2002 MMLA
Writing the Postcolonial
Judi Nitsch
Indiana University Bloomington
The Ambivalent Tourist: The 'Colonial' Male Spectator in the Global City in Salman Rushdie's Fury
In Power Politics Arundhati Roy locates the responsibility of translating
the invisible hand of globalization "into the realm of common understanding"
in artists. This task of political translating then opens up a new space,
for writers, painters, songwriters, etc., in which the transcendental
marketplace can be grounded in concrete cities, people, and experiences.
By doing so, artists decolonize the content of multinational business
plans and profits margins that is typically hoarded by the coven of "experts"
in neoliberal economics. The non-experts then have access to the reasons
behind their forced relocation, their suddenly privatized utilities, and
their country's economic collapse. The "newness" of Roy's formulation,
however, does not refer to the motivations and procedures of capital acquisition;
rather she suggests that the reconfigurations are different and deliberately
mystified-the inequalities continue as before. Assumedly, artists interested
in confronting previous colonial experiences would be the appropriate
translators of neoliberal policy and practice. Yet Roy's call for translators
may insinuate a lack of artistic engagement with current geopolitics,
as well the historical limits of postcolonial theory's relegation of the
colonial moment to some recent past. Indeed, as Arif Dirlik argues, many
postcolonial theorists' disregard for 'colonial' meta-narratives of capitalism
or nation disables any serious engagement with current economic oppression
that operates under capitalist imperatives. Putting postcolonial narration
and theory in conversation with the varied experiences and discourses
of globalization reveals the continuation of colonial projects, arriving
on 'native' shores in, perhaps, less nationalist and material vessels.
As Anne McClintock argues in Imperial Leather, the contemporary economic
hegemony of U.S.-based multinational corporations "can exert a coercive
power as great as any colonial gunboat" (13)-power expressed and
experienced in heterogeneous ways.
Such historical similitude between the colonial and its 'post' period
doesn't call for an extension of postcolonial binaries. Rather, the theoretical
and narrative challenge is to revise postcolonial binaries into frameworks
that capture more complex, web-like power distributions along ethnic,
classed, and gendered lines. Mapping the strands of postcolonial power
needn't resemble a postmodern celebration of 'pastiche' or uncritical
celebration of hybridity. Conversely, portraits shouldn't simply be a
study of American pluralism, which amounts to little more than, in Timothy
Brennan's words, the "reassert[ion of] U.S. national identity at
precisely the moment that the breakdown of national borders is vigorously
and messianically announced" (At Home in the World 313). Still, the
picture that Roy encourages of artists of the word, sound, and image to
create could come into focus, giving people beyond the academy ways to
process and theorize meaningful resistance to new global capitalism, without
their complete interpolation into Americanized global culture.
The search for a postcolonial artist confronting past and present Western
empires would undoubtedly bring us to Salman Rushdie, as he holds a prestigious
position within that counter-canon. Lest we commit the authorial fallacy,
we should gesture towards one of Rushdie's numerous claims to postcolonial
authorship. On the socially critical imperative of literature, Rushdie
comments that "liberal capitalism or democracy of the free world
will require novelists' more rigorous attention, will require reimagining
and questioning and doubting as never before" (426-27). This quote
is indicative of Rushdie's general leftist perspective that frequently
appears in The Guardian and The New York Times, and corresponds to Roy's
artistic imperative.
Oddly enough, the post-9/11 Rushdie has aligned himself with the present
postcolonial bully, the United States. We must note that Rushdie describes
his current position as one aligned with those rooted against fundamentalist
violence on innocent people-an experience he knows well. Furthermore,
his defense of the United States operates as a critique of European geopolitical
hypocrisy: disdain for America's insatiable neoimperialist consumption,
without implicating their homelands' similar efforts. In essence, he objects
to the "sanctimonious moral relativism" with which Europe pegs
the blame for September 11th on America itself. Rushdie's individual experiences
with the fatwa aside, his sudden rush to defend the actions of rightwing
American presidents warrants some consideration. In his more recent work,
Timothy Brennan reads Rushdie's more muted criticisms of the Thatcher-esque
conservatism after the fatwa as a direct result of the latter. With his
life at stake, Rushdie found himself incredibly dependent on the British
government, with its long history of working-class and immigrant repression.
