly transcends. Rushdie presents cyberspace narrativity as a seductive but ultimately dangerous means of artistic escape, rather than as enabling artistic freedom. Solanka’s disillusionment thus mirrors Rushdie’s sceptical stance towards cyberspace’s possibly redemptive potential.
Fury enacts the problematics of the science-fictional imaginings of a future that is also very much a past and a history. Contemporary New York, likened to the decadent Roman Empire and reflected in Solanka’s imagined Rijk civilization, is envisioned as a possible refuge from Solanka’s personal fury, but this imagined civilization is also a reflection of its creator’s rage as he incorporates the minute details of his life in New York into this cyber fantasy. Rushdie’s novel examines the postcolonial condition in its intersection with cyberspace. The intervention of the “real” in the form of a postcolonial rebellion in Solanka’s cyber narrative entails the breakdown of the cyber world and of the “real” world, which it both mirrors and inspires. Thus, the disillusionment from the dream of an ultimate elsewhere, a subject Rushdie revisits in his novels time and again, becomes even more pronounced. The migrant protagonist’s return “home” to London is an attempt to recapture the elusive presence of a “real” place, one that would replace the realm of virtuality. However, this return “home” is also problematic as the Indian-born Solanka goes back to the former colonial capital of the British Empire, attempting to reunite with his son Asmaan, the “hybrid” product of a mixed marriage.
The novel’s main locale is New York, an ideal setting for Solanka’s engagement with the virtual world. As Madelena Gonzalez points out in her astute reading of the novel:
What better place than New York to tell the story of postmodern culture, a vampire metropolis, based on obsessive consumption and tragically devoid of substance. The epitome of ersatz, New York is the perfect setting of the self-conscious politics of the novel and the anti hero’s solipsism. ( 2008: 769–70)
The science-fictional scenario in Fury pays homage to one of Rushdie’s favoured genres. But this choice of genre is also an ideological statement: science fiction is not only popular, but also has ethical, philosophical, and ontological implications; 2 a genre that is therefore most suited for Rushdie’s project of disorienting notions of subjecthood and querying the possibility of transcendence through technology. Science fiction is “a term that resists easy definition,” as Adam Roberts (2006: 1) reminds us in his study of the genre. However, if we follow Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as “a literary mode or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition and whose main device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (1979: 37), then we can see Fury’s cyberspace narrative as fulfilling these “requirements” of the mode.
If we choose to look at science fiction, a mode that provides this alternative imaginative framework, as “less a genre…than an ongoing conversation” (James and Mendlesohn, 2003: 11) then we shall find that Fury takes part in this ongoing conversation about the limits of the genre in its cyberspace mode. Fury’s cyberspace narrative provides an alternative to the “empirical” environment, which it both mirrors and estranges, while engaging with science fiction’s imaginative possibilities and its construction of alternate worlds that critique existing social and political realities. The “conversation” which Fury enacts is, as I shall show, about the very nature of “reality” and its interaction with the fictive. As Gonzalez points out,
the information age throws down a specific challenge to literature and thus forces it to engage with its order. Fury adopts the oxymoronic stance of troubled celebration of technology, the “strange euphoria” experienced by the protagonists of cyberpunk novels such as Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984: 9), undercut by a desperate skepticism. (2008: 766)
Rushdie’s novel engages with the political/ideological role of the science-fictional imaginary as a liberating site, concurrently offering and deconstructing a version of cyber transcendence.
Rushdie’s choice of genre is by no means a departure from his earlier work. His first published novel, Grimus (1975), a novel that originated in a sci-fi writing competition, tells the story of Flapping Eagle, a migrant figure who leaves his place of origin and travels through the world in search of a new homeland. But the political and social ramifications of Rushdie’s early allegorical text about the immigrant experience remain vague and less politically committed than his later novels. This first attempt at writing a postcolonial science fiction novel was not well received by critics. Rushdie himself comments on Grimus’s failure, noting that he had not yet found his voice as a writer. 3 However, Rushdie remains an admirer of the genre and his later works, like Fury, contain many science-fictional elements and engage with the genre’s imaginary in various ways. Rushdie’s love for this fantastic genre is voiced by Malik Solanka, the protagonist (and Rushdie’s alter ego in many ways), as he thinks back to his days as a young man in the 1960s. 4 Solanka reflects on his attraction to the genre: “In flight from his own life’s ugly reality, he found in the fantastic – its parables and allegories, but also its flights of pure invention, its loopy, spiraling conceits – a ceaselessly metamorphosing alternative world in which he felt instinctively at home” (169). This escape into the fantastic recurs later in his life as he creates his alternative world in cyberspace. Solanka’s early love of the genre’s golden age, a term coined to describe the (mostly American) science fiction novels of the late 1940s and 1950s, 5 however, is more than a youthful fascination. The older Solanka considers the genre to be much more than a mere escapist venture: “Golden-age science fiction and science fantasy was the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and metaphysics” (169).
