ONE OF MY REVIEWS I HAVE DONE DURING THE DAYS AT DARBHANGA HOUSE, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, PATNA UNIVERSITY.................................................
DECODING OF THE ‘DA VINCI CODE’
Controversy, of course, can increase the circulation of a particular work, but it cannot enhance its artistic quality. Art is the expression of impression. To express the impression we have various media e.g. Literature, Music, Dance, Sculpture, Painting and the like. Just as words are the medium for expressing emotions in Literature, similarly sounds, gesture, stones and colures are the tools in the hand of a musician, dancer, a sculptor, or a painter respectively. What one chooses that makes “All the differences”; in the words of Robert Frost used in his poem, “The Road Not Taken”. But, surely we cannot judge Parvej Musharraf’s “In the Line of Fire” and Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” with the same spectacle. In Musharraf, we find a number of paradoxes, who declared the defeat of Kargil as his victory, that may be true to some extent in the sense that it provided a platform for him to be the supremo of Pakistan in the one hand, whereas on the other hand in “The Da Vinci Code”, we find a wide range of symbolism in art, the Fibonacci series, pentacles cryptography, anagram, the concept of Divine Number, topography, the interpretation of the Bible in terms of definition, the Monalisha’s androgyny, and even the comparison between the nations clearly seen in the dialogue of Baju Fache and Robert Langdon about the pyramid and much more.
Ronald Gelatte is really true when he says that a child begins with ‘why’ viz ‘curiosity’ that becomes its comedy whereas an adult with comparison and this perhaps is the most insidious to human tragedies. The success of “The Da Vinci Code” lies in the fact that it successfully evoked a child like curiosity in a man in general except some rare exceptions not in its controversy. Although it is obvious that the theory about Mary Magdalene is not Brown’s real one that made the story extraordinary, of course, the factual locations, the paintings, ancient history, the secret documents, the rituals- the sum total of all these compelled him to draw the sketch of “The Da Vinci Code” in words. Nowadays when the aim of many authors is to increase the number of circulation in order to get royalty as well as to be in news, we have some such authors also who work for the satisfaction of their artistic appetite and it would not be an exaggeration to say that Dan Brown’s ‘The DA Vinci Code’ is a rare combination of both the elements. One can read it to observe the style in which he presented it. One cannot stop oneself from the moment s/he starts till its completion.
