Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen

Salman Rushdie has never made any secret of his fondness for the cinema and it is significant that it is to an iconic Hollywood movie that he has always attributed his desire to become a writer: “When I first saw The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me.” ¹ Much of the Rushdiean corpus is in fact concerned with the visual arts in varying ways. The reader may be familiar with the many filmic references in Midnight's Children (1981) and the scene in the “Pioneer Café” which creates the illusion of an Indian movie, ² or the detailed description of the canvases of Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), which, like Rai's photographs in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), come to life thanks to the narrator's use of the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis. Rushdie's prose consistently strives for a visual quality or effect that is often conveniently explained away by magic realism. The puzzling, for some, departure from this generic mode in Fury, at the same time as the extension of the preoccupation with the visual in the novel, pose a number of interesting questions concerning its aesthetics. Saturating his text with references to film, television, and the internet, Rushdie attempts to reproduce in Fury (2001) the visual excessiveness of contemporary life. The models that he takes, Sex and the City, Tomb Raider, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Pulp Fiction, to name but a few, suggest the complacent eclecticism of the postmodern and its random cannibalization of different cultural styles. This chapter will try to analyze the nature of such an aesthetics. Does it correspond to a desire for the novel to take the place of photography or film within the conventions of pulp realism, or an attempt to return to an ur-realism and make the narrator a mere Balzacian secretary of society? Or, is the author using it as an opportunity to comment on the proliferation and importance of images in our lives, or indeed the cinematic quality of our experience in the society of the spectacle?