Hello friends,
"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish,
make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to
challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story
we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves."
- The Sense of an Ending
-Julian Barnes
This is what Barnes quotes in 'The Sense of an Ending.' This is the another fear that life would not turn out to be like literature but problem is that life is not far different than literature. What if it turns out in literature by not turning out but by turning in. This is quite true for even Dan Brown's 'DA VINCI CODE'. This text is the mixture of fact + fiction.
FACT + FICTION
There’s a few genres that fit this description. Note that this isn’t a comprehensive list; these are just the genres I could think of off the top of my head. Many writers past and present have retold myths to express contemporary thinking or to add perspectives.
Winterson says that,
“When a myth gets fixed, it becomes an idol. That’s what idolatry really is. It’s when you fix something, and you won’t let it evolve, or change, or grow anymore.”
Margaret Atwood says,
“Myths only remain relevant because people keep retelling them. If anybody ever told them again in any other way, their meaning would become absolute.”
What is retelling with reference to DA VINCI CODE
A "retelling" is, 'an explanation written in one's own words that provides all of the details and information in a text'.
વર્ષો જવાને જોઈએ ત્યાં ક્ષણમાં જઈ ચડ્યો,
આશ્ચર્ય વચ્ચે એમના આંગણમાં જઈ ચડ્યો!
This is what I exactly feel when I come across Dan Brown's novel- DA VINCI CODE. The Da Vinci Code, a popular suspense novel by Dan Brown, generated criticism and controversy after its publication in 2003. Many of the complaints centered on the book's speculations and misrepresentations of core aspects of Christianity and the history of the Catholic Church.
Now, let's discuss some of the interesting points with the reference to DA VINCI CODE.
1.What harm has been done to humanity by the biblical narration or that of Milton’s in The Paradise Lose?
What sort of damage does narrative like ‘The Vinci Code’ do to humanity?
The dangers I’m talking about are real spiritual dangers. They are dangers that most often slip in quietly and nearly unnoticed before causing great damage to your spiritual life. These dangers can undermine your efforts towards spiritual growth and leave you spiritual malnourished despite a force fed diet of Scripture.
2. Do novels / films lead us into critical (deconstructive) thinking about your religion? Can we think of such conspiracy theories about Hindu religious symbols / myths?
This is really an interesting question and If we consider the case presented above, deconstruction seems to be unfeasible in a tangible sense.
Why is deconstructive reading necessary?
To elaborate,
“not purely negative, deconstruction is primarily concerned with something tantamount to a critique of the Western philosophical tradition.”
‘Logocentrism,’ ‘phallogocentrism’ and perhaps most famous ‘the metaphysics of presence’ are some of the terms which Derrida exploited to illustrate the deep-seated ways of thinking of traditional Western philosophy.
“Logocentrism emphasizes the privileged role that logos, or speech, has been accorded in the Western tradition. Phallogocentrism points towards the patriarchal significance of this privilege. Derrida’s enduring references to the metaphysics of presence borrows heavily from the work of Heidegger. Heidegger insists that Western philosophy has consistently privileged that which is, or that which appears, and has forgotten to pay any attention to the condition for that appearance. In other words, presence itself is privileged, rather than that which allows presence to be possible at all—and also impossible, for Derrida”.
In keeping with the Heideggerian viewpoint, Derrida believed that metaphysics —which created binary oppositions and established a hierarchy that regrettably prioritized only one term of each pair shaped the entire philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks. Deconstruction toppled this Western metaphysical convention in response to the theoretical and philosophical discourses of the twentieth century including phenomenology, structuralism and psychoanalysis - ‘Deconstructive Reading’.
Thus, as we have got brief idea about the theory of Deconstruction, deconstructive reading serves the way for the disclosure of inherent instability, ambiguities and multiplicities of meaning, and dichotomies within texts. Now, let's apply this theory into the text DA VINCI CODE.
Deconstructive reading of Dan Brown’s text DA VINCI CODE
The Da Vinci Code is certainly a work of fiction and so one cannot expect to draw any historical truth from it. However, the author confuses his readers in the section entitled “The Facts” wherein he states, “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” In other words, he tries to expound on historical concepts within the context of a fiction novel. Thus, as far as the critical reviews are concerned, the novel is superficially written.
"The Da Vinci Code's" iconography of Leonardo's "The Last Supper" implies three things:
(1)First, that the absence of a chalice suggests that Leonardo is conveying a hidden message about the real nature of the Holy Grail;
(2)second, that the figure we assume to be the Apostle John is really Mary Magdalene, who is supposedly married to Jesus;
(3)lastly, that Peter takes on a menacing stance against her because he considers her a rival. This monograph shall attempt to demonstrate the inconsistency of the said assumptions.
Dan Brown's novel is based on the premise that Leonardo's "The Last Supper" is actually a code that, when broken, would reveal a secret that has been guarded for centuries--a secret that would surely be damning to Christianity and to the Vatican in particular. Anyone who had seen other paintings of the Last Supper, like that of Juan de Juanes, would have asked the same question because the chalice is highlighted in the entire composition.
Why does it not then figure in Leonardo's work?
Could there be another reading of the Last Supper other than the traditional?
The Da Vinci Code affirms that Jesus Christ was married, with Brown saying that the said union was “documented,” even as he does not say where the documents are, which puts his statement to doubt. Moreover, there are more powerful reasons to believe that Jesus was indeed celibate. In one hand, the evangelists mention his “mother” and his “brethren,” but not a wife. On the other hand, if we presume that someone wanted to do away with elements that would put Jesus “on the spot,”
then why affirm the truth of other events and incidents, like Jesus’ baptism by John?
Finally, Celibacy in Israel was rare, but some did practice it. Therefore, it should not be surprising that Jesus Christ would want to highlight his unique mission in this way. While he did not demean matrimony or demand that his followers be celibate, he emphasized nonetheless that love for God ought to be above everything else.
Everyone knows that it is hard to be objective when writing history but it is also true that history, as a social science, observes certain standards to allow it to come as close to the truth as possible.
Yet we have learned a lot, not from Brown, but from the expertise of the critics who have assessed his book. These are men and women who have worked long and hard in their fields of specialization through which Brown so superficially tread. We can conclude that Brown's attempt of de-mythifying Christianity, had raised too much criticism against him that the only thing de-mystified was his novel.
3. Have you come across any similar book/movie, which tries to deconstruct accepted notions about Hindu religion or culture and by dismantling it, attempts to reconstruct another possible interpretation of truth?
4. When we do traditional reading of the novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’, Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology, Harvard University emerges as protagonist and Sir Leigh Teabing, a British Historian as antagonist. Who will claim the position of protagonist if we do atheist reading of the novel?
5. Explain Ann Gray’s three propositions on ‘knowability’ with illustrations from the novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
a. 1) Identifying what is knowable
b. 2) identifying and acknowledging the relationship of the knower and the known
c. 3) What is the procedure for ‘knowing’?
