Da Vinci and the Critics

For some reason The Da Vinci Code, book and movie, drives critics into frothing mouthed fury. Andrew Brown, for example, creates a whole (and wholly improbable) system of philosophy to explain the book's popularity.

The Da Vinci Code really does raises an important and ancient mystery: why do bad books sell better than good ones? (And I don't mean, why do Dan Brown's books sell better than those by other authors named Brown?)

...And even if you think JK Rowling is a bad writer, or a worse one than many children's authors who sell almost infinitely less than she does, it is easy to come up with explanations for her success that involve the things she does well.

We say, for example, that the invention and the plotting in her books mask the flatness of the style. Like the Ford Anglia, she may be ugly and unstylish in some ways, but she can fly. This sort of explanation holds that there are worse things than a pedestrian style: plain prose that gets the job done will do as well as anything more fancy. It also suggests that bad books would sell even better if their style were improved. And here the first problems arise.

Not all bad books would sell better if they were better written: if you rewrote The Lord of the Rings so that it did not read like a translation from invented dead languages, a lot of the book's strange credibility would vanish, though by no means all. Its deeper credibility is non-stylistic and has more to do with the experience of war and loss than anything else.

But there is a class of author where even this kind of explanation breaks down: Dan Brown, Dennis Wheatley, and some other thriller writers like Robert Ludlum fall into this category. They all produce books so aggressively badly written that no virtues of plot or characterisation - even if they existed, which they clearly do not - could make up for the deficiencies of style.

In this case, I think we have to admit that the badness of the prose style is integral to the books' attraction; if better written, they would sell worse. This explanation requires a special sort of bad writing. It is not vulgarity, not mere inelegance and certainly not lack of refinement: it transcends all these flaws. It requires that every sentence throw up obstacles to comprehension, that every other word be redundant.

Fortunately Mr. Brown (not the DVC author but the Mr. Brown nobody ever heard of) has a diagnosis:

It is not just that they are written by people who can't, in any interesting sense, write; they are read by people who have not properly learned to read.

Most people, you see, are not fully literate.

The links between speech and reading and writing are, in a fully literate person, so strong that all three appear to be aspects of the same activity.

Fully literate or otherwise, I find Mr. D. Brown's books quite an amusing read, whereas Mr. A. Brown's essay - no so much.

The always invaluable Juan Cole has a more interesting theory.

[One] pole of the film reflects the authoritarian side of modern institutions and culture. It isn't about Catholicism at all, or about Opus Dei. It is about the unchallengeable doctrines (norms) of society, and about the constant danger that ordinary obedience to the law can turn into a cultic exaltation of the law above principle and spirit. The Silas's of the US are the Ollie Norths and the Irv Lewis Libbys, apparatchiks who are willing to break any law and throw over any constitutional principle in order to serve their masters. (I.e. Cheney gets to play Aringosa in the Plame scandal). As for patriarchy, it is still dominant in much of American life, from the presidency to the CEOs in the boardroom to the US officer corps, and it is linked to the bands of brothers who form gangs and go overboard in imposing conformity. Joe Wilson had to be punished for challenging the orthodoxy that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The other pole in the Brown narrative is the priory around the female descendants of Jesus through Mary Magdalene. This pole is about paganism, feminism, individualism, scientific rationality and sexual freedom. This pole, likewise, can become corrupt and antinomian. Thus, the pagan orgy or hieros gamos repulses Sophie Neveu and causes an almost fatal break between the Grail (herself) and the priory. Likewise, scientistic society has led her to become an unbeliever, so that the Grail itself is corrupted by doubt. Sir Leah Teabing is the symbol of this pole gone to unethical extremes. In his quest for the Grail, he is willing to deceive and to kill. He is Silas's structural analogue.

...

By the way, Shiite Islam exhibits many of the features discussed in the film. The Prophet Muhammad did marry, Khadijah. And Muhammad and Khadijah's daughter was Fatimah, the equivalent of Sarah in the film. Fatimah had children by her husband Ali. So exactly the kind of dynasty issuing from the Prophet's daughter existed in Shiism as exists in the film as the sang real. Indeed, there are lots of Muslim women called Sayyida who claim descent from the Prophet, just as Sophie Neveu claims descent from Jesus of Nazareth. By the way, they sometimes have difficulty finding husbands because they are obliged to marry up.

The practice of self-flagellation also exists in popular Shiism, when believers mourn the martyred grandson of the Prophet, Huaayn, by beating themselves, sometimes with chains. Only a few Shiites go anywhere near in their flagellations as far as Silas in the film, though.

...
The Brown narrative does not advocate replacing the patriarchal,authoritarian, self-denying Church with the feminist, individualistic, pagan, libertine priory.

It is, in fact, only the melding of the two poles that would create the happy medium. That would lie in gender equality, and in moderation in each of the values of authority and individualism, self-denial and self-indulgence, law and ethical principle.

That is the centrist position the public is looking for. It is religious, but for the most part values individualistic spirituality above dry Church discipline. It is willing to sacrifice, but not at the price of giving up self-actualization and individual ethical integrity. It is increasingly challenging patriarchy, though that struggle is lively. It recognizes the need for authority but is suspicious, in the Madisonian tradition, that too much authority will corrupt its holders.

The film is popular because it isn't about Catholicism or France or some odd conspiracy theory centered on Mary Magdalene. It is popular because it is about the dilemmas of secular modernity.