Thus, "the Rushdie that the fatwa kidnapped" (120) was the serious
and savvy writer who openly opposed imperialism, orientalism, and anti-democratic
movements.
Fury, his latest fictional work, does little to explicitly recover that
Rushdie. The failure is painfully ironic, as Fury's geographic and historical
backdrop, New York City in dot-com boom of the early 21st century, seems
the perfect ground for a postcolonial confrontation of neoimperial practice.
On the surface, Fury engages crucial postcolonial issues, location and
belonging, in a historical moment enriched by new global capitalism. Yet
the novel's protagonist, Professor and puppet master Malik Solanka, suffers
from perpetual identity crises that continually distract him from meaningfully
engaging his surroundings. At first, his crisis is gendered-the male mid-life
nightmare figuring women as emasculating and treacherous, with his prized
puppet even adopting the stereotypical demon-woman role.
A closer reading of the narrative reveals more than a crisis of masculinity;
Rushdie also articulates an ambivalence towards the postcolonial migrant's
negotiations of the neocolonial order-an ambivalence that could translate
into critique. Solanka is simultaneously enamored and disgusted with the
glittering spectacle of American wealth, thus lending a critically interesting
ambiguity to his perceptions of New York as the representative American
space: one he believes is dominated by the towering, immigrant-loving
lady of liberty, and one he excuses for its ravaging of the developing
world for cheap labor and resources. Moreover, Solanka embodies the "locational
ambivalence" of migration that so intrigues Rushdie; Solanka is a
man who has traversed and settled on three continents. Partially out of
wanderlust, Solanka arrives in America to find a release from the horrible
fury that grips him-an unconscious rage that led him to draw a knife on
his sleeping wife and child. He survived a disturbing childhood in a colonized
land (in India), matures within in the racially isolating educational
system of the colonizer (in England), and flees both pasts for the mindless
self-absorption of the present neo-imperial power (the U.S.). A text so
saturated with ambivalence may reveal the ways in which postcolonial subjects
and narratives can challenge the democratizing rhetoric of the new global/information
age, which Roy opposes. That is to say, Rushdie may be subtly critiquing
(and implicating himself in his approval of) America's global oppressive
hegemony in economic and cultural realms. As Homi Bhabha theorized, the
ambivalence of mimicry and colonized identity can propose a means for
national resistance-acting as a living reminder of the paradox between
Enlightenment philosophy and colonizing practice. In Rushdie's text, Solanka's
migrant position may allow him that same subversiveness in the context
of globalized finance and multinational corporations.
Critique comes in the form of orientation, as recent arrival Solanka settles
into his new surroundings. Opening with a survey of the metropole's wealth,
Rushdie establishes Professor Solanka's voyeuristic relationship with
the city. At first, he seems to be there to watch the spectacle of the
opulent city unfold. Unencumbered by work or financial need, Malik spends
much of the book playing the affluent tourist or flâneur. But he
is no vapid tourist. Both Solanka and narrator are attuned to the ludicrous
consumption that surrounds them, as affluent Americans register their
'worldly' intelligence and taste through rampant consumption. Rushdie
fills the opening pages of Fury with wry cataloguing of the spectacular
wealth:
limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar corkscrews, customized
Humvees, … outsider art, featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff
of extinct mountain goats. So many people were doing up their apartments
that supplies of high-grade fixtures and fittings were at a premium. …
In spite of the recent falls in the value of the Nasdaq index and the
value of Amazon stock, the new technology had the city by the ears: the
talk was still of start-ups, IPOs, interactivity, the unimaginable future
that had just begun to begin. The future was a casino, and everyone was
gambling, and everyone expected to win.(3-4)
The rapid-fire descriptions of cosmopolitan goods and business rhetoric
convey both the whirlwind atmosphere of Malik's new environs, as well
as the seductive lure of the wares themselves. Rushdie's characteristic
sarcasm is unmistakably heard in the lines quoted above, but the speedy
sentence structure does more than illustrate the metaphor: it also imparts
the siren's song of America's conspicuous consumption in Solanka's ears.
