3.

The New Mythologies of the Age

In the beginning, there was the image 3.0. Videocy and Voyeurism: Towards Defining the Dialectics of our Age It all began with the photograph capturing and essentializing moments in our existence, persons, nature and what not. That was not an American achievement, but making an industry out of the visual from the very out starts of the twentieth century surely was. Then it caught on: from a few movie theatres designed to provide entertainment for the average American to cinema being turned into a politicized institution, to movie stars becoming idols by selling their image to the public. And the frenzy never ceased, on the contrary, it crossed boundaries, so that, by the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first we can speak about videocy which coexists with or displaces literacy, about the cult for fame and the power of the media, which can manipulate, distort, judge and set cultural models, about the postmodern as a visual, cinematic age(Denzin, 1995: 1) in which the voyeur is not only a movie typology but a social type: The postmodern is a visual, cinematic age; it knows itself in part through the reflections that flow from the cameras eye. The voyeur is the iconic, postmodern self. Adrift in a sea of symbols, we find ourselves, voyeurs all, products of the cinematic gaze(Denzin, 1995: 1). And this is happening worldwide: enhanced by systems of communication ( satellite, cable TV, telex, fax machines, electronic communications) that are controlled by multinational and state corporate structures[] articulates a set of popular culture ideologies which value family, sexuality, work and leisure,[] pro-Oedipal stories marketed, distributed, sold to, and consumed by Third World, Soviet, and European audiences(Denzin, 1991: 8). On the receiving end there is the public, taking pleasure in their voyeurism, consuming mostly American reality shows, sitcoms, popular cinema, being eager to pry into the private affairs of public figures, thus becoming the perfect target for marketing and advertising strategies and being dazzled into their contribution to creating new myths and glamorous heroes. What Rushdies readers are likely to see, as they move within his idiolect, that is, the language of his interviews and works of fiction, is that writers cannot ignore the present and its tendencies:
the real world has become fantasmagoric. The real world is no longer describable inside terms of naturalistic fiction. Its become too big, ugly, strange, distorted, weird. Every age in literary history needs to forge the tools with which

to describe the reality outside the window. Right now, that reality is so bizarre that its not surprising writers have used bizzare means.1

As a consequence, newly emerging realities are shaped with new descriptive tools: the cinematic and the voyeuristic acquire the status of self-sufficient languages by means of the allusive density employed within the works under discussion here. Through a carefully weaved net of pop culture references (public figures, celebrities in the worlds of music and film, movies in themselves), Rushdie succeeds to a great extent to state indirectly, in his fictional works, what elsewhere he can articulate in a very straightforward fashion about the contemporary cult that surrounds images: We worship, these days, not images , but Image itself: and any man or woman who strays into the public gaze becomes a potential sacrifice in that temple(Rushdie, 2002: 144) or about our increasingly demanding voyeurism: The brutal truth is that the camera is acting on our behalf[]We are the lethal voyeurs.(Rushdie, 2002: 118). In a world in which gazes and surfaces come to regulate meaning, looking or not is hardly a matter of questioning but rather of taking for granted. 3.1. To Look or Not to Look?- Do We Even Raise the Question? What is the voyeur? Although early attempts of conceptualizing the notion circled around the pejorative idea of the Peeping Tom- a typology perpetuated by early Hollywood movies-, the definition later on reveals its necessity of being broadened. For instance, Foucaults definition covers more than the sexual angle, although that is the original starting point: One who derives gratification from surreptitiously watching sex acts or objects; a Peeping Tom; one who takes a morbid interest in sordid sights; one who sees; may also be called a spy, reporter, peeper, detective, psychoanalyst, sociologist, or anthropologist (Foucault in Denzin, 1995: 1). We thus have the voyeurs frame and angle expanding into the various domains of the everyday. Accordingly, as an extension of theoretical definitions, voyeurism becomes part and parcel of our day- to day routine. We are voyeurs in some of the most trivial moments. Our education as such seems to render itself to being taken for granted, mostly regardless of what it is exactly that our gaze is being directed at: a cinema/ television screen; a subject/object through the objective lens of the camera; a photo, the furtive looks at the

(http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/katecrane.cfmPEN WORLD VOICES: AN

INTERVIEW WITH SALMAN RUSHDIE)

girl/boy next-door which, intrusive or not, come to prove that the clear-cut distinction between the public and the private is no longer operational in nowadays code. By turning our attention towards the texts of the novels, we shall observe how this social practice/ social type functions in various instances.

3.1.1. The First Hints of Voyeurism in Fury Keeping the cinematic in mind, Rushdie tries to explain the genesis of Fury through one of the classics of French literature, Honor de Balzac and the technique used in his Eugnie Grandet. Its opening had a zoom lens quality that proved of use to Salman Rushdies contemporary, openly declared cinematic frame of mind: It starts off at a very wide angle and gradually comes right in and picks out one figure and tells you that story. But first it's created a context. And I thought it was really interesting. And in a way very modern, cinematic, almost.2. Accordingly, in Fury we come across a brief, abrupt focus on the protagonist: Professor Malik Solanka, fifty-five, solitary, irascible dollmaker (Rushdie, 2001: 3), only to discover that the central focus is the context in which Solanka at moments plays only the supporting role- his sole purpose seems to be to introduce the star of the picture: the city, the economic and technological boom , the skyrocketing demand for products, household supplies: The future was a casino, and everyone was gambling(Rushdie, 2001: 4). Significantly, all that is said about the contemporary context seems to be introduced through a characteristically cinematic device: point of view cutting- we see what the character sees looking down the window- : Outside his window a long, humid summer, the first hot season of the third millennium, baked and perspired(Rushdie, 2001: 3) or, as Rushdie agrees in an interview: a world of economic boom with no end in sight3. We, as readers come to internalize the characters birds eye view. Then, the zoom lens closes in again on the professor, but in what seems to be a carefully devised stratagem to introduce another illustration of the context: the blurring of the boundaries between the private and the public- active voyeurism, prying into the life of the other in a society in which it is not only a common, but also a pleasurable practice. It can result, and it does in the case of professor Solanka, in the pressure that the individual self experiences through the increasing consciousness that the private is no longer a sacred, personal space. So, as soon as Professor Solanka crosses Americas borders, we witness a young girl who breaks into Solankas privacy:
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You walk a lot. I mean five or six times a day, I see you walking someplace. Im sitting here, I see you come, I see [my emphasis] you go[] the hours are strange[]. And you have a British accent, which makes you interesting too, right. A few times there we even followed you, but you werent going anywhere, just wandering (Rushdie, 2001: 4).

