Dan Brown and the Illusion of Knowledge

When Dan Brown’s page turner The DaVinci Code blew up and sold more copies than the Bible several years ago as well as sparked a temporary but vigorous national interest in historical topics such as the Knights Templars, the Emperor Constantine, and Mary Magdalene unrivaled until 300 came out a few years later and all of a sudden every bro in the lower 48 became a minor expert on the Battle of Thermopylae, I was a lowly sophomore RA at Colorado State. The floor atheist gave me his copy of the book to read, thinking, I imagine, that it would blow my dogmatic mind. When our hall director saw me reading it at the front desk one day he complimented me, giving me a knowing nod as if we were in on some great treasure together. And he said, and I swear I am not making this up, “Dan Brown is like John Grisham for smart people.” You know, cuz it’s, like, about art and shit.

Nothing better encapsulates the way most people think knowledge is acquired in our culture than that comment of my hall director, and Dan Brown has turned this desire for “knowledge” on the fly into a bestseller factory in a tough industry.

This is a man, after all, who in his most recent book, Inferno, includes a whole chapter’s worth of a “lecture” that his protagonist gave at a Dante society event in Vienna (naturally, such things do not happen in Poughkeepsie) which provided a blow by blow summary of the levels of hell in the Inferno. This would be the equivalent of going to a conference for mathematicians and working your way level by level through Pascal’s triangle. It is ludicrous, entirely simplistic. But of course this lecture isn’t really for the ostensible audience at the posh Viennese conference center, bedazzled by the symbological wizardry of our American art professor-hero, it is for the shlub reading the book at home in Cedar Rapids. The audience who largely has not read Dante’s epic, but now unfortunately feels as if they have.

Brown is at his best when he is moving the story along quickly, not giving people time to pause and consider the degree of realism of the events being described. He is at his worst when he is functioning, as he does for much of most of his books, as some sort of Frommer’s guide to cosmopolitan European locales. His books are filled chock-a-block full of extraneous information that is added only to tickle the intellect of the reader without actually forcing them to do anything at all with their mind. A cascade of paintings and famous buildings with famous architects attached to them, all added as if we are in a double-decker bus traversing Florence while we watch our hero and the girl on their caper.

Brown is also at his worst when he actually tries to describe even mundane situations. He has a tin ear for style. Consider the following paragraph as evidence of Brown’s rhetorical facility:

“The ponytailed doctor now took his right arm and removed the makeshift bandage that she’d fashioned out of his jacket, which she laid on the kitchen table. Then she carefully examined his wound. As she held his bare arm, Langdon could feel her slender hands trembling.”

Even in this simple paragraph, I can count about 12 words that do not need to be there, at the top of the list being “ponytailed.” Who in the world has ever used that adjective? Seriously, I was embarrassed to be reading the book when I read that sentence, grateful that it was being done on the anonymity of my Kindle. And that is what you see bad stylistic writers doing, accumulating silly adjectives and adverbs (I for one am glad that she “carefully examined his wound” with her “slender hands”, without which adverb I could only imagine she hastily and carelessly examined it with banana hands), completely unnecessary sentences and phrases (do we really need to know where she laid the removed bandage?), and tautologies such as “makeshift bandage that she’d fashioned out of his jacket.” Allow me to take a turn in his style: The renowned and bestselling author Dan Brown recklessly litters his groundbreaking new novel in characteristic abandon with such inane stylistic faux pas as the ones previously catalogued, including others that the rush of time's winged chariot prevents this intrepid writer from enumerating fully.

None of this is to say that Brown is not an entertaining writer. He certainly is, and it is because of his great ability to entertain that he continues to find such a vast audience. But it is also because he aspires to something more than mere entertainment, to educate the masses, that he has grown so popular. No one can read 50 Shades of Gray and imagine it be anything other than titillating fantasy fulfillment. However, when you read Dan Brown you are encouraged to think that this is something more than pulpy entertainment, but high literature about grand subjects. And, what’s more, by reading this book you are somehow vicariously touring Paris or the Vatican or Florence.

Such non-demanding pretenses of knowledge have mushroomed in our culture. Documentary films, TED talks, most news websites, all seem to proffer knowledge on a subject but all they really do is pass on a very small amount of information, distilled into catchy solutions that make the consumer feel smart for listening or watching. PBS survives on this, as does NPR. You watch Carl Sagan hosting Cosmos and imagine that osmotically his brilliance transfers to you, and all of this physics stuff is really pretty comprehensible. You hear Shelby Foote’s rich Southern drawl in Ken Burns’s Civil War, and you feel like you are becoming an expert on Antietam. Michael Pollan has made food experts, and Monsanto haters!, out of everyone who has watched Food, Inc.      

But this is not knowledge. Knowledge is not so cheaply won. I have studied the Bible for close to 10 years, reading numerous commentaries and systematic theologies, and know next to nothing about it. I’m reading N.T. Wright’s tome on Jesus now and I realize how little I know about Jesus. I have read Paradise Lost at least ten times and read half a dozen books explaining it or some aspect of it and still feel like a novice to the world of Milton. And so it goes.

We don’t have the time for patient accumulation of knowledge anymore. We demand it quickly and about a variety of subjects. Too many other things to be consumed. In a sense this is fine. Time is finite. I can’t read every book about Jesus or every commentary on Scripture or even every book produced about Milton in a single year let alone throughout history. But what knowledge breeds that TED talks do not, for instance, is humility. A glimmer of true knowledge opens you up to everything that you don’t know and can’t ever hope to learn. Pithiness closes us off, making us feel like we are in the know when we really all that we are doing is flattering ourselves.

This cheapness is what offended me so deeply about my hall director’s comment about Dan Brown and John Grisham. I didn’t learn a single thing more in reading The DaVinci Code than I did in reading A Time to Kill, and I imagine my hall director today can hardly remember a single detail about what he “learned” in Dan Brown’s book that separated the book as wheat from the chaff of other suspense writers. The least we can do when we are entertaining ourselves is admit it. What we tend to do, though, is encourage ourselves to think that we are becoming better people. And this bearded blogger finds that problematic.