The quasi-carnival that greets Malik from his apartment-window gazing
is not explicitly negative to him or narrator. The tone imparts a subtle
mockery of globalization's hallmarks, American nouveau riche commodities
and dot-com lingo, but as Malik's story unfolds, we see his easy affiliations
with both. Early on, Malik continuously wanders through streets that offer
makeshift bazaars, then identity parades, and finally spontaneous dance
parties. Yet, the deeper he digs into the city, the more Rushdie distances
Solanka's experiences from any potentially savvy global critiques. Oddly
enough, the distance comes with Solanka's rather smooth transition into
New York City life. As he sheds his touristic and flâneur-ish perspective,
his critiques all but vanish. Solanka is at home in this world-he speaks
the language, secures rental property, socializes with old friends, takes
several younger lovers, and helps create a successful website.
Situating Solanka's critiques within a more cosmopolitan context, we begin
to see Rushdie's creation of a "globetrotter," to borrow Zygmunt
Bauman's concept: a wanderer by choice, easily adapting to homogenized
niches, carved into local landscapes by highly mobile elites. Within the
same paragraph that critiques American culture as costly spectacle, "there
were circuses as well as bread" (6), Solanka marks himself as a "metropolitan
of the countryside-is-for-cows persuasion" (6) who gladly walks alongside
his "fellow citizens" (6) of the American global city. Despite
this egalitarian vision of the global city, Rushdie grants Solanka a modicum
of class awareness, as he ponders the ease with which he has abandoned
his London-based family and home. He cannot translate his flight into
a Hindu rejection of the material world, as "a sanyasi with a duplex
and gold card was a contradiction in terms" (82). The professor's
methods are self-consciously "first world" (in Bauman's terms)
as he travels unimpeded by spatial, national, or economic constraints.
Ever the cosmopolitan, Solanka can uproot, traverse the globe, begin housekeeping,
and rebuild himself-wherever his gold card is accepted.
Rushdie's deliberate inclusion of a cosmopolitan protagonist also mirrors
a troubling trend in theories of global culture and postmodern nations.
Timothy Brennan's analysis of 'cosmopolitanism' and its potential subversion
of colonial power structures speaks directly to Rushdie's latest narrative
engagement with neo-imperialism. Explaining the crux of his catholic reading
of cultural figures and texts, Brennan elucidates the limits of cosmopolitanism
as a perspective: it is a subtle product of its subject of critique: American
economic and cultural hegemony. Cosmopolitanism's inefficacy is compounded
by "an [American] argument about the importance of a white, middle-class
minority in the political sense of the term" (310) -a minority that
defines the parameters of what Stuart Hall calls "global mass culture"
(378). To Hall, the easy, instant arrival and absorption of American images
across physical and linguistic boundaries is a form of cultural imperialism.
Linguistically localized as Anglo-American, these pop cultural signs are
rendered universal because of their 'accessibility.' Thus, the continuities
between cosmopolitanism and American cultural/economic hegemony prevent
the former from thinking beyond the national, classed, racial, and (I
would add) gendered norms that American cultural exports impose and/or
sustain.
Rushie repeatedly illustrates the limits of cosmopolitanism as meaningful
critique of globalization. Solanka's critiques skim the surface of globalized
production and wealth, which one scene illustrates well. On his first
walk through the neighborhood, Solanka notes a street vendor's imitation
designer handbags and references a name-brand secondhand store, labeling
both as signs of global economic inequality. The crime resides in America's
apathy towards its wealth, which drives the upwardly mobile of developing
nations mad with envy. Rather than turn his flâneur-ish eye onto
the manufacturing sector, perhaps stumbling across an apartment-turned-sweatshop
or a homeless person, the professor's thoughts circle around the wealth
itself-and its poor distribution amongst the world's bourgeoisie. He cannot
look behind the label (or imitated label), so he never questions the possibly
exploitative production involved in manufacturing the clothing. Nor does
he pause to describe the actual persons hawking the illegal wares, who
are unlikely to participate in any lavish consumption. A strange oversight,
as critics of Rushdie typically hail his class savviness.
