The Da Vinci code
Feb. 4th, 2005 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThe impact of The Da Vinci Code on any person who knows history - any period of history from ancient Rome to the present day - is slow, cumulative, and horrendous. One has to come to terms with the fact that it has been read by millions; that our world is so dreadfully ignorant of the very basics of its own history, its own artistic heritage, its own intellectual background, that so many, so many individual readers can actually bear to go through it without throwing it to the floor about the twentieth page in disgust. It is, in the old phrase, like watching a train wreck.
The novel is preceded by a page arrogantly titled "Fact," and featuring the following claim: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. This is a claim that a serious historical novelist, let alone a serious historian, would not in a million years dare to make; and the hubris immediately calls nemesis upon itself, in the form of an avalanche of perceptible errors and falsehoods. These go from small facts such as Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, as "a five-foot-tall canvas," (it is six-and-a-half feet in height) to monstrosities such as that prior to the Council of Nicaea no one believed that Jesus was divine. If I were an atheist and an enemy of the Church, I would by now be groaning and holding my head in my hands, because such flagrant falsehood, if the reader ever realizes s/he is being conned, would discredit the whole polemic.
But Brown does not expect his readers to check his statements. He whirls his pretence of learning before his dazzled audience like a stage magician’s cape, to distract and befuddle them. The story is overladen with facts, most of which would not actually be necessary to its development, and which are wrong and false with a regularity that offends reason and soon ceases even to amuse. It begins with the title: Brown treats “da Vinci” as if it were Leonardo’s surname. But Leonardo had no surname. He was a bastard, and, according to the use of the time, could not use his mother’s or father’s family name. Vinci was the village where he was brought up, and “da Vinci” only means that he came from the place. Then we have the idea of an academic discipline called "Symbology", which does not exist. (The name of the study of symbols is semiotics; but perhaps Brown does not want attention drawn to that, because Umberto Eco, from whose Foucault's Pendulum he is said to have stolen much of the plot of The Da Vinci code, is an international authority on semiotics.) Then we have Paris being founded by the Merovingians; the Catholic Church burned 5 million women at the stake in the medieval era; all of Christianity's major beliefs have been stolen from pagan religions; the English language has no ties to Latin. None of these statements are required by the plot, and all are wrong. Brown has read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which features a fairly accurate account of the King of France’s suppression of the Knights Templar; yet he publishes a wholly false account, in which the culprit is the Pope alone, using a militia found God knows where and large enough to overwhelm the Knights – who, lest we forget, had been the military backbone of the Crusades. Incoherently, he also charges the Church with the violence of the Crusades. And for Brown, Church always means Papacy; he has no notion whatever that any movement, any event, any idea, might arise except under the total control of this gimlet-eyed, fantastically controlling bureaucracy.
Brown’s hatred for the Church is too well known to comment on, and besides it would let some of my less sympathetic readers claim that I am attacking him because he is anti-Catholic. (Well, dear me, yes. How dreadful of us. When others publish hate literature defaming us, we protest.) The only other religious group he seems aware of is the Jews, who suffer a lesser but still offensive assault (Brown claims that early Jews worshipped a goddess equivalent of Yahweh by performing sex-rites in the Holy of Holies). Though American, he is apparently unaware of the existence of Protestant, Orthodox and Non-Chalcedonian Churches, and his only reference to the Anglicans is so imprecise as to make us wonder whether he knows what they are. But then, the Church is a big target; for a sensational author, now that the Evil Empire is no more, it is hard to find as impressive a target. I have to wonder whether his hostility for the Church is real at all, or simply the mercenary scribbler’s grab for a likely Aunt Sally.
