First of all, shouldn’t the main character of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code be a professor of semiotics, not “symbology,” whatever that is? And had he been that, would we even be discussing Brown’s novel today?
Indeed, the problem with The Da Vinci Code is not the facts of the case but our failure as a culture to teach one of the basic liberal arts: the ability to tell fact from fiction and to understand the value of fiction as a cultural construction. Fiction means to go beyond the mere facts, to use narrative form to point to larger or less obvious or more difficult truths. Fiction is able to deal with troubling questions more honestly than reportage because it is not limited to what happened, when it happened, and who it happened to; it is not burdened with fairness nor with the laws and customs against slander or libel or character assassination.
By dispensing with a strict adherence to the facts, writers of fiction can speculate about the meaning of the life of, say, Jesus, in a way that religion, recalcitrant with tradition, would never be able to do. Fiction can explore how certain voices have been marginalized and othered and written out of history in a way that history may not be able to fully embrace.
And while we can quibble with the verisimilitude of many of the particulars presented in The Da Vinci Code, we cannot deny that even within our lifetimes the Catholic Church has been dangerously secretive about clergy sex abuse and has harbored the radical Opus Dei sect within its most inner circles. We can’t deny that trusted institutions of all sorts have conspired to hide what they were up to, and that such things have been, arguably, less than legal. We can’t lie to ourselves and say that archeology always agrees with scripture, nor can we dispute the fact that the voices of women, minorities and dissenters have been suppressed for most of Western history–an unacceptable state of affairs by today’s standards.
To think that The Da Vinci Code is really about theology or history is to miss the point. Like all art, fiction is about the here and now. To not recognize that is to lose the sense of art’s basic role, and a culture cannot survive without that functioning system of symbols and signs.