Still Thinking Furiously

Hello again, all. Another posting from a Rushdie "webspyder." I must say that I feel quite stirred up about Fury after our discussion this past Wednesday; I'm also eager to see it continue, so, if you're at all inclined, join me here! First of all, a tidbit or two from Sassen, if only so we get her article into the conversation in some way. How about this for a line that could centralize an argument for an extended paper on Rushdie: "Replete with such regulatory fractures, global cities include dense and complex borderlands marked by the intersection of multiple spatiotemporal (dis)orders" (221) (there are some echoes of Bhabha in there, too, right??). Later, Sassen proposes that "insofar as much of this activity happens in cities...much new critical and analytic effort is directed at the city....Borderzones have become the sites of analytic interest and complexity" (222). It seems that Rushdie's Bombay, London, and New York could be brought together profitably around the suggestions and possibilities of quotes such as these. His novels do nothing if not assess the new approaches to questions of national cultures and identities, and the new epistemological logic of "living here, belonging elsewhere." I also think back to our discussion of Chamcha's flight from London after everything goes haywire in The Satanic Verses: Rushdie seems so good at diagnosing the ills of globalization (via marginalized and/or working class characters; see, too, those crucial 184-187 pages in The Moor's Last Sigh, which tell us how urgent is the imperative that we theorize globalization carefully, which was part of my rationale for assigning Sassen), but when it comes right down to it the mode of response seems to be flight rather than the construction of a local politics. It's an interesting issue and problem with which to grapple.

Regarding this past Tuesday night, I now see what you all were up to. Everyone ate just the right amount of jelly bellies such that when Kaylen sent me home with the remainder the jar was poised for maximum sonic noticeability as I walked down the sidewalks to my car. It was as if you wanted to put me in the position of Malik on his bouncy castle. Ah, but we decided that we needn't interpret the ending in terms of infantilization, right?! Do others want to weigh in on Malik's return to Asmaan? Overly sentimental? Pathetic? Is Solanka merely infantilizing himself here, or does it recall the ending of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and thus become somehow right, somehow consistent with fairy stories and Tolkien's idea of "eucatastrophe"? "Read and bring me home to you" implores the epigraph of Haroun. Simple yet poignant stuff, and somehow it's echoed (for me) at the end of Fury. There's real emotion here and we might appreciate the sense of closure for a change (since we don't usually get it in Rushdie's novels), even though Malik's condition as he wanders "Asmaan's Heath" still seems exilic. This ending offers the antidote, perhaps, to life in the simulacrum, life in an unsettled, postmodern world: to quote the title of a novel we're not reading, salvation is to be found in the ground beneath your feet (even if you're carrying a noisy bucket of jelly beans).

I handed out the Yeats poem the other night not only because it's invoked in Fury (what isn't invoked in this novel, right?!), but also because I like the way Fury becomes kind of a turn-of-the-century bookend to Yeats's early-century warning about the (violent? apocalyptic?) culmination of "twenty centuries of stony sleep." Each is concerned with the best lacking all conviction and with the fear of what "rough beast" might be slouching towards Bethlehem. 9/11 has only made this a more startling comparison. I think I saw the novel less as a critique of America, per se (at least along the lines of what could have been "those nasty cultural imperialists" et al.), than as a sobering critique of postmodern/American banality, where the simulated and the real are almost indistinguishable (Ted was speaking persuasively to this the other night). That doesn't strike me as cliched, even though we've seen films like The Matrix and read William Gibson's fiction, etc. Zygmunt Bauman refers to "the consuming desire of consuming," and it seems Rushdie's novel can/will indeed ultimately serve (again to use Ted's phrase) as a kind of time capsule related to that notion. I've been thinking more, too, about all those pop culture references and "lists": is it the case that this novel will not age well because of them, or might the opposite be true? That is, will the point about the banality of this part of postmodern life become even more striking when readers no longer can smile knowingly and recognize the references? Maybe some particularly resourceful reader of the future will still be able to track the reference to "sly-eyed lady of the fenlands" here so as to enjoy some poetry Dylan-style.

I was also interested in that part of the conversation that wondered if this novel should provide more of a localized description and experience of New York. Part of me is inclined to think this novel could no more be Let the Great World Spin in that regard than The Matrix could be a Woody Allen film. Still, this issue gets even more interesting when we consider the cover image, with that hovering cloud over the Empire State Building. Talk about adding an uncanny element to the novel's reception (post-9/11).

Could it be that this novel is interrogating and undermining one of Rushdie's most treasured elsewheres, destinations, imagined homelands: Oz? Fury tells us that Oz is sometimes a land of "half truths." There's a paper in there somewhere, too (one that might include Benengeli vs. Erasmo in The Moor's Last Sigh, the ruby slippers, the vacuousness of "Dream-America" in Fury, the wandering, can't-go-home-again Malik, etc.). Rushdie's gathering body of palimpsests are really quite extraordinary across the full trajectory of his work.

I could also see someone pursuing a comparison between the sea of stories and Solanka's hypertext tale-telling as companion and mutually-enriching metaphors. The digressiveness and endless possibilities of The Thousand and One Nights could come into play here, too. At their best, these various venues for stories suggest fluid mergings, recombinations, multiple pathways, nomadic stories (ah, there's also the Moor nailing his "last sigh" of a story to all those various doors) -- whether it's the oral tradition, the novel, or hypertext/cyberspace, the power of stories transfers to each new medium with confidence and verve. And we subsequently learn the use of stories that "aren't even true."

Well, there's a start, a 31st jar for Fury! And I already sense I'll be back with more ...