Urban Alienation and Postmodern Anxiety in Salman Rushdie’s Fury: A Critical Exploration of Identity, Space and Cosmopolitan Dislocation

Abstract

Fury (2001) by Salman Rushdie is a book that explores the disenchanted human state where the world has been globalized, displaced and with shifting cultural identities. The novel locates its character, Malik Solanka in the New York City, which is a place of anonymity, gluttony and multiplicity of cultures. Rushdie uses this hyper-urban environment to develop the theme of alienation and anxiety taking over the post-modern experience. Theorists have considered Fury in terms of postmodernism, cosmopolitanism and identity politics. Nonetheless, there is scanty literature linking the urban space with the psychological dislocation and postmodern anxiety. Majority of the critical writing underscores the metafictional devices or diasporic interests of Rushdie but it ignores the city as a dominant influence on identity and anxiety. This paper fills this gap. It aims: (i) to see how Rushdie depicts the theme of urban alienation in Fury, (ii) to see postmodern anxiety as a cultural and psychological, and (iii) to relate the identity crisis of Solanka to the cosmopolitan city of New York. The approach is an amalgamation of close reading with the contributions to postmodern theory, identity studies and the discourse of cosmopolitanism. The discussion reveals that Fury is a postmodern novel that portrays the disintegration of the self in the globalized world. Rushdie examines contemporary urban reality as a disorienting and unstable one, yet he also exposes the fears of the post-modern subject who is in between the opportunities of being a cosmopolitan and the state of existential uncertainty.