A grailing we will go...

[morgan_dhu]

For anyone who found my previous rant about the Da Vinci Code nonsense interesting, my discussion of the literary histoy of the Holy Grail as presented in Richard Barber's book The Holy Grail: History of a Legend is up on my book journal: bibliogramma.

You know, I wouldn't have minded at all if Brown had said "This is a works of fiction. I've taken some historical people and things and reinterpreted them as is my right as a creator of works of the imagination, but this is literature, not history."

But no, he said it's all based on fact, when it simply isn't, and that makes all the difference to me.

Comments

[trinityva.livejournal.com]

Yeah. My mom went to a seminar by a priest debunking it, and was really confused that he'd care. I was confused that she wouldn't get why. She kept going "The priest kept saying 'It said FACT', why would that matter?"

O.o

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

What really worries me about that attitude is that it speaks to a general lack of curiosity about the truth. The next step, I fear, is total acceptance of whatever something considered to be authoritative says as truth. And that's the end of personal freedom, social change, and a great many other things including democracy.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

What does "based on fact" mean anyhow? I thought that all historical fiction was "based on fact".

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

In interviews, he's said all sorts of things are "true":

That there are well established folk legends saying that Mary Magdalen came to the south of France with the Grail and/or with her daughter Sara (there aren't - there is a legend that two of the other Mary from the Bible came to the south of France with their dark-skinned, Egyptian servant girl named Sara).

That the "Dossiers Secret" that he found in the Bibliotheque National that discuss the connection of the Merovingian bloodline to Jesus and mane the leaders of the Priory of Sion are legitimate documents (they aren't - and the people who invented them and put them in the Bibliotheque National have actually acknowledged doing so in public).

That there is no possible other historical reason known to historians for the Templars becoming so rich and powerful and then being exterminated by Phillip IV other than that they were in possession of documents proving that Mary and Jesus had a daughter (most historians note that the Templars were often given gifts of land by nobles they protected in the Holy Land, and also invented international banking, which would tend to make on rather rich, and that they were destroyed, like several other groups of people at the time, because Phillip owed them huge amounts of money and couldn't pay them back).

And so on and so on - those are just the first three examples that come to the top of my head. He presents the premise behind his novel as if all of the historical circumstances in it were supported by historical fact. It annoys me greatly.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that Brown was claiming that his book was based on fact. I couldn't get past the first badly-written chapter.

But from what you say here, it sounds as though Brown is cannily catering to that modern obsession with authenticity, that manifests itself in 'reality TV', and the insistence that fiction should be thinly disguised personal memoir (as manifested in the scandals over 'J T Leroy').

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I agree, that's exactly what he - and his publicists - are doing. What annoys me almost as much is the way the cottage industry of books and "documentaries" discussing the Da Vinci Code is doing the same thing.

I was watching a "documentary" last night that purported to be examining whether there was any historical proof for the scenario of Brown's novel. What literally enraged me was the way that the person presenting the documentary would interview some total wing-nut whose book said that a particular aspect of Brown's novel was factual based on her feelings about Mary Magdalen or the visions she had when she visited some church or whatever, and would then interview a serious historian or archeologist with several peer-accepted schoraly book to their name in the pertinent field who would say that there was no textual evidence for that aspect of Brown's novel, and then the presenter would sum the segment up by saying rather chirpily "We may never know the truth about this aspect, so let's go on and talk about Y now."

To me, the frightening reverse to this obsession with authenticity is the complete lack of respect for what is actually authentic (I include reality TV, becasue most of them are contrived and at least partly scripted situations, and not at all "real").

And there's the fact that so many people just accept that if someone tells them "this is historically accurate" or - to broaden the field - "this is scientifically accurate" or "this is what is actually happening in another part of the world you can't witness personally" then it must be so.