This is an instance of how daily life can be turned into a spectacle by way of the gazeattracting potential of otherness, of how voyeuristic pleasure does not only define the relationship between the spectator and the screen in a confined space, but also social interaction in the everyday life turned into a theatric show Having looked into the cinematic, voyeuristic debut of Fury, let us also explore the ending of the novel, since it turns out to be of significance for the present analysis. Malik Solanka himself emerges as an embodiment of the voyeur, watching his son from the distance. Estranged from everything I love on this earth(Rushdie, 2001: 257), the professor indulges in looking at his son enjoy the funfair and ultimately tries to establish a relationship based on an exchange of looks, by determining Asmaan in his turn to be some kind of voyeur: Look at me, Asmaan! Im bouncing higher and higher!(Rushdie, 2001: 259). Seeing and being seen may restore a broken pattern of communication. If so, the readers are never told in the open ending of the novel. 3.1.2. Click, Click- Another Voyeur Shapes our Vision But where Rushdie best explores the ins and outs of the voyeuristic point of view by assigning the narrative perspective to a photographer is in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Why this choice of narrator? As it usually is the case as far as Rushdies work is concerned, covertly, he is making a statement about issues of contemporary interest. This brings us to the late 90s and their events, especially to how he thinks that the perception about photographic art has changed after princess Dianas death: [...] photography became the most unpopular profession in the world. All photographers, even artists like Richard Avedon, suddenly began to be thought of as paparazzi.4 Naturally, this is transposed into the discourse of the novel, in which the photographer- voyeurs unwelcome intrusion is described in terms of murder:

Often I had to turn my heels and run pursued by insults and stones. Murderer! Assassin! the mourners shouted after me, as if I were responsible for the death they mourned. And there was a truth in the insults. A photographer shoots. Like a gunman[], like an assassin[], he must line up a clear shot, he must try not to miss(Rushdie, 1999: 213).
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Although the photographers part as narrator had been decided before those tragic events, the question of photographic representation suddenly gained in interest: And I thought how strange that was, and it made me even more interested to write about the business of representation, the business of image-making, about what it is to take a picture of the world, what it is to walk up, walk up to the world and take its photograph.5 So, as readers, we will be constantly accompanied by Umeed Merchants voice and perspective, the latter being directed towards immortalizing, capturing the world in a sequence of clicks, images that are supposed to be representative of attitudes, people. As usual, Rushdie does not approach the subject without thorough research and knowledge, as with the cinematic. The subtlety of some of the allusions renders them available to connoisseurs only. Such is the case with the narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet working for the Nebuchadnezzar photo agency. The interviewer for January Magazine admits to being puzzled and later on enlightened by a photographer friend- nabuchadnezzar also denominates a very large champagne bottle in certain circles. Rushdie himself addresses this pun- like reference, as well as the genesis of the novel:
Well, he got it. Photographers get it. It's a photography joke. If you want to have something that isn't Magnum [the world's largest non-fictional photographic agency].[]. If you're going to write about photography, obviously it starts because you have a sort of interest in it anyway and then you go and find out a great deal more about it in order to write the book and so, along the way, you find yourself reading a lot about things like Magnum Agency and the birth of it and so on.6

We will hear the narrative voice go so far as to foreground the photographic as part of our anthropological constitution from early childhood. It is only later on that we become voyeurs: As children were all photographers, needing no cameras, burning images into memories []. Then they gave me a camera, a mechanical eye to replace the minds eye, and after that, much of what I remember is what the camera managed to snatch out of time. No longer a memoirist but a voyeur, I remember photographs (Rushdie, 1999: 157-8). The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a complex fictional body, one of its strong points being precisely the further development of this photographic-voyeuristic point of view. From what Rushdie had originally intended,-as we discover in an interview: He's a photographer because I thought, if you look to the left of a rock star, you'll find the photographer. And if you want a point-of-view character, a slightly voyeuristic point-of-view character, it seemed a

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perfectly appropriate choice of profession.7-the subject will evolve towards intricate patterns. Thus, we will gain insight into the voyeurs psychology, which markedly goes beyond the attributes of a stars tail, we will witness the voyeur as artist at work and get an inside view of the proportions of the image and image- worship phenomena. To begin with, along with verifiable historical data about the first photographs being taken, Rushdies style and his somewhat humorous (verging on ironical and satirical) language convey the process of the image boom, with all its reverberations:
No hint here that this first quiet note [the first photographs] of what will become a thundering symphony, or may be more honest to say a deafening cacophony.[] a floodgate has been opened, an unstoppable torrent of pictures is to follow, haunting and forgettable, hideous and beautiful, pornographic and revelatory, pictures that will create the very idea of the Modern, that will overpower language itself, and cover and distort and define the earth(Rushdie,1999: 209-210).

Then, by following the modulations of the narrators discourse about photography and clicking his way through life, we see it configured ontologically as my way of understanding the world (Rushdie, 1999: 210) and we also gain access to the inner world of the subject-voyeur and the way he perceives his own art/work: A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eight of a second, or one sixteenth or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eight. Snap your fingers; a snapshots faster (Rushdie, 1999: 13). It is all part in parcel of the fast-paced contemporary rhythm, of life being edited into a slide-show of images by means of the photographer effacing himself in order to gain access to the object of the photo:
I developed a knack for invisibility. It allowed me to go right up to the actors in the worlds drama, the sick, the dying[] the murderous, the secretive[]into the midst of their rage or grief or transcendental arousal, to penetrate the defining instant of their being- in- the- world and get my fucking picture(Rushdie, 1999: 14)

This pursuit of the right photographic moment is configured as going beyond the simple, pragmatic requirements of just another job. It involves intimate contact with the subject whose life becomes momentarily accessible to the photographer: For a while I became a photographer of exits. It isnt easy to take photographs of strangers funerals.[] the photographer must be a thief []- it was this intimacy I sought, the closeness of the living and of the dead(Rushdie, 1999: 212-13).
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The climax of Umeeds career, the snapshot of Vinas death is also an acknowledgement of the consumers need for dramatic images that verify the real; of the ease we all prove in accepting their authenticity and in embracing the newly created idols:
my earthquake picture will join the small stock of photographic imagesMonroes flying skirt, the burning girl in Indochina[]-which actually become experiences, part of the collective memory of the human race[] The Lady Vanishes , as it will come to be known, will surely be my bitter posterity[] Even though there could not have been a photographer present at Vinas death, we accept the authenticity of the image without too much trouble(Rushdie, 1999: 467).

We can even go so far as to picture the history of humanity, of (pop) culture as a collage of snapshots, as a collection of meaningful images. What images would we include to speak for the ages? Would Marilyns flying skirt be among them?