One might argue that Solanka's indifference to working class struggle
is in itself a critique, both of the situation and of the protagonist
himself. Timothy Brennan's explanation of the 'Third World,' cosmopolitan
writer's treatment of post-nationalist life offers an explanation for
Solanka's class-based apathy, as the writer "join[s] an impassioned
political sarcasm (a situated satire) with ironic detachment, employing
humor with a cosmic, celebratory pessimism" (At Home, In the World,
41). Even if Rushdie is mocking Solanka with his tepid criticism of globalization
and the third-world bourgeois, the very effect of that criticism is detached
and cursory, resulting in an implicitly fatalistic vision of global class
structures as imperturbable. Moreover, Solanka's stumblings into other
overly political metaphors do not speak highly of his critical acumen.
The spectacle of New York and his neediness are too distracting. Coming
upon a celebration of sexual and then of national identity, Solanka represses
his troubling memories of violence (realized and potential) within his
various families, all while "rub[bing] shoulders and [getting] jiggy"
(7) with the masses. The crowds become spaces in which to dissolve, as
Malik sees the gay pride marches and Puerto Rican girls there "to
lose themselves" (7) as well. It is an ironic interpretation, as
both gatherings are the public performance of marginal identities; this
publicized naming and claiming of otherness draws Solanka in, which he
interprets as "the unarticulated magic of the masses" (7), promising
the "satisfying anonymity" (7) he desperately desires. Solanka's
reading of collective self-negation can only be a projection of what he
needs New York City, and by extension, America, to be: the ahistorical,
apolitical country; the land of perpetual, self-centered self-construction.
Solanka's embrace of American vapidity becomes his central desire. For
the first half of the text, New York City figures as the ultimate panacea
for the migrant man's mid-life crisis:
It was precisely his back-story that he wanted to destroy. … He had
come to America as so many before him to receive the benison of being
Ellis-Islanded, of starting over. Give me a name, America, make me a Buzz
or a Chip or a Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful
unknowning. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears! No longer
a historian but a man without histories let me be. I'll rip my lying mother
tongue out of my throat and speak your broken English instead. (51)
The soporific thrill of American ignorance to global realities-criticisms
for which Rushdie later upbraids British journalists covering Ground Zero-this
is the viagra for Solanka's creative impotence. To drug himself with culturally
sanctioned amnesia means to forget history, including the foreign policy
that signifies the U.S. as a globally oppressive force. Indeed, Solanka
readily jumps into the cyber-market that elides the reality of the sweatshop,
the death squad, and perpetuation of global poverty. Parroting tech-marketing
rhetoric, Rushdie celebrates the Internet's revolutionary time-space collapse
as "available to all, at the merest click of a mouse" (187).
Never does he mind that the chip-manufacturing sector relies heavily on
female sweated labor. For this cyber venture, while augmenting Solanka's
already impressive wealth, assuages his masculine crisis. Thus it is the
unapologetic and uncritical participation in the new global economy that
Rushdie sites as curative for Solanka's anxieties of age, gender, and
identity.
Technology is not the only problematic solution for his migrant hero.
Rushdie rather dramatically turns Solanka towards women as a site of psychological
relief. As Ambreen Hai suggests in her essay, "'Marching in from
the Peripheries,'" Rushdie's feminism is an ambivalent one, revealing
potentially liberating and insightful critiques of patriarchy. Indeed,
both central women in the text, Mila Milosevic and Neela Mahendra, share
the protagonist's migrant and cosmopolitan identity. Interesting to the
context of globalization is the considerable scholarly work and human
rights reporting that continually describe women as the most exploited
of those who suffer the short-ended stick of our new global economy. Rushdie
could locate more subversive critiques of neo-imperialism and gender within
female characters that are periphery to the narrative but central to the
theme of neo-imperialism.