Solanka’s view of the philosophical and ideological implications of writing science fiction is shared by Salman Rushdie’s fictional project in Fury. The novel tells the story of Solanka’s entanglement in the tale he had created and his eventual disillusionment. Rushdie engages with science fiction’s narrative, thematic, and ideological possibilities as a means of investigating the problematics of selfhood: can one escape the shackles of a unified self through an imaginative engagement in the realm of the fantastic? Will the new options for transcending time and place opened up by cyberspace offer such an escape? What are the dangers that such a route poses?
Rushdie explores these issues by devising a unique intersection between three different, yet related, worlds: the postcolonial arena outside the US (in the fictive island of Lilliput-Blefuscu); the postcolonial scene within the US (in the stories of immigrants and other “others”); and cyberspace (Solanka’s creation of an alternative world). The three worlds mirror each other, affect each other and finally merge, thereby questioning their “fictive” or “real” status. I will centre on the way in which the novel enacts the destructive clash between the “fictive” (cyberspace) and the “real” (the postcolonial arena). Fury dramatizes this conflict between “worlds” both “fictional” and “real”, using cyberspace as the ultimate elsewhere, the arena where these conflicts are played out, and also the site of their final (and ultimately bloody) resolution.
As the above overview of the novel’s concerns suggests, Rushdie is reenacting Baudrillardian notions of simulation in the virtual realm. In The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard presents the notion of simulation as a state of endless repetition, which he names “the epidemic of simulation”, eliminating the possibility for revolution and redemption. In this state, “[nothing] (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination” (Baudrillard, 1993: 4). Baudrillard situates this “epidemic” in the linguistic realm, as it reflects the shift in our experience of the world: “the possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere”, leaving us with metonymic relationships “replacing the whole as well as the components” ( 1993: 8). The loss in language is in turn reflected in a collective mental state Baudrillard names “melancholy”, which he sees as one of the defining features of our age. This state is the outcome of the only law “imposed on us”, namely “the law of the confusion of categories. Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic. All at once” ( 1993: 9).
This collective melancholy is conspicuous in Fury, as the protagonist ruminates upon his mental state. After wandering around New York, enjoying one of its many parades and finding comfort in the “satisfying anonymity of the crowds” (7), Solanka returns home and is seized by “melancholy, his usual secret sadness, which he sublimated into the public sphere” (7). 6 This state of melancholy, both private and public, is also reflected in Solanka’s lament, again closely echoing Baudrillard’s sentiments about the loss of metaphoric language:
In these days when the age of pulse was giving way to the age of tone. When the epoch of analogue (which was to say also of the richness of language, of analogy) was giving way to the digital era, the final victory of the numerate over the literate (8).
Thus, Solanka’s attempt at self-rejuvenation through cyberspace ends up being confounded by the same logic of Baudrillardian simulation, or endless copies without originals.
The metaphysical laboratory of cyberspace
In reflecting on Rushdie’s depiction of his protagonist’s experience, I first analyse a number of theoretical paradigms that explore the genesis of cyberspace as a way of understanding both its mystique and pitfalls. In “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace”, Michael Heim rethinks the role of cyberspace as a way of engaging with reality. He locates the allures and perils in cyberspace in the realm of the erotic: “Rightly perceived, the atmosphere of cyberspace carries the scent that once surrounded Wisdom. The world rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and minds, it captures our hearts” (Heim, 1992: 61). Heim considers virtual reality to be a realm where the “erotic” becomes disembodied. This cyber “erotics” is reflected in Fury’s depiction of the web as providing a substitute to libidinal pursuits.