-perhaps the photo speaks of how images get to be significant of whole historic periods But where does the meaning lie? Does it lie in the event/person portrayed in the photos? Or does it reside in the image in itself? If we are to take Baudrillards theory of the simulacrum- governed postmodern age, there is no truth beyond the image, the replica: Today there is only a single truth, the simulacrum, the truth which tells us that there is no truth beyond the image itself (Denzin, 1995: 199). Or, as Umeeds discourse goes: Thus, a photograph can create meaning of an event (Rushdie, 1999: 466)- the meaning/truth does no

longer precede the image, it can produce meaning and interpretation, without it being a supplement of reality. However, although the shift in the relationship between reality and image is signaled in both texts, as Rushdies readers, it is doubtful that we might detect the same nostalgia for the Modern that Norman Denzin does in the case of Baudrillards reading of the postmodern replica- driven world. Baudrillards postmodern world seems, Denzin notes, devoid of meaning, whereas Rushdies multifaceted depiction of the voyeurism matter, with all its by-products, shows a necessity of coping with the newly emerging realities. So, do we live in a world in which the supremacy of the image goes without saying? Are we all demanding voyeurs? Perhaps. The question is, how can one make art happen in such a context? Where do artists stand in this world of the visual? Maybe the narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he himself having a borderline standing-Halfway between voyeur and witness, high artist and low scum, thats where Ive made my life, making my eye-blink choices(Rushdie, 1999: 14)- provides us with one possible answer:
Faced with the blazing magnificence of the everyday, the artist is both humbled and provoked[]. Turn right on this forking path and you find god; turn left and there is art, its uncowed ambition, its glorious irreverent over-reach. In our hearts we believe- we know- that our images are capable of being the equals of their subjects. Our creations can go the distance with Creation; more than that our imagining- our imagemaking- is an indispensable part of the great work of making real (Rushdie, 1999: 466).

Without going too deep into the matter of irreligiousness in Rushdies writing, essentially, the same coordinates are set here as for Solanka and his dolls in Fury: the artist creating realities, more so in the age of instant pop culture phenomena, in which , in a matter of fleeting moments, a myth is being forged, while another is fading into anonymity. Both in this case, as well as in Fury the power of the consuming public and massmediation is greater than that of the artists to contain his creation within limits: So I am deep in the heart of ruination when the Vina photograph goes boffo on the planets front pages; when she becomes the face of the catastrophe.[] I have no awareness of having helped create a myth (Rushdie, 1999: 473). This time, the truth that lies behind all the images and their existence is our increasing demand for the visual, combined with its closest buddy, the sensational: The brutal truth is that the camera is acting on our behalf. If the camera acts voyeuristically, it is because our relationship with the Beauty has always been the voyeuristic[] when u saw the pictures of Dodi and Diana cavorting together, did u say thats none of my business and turn the page?(Rushdie, 2002:118).

3.2. Is This Film or Reality? Naturally, one might ask- where do movies fit into the literary scheme? With few exceptions on both sides, literature has developed an aura of a high form of artistic expression, whereas movies are rather seen as a form of pop culture. Moreover, as statistics conducted on television and newspapers have shown, the number of literati is in continuous decrease, while, on the contrary, movie goers as consumers seem to be a more viable and reliable target audience. However, as postmodern aesthetics blurs boundaries for a living, different forms of high and "low collapse as closed categories, and so the cinematic gains its rightful place in cultural production:
The closing of the gap between popular culture and cultural production in the contemporary period, while strongly dependant on the new technologies of communication, seems to lack any avantgardist or revolutionary impulse, leading many to accuse postmodernism of a simple and direct surrender to commodification, commercialization and the market(Foster in Harvey, 1990: 59)

Does the cinema really have any relevance for shaping our reality? Or, as in the present case, can its means be employed to configure a literary technique or a particular perspective? Unlikely though it may seem, the age of technology, with some of its reverberations- the cinema screen; the image boom and ultimately the film as a finite product are actually deemed able to intervene into our making sense of the real reality/ fictional reality:

films define, mediate, contradict and create new understandings of reality. These understandings mirror and distort the realities of everyday life, which are themselves often contradictory. In opening up previously unexamined corners of reality, and by exaggerating particular sets of experiences over others, films perpetuate stereotypes, fears and anxieties that exist in the culture at large(Denzin, 1995: 10).

For a writer to declare his first literary influence as being that of a movie, The Wizard of Oz (Rushdie, 2002), has something of an iconoclasts attitude, especially when humanity takes pride in its literary creation. For the very same writer to parade his movie knowledge and to go as far as accepting a cameo appearance in what would become the popular Bridget Joness Diary and to own to trying his luck at writing movie scripts, hardly matches the traditional view of the writer as a scholarly man with good old solid library books standing behind him as literary influence. Rushdie does not ignore the extant literary

creation, but pop culture phenomena like the cinematic, are part and parcel of our contemporary context, insomuch as they come to merge with the high forms of literature. Using the cinematic language is somewhat central to all the American novels, but it is hardly Salman Rushdies first dive into the matter. For instance, in his Booker prize winning Midnights Children, we have the character of Saleem discussing the metaphor of the cinema screen to pinpoint perception, and in Imaginary Homelands, the writer himself justifies this detour towards cinemas means: The movement towards the cinema screen is a metaphor for the narratives movement through time towards the present, and the book itself , as it nears contemporary events, quite deliberately loses deep perspective, becomes more partial(Rushdie, 1991: 13). However the best parade of movie knowledge occurs in all three novels here discussed, where film references inserted in their discourse do not strike us as unnatural or artificial. On the contrary, their presence might suggest, as Rushdie does when rock music is being mentioned, that the cinematic has entered our lives to the point where it actually becomes a language of reference, accessible to some in the same way allusions to the ancient Greek mythology were during other historical periods. Similarly, film references in Rushdies novels can now function to help pinpoint feelings, attitudes, even real life experience, which comes to be depicted in such a way that the filmic and the real are no longer clearly separate entities and they come to overlap. 3.2.1. Let Us Speak Movies Before we can look into this merging of fiction and reality, let us examine instances of this new movie language. The whole text of Fury exemplifies it well enough by revealing, from the very beginning, the film-related inner-workings of the fictional space we will be moving through. Rushdie makes the choice of establishing the exact contextual moment for the readers by way of covert movie reference: The seasons hit movie portrayed the decadence of Caesar Joaquin Phoenixs imperial Rome[] actions and distractions, were to be found only in the computer-regenerated illusion of the great gladiatorial arena(Rushdie, 2001: 6). The name of the actor, the emphasis of the image technologically created and improved to the stage of illusion and the fact that in most of the readers minds it instantly triggers the memory of Gladiator without the movies name actually being mentioned might be held as proof that Rushdie plays his cards well when taking for granted that the descriptive language he uses is familiar to popular culture consumers, some of whom, incidentally, also turn out to be his readers.

