Final thoughts on The Da Vinci Hoax, relativism and revisionism

Last week I wrote a critique of The Da Vinci Hoax, by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel. That critique prompted responses from both Olson and Miesel. Those replies have caused me to reevaluate my opinion of Olson and Miesel. I originally believed that their grasp on how history was rather naive and unsophisticated. It's now clear that they both have a firm grasp on the various problems historians face. However, I stand by my critique of The Da Vinci Hoax as a misreading of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

My purpose was to illustrate how Olson and Miesel misread and misinterpreted Brown's work and broadly tarred him with charges of relativism and revisionism, charges that are, respectively, unfounded and intellectually lazy.

Revisionism
Regarding Brown's alleged postmodernism and relativism, Olson and Miesel have made the following statements:

This [statement by Dan Brown] may strike some as thoughtful commentary, but it is simple sophistry, based on a mixture of popularized post-modernism and deconstructionism. (DVH, p. 27).

The offending statement by Brown, as far as I can tell, is this question: "How historically accurate is history itself?" I fail to see how asking this question is in any way "postmodern." To be sure, postmodernism is a notoriously difficult concept to define precisely, but is it really postmodern to question the accuracy of written history?

One of the great dangers of a popular, entertaining work such as The Da Vinci Code is that it reinforces the relativistic attitudes that are already prevalent in Western culture and offers additional reasons for readers to embrace such attitudes. [...] This idea [of relativism] is evident in remarks made by the character Robert Langdon, who talks about "faith" as being built upon "fabrication" and beliefs that cannot be proven in any way (DVH, p. 37).

Olson and Miesel's insistence that Langdon (and therefore Brown) is a relativist would be far more compelling if he weren't simultaneously obsessed with discovering the truth of the Holy Grail. At its heart, The Da Vinci Code is a detective story. Sure, there are bits of romance thrown in, but the central action of the novel is concerned with discovering the nature and location of the Holy Grail. And by the end, Robert Langdon has found the answer. This last bit bears repeating: Robert Langdon has found the answer.

Put as simply as possible, The Da Vinci Code is deeply anti-relativist in its basic assumption that the Truth is out there. The protagonist, Robert Langdon, makes one potentially relativist statement in the whole of the novel (at least as substantiated by Olson and Miesel). And it is this relativism that Olson and Miesel so thoroughly decry as a dangerous element of Brown's work.

Revisionism
On the question of revisionism, Olson and Miesel are entirely correct. Dan Brown's version of the past is revisionist and explicitly challenges long-held beliefs.

But there is absolutely nothing wrong with revisionism in of itself. All good history is revisionist, for it changes our understanding of the past.

Calling someone a revisionist is a lazy and almost meaningless attack. Anyone who suggests an analysis or interpretation that in any way differs from the current consensus is a revisionist. To be sure, some historians write more extreme versions of revisionist history. But this is not a bad thing. Only when revisionist views are based on shoddy research and interpretation are they bad, just as "traditional" views are disproved in light of new evidence and more enlightening analyses.

Olson and Miesel are tilting at windmills: the problem with DVC is not its revisionism but its inability to present the facts accurately.

Da Vinci Hoax authors respond

In the past few days I've received e-mails from both Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel, the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, a rather successful debunking of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. They've done real yeoman's work in slogging through Brown's book to show how often Brown's ideas are completely wrong-headed. But they also seem to have some rather old-fashioned ideas about history, as I wrote about last week. In the interest of fairness and promoting further discussion, I'm posting the key points of Olson and Miesel's e-mails.

From Olson:

I'm not convinced that Brown does think we can know the truth about the past, nor am I sure that he could articulate, as you have, the difference between interpreting recorded history and figuring out what actually did happen. There is, it seems to me, a very fine line to be walked here, and I don't think Dan Brown is much for fine lines. I am firmly convinced that one reason his novel has done so well is that he relies on a relativistic notion of truth, while also claiming to have The Truth. Again, having it both ways.