A similar view is expressed by Slavoj Žižek’s meditation on fantasy in cyberspace. Žižek’s post-Lacanian reading of cyberspace investigates the “artistic potential of the new digital media” ( 1999: 110). Žižek sees the possibilities inherent in this new media for liberating the subject by offering potential fulfillment of fantasy. Cyberspace play entails total immersion and leads to a dismantling of subjecthood, which paradoxically becomes a form of liberation. However, like Heim, Žižek also sees the terrifying ramifications of this total immersion in cyberspace.
The erotic appeal of cyberspace activity may lead us away from our physical bodies toward a realm of simulated bodies. This loss of subjectivity is at once alluring and dangerous. Heim claims that, “when on line, we break free, like the monads, from bodily existence” ( 1992: 73). While recognizing the possible benefits of such “freedom”, Heim chooses to focus on the “dark side” of computer technology. It is this loss of subjectivity that Žižek sees as the possibly redemptive potential of cyberspace as well as having potentially terrifying and violent implications when “the consistency of our (self) experience can, perhaps be undermined” (Žižek, 1999: 123). This dark side of the alluring, potentially liberating “freedom” from bodily restraints is examined in Fury as Solanka is finally disillusioned from his vision of total creative freedom in the brave new world of the web.
Heim warns against the loss of the erotic thrill of discovery in the cyber world: “Computerized reality synthesizes everything through calculation, and nothing exists in the synthetic world that is not literally numbered and counted” (Heim, 1992: 79). In such a “synthetic” world, asks Heim, “can we be touched or surprised…or will it always remain a magic trick, an illusory prestidigitation?” ( 1992: 79), and he concludes with an impassioned call to the “fleshly world” with its “hidden horizons” ( 1992: 80). Žižek casts cyberspace “play” as an act of dismantling coherent selfhood which is an “authentic act” (Žižek, 1999: 122) that liberates the subject from the shackles of subjectivity while also risking total disintegration to the point of no return. Žižek leaves these contradictory options open, claiming that the possible influence of cyberspace technology ultimately “hinges on the network of socio-symbolic relations (of power and domination, etc.) which always-already determine the way cyberspace affects us” ( 1999: 123). These relations of power and domination are very much at play in Fury as Solanka discovers that his venture into cyberspace play has deep ties with the political, economic, and social systems it both describes and influences. The eruption of the “real” into cyber fantasy no longer allows it to remain a solipsistic and solitary realm where “play” takes over from “reality”.
These concerns with the possibility of true creativity in a digital world are one of Fury’s main themes. As Rushdie’s protagonist enters this cyber world, he encounters the dilemmas that Heim describes: Solanka has to choose between this “numbered” (or digital) world and its “literary” (or analogue) counterpart. Rushdie’s twin tales of postcolonial revolution and a cyberspace revolt become absurd “copies” of each other, thus reflecting the ways in which Solanka is implicated in his own tale. His authorial position becomes no more than a hollow “mask”, rather than what he first perceives as godlike omniscience. This conflict between the numbered and the digital is enacted in the tale of the web-inspired postcolonial revolution on Lilliput-Blefuscu. The revolutionary impulse at the heart of both tales (the cyberspace saga and the revolt on the island of Lilliput-Blefuscu) is critiqued by the protagonist, as he witnesses the bloody outcome of the wish for independence and freedom from (colonial) oppression.
Laptop as lapdancer: The allures of cyberspace
Rushdie’s protagonist is in many ways the “monad” of Heim’s narrative of the genesis of cyberspace. He is introduced to this exciting new realm by Mila Milo, a young woman who models herself after his most famous creation and his first commercial success: the philosophical doll Little Brain. Malik and Mila become entangled in an (unconsummated) erotic relationship that enacts Mila’s own (possibly incestuous) relationship with her dead father. It is only after the breakdown of this illicit relationship that the scorned Mila offers Solanka the opportunity to encounter the exciting new world of the web. Mila’s offer of “something else” (176), then, is the way she chooses to describe the proffered internet venture, and this offer comes only after Solanka abandons Mila for another woman – Neela Mahendra. Therefore what Mila offers is an erotic replacement for the illicit pleasures that they had previously engaged in. Mila describes cyberspace in sexual terms: “This new world is my life, Malik, it’s the thing of my time, growing as I grow, learning as I learn, becoming as I become. It’s where I feel most alive. There, inside the electricity” (179). Mila promises Solanka a thrill that would rival their past tryst: “Well, baby, for me that’s better than what was waiting under the cushion on your lap” (179). Solanka’s excited response mirrors Mila’s erotic enthusiasm, as he envisions the computer screen “[bursting] into life” and becoming sexually charged: “This was technology as hustler, or, as if in a darkened nightclub, gyrating for him. Laptop as lapdancer. The auxiliary sound system poured high-definition noise over him like golden rain” (179). Thus computer technology is envisioned, even before Solanka becomes actively involved with it, as a potential site of erotic pleasure.