As we advance, we become well acquainted and familiar with this cinematic language used in Fury, we join in the play of references and, amazingly, it does make sense. Does that mean that we are all avid movie consumers? Perhaps. We will come across movies being alluded to in a variety of contexts: used in describing a person, a copywriter who lived in Solankas building: Solanka was uninterested in this bow-tied, bespectacled, markedly unJedi-knight like young man, and as a former science fiction buff despised [an opinion Rushdie himself reveals in an interview] the lowbrow space opera of the Star Wars cycle (Rushdie, 2001: 34); used to pin down a feeling: He[ Solanka] felt like a drone, or a worker ant. He felt like one of the shuffling thousands in the old movies of Chaplin and Fritz Lang (Rushdie, 2001: 45); even a seemingly insignificant character as the plumber Joseph Schlink uses movie language to describe an attitude: Like the shvartzer says in the movie, show me the money(Rushdie, 2001:47). In this last instance the reference to Jerry Maguire is a covert one and available only to somewhat constant film fans, who sometimes move through language and speech situations by way of movie script quotations. This is not the only case in which characters speak movie. Mila, for instance, assumes the idiolect of a Star Wars character (again, a somewhat esoteric reference- it can only be recognized as such by the name of the character and his distinct manner of speaking), to describe herself: Call me Yoda. Backwards I speak. Upside down I think. Inside out can I turn you. Strong with you think the Force is? Strongest in me it moves.(Rushdie, 2001: 119). We can also direct our readers attention towards the description of the city space through a somewhat heterogeneous mixture of film references, all markedly chosen from comic- book inspired cinema productions. It results in a hyperreal description of the postmodern city as inscribed by movie knowledge in Solankas mind: How had he ever persuaded himself that this money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman[] this Metropolis built of Kriptonite in which no Superman dared set foot(Rushdie,2001: 86). All throughout Fury, the sustained creative effort behind this very language cannot escape our notice- an effort that is consciously directed: I always thought the book, if I did it right, could at some later point which we're already at, as it turns outbe a kind of evocation of an age. In the way, to be vain, that you look at the Jazz Age through Fitzgerald8. In the case of Shalimar the Clown, the opening pages also prove revelatory for the whole fictional space. The language in which India cried out is described through both literary, tradition reinforcing references, but also through contemporary film references: [] as if she were speaking Arabic. Night-Arabian, she thought, the dreamtongue of Scheherezade. Another version described her words as science- fictional, like Klingon (allusion to Star Trek), like a
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throat being cleared in a galaxy far away. Like Sigourney Weaver channeling a demon in Ghostbusters(Rushdie, 2005: 1). Gradually, by reading it, we discover both oriental tradition and contemporary cinematic language at work. By further exploring the latter, we may find India, after Maxs death, surrounded by police officers, a reality that provides the stimuli for a movie analogy in her mind: She imagined the circling officers in oiled Full Monty undress, wearing police hats and studded leather posing pouches with their badges pinned on the front(Rushdie, 2005: 332) The Ground Beneath Her Feet, although not as suffused with movie references as Fury( Rushdie will resort here to mentioning other pop culture phenomena and prominent rock& roll figures) also begins with a revelatory dream sequence, Vinas dream, shaped through cinematic images: Baretorsoed men resembling the actor Cristopher Plummer had been gripping her by the wrists and ankles(Rushdie, 1999: 3) and continues with somewhat inconsistent allusions to films such as Back to the Future, Superman; the Titanic; the year of 1987 is marked as the climax in the VTOs career and as the year of Bertoluccis The last Emperor and in the context of Umeeds increasing fear of the violence that is markedly invading our world, this destructive rage is conveyed discursively by employing an allusion towards an essentially violent movie: I can live with the name-calling. Its the men with all the heavy weaponry that worry me. And they are men, almost always, all those Arnolds carrying terminators(Rushdie, 1999: 14). The Disney fashion gets a reference here as well, when Umeed tries to pinpoint the facts and sensations that occurred the day Vina dies: even the banquet table itself, now commenced to jump and dance in Disney fashion, inanimate objects animated by the little sorcerers apprentice (Rushdie, 1999: 13). In addition to this, there is the shaping of human experience by analogy with the cinematic: As I try to remember the exact sequence of events, I find that my memory has become a silent movie( Rushdie, 1999: 13). The silent movie as a form of regression (it used to be the lowest of the low in terms of image and sound technology synchronized) is also employed as a term of comparison when the narrator tries to convey, Viruss (Ardaviraf) reluctance to speak after the accident- retreated into an impassive silence from which he would never emerge-as if he became a photograph of himself. As if he were a motion picture, a talkie unaccountably denuded of its soundtrack, restored to the era before sound(Rushdie, 1999: 36). Finally, we come across a somewhat extended reference to Star Trek, configured as a world in itself, whose inhabitants, its cult movie worshippers, the Trekkies try to recruit Vina:

Vina had once been a guest star on the Next Generation series, conjured up on the holodeck to sing for an enamored Worf. He taught her Klingon and she taught him Hug- me[] but Vina was bigger than the Enterprise now, she was in a continuum of her own, perhaps even the fabled Q(Rushdie, 1999; 490).

This particular type of reference, as is the case with the Star Wars phenomenon in Fury may be considered as a typical form of the criss-crossing from one world into another. These are films that in their years of glory generated cult phenomena and determined obsessive film fans to quoting their favourite characters in real- life instances, to dressing up or collecting symbolic tokens, to debating and continuously watching them. This becomes symptomatic and emblematic insomuch as it may act as a mirror of American culture, as a reflection of what viewers consume and enjoy at a specific historic moment. Thus both histories of cinema and its viewers can turn out to be operational concepts. 3.2.2. The Hitchcock Link Among the most interesting references in Fury is Rushdies evoking the famous shower scene in Psycho as description of the non-efficiency of Americas panacea, the antidepression medicine, in the case of Solankas crisis: The medication[] was a translucent shower curtain, like the one in Psycho.(Rushdie, 2001: 182). This is a highly ironical reiteration of a scene that has already been used and abused throughout cinema history. Starting from this reference, and examining the other American novels we come to what may perhaps be considered as one of the knots that tie the three novels together: the allusion to Hitchcocks movies, which gains greater prominence in The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Shalimar the Clown. In the first case, the photograph that captures the exact moment of Vinas death in the earthquake (an image thoroughly described in the novel, with all its dramatic effects) is to be acknowledged, both in the mind of the accepting public and of its creator as The Lady Vanishes, which is also the name of one of Hitchcocks early films. Although it is forged in the fashion of most images-that is, partly false- the publics reaction is somewhat connected to the suggestive name and the image itself as iconic of disaster: Another fraud. And though I will try to set the record straight, telling the story of the photograph over and over again, nobody will be really listening. They will already know all they need to know. The Lady Vanishes. The world has made up its mind( Rushdie, 1999: 468). It is as if the acoustic image of the name and the image itself do not need the story behind them. In Shalimar the Clown, the mention of one of Hitchcocks film is closely related to identifying fiction with reality, or describing the latter in terms of the former. Significantly, India sees the real image of Maxs house on Mulholland Drive triggers the memory of the