[...]

In other words, Brown does make (as Sandra indicates and you well know) a myriad of factual errors. This is quite serious in its own right, of course, but here are other problems, namely his coy, slitherly remarks about history and it being "written by the winners" and so forth. This attitude, however poorly expressed by Brown, owes quite a bit to postmodern and deconstructionist thought, as I attempted to explain in our book.

[...]

Both Sandra and I understand the difference between the historical record and how history has sometimes been written; I'll also acknowledge that we don't make that entirely evident in our book, and so you make a valid and helpful point. But we can, I am convinced, know truth about the past, even while we might revise our understanding of particular events, people, etc. I have a serious problem with the statement, "We can't know THE truth about the past," since it begs a number of serious questions: Is that a true statement? Can we know the truth about the present? Can we know the truth about truth? Can we know TRUTH, period?

[...]

I don't think that Brown really takes history seriously at all; in reacting against his irresponsible and insulting approach, I may have overreacted a bit in the other direction. But I think it's unfair to say that our view of history is "awfully outdated," when our view is simply that there are many historical facts that we can and do know, and that these need to be taken seriously and address soberly. And we also know that there are many things that we do not know about the past and many judgments that historians will disagree about to one degree or another.

And from Miesel:

I was indeed a history major, specializing in the religious and social history of the Middle Ages. MA, University of Illinois; abd Indiana University. My old professor, the distinguished Reformation scholar Gerald Strauss, who taught me historiography, could assure you that I am aware of the impossibility of fully recovering the past. But the kinds of errors that Dan Brown makes require no lofty analyses of "discourse." He inverts and invents on matters over which there's not the least disagreement. (ie, who arrested the Templars; the significance of Templar architecture) He attempts to exalt silly, worthless sources at the expense of consensus academic authorities. And no, not all history is "written by the winners." Such revisionism and relativism were our targets. You have not demonstrated that we failed to demolish Brown's claims.

I'll post my response tomorrow.

Dan Brown's not alone in his historical naivete

My parents know me well. In their latest care package they included The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel. It's part of the slew of books that have come out recently that set out to debunk The Da Vinci Code. You know my feelings on Dan Brown. So I think Olson and Miesel have done valuable and important work in showing the many ways in which Dan Brown is wrong. I don't share their concern about the anti-Catholic implications of The Da Vinci Code (their book is published by Ignatius Press, a Catholic publisher), so I could quibble with some of the things they choose to emphasize. But on the whole the substance of their debunking is spot-on.

That said, I do think Olson and Miesel get some things wrong.

For starters, they give Brown far too much credit. They view The Da Vinci Code as a systematic effort on the part of Brown to discredit traditional Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) and replace it with a relativistic belief in the "sacred feminine." But it seems to me that Dan Brown is simply not smart enough to be as insidious as Olson and Miesel suggest he is. The problem with Dan Brown is not that he's anti-Catholic (though he may very well be); the problem with Dan Brown is that he just doesn't know enough to say anything informed or intelligent about religion at all.

Olson and Miesel go off the deep end when they start railing against the relativism and postmodernism of Dan Brown's writing. Again, I simply do not believe that Brown is smart enough to be either a principled relativist or postmodernist. Brown is not concerned with questioning the nature of knowledge or morality. He firmly believes that the Truth is out there. All he's doing is challenging the received wisdom.Put simply, Brown believes in a definitive answer regarding the nature of Jesus and Christianity, a position that relativists and postmodernists would never support.

Olson and Miesel's own vision of history is awfully outdated; no historian that I know of shares their opinion. Criticizing Brown, they write that "He openly questions whether we can even know the truth about the past" (27). Well, yes. Any historian who doesn't question the limitations of historical knowledge isn't being terribly responsible. We can't know *the* truth about the past, and to think otherwise is to display a remarkable lack of knowledge about just how history is produced.

