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

Kundera quite vocally defends Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in several of his Testaments Betrayed (1995). The Art
of the Novel posits theoretical principles about the genre of the novel that Kundera elaborates upon as
particularly relating to Rushdie in Testaments Betrayed. I attempt to do the same here, except as applies to
Midnight’s Children instead of to The Satanic Verses.
19 Wagner, “Rushdie: Veils Take Power From Women”.
20 The parallel between the novel’s Ahmed Sinai and Rushdie’s own father represents another instance of the
disparity between Rushdie’s fiction and his practice in the media of elevating himself his family to the status of
ideal, enlightened Muslims. In Midnight’s Children, Ahmed Sinai desires during his depressive, drunken
tirades to rearrange the Qur’an into a linear narrative, rather than the non-linear form of narrative in the standard
version of the text (Rushdie, 339). Rushdie parodies this desire in the novel, tingeing it with the lunacy of
Ahmed’s alcoholic depression and the ridiculousness of his other far-fetched schemes. However, in the same
interview with The Independent cited above, Rushdie mentions that his own father had similar intentions with
regard to ‘rationalizing’ the Qur’anic narrative. In the interview, then, this scheme takes on the characteristics
of ‘rationalism’ and ‘enlightenment’ (Rushdie compares his father to Thomas Jefferson), rather than the
ludicrousness associated with Ahmed Sinai. In this manner, the richness of Rushdie’s characterization of
Ahmed Sinai transforms outside the novel to mere endorsement of Rushdie’s own personal and political
realities. Furthermore, that in the interview Rushdie prescriptively privileges linear narrative over non-linear
narrative reinforces Brennan’s criticism of Rushdie’s elitist aesthetics.
21 See Chapter 2.
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