movie up to the point where it generates meaning of her experience of space: with barrel-tiled roofs and a bell tower that reminded her of Hitchcocks Vertigo[]She thought of Kim Novak falling from the San Juan Bautista Mission at the end of the movie and shuddered and refused her fathers offer to take her up to the tower[] (Rushdie, 2005: 351). And this goes further to assigning herself in the part Kim Novak played in the movie: Kim Novak had played an impostor []. There were days when she felt as an impostor too, when she felt as if shes been hired by Max to impersonate a daughter who had died (Rushdie, 2005: 351) and to extending the process of casting roles upon others. So, when she finds a blond wig in a hatbox:
she backed away from it, terrified, as if it was a death sentence. There was something of James Stewarts slow grace and when the shadows fell across his face in a certain way, he scared her. He had to remind her that Jimmy Stewart hadnt been the murderer in Vertigo[] When she brought up Kim Novak and the blond wig in the closet he did not restrain his tongue. Be so good[] as to cease to cast yourself in fictions[]you are non fictional and this is real life(Rushdie, 2005: 352).

Coincidence or not, bringing up Hitchcock movies can be invested with some significance in the context of Rushdies work, especially if we take into consideration the obsession with voyeurism, misrepresentation, multiple perspective in the directors films. He is one of the first directors who questioned the myth of seeing is believing (photographic and video truth)- both Vertigo and The Lady Vanishes explore the very thin line between what we, as spectators see and what we ultimately get out of the fleeting (cinematic) imagewhich doe not run so far from Rushdies own purposes. Let us not forget that Hitchcock was an artful, slippery and highly ironic modern director, who enjoyed popping up into his own movies in cameo appearances- one form, if we like, of transgressing the lines between movie fiction and empirical reality- a game that Rushdie as well enjoys playing in his fictional works (as regards the blurring of the borderline between the two dimensions). Finally, Hitchcock himself as well as his filmography has become pop- art phenomena, at least as far as being constantly quoted by other directors is concerned. 3.2.3. Mystories Turned into Movies? It does not take an advised reader to deduce that a mystory circles around the personal- a story one would tell in different moments in life, one that does not necessarily come in a written form. But the postmodern video age presupposes, in Norman Denzins reading of Greg Ulmers Teletheory, three levels of sense- making- common sense, the popular and the scientific. These three discursive structures, which involve science, popular culture, everyday life and private experience circulate through all levels of culture, from

high to low and back again.(Denzin, 1991: 154). A mystory thus incorporates an autobiographical level, a popular one (such as culturally defined stories of a particular community, nationality) and a scientific, expert level of general significance. What is theorized here is a pedagogigal device that universalizes the singularity of the students experience(Denzin, 1991: 155). However, the scope of the mystory is not restricted solely to this type of text. A novel may be seen as a type of mystory- the migrants in this casethat narrates personal life experience, turning its uniqueness towards the readers judgement. The novelty is that the narrative includes the visual in its structure. As we have seen so far, this intrusion in the written text has been achieved, as far as Salman Rushdies here discussed novels are concerned, by evoking images or visual, cinematic experiences, primarily through references to films. But what happens when the personal becomes movie material itself? Mystories turned into edited filmic productions? Or is it the case that these personal narratives, real experiences have come to be judged against their staged, cinematic, video counterpart(Denzin, 1995: 32)? Cinematic realism that mirrors back to reality? As Norman Denzin comes to assert, reiterating metaphors other theorists have conceptualized, the dramaturgical society[], life as Theater [] ceased to be just a metaphor. It became interactional reality. Life and art became mirror images of one another(Denzin, 1995: 32). Further on, by operating the shift from theory to its concrete manifestations in the discourse of the three American novels we will note how life as spectacle is transposed textually. Notably, it may be seen as a form of boundary crossing between fiction and reality, one of Rushdies major preoccupations which comes to gain prominence in all the three novels discourses. One of their distinguishing features is that this criss- crossing is all related to filmic images and experience, to movie characters/pop cult figures expanding their influence upon the real life insomuch as they generate meaning and models that permeates real reality. So, the possibility of rendering someones life in film is as plausible in Fury as our constantly turning movie stars into a matrix for life- style and experience seems to be: A novelistic life, Solanka was forced to concede. Filmic, too. A life that could be a successful mid-budget feature film. Dustin Hoffman maybe as the plumber[] (Rushdie, 2001:48). If at first, a potentially marginal film character such as Schlink the plumber is cast into Solankas cinema production, later on in the novel it is the formers minority, ethnic message that prevails and is cast into the leading role- Billy Cristal- the real actor transposed into the fictional space- is the one who will act it out this time:
Maybe you dont remember.[] my life story I shared with you for nossink. From zis you made a cruel choke. Maybe a movie, you said[] A film deal! See for yourself, here it in black and white.[] Yes, a comedy, chust imagine. After a

lifetime vizout humour I will be played for laughs.[] Okay, so long, Proffessor Asshole, and sank you for ze title. Jewboat.(Rushdie, 2001: 211-12).

In what seems to be an ironic transcript of the plumbers broken English, the profit driven language of Hollywood fame- the new religion- is naturally inserted. Gratuitous acts come to an end. Human life played by actors? Or is it actors played in real life experience. There certainly seems to be an exchange of authenticity between the two worlds, one that goes on further to the exchange of identity and language:
The movies were infantilizing heir audience, Solanka thought[]. Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anaesthetized people. [] the experience on offer in the movie theatre now felt more real than what was available in the world outside. For Eddie, his movie-hoodlum riffs possessed more authenticity than any more natural pattern of speech, even of threatening speech at his disposal. In his minds eye, he was Samuel L. Jackson, about to waste some punk (Rushdie, 2001:230-1).