Initially, Mila's entrance into the text offers the potential for migrant
bonding, as she and Solanka immediately recognize each other as 'outsiders'
in America. Sharp-eared Mila detects the colonial accent in Solanka's
voice and hails him as a fellow European migrant. She too has caught Solanka's
wandering eye-and not for wholly sexual reasons, at first. Despite her
decidedly American dress, baggy clothes, black D'Angelo Voodoo baseball
cap, Mila appears too striking to pass for the khaki-clad, Nike-wearing
denizens of Solanka's treasured America. Her appearance is doubly significant,
molded as it is after Solanka's beloved and first puppet character, Little
Brain. Now lost to her global-cultural icon status (a loss that figures
as a primary source of his creative rage), Little Brain once signified
for Solanka spunky intellectual vivacity: L.B. is "his hip, fashion-conscious,
but still idealistic Candide" (17) who travels through time to interview
famous, male (of course) philosophers. Rushdie deliberately sends Mila
into the narrative as Solanka's first human, creative lifeline, as she
mimics a past sign of artistic energy.
Mila's compassion for the ruin inflicted by Solanka's fury comes from
her own experience of a father destroyed by the demons of nationalism
and historical conflict. After the professor confides in Mila about his
loss of Little Brain and his flight to New York, she explains the death
of her mother, a life on the literary superstar circuit with her talented,
ex-pat father, and his sudden death during his return to Serbia. The explanation
reveals her as another well-educated globetrotter, raised in the conference
rooms of prestigious, international literary gatherings and educated by
the finest tutors. Also a victim of childhood trauma, Mila shares in Solanka's
desires to dissolve painful pasts into American pop cultural oblivion.
More importantly, though, she illustrates the failure of that self-abnegation.
Later, when Malik enters Mila's apartment he's quick to notice that even
the room "was trying hard to be an all-American apartment but failing
badly" (176), with posters of American pop icons overshadowed by
massive bookshelves filled with Eastern European literature. As neither
she nor Solanka can forget their pasts, Mila decides that Solanka must
revitalize himself through artistic creation-by bringing another puppet
world to life. So he does, with Mila's help.
Her particular method of assistance is where Mila's character settles
into a portrait of perversity and feminine deviance. As is common in Fury,
Solanka's late-middle-age charm ultimately drives the young beauty mad
with passion for him. Indeed, part of Solanka's artistic flow is dammed
by more than fury's scars and international homelands; Mila adores the
earliest, original version of Little Brain, from whom she takes her current
hair and clothing style. Thus, the professor's newest friend and confidant
is an older, real version of his doll-daughter. Afternoon discussions
between the professor and woman take a disturbing turn when the encounters
gradually become sexualized. Getting her own key to his apartment, Mila
comes to the professor every afternoon, dressed in a baby-doll nightie,
and sits upon a pillow perched on the professor's soon-to-be excited lap,
and gropes him for several hours. Mila explicitly labels herself in these
scenes as a lustful Lolita, living doll for his 'cathartic' amusement
: "Everybody needs a doll to play with… You don't need it anymore,
all that rage. You just need to remember how to play" (130).
Indeed, Solanka's passive acceptance of these daily seductions does help
the furious outbursts to momentarily cease, though he still takes to the
streets when left alone. He goes so far as to concede that Mila's behavior,
never his (of course), may be spurring these late-night wanderings (129).
The acknowledgment of trouble precedes Mila's explicit labeling of their
encounters as incestuous, with her naming Solanka "Papi" (130).
While this clues Solanka in on Mila's molestation by her father, Solanka
and the narrator re-assert her Lolita-ness, imagining the incestuous encounters
as brought on by the daughter "to fill the forbidden, vacated maternal
space more fully than it had been filled by her dead mother" (132).