But whether or not Brown is sincere in his hatred of the Church (and the contrived happy endings with which he decorates both this novel and the earlier Angels and Demons suggests that he is not), it is certain that he has an ideology, and one with which any honest Catholic would have to disagree. Indeed, all the fuss about the “conspiracy” suppressing the “sacred feminine”, it would be easy to miss Brown’s most seriously intended passages. Take his mouthpiece, a supposed historian with an impossible name, Teabing: "Now, however, we are entering the Age of Aquarius — the water bearer — whose ideals claim that man will learn the truth and be able to think for himself. The ideological shift is enormous, and it is occurring right now." Brown himself stated it unequivocally in a Washington Post interview: "In the past, knowledge was something that was handed down by authority figures; now we seek and discover for ourselves." In other words, we decide what is right and what is wrong. This is at 180 degrees from what makes good history, good scholarship, good science; but it is a perfect description of Brown’s own wilful, incoherent, but always self-centred approach to history. The novel carries within its body a number of what can only be called lectures, informing the reader what s/he is to think. The level of brilliance and insight these reach is best shown by this quotation: "Every faith in the world is based on fabrication." And the thing is that whatever Brown is, one thing he is not is a Dadaist. He does not believe (on a conscious level) in self-contradiction. And he still does not realize that he is telling us not to have faith in him, because the faith he is pushing on us is based on fabrication.
In another remarkably unsubtle passage Brown uses Teabing, to trash the whole discipline of history: "[H]istory is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books — books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe…. 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?'" This, of course, is shit. That “history is written by the winners” is a cliché that owes its popularity to the popularity of cynicism, but to anyone who knows what history is, it is plainly false. Most history is written by the losers, from Thucydides contemplating the defeat of Athens from his own exile, to Tacitus hankering for the Republic that would never return again, to Jordanes describing the history of the Ostrogoths after they had been destroyed, to Ssuma Chien writing the history of China from exile and under the threat of death, to Philippe de Comynes describing the glories of Burgundy after its fall, to Guicciardini recounting the ruin of Renaissance Italy after having fought to avoid it, to Mommsen watching his Prussian enemies triumph both in culture and in politics, to the great Marxist historians of our time (and there are such things as great Marxist historians – Christopher Hill springs to mind) contemplating the collapse and disgracing of the Soviet Union in their old age. This, indeed, has been down the centuries one of the main stimuli to writing history: “Let our children know what manner of men their fathers were; and that if we were defeated, it was not without honour. Defeat loosens the tongue. But even if we had to take Teabing’s little faux-clever quip seriously, we would have to ask: if Teabing really is so contemptuous of history, why the Devil did he spend years studying to join this conspiracy of liars and bootlickers? It really is weird, you know, how Brown’s characters condemn themselves and their motives with every word they speak.
Nothing shows the book’s dishonesty better than its attitudes to sex. One thing that good critics learn is that the core message of a story is carried by its plot. Now the message which Brown sets forth in his preach-pages is that the Church is, one is not quite sure whether a part or the whole, of an age-long conspiracy to suppress orgiastic goddess-centred cults involving holy prostitution and, if I remember right, ritual group sex. But the plot does not lead to any such orgiastic denouement. We do not hear the drumbeats of Dionysos anywhere in it – more like the ticking of clocks typical of any race-against-time thriller. Above all, its conclusion is that of the average romance novel, a man and a woman, a woman and a man. It is rather damaged by the fact that Brown cannot write character and his hero and heroine are a Mary Sue and a Gary Stu; but nonetheless, his plot is at odds with his stated ideology. He declares the sanctity of orgiastic sex; but the hankering expressed in his plot is for the One and Only, marriage, and exclusive love. In fact, if I remember correctly, this is probably the only successful thriller in the last several decades not to feature one or more explicit copulations. It is as chaste as an old-fashioned ladies’ romance story.
But this chastity is not a virtue: it is another testimony to Brown’s mental confusion, dissimulation, and half-conscious mendacity. The worst thing about this book, once one has gone through the lies, the defamation, the debasing of intellectual work (by which I mean his assault upon history), the monstrous arrogance built on little talent and less honesty, is the sheer cowardice at the bottom of it. A writer of talent who had reached Brown’s conclusion would let his/her talent drive him or her to the ultimate conclusions; and the final scenes of the book would involve some sort of psychedelic, liberatory scene. Instead of which we get Barbara Cartland. Even the ferocity of his assault upon the Church, which had been the book’s fuel, abates: you cannot, in the end, offend all those Catholic readers, so the climactic twist of the story manages to absolve the Church! It had killed five million women in the Middle Ages alone, but never mind. Right now they are only deluded, not murderous. This is something he has already managed, I am told, in a previous book, Angels & Demons, where another murderous conspiracy turned out not to involve the Church after all. In fact, dear Mr.Brown wishes to redeem the Church: in Angels & Demons, a cabal of “liberal” cardinals (the kind, you know, who backed paedophile priests all over North America) impose a new Pope who prepares to abandon outmoded teachings. “Third-century laws cannot be applied to the modern followers of Christ,” says one of the conspirators. We can look forward to a suitably “updated” Church.
