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Tuesday,
January 17, 2006
I have a confession to make
Until last night, I never read THE DA VINCI
CODE. Yes, I know – I'm a sad,
pathetic slacker when it comes to popular culture. And to be honest, the only
reason why I went out and bought it at all was because I saw the trailer on
the Apple website and thought, "Okay, that doesn’t seem as lame as I thought
it would."
So I bought it. And read through the bulk of it last night, including skipping ahead to the end (yes, I know that's cheating. In this case, however, I was pretty sure I knew how Brown was going to wrap everything up, and wanted to see if I was right before I had to go to bed).
As it turned out, I was right, by golly. And my initial response was," …eh." This is partially due to the quality of the writing, which was workmanlike enough but dragged unmercifully in places, and left some very annoying plot points dangling (at the beginning of the book he mentions some life-threatening event that happened to the main character a year ago at the Vatican, and a lost romantic attachment named Vittoria. I found out later that these were actually events that happened in a previous book, but the way these references were written made it seem like they would affect the current book. They didn't, and that annoyed me.
The rest of my lackluster response isn't actually Brown's fault, because it's related to my anticipation of the story's central conceit. For those of you who don't want to be spoiled, well, stop reading now:
The central conceit of THE DA VINCI CODE (which is also the theory behind the non-fiction book HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, something I read years ago when I was noodling around with the idea of writing a historical thriller about Mary Magdalene's post-Crucifixion life in Gaul) is that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene, who was never a prostitute (a smear campaign launched by the early Church in an attempt to cut women out of the religious power structure entirely), and indeed was one of Jesus' disciples. She then became the "Holy Grail" (san greal – "holy grail" – can also be interpreted as sang real – "royal blood") and bore his children, a royal line which ends in the character Sophie Neveau and her presumed-dead brother (this, by the way, is based on an actual interpretation of the Grail mythos, which purports that a scion of JC and MM is currently living somewhere in Paris). This marriage, as well as being the marriage of two royal Jewish houses (Benjamin and David), signified the union and proper balance of male and female forces, and MM was supposed to found a new church based on this precept. Unfortunately, Peter wasn't too thrilled about having to listen to a woman, so he grabbed the ball and ran with it while she was busy gestating (all these frigging desert tribes and their misogyny have caused more havoc throughout history…). Emperor Constantine (let's throw in some Roman misogyny for good measure) and the Council of Nicea further obfuscated the matter in favor of proclaiming Jesus's divinity and erasing any hint of a "human" life, resulting in the patriarchal cast of Christianity.
The "secret" of the DaVinci Code is the location of the Holy Grail – in this case, MM's bones, protected for millennia by the Priory of Sion. As it turns out, the Priory, with the assistance of President Mitterand, had them interred in the 1980's in their final resting place -- a small pyramid underneath an inverted pyramidal skylight in the Louvre (and I'm sure the conservators of the Louvre were just thrilled with this – wonder how much extra security had to be put around the pyramid after publication…).
Back to my eh reaction -- part of it is
due to the fact that, well, Jesus doing mundane things like marrying and
having kids doesn't really horrify me. He was a Jewish man at a time when
Jewish men were expected to get hitched and start generating new members
of the tribe ASAP – for him not to
get married would have seemed extremely weird to his followers. And whatever
you may think or believe about his divinity, he was also a human man; to deny
him basic desires for love, family and security would also deny his humanity.
So yeah, if that means that his Merovingian descendents are eating snails and
driving like maniacs somewhere in Paris, I'm cool with it (I wonder if that's
what bothered so many people, however – the idea that the scions of Christ
were French. The descendents of Jesus as cheese-eating surrender monkeys
-- yeah, I bet that went down really well in certain neo-con fundie pulpits…).
And I'm not blown away by the idea of MM being the Holy Grail (or, for that matter, Jesus being a feminist) because it's like being told "2 + 2 = 4" – a supreme No Duh moment. While I'm not Wiccan, I feel a resonance with the belief in both male and female divinity, and one thing I do like about the story is the suggestion that male and female forces should be held in balance, not skewed towards a particular gender. One of the scariest things about Western religious fundamentalism (including the triad of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is the way it constantly tries to relegate women to an inferior position – we're temptresses, witches, chattel, not worthy to be priests because we bleed once a month, yadda yadda yadda. Do you have any idea how tiresome that gets? How belittling and frustrating it is to have it ingrained in the very fabric of your civilization that there's something wrong with you because you have a uterus?
Oy, such bullshit.
So no, it doesn't surprise me at all that someone as inherently cool as Jesus would recognize this bullshit, and try to fix it in conjunction with his wife (it's not his fault that Peter was too much of a peckerhead to share any authority with Mary M). To be honest, my primary thought is, "Pity it didn't work."