E.P.N.M. Borgman

Responsibly Performing Vulnerability: Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Edgar Laurence Doctorow’s City of God

Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (2002) presents modernity as intrinsically religious. Fury creatively twists and reverses the Koranic story of Abraham (Ibrahim) sacrificing his son by presenting its main character Malik Solanka as attempting to avoid the rage that urges him to murder his son. The postmodern chaos of New York, however, is itself a theater of frustration, aggression, and violence. The novel pictures this as the breaking loose of the furies, the unbounding of the religious energies once contained within religions. In the end Malik Solanka surrenders to his vulnerability, accepting to depend on the love of his son. A parallel is drawn between Rushdie’s Fury and the Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno: both criticize religion in order to hold on to a central religious notion. In Rushdie’s case the notion is vulnerability, in Adorno’s case it is the always remaining absence of truth and meaning. This essay argues that simply stressing the need to surrender to one’s vulnerability is not enough for the question to what or to whom one surrenders is inescapable. Edgar L. Doctorow’s novel City of God (2000) addresses this issue. It shows how, after Auschwitz, sticking to one religious story, simply because it happens to be one’s own, is inadequate. Religion should function as the memorial of suffering and resistance to it. Memoria passionis (Remembrance of the Passion) is the task of the Christian tradition according to the interpretation of Metz’s New Political Theology.