The Secret Society: Descendants of Crypto-Jews in the San Antonio ...

8
“I do not propose to offer, prescriptively, any answers to these questions [of
existence]; only to state that these are the issues with which each of us will have to come to
terms,” Rushdie writes in his essay “Imaginary Homelands.” 17
However, Rushdie doesn’t
prescriptively offer answers in his fiction because the nature of the novel as a genre precludes
prescriptivity. Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose status as an exile who writes almost
entirely about his country of origin closely mirrors Rushdie’s, provides an extensive treatise
on the nature of the novel as a genre which will be useful in determining the political
ramifications of Rushdie’s genre choices. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera conceives of the
novel as a genre of possibility: “both the character and his world must be understood as
possibilities.” 18
According the Kundera, the mode of prescriptivity constitutes propaganda
more so than novelistic fiction. Indeed, the novel is a genre, not of answers, but of questions
that embody what Kundera calls “the wisdom of uncertainty” (Kundera, 7): “The world of
one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are molded of entirely
different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relatively, doubt, questioning; it can never
accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel” (Kundera, 14).
Kundera criticizes the Orwellian novel as contrary to this same “spirit of the novel”
because “[what] Orwell tells us could have been said just as well (or even much better) in an
essay or pamphlet” (Kundera, 12). In Rushdie’s case, however, what he tells us of the veil,
and the resultant questions that arise about the nature of religion, culture, gender—indeed, of
existence—is far better stated in his novel than in his press statements. While in both genres
he ultimately poses the same underlying criticisms about the veil, and in a larger sense, about
the position of women in Islam [in that “the veil is a way of taking power away from
women” 19 ], only Midnight’s Children adequately realizes the issue of veiling in its full