This belief is based, as far as I can tell, on Olson and Miesel's conflation of history as it happened and history as the record of what happened. These are two very different things, and historians have been distinguishing them for a long, long time. Yet they claim that Brown's comment "'How historically accurate is history itself?' is nonsensensical since it rests on the premise that 'accuracy' is in the eyes of the beholder and therefore cannot ever be objectively gauged" (28). In this case, Olson and Miesel are simply wrong. It's perfectly sensible to examine whether history (as it is written) is historically (as it happened) accurate. Indeed, evaluating and improving upon older conceptions of history is exactly what historians do.

(Can I say how bizarre it feels to be defending Dan Brown's position on historical thought?)

The idea that our interpretations of the past change over time is hardly novel. G.M. Trevelyan, born all the way back in 1876, once wrote:

It is still too early to form a final judgment on the French Revolution, and opinion about it (my opinion certainly) is constantly oscillating. On such great and complex issues there can never be a final ‘verdict of history.’

The history found in books is not necessarily right, it's just the best guess of the historian. It should be reexamined and challenged. That's the only way our understanding of the past improves. On this question (and probably no others!), Dan Brown is right and Olson and Miesel are wrong.

I can't wait to start grad school

Onto the home stretch before I head off to England! In the meantime I'm just marking time around here. I went up to the high school last night for a football game... my sister's a cheerleader. She's tiny, so she's the one they toss up in the air. Impressive stuff, if nerve-wracking for my mom.

I ran into an old gym teacher at the game. After I filled him in on my plans, he asked what I wanted to do after that. I gave him the spiel... "Grad school in history these days is basically good for going into academia and not much more." He commiserated and suggested teaching high school instead (something I've considered). Then he came up with another suggestion: "You could be the next Dan Brown!"

Urgh. "Yeah, I guess. His history actually isn't all that good. If you look at the things he says carefully he makes a lot of mistakes."

"No, he says it's all true. I've seen him on TV. He's done all sorts of research into this stuff. Where there's smoke there's fire, right?"

Awkward silence.

So there you have it. People actually do buy into Dan Brown's BS. I'm not really sure how to counteract it. Is it even worth the effort? For my own sanity I need to do something. If the general public sees Dan Brown as a reputable historical authority there's something seriously wrong here.

Initial thoughts on Angels and Demons

A bunch of people have told me that Angels and Demons is better than The Da Vinci Code. And since I'm done work for the summer, I have all sorts of free time. There's a limit to how many hours of the Olympics I can watch each day. So back to Dan Brown I go. This time with my eyes wide open.

It's more of the same. More infelicitous writing, more factual errors, more bold assertions that just don't make sense. And I can't help shake the feeling that this was just a test run for The Da Vinci Code. Robert Langdon woken by a late-night phone call? Check. Nubile young woman? Check. Murder of adoptive father of said young woman? Check. Let me guess... the real villain is the guy who seemed to be helping all along! Wake me up when there's something new.

I suspect the fact that I know Rome much better than Paris is going to make this even more painful.

Dan Brown doesn't know history

Apparently I'm a glutton for punishment, because I just spent the last hour poking through Dan Brown's website. Don't ask me why. Perhaps I'm still just so astonished by The Da Vinci Code's popularity that I'm trying to figure out the man, myth, and legend that is Dan Brown.

The more I read of Brown, the less I think of him. Beyond the countless and inexcusable factual errors, Brown has an incredibly naive conception of how history is produced and how historians think. Take this quote from his FAQ page:

Since the beginning of recorded time, history has been written by the "winners" (those societies and belief systems that conquered and survived). Despite an obvious bias in this accounting method, we still measure the "historical accuracy" of a given concept by examining how well it concurs with our existing historical record. Many historians now believe (as do I) that in gauging the historical accuracy of a given concept, we should first ask ourselves a far deeper question: How historically accurate is history itself?