Of such stuff are made billion-dollar hits.
The novel is preceded by a page arrogantly titled "Fact," and featuring the following claim: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. This is a claim that a serious historical novelist, let alone a serious historian, would not in a million years dare to make; and the hubris immediately calls nemesis upon itself, in the form of an avalanche of perceptible errors and falsehoods. These go from small facts such as Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, as "a five-foot-tall canvas," (it is six-and-a-half feet in height) to monstrosities such as that prior to the Council of Nicaea no one believed that Jesus was divine. If I were an atheist and an enemy of the Church, I would by now be groaning and holding my head in my hands, because such flagrant falsehood, if the reader ever realizes s/he is being conned, would discredit the whole polemic.
But Brown does not expect his readers to check his statements. He whirls his pretence of learning before his dazzled audience like a stage magician’s cape, to distract and befuddle them. The story is overladen with facts, most of which would not actually be necessary to its development, and which are wrong and false with a regularity that offends reason and soon ceases even to amuse. It begins with the title: Brown treats “da Vinci” as if it were Leonardo’s surname. But Leonardo had no surname. He was a bastard, and, according to the use of the time, could not use his mother’s or father’s family name. Vinci was the village where he was brought up, and “da Vinci” only means that he came from the place. Then we have the idea of an academic discipline called "Symbology", which does not exist. (The name of the study of symbols is semiotics; but perhaps Brown does not want attention drawn to that, because Umberto Eco, from whose Foucault's Pendulum he is said to have stolen much of the plot of The Da Vinci code, is an international authority on semiotics.) Then we have Paris being founded by the Merovingians; the Catholic Church burned 5 million women at the stake in the medieval era; all of Christianity's major beliefs have been stolen from pagan religions; the English language has no ties to Latin. None of these statements are required by the plot, and all are wrong. Brown has read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which features a fairly accurate account of the King of France’s suppression of the Knights Templar; yet he publishes a wholly false account, in which the culprit is the Pope alone, using a militia found God knows where and large enough to overwhelm the Knights – who, lest we forget, had been the military backbone of the Crusades. Incoherently, he also charges the Church with the violence of the Crusades. And for Brown, Church always means Papacy; he has no notion whatever that any movement, any event, any idea, might arise except under the total control of this gimlet-eyed, fantastically controlling bureaucracy.
Brown’s hatred for the Church is too well known to comment on, and besides it would let some of my less sympathetic readers claim that I am attacking him because he is anti-Catholic. (Well, dear me, yes. How dreadful of us. When others publish hate literature defaming us, we protest.) The only other religious group he seems aware of is the Jews, who suffer a lesser but still offensive assault (Brown claims that early Jews worshipped a goddess equivalent of Yahweh by performing sex-rites in the Holy of Holies). Though American, he is apparently unaware of the existence of Protestant, Orthodox and Non-Chalcedonian Churches, and his only reference to the Anglicans is so imprecise as to make us wonder whether he knows what they are. But then, the Church is a big target; for a sensational author, now that the Evil Empire is no more, it is hard to find as impressive a target. I have to wonder whether his hostility for the Church is real at all, or simply the mercenary scribbler’s grab for a likely Aunt Sally.
But whether or not Brown is sincere in his hatred of the Church (and the contrived happy endings with which he decorates both this novel and the earlier Angels and Demons suggests that he is not), it is certain that he has an ideology, and one with which any honest Catholic would have to disagree. Indeed, all the fuss about the “conspiracy” suppressing the “sacred feminine”, it would be easy to miss Brown’s most seriously intended passages. Take his mouthpiece, a supposed historian with an impossible name, Teabing: "Now, however, we are entering the Age of Aquarius — the water bearer — whose ideals claim that man will learn the truth and be able to think for himself. The ideological shift is enormous, and it is occurring right now." Brown himself stated it unequivocally in a Washington Post interview: "In the past, knowledge was something that was handed down by authority figures; now we seek and discover for ourselves." In other words, we decide what is right and what is wrong. This is at 180 degrees from what makes good history, good scholarship, good science; but it is a perfect description of Brown’s own wilful, incoherent, but always self-centred approach to history. The novel carries within its body a number of what can only be called lectures, informing the reader what s/he is to think. The level of brilliance and insight these reach is best shown by this quotation: "Every faith in the world is based on fabrication." And the thing is that whatever Brown is, one thing he is not is a Dadaist. He does not believe (on a conscious level) in self-contradiction. And he still does not realize that he is telling us not to have faith in him, because the faith he is pushing on us is based on fabrication.
