Ethical Treason: Radical Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001)‪.‬

While one reviewer sarcastically comments that Fury "sounds more in-teresting in synopsis than it actually is to read" (J. Leonard 36), Rushdie's novel resists a coherent outline. The novel revolves around Malik Solanka, a 55-year-old former Cambridge professor of ideas turned doll-maker. Solanka creates a beautiful and smart doll named Little Brain, who becomes the host of a BBC talk show featuring philosopher dolls such as Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Galileo. After Little Brain becomes an unprecedented global hit and "tawdry celebrity" (Rushdie 98), Solanka becomes disillusioned by Little Brain's sellout to global consumerism, develops a murderous fury toward his English wife and the world, and exiles himself to Manhattan. Two major events occur while he is there. First, Solanka starts an affair with the traffic-stopping Indian beauty Neela Mahendra. A cosmopolite from the imaginary island of Lilliput Blefuscu, loosely based on Fiji, Neela is modelled after Padma Lakshmi, a real-life Indian model and .Rushdie's fourth ex-wife; she is also the dedicatee of this novel. Second, Solanka launches an Internet saga on PlanetGalileo.com, relating a galactic battle between cybernetic Puppet Kings and their human master. The digital story of the "PKs" becomes an entrepreneurial success worldwide. In the novel's last chapter, however, Solanka returns to London, howling "the cry of the tormented and the lost" (Rushdie 259), after Neela kills herself in a political coup on Lilliput-Blefuscu, and he witnesses the revolutionary puppets of his creation being misinterpreted by fanatical nationalists in the fictitious island nation. By criss-crossing the boundaries of the real/fictional/virtual, national/ global/planetary, and textual/intertextual/extra-textual, Rushdie's novel condenses disparate themes, settings, and tones deemed incompatible and extravagant by many critics even for a Rushdie novel. Reviewers have received the novel with furious criticism. According to some, Fury "signif[ies] nothing" ("Signifying Nothing"; Mendelsohn; Patterson and Valby), is written by a "trivial monster-ego" (qtd. in Tonkin), and "exhausts all negative superlatives" (Wood). Amitava Kumar notes that Rushdie is "utterly complicit in what he wants to lampoon" (35), pointing to Rushdie's lack of critical distance in portraying Manhattan's cultural politics--the culture of "celebrification" (Brouillette 154)--that this novel condemns and reinforces simultaneously. In other words, Rushdie's satire of the culture of celebrification remains powerless, insofar as the author seems to take too much pleasure in describing what he purports to denigrate.(1)