Solanka calls Mila out after her slip of the tongue, indicating that he
now understands the destructiveness of her relationship with her father,
but Mila won't have it. She continues with her pawing and denies the existence
of incest now or at any time, which Solanka interprets as her dependency
on "men like Solanka to raise her lover very, very slowly from the
dead" (133). Thus, Mila has a quintessentially sexualized identity
that transcends even childhood innocence and paternal psychosis.
As Solanka and Mila's encounters become more problematic, Solanka's powerlessness
is continually reiterated, as he fails to refuse Mila and to process the
city that he once imagined as gleefully harboring. Indeed, the global
city all but dissolves, as Rushdie situates the narrative in the private
space of Solanka's bedroom. It isn't until the sexual culmination of their
illicit afternoons, rather than the acknowledgment of their mutual perversity,
that Solanka emerges out of the bedroom and out of his funk. After one
of their petting sessions, Solanka keeps Mila from leaving by sharing
with her his hypothesis on the varying translations of the fellatio in
English and American contexts. Fellatio is rare and signified as extremely
intimate in England. For the Americans, Solanka contends, oral sex is
"the most common way for young girls to preserve their virginity
while keeping their sweethearts satisfied" (137). Narratively, the
tirade gives Mila the 'inspiration' and excuse to remove the pillow in
"an unexpected and overwhelming escalation of their end-of-afternoon
routine" (137). Through a narrative jump in time, Rushdie elides
the highly probable oral sex scene between Solanka and Mila, through which
she can conveniently satisfy the professor without asking him to transcend
too taboo a boundary-no matter how metaphorical it is between them. That
evening, the professor renews his old creative pursuit of dollmaking with
"new fire" (137), after a pep speech from Mila heavily laden
with twisted sexual innuendo:
There's so much inside you, waiting, she had said. I can feel it, you're
bursting with it. Here, here. Put it into your work, Papi. The furia.
Okay? … Make me dolls that come from [the original Little Brain's]
neighborhood-from that wild place in your heart… Blow me away, Papi.
… Make adult dolls, R-rated, NC-17 dolls. I'm not a kid anymore (138)
Sexual metaphor saturates Mila's talk and inspires Solanka to start creating
those wilder dolls to fulfill Mila's desire. Mila ceases to be a sexual
deviant,, becoming a less disturbing muse, albeit still a figure whose
power comes from her sexuality. She is now "genuinely inspiring"
(138), with her "potent urgings," Solanka's "long congealed
and damned" ideas to "burn and flow" (138). Interestingly
enough, Mila's removal of her childlike, doll persona in the speech becomes
narrative reality. The afternoons with Papi cease, though not for any
ethical reasons. Solanka finds a more beautiful muse to replace her with,
Neela-who ends up, not dumped, but dead.
Borrowing from Aijaz Ahmad's "symptomatic reading" (In Theory
152) of misogynistic feminine representations in Shame, I suggest that
Rushdie's continual figuring of women as vampiric virgins or sexually
empowered muses negates any possible critique of neo-imperialism.
If one's desire is to complicate neo-imperial power games, than reproducing
misogynist images of women negates genuinely complex thinking. Indeed,
as Anne McClintock suggests, ignoring gender difference ultimately elevates
"masculinity … as the invisible norm of postcolonial discourse"
(65). Rushdie's call for "rigorous attention" to current geopolitical
events sounds rather weak, if his "reimagining" ratifies gender
inequalities (426-27). His obsession with creating a sexually potent and
irresistible protagonist overrides any potential narrative resistance,
as illustrated by the book's final conflict. Solanka and Mila continue
with their business relationship, as the professor's sci-fi doll world
creates an international stir-particularly in his new woman's homeland,
Lilliput-Blefuscu. Neela's people, the Indo-Lillies, adopt globally exported
simulacra of resistance to express their material rebellion; more specifically,
they don the identities of Solanka's doll world, which seems an exercise
in postmodern absurdity. Yet the possibility of neo-imperial subversion
again appears with the entrance of a local rebellion that utilizes the
Internet for politically empowering and ethnically liberating purposes.
Rushdie may be signifying the Internet as a tool of Zapatista-esque global
change, when the cry for mass resistance utilizes the neoliberal tools
to deconstruct internationally oppressive economic conditions.