Living “inside the electricity” promises unimagined delights, causing the previously sceptical Solanka to be immediately tempted. His venture into the “brave new electronic world” (186), is described as no less than regeneration: “The blood seemed to pump harder through his veins. This, he thought, was renewal” (186). The bodily/sensual impact of the disembodied computer world is described, again, in erotic terms. Though Solanka is “intoxicated” (187) by his self-created world, the dangers of his complete absorption in this “imagined world” are already apparent. As Heim observes, with the “thrill of free access to unlimited corridors of information comes the threat of total organization” (Heim, 1992: 79). 7 The risk of totality is never far away. Cyberspace offers putative freedom from the constraints of the physical body and offers seemingly endless artistic freedom, but this independence may entail another form of enslavement.
Solanka first becomes enraptured by “the possibilities offered by the new technology, with its formal preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterest in linear progression” (186). He marvels at the move away from previous narrative forms to this new medium: “Links were electronic now, not narrative. This was…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” (187). But as Gonzalez (2008: 773) points out, “[this] creative omniscience […] is no more than a delusion, for the omniscient artist has been superseded by the technology of the counterfeit”.
This “omniscience” at “the merest click of a mouse” (187) is an exhilarating prospect. 8 However, it also becomes a site of moral and ethical dilemmas that come into play as Solanka plots his cyber saga “Let the Fittest Survive”, finally entailing his change of heart and eventual disillusionment. But even at this early stage, Solanka comes to realize the dangers of his new pursuit:
He found himself inhabiting a world he greatly preferred to the one outside his window, and came to understand what Mila Milo had meant when she said that this was where she felt most alive. Here, inside the electricity, Malik Solanka emerged from the half-life of his Manhattan exile, traveled daily to Galileo-1, and began, once more, to live (187-188).
The dangers of this immersion in cyberspace become most evident (or real) when the story of Solanka’s imagined planet Galileo-1 and the cyborg revolt inspire a postcolonial coup in Neela Mahendra’s home island of Lilliput-Blefuscu. This event forces Solanka to become aware of the many ways in which his fictional creation is both implicated in “reality” and influences it, and finally leads not only to Neela’s death but also to the demise of his artistic-virtual project. Solanka’s cyberspace narrative thus merges with a “real” postcolonial revolt in the novel’s imagined version of ethnic conflict on a (fictive) island. Rushdie alerts us to the many ways in which his fictional creation and Solanka’s cyber narrative are equally implicated and influenced by “real” and imagined historical events, entailing a confusion of boundaries between the fictitious and the real. The postcolonial arena becomes another “space” for Rushdie’s engagement with these multiple sites of the fictive and the real. The violent outcome of both cyber revolt and postcolonial revolution reflects Rushdie’s critique of grand national causes and of the pursuit of power and domination, be it in a fictional cyber tale or very bloody “fact”.
Revisiting Swift: Rushdie’s postcolonial Gulliver
The story of Lilliput-Blefuscu as a site of postcolonial struggle is a retelling of an episode in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Rushdie casts the tale that depicted the Anglo-French war in North America as a postcolonial site of ethnic conflict between two groups living on the island: the Elbees and the Indo-Lilliputians. As John C. Hawley points out (2004: 17), Swift’s narrative engages in “imaginings of places that are pointedly Not Here”, thus providing a “unique angle of vision on the society against which they are ‘placed’”. This changed vision affects the returning traveller who, once returning “home”, feels simultaneously estranged and strangely enlightened. Solanka, much like Gulliver, experiences this change of heart and mind when he returns to London at the end of the novel. Solanka’s journey into the “not here” takes place in cyberspace, which in some sense is the ultimate site of such nowhere-ness. It may thus be argued that his venture indeed transforms him in ways he only begins to fathom in wake of his homecoming.