This reflection upon the effect the cinematic as realistic illusion- making has upon the audience is a point of focus for the narrator in The Ground Beneath Her Feet as well: Outside the citys cinemas I examined the faces of audiences emerging from dreams into the pungency of the real, with the illusion still hanging in their eyes (Rushdie, 1999: 213). Both Solanka and Umeed seem to throw the look of documentary interest upon the mass of the audience, the first with somewhat detached disgust and the latter in an attempt to document more quotidian departures(Rushdie, 1999: 213). Alongside death, cinematic influence up to the point of infantilizing and allowing the illusion to prevail over reality is seen as departure from real life and as an immersion into a world made coherent by carefully edited images. The same endeavor to document reality is, in Kashmiras context, a reaction against her tendency to mistake film experiences with personal ones: She wanted to inhabit facts, not dreams[] to push through the hymen of the brightness, into the bloody hidden truth(Rushdie, 2005: 12). In the end of Shalimar the Clown she gets to pursue this interest in the spirit of combining the raw material of life- the one that delivers the culturally defined message of subcultures and exotic otherness, with cinematic re-creation/ editing:
the now stuff was what she was after, the changing gang culture of the barrios, the trailer park families[..] the less pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl filling up with Koreans, the Indians, the illegals; she wanted the dirty underbelly of paradise, the broken harp strings, the cracked haloes, the narcotic bliss, the human bloat, the truth.(Rushdie, 2005: 333).

Though documentary it may be, it still treads the path of all cinematic production and its observance of life, as we have seen both in Solankas and Umeeds case, is hardly ever purely objective or purely historical presentation of facts: In the course of the next six years she completed Camino Real, took it to the major festivals, found a good home for it on television, and followed it with Art and Adventure, a dramatized re-creation of her grandparents lost, prewar Strasbourg and its eventual destruction(Rushdie, 2005: 391). The idea of its politicized nature finds support in Kashmiras manipulation of the historical angle in her documentary Camino Real the past, the trail of the first European land expeditions in California, fades in front of the now stuff, the quotidian populated by ethnic groups whose very ethnicity turns them into bearers of messages endowed with sub- cultural significance, the contextual factors whose immediacy cannot be disregarded. However, as in Art and Adventure the past is still the playing ground of the present insofar as it can be cited and exploited. What about the young generation, the one whose children first get hold of the zapper rather than of any book of stories, the image- educated generation who is acquainted with the essentials of culture in video form and who shape their universe according to, lets say Disney standards? Will they be a generation prone to casting themselves in cinema versions of experience? Very likely. Significantly, just as young zapper Tara, in the very last paragraph of The Ground Beneath Her Feet is set in our readers consciousness and made an example of as yet another American TV-kid watching the video remnants of the VTO, we witness young Asmaan in Fury requesting his daily hour of Disney video reruns, and , like most children tend to do, he assigns more authenticity to the fictional than to the real: in the minds of children[], the creatures of the imagined world- characters from books or videos or songs- actually felt more solidly real than did most living people[]. Asmaans world- Disney World was trespassing in New York and murdering the citys young women(Rushdie, 2001: 130). This criss- crossing obviously goes beyond childrens imaginary lands. 3.3. Worshippers of the Image we Are9 - a Walk through Media-Land and AdLand The blurred borderline between fiction and reality will be further developed in Furys text economy for instance, through Rushdies mastery of Little Brain as character. Solankas doll acquires real life qualities through a process too simple to explain, actually, in contemporary lifes terms: it becomes a cult image on a consumer market that is all too
9

Since this section is an analysis of how the cinematic and the visual shape our experience and language, the movie syntax adopted can only fit into the picture- the title of this sub-chapter is a reiteration of Yodas idiolect in Star Wars, its particular feature being that of reversed word order in a sentence. Yodas speech is also hinted at in the discourse of Fury.

quickly prone to image worship and that looks towards stars(all more or less fictional) for lifestyle models. Cult images and media stories will also be a point of focus. in Shalimar the Clown and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In the three American novels the question of image replication is a central one. In Fury in particular, the subject is brought to its peaks, as Rushdie basically proves his linguistic mastery by initiating the use of new word-dollification, that denominates the extent to which images shape identities in the contemporary world. This symptom has also been theoretically acknowledged: Insofar as identity is increasingly dependent upon images, this means that the serial and recursive replications of identities (individual, corporate, institutional and political) becomes a very real possibility( Harvey, 1990: 289). However, since the early nineties, the path from possibility towards fact has been already trodden upon. As we shall further discover in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, acquiring an image is a prime concern in attaining stardom as well, in accordance with what Rushdie considers to be among the primary concerns of nowadays in the Western forma mentis: Famous and rich are now the two most important concepts in Western society, and ethical questions are simply obliterated by the potency of their appeal(Rushdie, 2002: 379). And ultimately, we shall catch a glimpse at media images in Shalimar the Clown.

3.3.1. Media and Advertisement in Fury The character of Little Brain and its depiction are closely connected to what in Fury is called medialand: a self-sufficient world, with its own code of meaning, interpretation and judgment, which, next to ad-land, contributes to the fine picture Rushdie draws of the postmodern society. What we come across in Fury is the creation that turns against its creator by escaping his control. The parallel to Frankenstein comes to mind and is actually drawn in the text, but in contemporary terms: the fright of it resides in it being a mediatic monster: Day by day, she became a creature of the entertainment microverse yes, she was a recording artist now!-out-raunching Madonnas[].This creature of

his own imagining, born of his best and purest endeavour, was turning before his eyes into the kind of monster of tawdry celebrity he most profoundly abhorred[]. She was a video game and a cover girl[]( Rushdie, 2001: 98) and ultimately a multimedia beast- (Rushdie, 2001:190) .

