American Idiot or: Da Vinci Scores Zero For Literature

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was a great novelist, playwrite and satyrist. I'm sure he didn't write a single line without life and literature both in mind. And the above quotation is not an exception. There are worldwide bestseller to support his statement and fortunately there is a typical example of these 'master-pieces' in every bookstore these days: Da Vinci Code.

This novel is completely ignorant about life. The detailed descriptions of well-known places, such as Louvre Museum and the streets nearby- are proposed to induce a sense of realness, an effort that is neutralized by the silly fantasies imagined to take place. Dan Brown takes a professor of religious symbology, named Langdon, from Harvard University and Sophie, a cryptographer from Royal Holloway -two bookworms in true life- and tries to put them among the best stuntmen and private detectives of the century! Holly shit! (a polite discussion about the possibility of incidents can be found here).

Although the author tries to imitate realism, the result is nothing more than an informative novel: it just abuses realism for the sake of giving information. If in symbolistic novels, the incidents are always set to imply an analogy with some certain central concepts, here -in informative novels- they are always irrelevant to the central theme of the book: Da Vinci Code is striving to make its readers aware about some controvertial subjects such as paganism and extremist Christian sects, and this is done by scattering the available pieces of information into the dialogues and monologues of an adventurous novel. What Dan Brown does is a betrayal to literature when I compare it to the courage and honesty with which, Milan Kundera inserts completely non-fiction chapters into his novels. He doesn’t want to enslave the characters to carry his historical, cultural, political or philosophical ideas. An older example is Moby Dick, where Herman Melville interrupts his story with a full-length chapter about the whales, instead of spoiling the fiction. God bless them.

But the most frustrating thing about this novel is the way the flashbacks are patched and glued into the main flow of adventures. The writer creates some unlucky guys, who have nothing to do with the person remembering them and instantly disappear after they accomplish their share in informing the reader. They cannot be called characters at all; they are nothing more than dead packages of information. Here is an example:

In chapter 20, Langdon and Sophie are in a hurry to save their lives. They have a short time left. while escaping from the emergency stairs, they have a very informative conversation about Fibonacci sequence, Tarot, pentagrams, Leonardo's Last Supper, etc. Suddenly, Langdon flashes back to Harvard and introduces a clever ‘longlegged math major’ named Stettner, who vapors out in a couple of pages and never appears again. Nobody kills him. He was fabricated just for blathering a few sentences about PHI (including how it is pronounced), that’s all.

I really missed poor Stettner and remembered the humane sympathy with which the novelists like Dostoevsky were used to treat their characters. The great novels and genuine writers are giong to fade away from the spotlight. This is the reason, they say that the literature is dead.