The Elusive Truths of Literary Narrative

Abstract

admits that his plot is pure fabrication. Despite his claims to have accurately described artworks, documents, and rituals, his Code reveals from the first that all of the characters and events in this book are It is nonetheless instructive to consider how much todays cultural skirmishes about the veracity of one popular narrative recall issues that vexed Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Then, as now, the oddly permeable nature of storytelling, its ambiguous relation to historical truth-claims, could be threatening as well as enchanting. A compelling or at least a widely circulated story has a way of swallowing up other narratives, thereby eliding usual distinctions between fiction and fact, fantasy and history. Thus I think cultural opponents of The Da Vinci Code are right to worry about this story's capacity to distort impressions of historical reality. In itself the book may be just one more ingenious thriller stuffed with pseudointellectual musings and hints of momentous disclosure. But, insofar as it invokes other larger narratives along its way, it makes a bid to refashion them, an effort that becomes credible only by virtue of the expectations it arouses for its huge popular audience. Despite its European setting the novel draws on long-standing mass suspicions in the United States lately heightened by sex-abuse scandals that there is something sinister, alien, inherently oppressive, and unnatural about Roman Catholicism. Its narrative likewise exploits the larger cultural metanarrative of Christian origins, insinuating but not seriously arguing that the received understanding of this history may itself be fictitious.