Reflection of the Spirit of the Age in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code

Abstract

This paper explores the spirit of the age in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Contemporary age is the age of privileging petty narratives, celebrating relativity of truth claims, promoting marginalized interests, questioning the historical fact, favoring plurality of truths, acknowledging story as history, accepting multiculturalism and adopting techniques of re-visiting and intertextuality in writing. Therefore, this thesis argues that Brown’s relativizing the truth claims of Christianity is actually an epitome of the spirit of our age. Since the novel demystifies Jesus Christ’s divinity, interrogates on formation of the Bible, displays distrust towards the Church, privileges non-linear order in history, destabilizes the historical facts, and adopts re-visiting the past and intertextuality. Jean Francois Lyotard’s mistrust of metanarratives; Linda Hutcheon’s critical concepts on history, theory and fiction; Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher’s view on the relation between history and literature; Adrienne Rich’s notion of re-visiting; Foucauldian notion of effects of truth and Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality form the theoretical base for the researcher’s observations. The researcher ultimately concludes that Brown’s divesting Christ’s divinity is the result of contemporary spirit of our age. Thus, The Da Vinci Code is the quintessential literary piece of writing based on contemporary spirit of the postmodern age.