Once again, carefully elaborated movie language is employed to describe the dolls trajectory through intersecting film genres: Her fictive story, part Dungeons &Dragons fairy tale, part dirt-poor ghetto saga(Rushdie, 2001: 98). The availability of such a configuration to its readers is given in terms of their movie knowledge. The climax of the transformation, is naturally described in terms of the Hollywood ideal of success and stardom: the glamour-puss transformation[] giving press conferences at which she spoke of setting up her own film production company[]even going nationwide, in the USA, on cable television.(Rushdie, 2001: 99). This is carefully constructed language, accessible within the code of contemporary reality, in which, for quite some time we have to accept Hollywood as a meaning-making institution (Denzin, 1995: 3) on a global scale, a reality in which the language of the visual has come to prevail . It is a have image, well travel world, or as Solanka puts it when the decisive moment of his discourse towards Neela, towards the end of Fury, comes: All or nothing, Hollywood or bust: he would never get another chance. (Rushdie, 2001: 247) -a form of bravery shaped by the then viable mentality. So, if the subject of media-land is touched upon, as we have already observed, adland will indiscriminately get the same attention. After all, it is yet another postmodern domain in which the image reigns over our consumers tastes and choices, not only insofar products are concerned, but also the lifestyle they sometimes come to profess through falsifying and manipulating images and adapting marketing strategies. In the novels text, we witness Solankas first wife, Sara, leaving her cultural life, the serious life for the frivolous, working in ad-land[]Everybody, as well as everything, was for sale( Rushdie, 2001: 33) and her husband deploring the choice. The occasional walk through ad-land actually comes to complete Rushdies depiction of dollified human beings: The girls in the ads[], the guys in the ads[] as well as presenting the dream of an ideally beautiful America in which all women were babes and all men were Marks[] the commercials soothed Americas pain[] It showed you the road.(Rushdie, 2001: 34). Ads, besides showing an aestheticized version of reality, have come so far in the capitalist and post-capitalist world as do develop their own aesthetic in what we may view as another instance of interdisciplinary blurring of boundaries:
The deployment of advertising as the official art of capitalism, brings advertising strategies into art and art into advertising strategies[] as integrated in the mobilization of fashion, pop art, television and other forms of media image, and the variety of urban lifestyles that have become part and parcel of daily life under capitalism.( Harvey, 1990: 63).

Art sold on consumer markets by adopting luring advertisement strategies(a form of massmediation, a particular type of media image) becomes as plausible as the media actually interfering in matters of the everyday and becoming a meaning-making system. 3.3.2 Media Trial and Mass-Mediated Clich Images in Shalimar the Clown The idea that the medias primary purpose is to inform and provide access to accurate news is now overrated. In the postmodern period, the steady division between the private and the public sphere is no longer viable and the medias contribution to this overthrow is literally staring us in the face: talk-shows, reality- shows, faits divers as newsworthy material, media interpretation (as apposed to accurate rendering) of events that goes to the extremes of passing judgments are reinforcements of the fact that No corner has been left untouched or unphotographed. Media justice without the benefit of a trial[].The media, the core structure in the Americas consciousness industry, have become the arbiters of everyday manners, morals and justice(Denzin, 1995: 209-210). Given this context, it hardly comes as a surprise that Rushdie tries to depict some of it in Shalimar the Clown, his latest novel and thus the most justified to touch upon the issue. The tools of fiction will be employed to give a demonstration of how the media and the public of voyeurs can create pressure and a hunger for the sensational image as proof. After Shalimar the Clown has been pinpointed- partly due to the tension and pressure generated by the mediaas the killer of the American ambassador, the hunt for the person is over, but the hunt for the revelatory image is just beginning:
Maxs death was a big story, and they had more than just the commissioner on their backs, the TV audience was impatient, too, it wanted the pictures right away, a shoot-out, preferably, or car chase with helicoptered cameras, or at the very least a very good, close-up look at the captured murderer(Rushdie,2005: 339).

Further on, we will witness the way in which the media can manipulate the public opinion towards a negative or a positive image: The news of the arrest of Shalimar the clown made the front page and gave the riot-battered Los Angeles Police Department some positive ink at a time of exceptional unpopularity(Rushdie, 2005: 372), manipulation that may go as far as media intervention in the states institutions. The next natural step in an American mass-media code, after the making the arrest newsworthy, would be turning it into a movie (what else?): One of the television networks announced plans for a movie about the manhunt (Rushdie,

2005: 372). If we are to take a look outside the literary into the trajectory of an event such as September 11, we perceive the same movement, from perhaps excessively mass-mediated event towards the cinematic, trajectory that has little else as set purposes except for profit laws (let us exploit tragedy while it is still hot) which come to materialize in making events available/consumable in the melodramatic, part fiction part fact hollywoodian way. Media insertion into justice-making is further explored in Shalimars circus of a trial. Irony operates here effectively: if Shalimar, up to this point had been a clown in the remote corners of the rural world he had inhabited, now he becomes a clown in a media circus act, in which he is transformed into the manipulated victim by a artful lawyer who makes use of the ludicrous arguments to which only an America court of law could render credible. Correspondingly, Shalimars lawyer alludes to a thirty year old movie to establish an analogy with Shalimars situation; even plans a video screening as evidence to support his legal argument. The media reaction immediately follows:
In the days that followed Tillermans opening remarks the entire country was captured by his sorcerers or Manchurian defence of Shalimar the Clown. The classic movie was screened on network television, and plans for a remake were announced. The Twin Towers bombers, the suicidists of Palestine, and now this (Rushdie, 2005: 384).

Once this transposing into the world of TV is set into motion, there is no telling what world we are inhabiting. Or, as someone who addresses the opposing lawyer: Trust in the law and do your job he told her. This isnt Perry Mason. Were not on TV. Oh yes we are, she said, but thanks for stiffening my spine.(Rushdie, 2005: 384). Moving along the line of what clich and iconic images suffuse the media, especially television, it comes as no surprise that the American ambassadors thinking moves within those codes: when he sees Boonyi dancing he thinks back to the showgirls back in the Nazi context. However, he no longer has an identity in that world- his identity is now established through one of the many clich images that originated in the Western movies of early Hollywood days, movies that set stories of origins to stage : But Im not a Nazi, he thought. Im the American ambassador, the guy in the white hat [my emphasis](Rushdie, 2005: 141). It is also common practice for public figures to keep up the glittering faade image of demygod role models: Ratty and Moley, the golden couple whose New York kiss at the battles end had become for a generation an image, the iconic image of love conquering all, of the slayings of monsters and the blessings of fate, of the triumph of virtue over evil and the victory of the best in human nature over the worst(Rushdie, 2005: 176). But American clich images do not function anywhere, even if they are made available on a global scale through mass-

mediation. As such, we will mark Peggy Ophluss shattering of a myth created in the early Hollywood days of the westerns: And you imagine thats the chap [Shalimar] who will give this little girl his name- Kashmira Noman and take her for his own, and then its off into the sunset for a spot of happily ever after?(Rushdie, 2005: 210). Is this an attempted wake-up call towards seeing the other side of indulging in mass- mediated illusions- that is, the side in which they no longer function? And finally, Rushdie also examines the way the televised image makes its way into the remotest corners of the world, the present case being that of the village of Shirmal ;
Ever since the commencement of television transmissions at the beginning of the 1960s the panchayat of Pachigam had taken the view that as the new medium was destroying their traditional way of life by eroding the audience for the live drama, the one-eyed monster should be banned from their village(Rushdie, 2005: 243).