In another remarkably unsubtle passage Brown uses Teabing, to trash the whole discipline of history: "[H]istory is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books — books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe…. 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?'" This, of course, is shit. That “history is written by the winners” is a cliché that owes its popularity to the popularity of cynicism, but to anyone who knows what history is, it is plainly false. Most history is written by the losers, from Thucydides contemplating the defeat of Athens from his own exile, to Tacitus hankering for the Republic that would never return again, to Jordanes describing the history of the Ostrogoths after they had been destroyed, to Ssuma Chien writing the history of China from exile and under the threat of death, to Philippe de Comynes describing the glories of Burgundy after its fall, to Guicciardini recounting the ruin of Renaissance Italy after having fought to avoid it, to Mommsen watching his Prussian enemies triumph both in culture and in politics, to the great Marxist historians of our time (and there are such things as great Marxist historians – Christopher Hill springs to mind) contemplating the collapse and disgracing of the Soviet Union in their old age. This, indeed, has been down the centuries one of the main stimuli to writing history: “Let our children know what manner of men their fathers were; and that if we were defeated, it was not without honour. Defeat loosens the tongue. But even if we had to take Teabing’s little faux-clever quip seriously, we would have to ask: if Teabing really is so contemptuous of history, why the Devil did he spend years studying to join this conspiracy of liars and bootlickers? It really is weird, you know, how Brown’s characters condemn themselves and their motives with every word they speak.
Nothing shows the book’s dishonesty better than its attitudes to sex. One thing that good critics learn is that the core message of a story is carried by its plot. Now the message which Brown sets forth in his preach-pages is that the Church is, one is not quite sure whether a part or the whole, of an age-long conspiracy to suppress orgiastic goddess-centred cults involving holy prostitution and, if I remember right, ritual group sex. But the plot does not lead to any such orgiastic denouement. We do not hear the drumbeats of Dionysos anywhere in it – more like the ticking of clocks typical of any race-against-time thriller. Above all, its conclusion is that of the average romance novel, a man and a woman, a woman and a man. It is rather damaged by the fact that Brown cannot write character and his hero and heroine are a Mary Sue and a Gary Stu; but nonetheless, his plot is at odds with his stated ideology. He declares the sanctity of orgiastic sex; but the hankering expressed in his plot is for the One and Only, marriage, and exclusive love. In fact, if I remember correctly, this is probably the only successful thriller in the last several decades not to feature one or more explicit copulations. It is as chaste as an old-fashioned ladies’ romance story.
But this chastity is not a virtue: it is another testimony to Brown’s mental confusion, dissimulation, and half-conscious mendacity. The worst thing about this book, once one has gone through the lies, the defamation, the debasing of intellectual work (by which I mean his assault upon history), the monstrous arrogance built on little talent and less honesty, is the sheer cowardice at the bottom of it. A writer of talent who had reached Brown’s conclusion would let his/her talent drive him or her to the ultimate conclusions; and the final scenes of the book would involve some sort of psychedelic, liberatory scene. Instead of which we get Barbara Cartland. Even the ferocity of his assault upon the Church, which had been the book’s fuel, abates: you cannot, in the end, offend all those Catholic readers, so the climactic twist of the story manages to absolve the Church! It had killed five million women in the Middle Ages alone, but never mind. Right now they are only deluded, not murderous. This is something he has already managed, I am told, in a previous book, Angels & Demons, where another murderous conspiracy turned out not to involve the Church after all. In fact, dear Mr.Brown wishes to redeem the Church: in Angels & Demons, a cabal of “liberal” cardinals (the kind, you know, who backed paedophile priests all over North America) impose a new Pope who prepares to abandon outmoded teachings. “Third-century laws cannot be applied to the modern followers of Christ,” says one of the conspirators. We can look forward to a suitably “updated” Church.
Of such stuff are made billion-dollar hits.
