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.