Moreover, Rushdie complicates the relationship between “real” and “imagined” worlds by presenting Lilliput-Blefuscu, the inspiration for “Let the Fittest Survive”, as always already implicated by its own “fictional” status. The choice of Swift as an intertext causes the reader to pause and question the fictional status of a tale within a novel replete with constant references to real historical events and persons (George Bush and Al Gore, Monica Lewinsky, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, and Hillary Clinton, to name but a few). Thus, Rushdie alerts his readers to the elaborate game of boundary confusions he unfolds in Fury.
As Neela, Solanka’s new lover, recounts her ancestors’ rise from slavery to domination of the island, she refers to Swift jokingly, employing his terms to describe the Anglo-French conflict in her own story. The two warring ethnic groups are described as representing polar options: the indigenous Elbees are meat eaters, whereas the Indo-Lilliputians are vegetarians; the Elbees are “collectivists” while the Indo-Lilliputians represent “good business practice…free market mercantilism and profit mentality” (158). Neela refers to Gulliver’s Travels as she describes this rivalry: “The Elbees […] say that the only end of a soft-boiled egg to break is the little one. Whereas we – or at least those of us who eat eggs – are the Big Endians, from big Endia” (157).
The Indo-Lillys (or Indians) thus take over the island with their good business practices and their computer knowhow. Rushdie’s joke here hinges on the alternate meanings of Big Endian, which has become a technological term denoting the order in which a sequence of bytes is stored in a computer’s memory; this term is therefore associated with the notions of the Indo-Lillys as representing the numerical/digital aspect of the conflict.
Neela comments on this reversal of former subject positions when the Indo-Lilliputians ascend to power: “[The] world speaks our language now, not theirs”, says Neela, “It is the age of numbers, isn’t it? So we are the numbers and the Elbees are the words” (158). She then comments on the nature of this conflict: “[The] battle between the Indo-Lillys and the Elbees is also the battle of the human spirit…between what’s mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that loves and dreams”. Neela admits that “with my heart I’m probably on the other side” (158).
Her commitment to the national cause, however, overrides such sentimental concerns: “But my people are my people and justice is justice and after you’ve worked your butts off for four generations and you’re still treated like second-class citizens, you’ve got a right to be angry” (158). The battle of the human spirit, then, gives way to loyalty for a national cause. Rushdie posits the national sentiment as a destructive force – another aspect of the “fury” that pervades the novel. The impulse to “right a grave injustice, to be a servant of the Good” (246), ends up in disaster. Neela’s death seems futile: although she sacrifices herself to save Solanka and her film crew, the national cause takes on horrific manifestations in the form of Babur, the leader of the Indo-Lilliputian rebels. 9 Choosing to name the rebel leader after the famous emperor of the Mughal Empire provides an ironic comment on the nature of leadership. 10 While the historical (and mythological) Babur has come to represent a leader who is very much aware of his own vices, a learned man, who despite his overwhelming cruelty, can still provide ironic comments on his own debauchery, Rushdie’s Babur retains the physical attributes and the cruelty of his namesake with none of the mitigating virtues of humour and sharp wit. Babur is transformed into a deranged and “grotesque” mirror of Solanka’s own quest for (artistic) godlike power.
The futility that underlies grand national causes is a recurrent theme in the novel. 11 The revolt in Lilliput-Blefuscu is at least as ridiculous as Swift’s Little/Big Endian dispute, but its consequences are very “real”. This defining moment, when “fictional characters [begin] to burst out of their cages and take to the streets” (225), marks “the intervention of the living dolls from the imaginary planet Galileo-1 in the public affairs of actually existing Earth” (226). The revolutionaries identify with the “Puppet Kings” in Solanka’s tale, the cyborg slaves fighting for liberation, entailing, as Solanka realizes, “no less than a third ‘revolt of the living dolls’” (227). The cyber world, previously viewed by Solanka as a refuge from “reality”, is contaminated by this “intervention” of the fictional in the “real”.
Let the fittest survive? Rushdie’s dystopian imaginary
“Let the Fittest Survive” is an open-ended narrative that does not offer any closure while depicting a scene of moral ambiguity. The Darwinian overtones of the subtitle foreshadow the tale’s engagement with the battle for survival in a hostile other-worldly environment, in which the nature of humanity is put to the test. This tale within a tale acts as a subversive counter-text in the novel. As Fredric Jameson notes in Archaeologies of the Future, postmodern science fiction creates “an imaginary enclave within real social space”, with cyberspace offering a unique, new sort of enclave: “…a subjectivity which is objective and which once more does away with the ‘centered subject’” (Jameson, 2005: 15; 21).