Attempts to resist are naturally made, especially in traditionalist/ fundamentalist contexts, but these attempts are enfeebled when facing the immense unifying power of television even in Pachigham, whose residents were perfectly willing to set aside the long history of their difficulties with their neighbours in order to be able to watch comedy shows, music and song recitals, and choreographed item numbers from Bombay movies.(Rushdie, 2005: 244). It is, after all, television for everybody- any segment of the public will be contained within its entertaining power.

3.3.3. Lets Rock & RollTowards the Forging of Cults Rushdies depiction of the rock & roll phenomenon in The Ground Beneath Her Feet is somewhat similar to that of movies: inaccessible to unbelievers. It definitely takes a connoisseur to move through the genuine and pseudo references to songs and artists and make sense of them and of the language employed- the insertion of lyrics from songs-, if that is ones interest. It takes even greater suspension of disbelief to accept that two of the worlds most famous rock stars are Indian. But the accuracy of the allusions is not the main concern here. Although many of the references are too esoteric or misleading, that does not mean that the novel fails to convey the fact that, in the same way movie language speaks to us, rock & roll is also a form of popular culture that requires less explanatory effort than a mythological reference today, for instance:
It meant that there was a language of cultural reference that I could use which people all around the world would easily get, just in the same way that

people once might have got a range of classical or mythological reference. Rock is the mythology of our time. It was interesting to contrast it in the novel with that older mythology, which now requires more explanation.10

As we have already noted, the subject of rock & roll is carefully interwoven with that of voyeurism and media, the latters contribution to the making of myths has already been acknowledged ad accounted for. Media facilitates the creation of new idols, both in life and in death:
Once its been on tv, people are no longer acting, but performing. Not simply grieving, but performing grief[] rushing to be part of a phenomenon they have seen on tv. This loop is now so tight, that its almost impossible to separate the sound from the echo, the event from the media response to it. From what Remy insists on calling the immediatization of history.(Rushdie, 1999: 485)

The performance, the happening both create a presentification, an immediacy which work towards the loss of the past and the highlighting of the present moment of fleeting glory. But how exactly does a cult for a (rock) star and stardom come into being? The process is somewhat exposed in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. First of all, besides talent and songlyrics that appeal to the masses, necessarily, you have to put on a good show: The addition of showmanship, of spectacle, gained VTO new legions of admirers. They entered that zone of celebrity in which everything except celebrity ceases to signify (Rushdie,1999: 425). Then, of course, the willingness to make the private public, so as to appeal to the sensational- hungry public made of voyeurs: The willingness of Vina Apsara to talk publicly about private matters- her catastrophic childhood, her love affairs, her sexual preferences, her abortionswas as important as her talent, even more important in the creation of the gigantic, even oppressively symbolic figure she became (Rushdie, 1999: 161162). A name for the worshippers is also necessary, as a new religion needs a denomination both of its god(s) and of its followers: The cult of the VTO- its adherents have started calling themselves the New Quakers[] It s a characteristic of rock music that it drives otherwise reasonable men to rapture, to excess(Rushdie, 1999: 392). Naturally, similar to Solankas doll in Fury, Vina does not promote only rock-music, but also life- style choices by selling her appearance, her image:
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Her diet book and her health and fitness regime will become world-wide best-sellers. Later, she will successfully pioneer the celebrity exercise video and license a range of organic vegetarian meals, which under the name of Vinas VegeTable, will also succeed.[] She is the woman most cited by the worlds young women as their role model(Rushdie, 1999: 394).

Death as sensational adds a new dimension to creating a cult. Again, by taking a look outside fiction and looking at the Elvis Presley phenomenon, for instance, we realize the potential celebrity has of selling itself even decades after the physical persons death( let us only think of the impersonation phenomenon, or of the fact that in the twenty first century his songs are still being remixed and sold). In fiction, Rushdie makes Vina such an iconic figure that survives ages; we witness the the impersonation craze that follows: On every screenthere must be more than three hundred- a different phoney Vina pouts and twirls(Rushdie, 1999: 517). All this goes so far as to lead to the mistaking of the replicas for the authentic Vina (can a star even claim this authenticity?). Death also enhances commercialization of the image: It is true that commercial interests will do their damnedest to posses her and use her, that her face will continue to appear on magazine covers, that there will be video games and CD-ROMs and instant biographies(Rushdie, 1999: 486). But this selling and re-selling takes the Olympian dimension out stardom: One minute shes a goddess, and the next shes property (Rushdie, 1999: 486). 3.4. An overview of the issues and questions raised so far reveals Rushdies acceptance of the context as something worth including in the fictional text. As he states in an essay in Imaginary Homelands, employing a metaphor previously used by G. Orwell, that of the belly of the whale in which Jonah is trapped, as symbol for writers that ignore the reality that is out there:
If books and films could be made and consumed in the belly of a whale, it might be possible to consider them merely as entertainment, or even, on occasion, as art. But in our whaleless world, in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss (Rushdie, 19991: 101).

So, the world we live in demands our attention and most artistic gestures do not and cannot exist in the form of art for arts sake- they are politicized and employed towards making mostly covert statements about the realities knocking at our doors. What is it that we see out there? A proliferation of billboards in the big cities: promotional images on TV; in newspapers and magazines; images being sold and consumed,

privacy and the self exposed and finally, a shift in language and in myth-making. The visual prevails, mass consumption of images being made possible by mass television ownership, coupled with satellite communication makes it possible to experience a rush of images from different spaces almost simultaneously, collapsing the worlds spaces into a series of images on a television screen(Harvey,1990: 293). Rushdie himself addresses the issue in an interview: now I suggested that what we have instead of angels is television. Television occupies the position in our culture that the angels had. We watch television to get the message.11 What about the new myths? Consumerism and mass media certainly participate in forging them, Hollywood as an institution helps to promote some:
Hollywood always did see us as pathetic humans, didnt it, as lesser breeds in need of the profane demigods up there in VistaVision, Todd-AO or Cinemascope. Our place was a seat in the dark, from which we could look up to the stars and watch them shine. Banality made our lives unreal; they were the ones who were fully alive. So we munched our popcorn and grew confused about reality. As the modern city became the negation of nature, so the movies were the perfect metropolitan form, mythologies of the unreal, and they came complete with a new religion[our emphasis]: fame(Rushdie, 1991: 326).

Our humble voyeurs seat seems to be nicely warmed up for us and prepared to let us indulge in cinematic fantasies that we can later transpose into the real reality. The city space comes in aid of hyperreal/surreal imaginings and emerges as the perfect medium to engender the new mythologies and the religious cult for fame they bring about. But, as the fictional works discussed here will show, the old myths (necessarily?) coexist with the new, in an eclectic mixture in Rushdies work- a matter that will be approached in the following chapter.

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http://www.davidcronenberg.de/cr_rushd.html.