Bookwatch 2009: The Magic Continues!

The Amazon blurb for this recently published collection joyfully announces: There is only one Dan Brown—and there is only one Secrets team that has achieved worldwide bestselling success by providing curious readers with compelling and authoritative explorations into the thought-provoking ideas that lie behind Brown's bestselling novels. Once again, Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer have gathered a wide range of world-class historians, theologians, scientists, philosophers, symbologists, code breakers, art historians, experts on the occult, and writers and thinkers of all types who give readers the essential tools to understand The Lost Symbol.

The panel of luminaries includes, among many others, Karen Armstrong, Richard Dawkins, and (naturally) Lynne McTaggart. 

The fundamental conceit of the work is explicitly stated in the blurb: it is by appeal to recognized experts in the subjects to which Brown makes reference that one can understand The Lost Symbol.

Our work, of course, is animated by exactly the converse claim.  It should be self-evident to any careful reader of TLS, DVC, or A&D that reading around any of these texts is antithetical to their project.  This project, generally stated, is that of naturalizing ideology and containing resistance through a sort of formulaic puppetry which employs caricatures of historical events, works of art, well-known narratives, and social criticism to mouth the words of the Obnoxious Other.  To elaborate on these caricatures as though they were participant in anything other than a simple exercise of ideological re-containment can be amusing, but only because it reveals their appalling simplicity and the transparent relationship of their form to their function.

Burstein and Keizjer imagine that by eliciting tangential commentary on TLS they can illuminate its subjects, e.g. Freemasonry, religion, noetic science, etc.  In truly symbological fashion, Brown's narration is assumed to be consubstantial with pre-existing academic and journalistic discourses on the same subjects and, through the clean window of scholarly prose, with the objects themselves.  To read Dawkins discussing his position on "religion" as characterized by Brown, we are apparently to believe, will illuminate the actual object, religion.  As Mal'akh incessantly murmurs, "It's buried out there, somewhere."

In fact, when undertaken earnestly such commentary simply functions to misclassify the function of the plot-elements of the symbological novel.  Noetic science, for instance, does not function in TLS (its description in the text notwithstanding,) to expand the possibilities of human ontology; rather, it works precisely to constrain it to the range of obviousnesses already available to the reader qua subject of late American/Western European capitalism by, for instance, confirming that there is something fundamentally efficacious about will as manifested in faith and patriotism.

The tools to understand The Lost Symbol, then, are found precisely in resisting the urges to elaborate on the elements of Brown's plots, to critique the accuracy of their representation vis-a-vis established discourses respecting them, or to elicit expert commentary.  To understand TLS, one must allow it to enact its dumbshow, whose only real allusions are to subject-structuring obviousnesses which transcend demarcations like "noetic science" or "freemasonry."