“Let the Fittest Survive” is Rushdie’s own such imagined space. Significantly, this enclave is “located” in cyberspace, which as Jameson observes, provides a “space” for postmodern re-imaginings of subjectivity. Jameson contends that unlike fantasy, which remains a conservative and even a reactionary form, it is in postmodern science fiction that we may still find a revolutionary potential. I propose that Rushdie’s cyber tale enacts the idea of “revolution”, showing both its perils and potential for change. Revolution, meant to be the vehicle of liberation and redemption is thus transformed into a bloody cycle of relentless violence.
Solanka’s cyber saga appears midway through the novel in italicized typeface, thus signalling a story within a story that is set apart both graphically and thematically from the rest of the novel. It is only in the next chapter that the readers are told of Solanka’s love of science fiction, and explanations for some of the characters’ names and the story’s events are provided. This miniature science fiction tale within the text incorporates elements from works of Rushdie’s admired authors, engaging with core metaphysical dilemmas of the genre. The story centres on Akasz Kronos, a puppet-maker who created figures he calls the Puppet Kings, only to find out that they have turned against him, their maker. Kronos is clearly, then, Solanka’s mirror-image or evil doppelganger. Solanka’s own conflicted status as doll-maker provides the impulse for writing the tale, and is ultimately the reason for his change of heart in the wake of the tragic consequences of the realization of his fiction.
Solanka’s tale is self-reflexive from the outset, as it casts the events of his life in a science-fictional setting. The tale appears to be an odd pastiche of generic tropes (“The Prime Directive”, for one), 12 utopian elements, the theme of golem/Frankenstein’s rebellion against its creator, as well as a parodic retelling of events taking place in contemporary New York. Solanka finds out that it
wasn’t necessary to end the story – indeed it was vital to the project’s long-term prospects that the tale be capable of almost indefinite prolongation, with new adventures and themes being grafted on to it at regular intervals and new characters to sell in doll, toy and robot form (190).
Although the commercial potential of this cyber venture is stated as the reason for this “indefinite prolongation”, it nonetheless offers new and exciting ways of exploring the nature of narrative.
The tale is metaphorically described as a living being, a “many-armed, multi-media beast” (190), symbolic of the dangers of this commercial venture and its monstrous consequences. But Solanka’s tale also has ethical and philosophical implications, raising dilemmas without solutions: “[I]t was not necessary to answer questions; far better to find interesting ways of rephrasing them” (190). Solanka’s engagement with his characters’ moral choices is described as an addiction: “Professor Solanka was intoxicated for hours on end by the Puppet-Kings’ six-pack of ethical dilemmas” (187). He is at once “fascinated”, “revolted”, and,
deliriously entranced by the shadow play possibilities (intellectual, symbolic, confrontational, mystificational, even sexual) of the two sets of doubles, the encounters between “real” and “real,” “real” and “double,” “double” and “double,” which blissfully demonstrated the dissolution of frontiers between the categories. (187)
Again, we see Baudrillardian language replicated almost verbatim. This fascination with endless doubling and mirroring masquerades as artistic freedom but, as Gonzalez points out, is merely “a parody of creativity that produces only clones; […] complicit with the recuperation of difference and the mechanization of the human, […] the dead aesthetic which is the by-product of the conditioning of marketing” (Gonzalez, 2008: 774).
The action takes place on “Galileo-1”, the “Rijk’s home planet” (161). This imagined space is a close echo of millennial New York as Solanka experiences it. “Boom America” (188) is “in a golden age”: “Outside his window a long, humid summer, the first hot season of the third millennium baked and perspired. The city boiled with money” (4). Solanka recreates this urban space in his cyber tale – it indeed becomes an “extension” of New York as well as prophesying its imminent (imagined) fall, as the Roman Empire of our times.
This new narrative/urban “space” can find its ultimate expression in science fiction. Cyberspace becomes the realm for narrative engagement with the very issues that have been occupying the genre from its earliest manifestations. “Let the Fittest Survive” explores the limits of human perception, comprehension, and possible intervention in the world, suggesting that the seemingly liberating site of cyberspace creativity, ends up in the collapsible real. Both in New York and in Lilliput-Blefuscu, the real invades what Solanka identifies at the very beginning of the novel as “phoney”: 13
Something was amiss with the world. The optimistic peace-and-love philosophy of his youth having given him up, he no longer knew how to reconcile himself to the increasingly “phoney” (he loathed, in this context, the otherwise excellent word “virtual”) reality. (7)
In the novel’s final scene, we find Solanka returning to the “real”, in a conflicted attempt to do away with the “phoney” nature of the world.
