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

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complexity. What Rushdie says of the veil in Midnight’s Children, with its nuance and
subtlety, its recognition and realization of the possible connotations and consequences of
veiling, far outshines the flat, hollow resonances of a statement like “veils suck.” 20
Through
his various portraits of purdah and his emphasis on the role of culture in religion, as well as
the manner in which his female characters adopt purdah as a form of power (however
perverse), Rushdie explores veiling through fundamental questions of existence. In
Kundera’s terms, he “examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has
occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become,
everything he’s capable of” (Kundera, 43). Rushdie’s press statements, on the other hand,
mean to prescriptively and absolutely represent the secular, Western reality to which he
himself subscribes.
However, although Kundera notes that “the novel is more and more in the hands of
the mass media” (Kundera, 18), Rushdie’s novels stand out distinctly from his mass media
presence. The lofty, academic register of English in which Rushdie writes his novels
necessarily narrows his literary audience as compared to the vast audience of those who
might read his press statements in the mass media. Especially with the increasing popularity
of online news, those reading newspapers with headlines claiming that “Veils suck” would
substantially outnumber those who might read Midnight’s Children. In Salman Rushdie and
the Third World, Timothy Brennan criticizes Rushdie for appealing to “the parochial tastes of
the Western public” while at the same time censuring his elitism due to his novels’
postmodern aesthetics. Even if Rushdie draws criticism for the supposedly elitist audience of
his novels, that audience includes the educated people of the world, not just those of the
West. Brennan himself points out that “under conditions of illiteracy and shortages, and