Rushdie's only portrayal of nationalist revolution is tainted by its intersections
with his protagonist's love interest. After a terrible fight with Solanka,
the gorgeous Neela heads to Lilliput-Blefuscu to finish a documentary
on the Indo-Lilly people's resistance to the island's (most likely Sri
Lanka) dominant power-and staying with the dashing rebel leader, Babur,
whom she met in New York. The professor follows Neela into the revolutionary
climate, seeking to regain his love. The revolution ceases to have much
political or narrative importance. And Neela's potentially empowered role
as the documentarian of third-world revolution is supplanted by her position
as lost feminine object. On arriving in Blefuscu, Solanka collapses national
events with his love life: " 'You are not a party to these events,'
Professor Solanka rebuked himself for the umpteenth time, and himself
replied, 'Oh yeah. Then why is that hairless flag-waver Babur hanging
out with my girl, wearing a molded-latex mask of my face?'" (235).
Undoubtedly reassuring is the fact that Babur's impressive political feat
came while mirroring Solanka's older visage (Akasz is physically modeled
after Solanka). But this recognition of self doesn't translate into realizing
his complicity in neoliberal exploitation-as the industries circulating
his website and manufacturing those costumes 'require' cheap, often South
Asian, labor. Far from globalized critique, the revolution is a disturbing
example of this mimic man's overt interpretation of world events as gendered
threats to his heterosexual fantasy: revolution becomes a vehicle for
Solanka to exorcise his insecurities over retaining his younger lover.
Accentuating the 'man' in mimic man, Rushdie is placing 'heterosexual
lover' as the identity that overrides Solanka's ambivalent colonial self
and any subversive ambiguity that lurks therein.
Through narrative detail and conspicuous silences, Fury illustrates the
shortcomings of postcolonial ambiguities in the negotiations of present
neo-imperial ventures. We should, as Edward Said suggests, offer readings
"that gives voice to what is silent or marginally present" (Culture
and Imperialism 66) in metropolitan novels that introduce colonial space
as a backdrop or plot device. I have tried to outline the limits of ahstorical,
postcolonial narratives to complicate current global power structures.
What is surprisingly missing in Rushdie's text is an engagement with the
problematic gender and class realities that allow a cosmopolitan man,
of colonial origins or not, to prosper from an exploitative world economy
that has dramatically widened the gap between rich and poor. Fury does
illustrate is the gendered inequalities, but only as experienced by middle-class,
cosmopolitan women. A narrative so interested in stock-market fortunes
and cyber revolutions, as well as once-marginalized colonial identities
(be it South Asian or Eastern European), could easily articulate, if only
briefly, the exploitive practices of neoimperialism. And a writer explicitly
concerned with careful evaluation of "liberal capitalism" would
have little trouble imagining the persons forced to live in squalor and
work in quasi-prisons, so that his protagonist's global city can be paved
with gold. In Women in the Global Factory, Annette Fuentes & Barbara
Ehrenreich describe the corporate benefits and worker losses of the typical
Free Trade Zones (FTZs), where Solanka's dolls and costumes might be manufactured:
[as] a colonial-style economic order … Customs-free import on raw
materials, components and equipment, tax holidays of up to 20 years and
government subsidization of operating costs. … Inside [the FTZ],
behind walls often topped with barbed wire, the zones resemble a huge
labor camp where trade unions, strikes and freedom of movement are severely
limited, if not forbidden. A special police force is on hand to search
people and vehicles entering or leaving the zones. (10-11)
Though Solanka crosses continents, we never glimpse a sweatshop or slum.
Indeed, Rushdie resolves his narrative with Solanka's return to the metropole
to reclaim his role as middle-class father. The global city and Solanka
the flaneur, for all their ill-begotten wealth, are supplanted for the
restitution of patriarchy and the rejection of narrative challenge to
new global capitalism.
Works Cited
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New York: Verso,
1992.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
Bhabha, Homi. "Of Mimicry and Men." In The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. 85-92.
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