First, the well-rehearsed notion of history being written by the winners. Once upon a time, perhaps. But not anymore. Historians (at least the good ones) aren't concerned with presenting a past that reinforces the status quo. Historians try to understand what happened, not telling the story of the winners. History from below, anyone?

This isn't exactly a revolutionary idea. I learned that "history is written by the winners" back in elementary school. It's not a very profound insight. Yet Brown seems to think that he's revealing an important truth to his readers. Bland, obvious, uncontested fact is more like it.

Second, Brown expresses concern about measuring "the 'historical accuracy' of a given concept by examining how well it concurs with our existing historical record." I'm curious. What's the alternative? As I've written about before, historians are bound by the evidence available. Does that mean historians are incapable of capturing the totality of the past? Well, yes. But that doesn't mean that historians can make stuff up. If Brown wants to present an alternative history, fine. But if you're going to treat it as history, provide some evidence. Please.

It might be possible to just ignore these problems. Dan Brown, after all, is a novelist, not an academic. But Brown presents himself as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about history. He casts himself in the company of historians by pointing out that he, like many historians, think it's important to consider the accuracy of history itself. The implication, of course, is that there are historians who don't share this belief. If you listened to Brown, you'd think that there are plenty of historians out there who accept, without question, the findings of all previous historians.

This could not be further from the truth. Historians are trained to examine sources with a critical eye. That goes for scholarly history books just as much as primary sources like diaries and letters. Historians are willing and eager to reformulate previous conceptions of the past. For Brown to suggest otherwise is either ignorant or self-promoting.

Dear God is Dan Brown a hack

I finished reading The Da Vinci Code a few days ago. I never threw it across the room, but I did throw it down on the table in disbelief. A lot. I'm not even sure what annoyed me the most, so I'll start by saying something positive about the book. Yes, it's a page-turner and easy to get through. It's perfect reading for a commute... short chapters mean you have plenty of easy stopping points and it's easy to get right back into the action.

Aside from that, it's a trainwreck. The writing sucks. The history is laughable. The vague theological musing about the sacred feminine read like a '70s New Age tract. Worst (?) of all, it's all just a rip-off of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Geoff Pullum has a great post on Brown's stylistic atrocities. The opening sentence of the book ("Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.") reads like a newspaper article, not an action novel. A bit later Brown has Saunière simultaneously freeze and turn his head. Then we have a silhouette staring! Silhouettes can't stare! Pullum has it exactly right: "Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad."

All that before you even start thinking about the factual inaccuracies. As bad as Brown screws up French geography, it's to believe he's ever looked at a map of France, to say nothing of actually going there (as he's apparently done). Versailles is *not* northwest of Paris. There's absolutely no reason why someone arrested in France would be sent to prison in Andorra. The Priory of Sion a 20th-century hoax, not an ancient secret society.

Beyond the obvious factual errors, there's also a ton of things that just don't make sense. You're telling me that Robert Langdon, famous Harvard symbologist, doesn't know French? There's stuff like that throughout the book. Not necessarily "wrong," but endlessly grating. Dan Brown just doesn't know much about what the world is actually like. It's like he exists in some parallel universe where buildings exist in slightly different locations, dubious archives are completely trustworthy, and art historians don't know French.

Now you could very easily argue that that parallel universe is the world of fiction. Fine. But Brown makes a big to-do about how much research he does for his books, how everything is accurate. Hell, the first page of the book is entitled "FACT." And people seem to believe him. And that's the real problem. If everyone just took this crappy book as fiction, I'd have no complaints. Or at least I'd shut up about them. But when people buy into Brown's pseudohistorical tripe, there's a problem.

My first book after college

Against my better judgment, I've just started reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. People keep telling me how much I'll like it... "It's full of history!" But I'm not terribly optimistic. This Language Log post alerted me to the oddities of Brown's writing. And I have to say, even just a few dozen pages, the writing is painfully bad. More than once I've wanted to throw the book across the room.

All that said, it's nice to have time to read fiction again, even if it's trashy airport fiction.