Asmaan’s Heath, or: Can the weary traveller return home?
Michael Heim’s cyberspace erotics become its “neurotics”. As cyber rebellion becomes bloody fact, there is no longer any room for indulgence in a reassessment of philosophical and metaphysical quandaries. The novel’s final scene can therefore be seen as a return from the isolated/cyber world to the “real”, though a very bizarre homecoming at that. As Gonzalez states:
Closing with an image of infantile regression, the tale leaves Solanka jumping up and down on a bouncy castle, in a parody of Gatsby, that “gold hatted” bouncer and self made man. Literally reaching for the sky, the ending falls (intentionally?) flat, an ironic judgment on the American dream, fuelled by the flows of fast capitalism. ( 2008: 778)
While she accurately reads the ending’s ironic references, Gonzalez does not refer to Solanka’s genuine wish to reach for the “Sky”, which is also his son’s name. Although Gonzalez concedes rightly that,
the novel’s nostalgia, not so much for realism as for the real emotion expressed in its title, is a surgical strike against our world of simulacra while also being complicit with it, as both its tone and form, and indeed, its post-realist aesthetics suggest ( 2008: 778)
she fails to recognize the protagonist’s real emotions that are expressed in the novel’s very moving last scene.
In my own reading of the final scene, I suggest rather that Rushdie’s playfulness, though conspicuous, finally gives way to the expression of emotion: not of “fury” but of love. Although Rushdie leaves us bouncing with Solanka as he attempts to make his son notice him, we nevertheless feel that this closing scene signals a return to life and to real emotion, after a long hiatus in the web’s simulated life, in the novel’s very last lines:
But grand and high was his bouncing; and he was damned if he was going to stop leaping or desist from yelling until that little boy looked around, until he made Asmaan Solanka hear him…until Asmaan turned and saw his father up there, his only true father flying against the sky, asmaan, the sky, conjuring up all his lost love and hurling it up high into the sky like a white bird plucked from his sleeve. 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. “Look at me!” shrieked Professor Malik Solanka, his leather coat-tails flapping like wings, “Look at me, Asmaan! I’m bouncing very well! I’m bouncing higher and higher!” (259)
The entire paragraph is cast linguistically, as well as thematically, in the mode of possibility. We will never know if Asmaan does indeed hear his father. We are left, much like Solanka, to ponder the “possible” instead of realizing the “actual”. Although he has abandoned his dreams of the ultimate space “inside the electricity”, Solanka is yet unsure of what the future may hold. In this last cinematic scene, we see the protagonist in a “freeze frame moment”. If this is a happy ending, then it is a qualified and limited one. It is only in this frozen moment in time within the space of the novel that a glimmer of hope for a better future remains.
Fury thus ends in a realm of prospects. While the novel has offered us the possibility of a liberating utopian option in cyberspace, only to deconstruct it and demonstrate its inherent perils, its final scene brings us back to London, Solanka’s former home. Leaving the decadent New York for London, the capital of a former Empire, a city facing its post-imperial and postcolonial reality, may signal a move towards a different engagement with futurity. Solanka returns “home”, but like Gulliver and the “antique traveller” in Shelley’s Ozymandias, he finds that “nothing beside remains” (257). Nevertheless, Solanka is drawn to the one place in the heart of the metropolis which he renames after his son: “Asmaan’s Heath – or at least Kenwood” (257). This place is “studded with magical trees” and with the magic of artistic creation: “[t]he Hepworth sculpture was a sacred spot” (257). Returning to this hallowed ground then, on a “perfect April day” (257), offers a vision of a possibly better future for Solanka who longs to reconnect with his “only true son”. Instead of disembodied “space”, we find a real place: a manmade garden in the midst of a different urban space. Rushdie’s choice to end the novel in that particular spot, envisages a possibly different future for both father and son.
This possibility of futurity may also lie in the promise inherent in the next generation: Asmaan, the son/sky/heaven is projected unto Solanka. As Solanka bounces up, he becomes Asmaan if only for a split second. Futurity becomes an embodied rather than a science-fictional option. Cyberspace gives way to a literal and figurative “sky”.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.