People (well, a fairly large proportion of them aren't questioning the things they see or hear or read. And maybe unquestioning accptance of historical inaccuracy isn't as important an issue as some other manifestations of this kind of complacency, but it is part of the phenomenon. And it disturbs me greatly.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

'the frightening reverse to this obsession with authenticity is the complete lack of respect for what is actually authentic'

Sounds like the reliance upon 'truthiness' problem in a somewhat different context.

'And maybe unquestioning accptance of historical inaccuracy isn't as important an issue as some other manifestations of this kind of complacency'

Well, yes and no. Some bits of fake history are dynamite - like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for instance.

And though I have no time for Opus Dei, I think they should be held in suspicion for what is really known about them, documented stuff, like their historic links with fascism, not some paranoid fantasy.

How far all of this is a new problem is an interesting question. I remember back in the late seventies watching a really bad documentary on the Shroud of Turin. Two or three 'scientists' were wheeled on to expound some rather unlikely theories as to its provenance. We were never told their areas of expertise; they could have been geologists, or astronomers, or climatologists, or anything. The magic word 'scientist' was supposed to make the viewers genuflect in reverence and assume that they must know what they were talking about. Mind you, none of them claimed to have received any visions.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Conspiracy theories in general are kind of a hobby of mine - studying them, that is, not expounding them. And it seems that when a piece of pseudo-history involves either conspiracy theories, religion, or best of all, both, it really seems to take off.

Part of this, I suppose, is very basic to human nature - we want to understand how things happen, and even more important, it seems, who is responsibleand if we can't find an answer that is obvious, we make one up - or latch onto the answer that someone else has made up that best suits our worldview. And where matters of belief are concerned, it seems to be very difficult for us to step back and apply reason.

So on the one hand, these aren't really new problems. I think that what concerns me most is that in a world of increasing access to information, it really "should" be getting better, not, as I fear, worse. We actually have the tools to gather, at the very least, enough information about all of these things to decide if there is doubt, even if we can't determine what was the truth.

The Shroud of Turin is an excellent example of that - there are a number of different theories about how it came to be, including the church-sanctioned one about it really being the shroud of Jesus, who left some kind of holy watermark behind him. But there is certainly enough evidence to suggest that this is not the the most likely scenario, even though no one can, given the information that is available, really be certain. Of course, if the Church allowed more testing to confirm or disprove many of the questions on both sides or the real-or-fraud controversy, we might get closer to a definitive answer - but it hasn't yet, and so we can't. but we can be sure that their is doubt about how the thing came to be, and none of the hypotheses have incontrovertable evidence behind them, to the best of my knowledge.

What I see around me is an increasingly huge amount of random information on a vast range of subjects, some crucial, some trivial, most somewhere inbetween, being released on a populace that is unprepared to evaluate or even estimate the realtive accuracy of all these pieces of information.

And if information is power, the inability to assess information is a prescription for vulnerability to the power of others.

And now I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist. ;-)

[pretzelsalt.livejournal.com]

I am glad to see this da vinci shit is driving other people insane as well.

I can't even flip to the "public broadcasting" channel on teevee these days because it will be some grail bullshit all spoken in the daddy white culture voice of "reason".

I need to add yer book journal.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean.

The frightening thing is that, because these topics are of interest to me (Arthurian and Grail literature, history of religions, conspiracy theories, etc - all "hobby" interests of mine), I find myself watching a lot of this crap becasue I want to find out just how wrong they've got it. Intellectual masochism, or something to that effect.

Re book journal - I will likely be adding a lot over the next few days - I read a lot, and I've been too busy at work lately (i.e., since January) to post about everything I wanted to, so there's a backlog of about 20 books that I plan to write at least some commentary on while I'm on vaction this week. My reading tastes are, to say the least, eclectic.

[pretzelsalt.livejournal.com]

"The frightening thing is that, because these topics are of interest to me (Arthurian and Grail literature, history of religions, conspiracy theories, etc - all "hobby" interests of mine), I find myself watching a lot of this crap becasue I want to find out just how wrong they've got it. Intellectual masochism, or something to that effect."

Me too. I'm a liar - I totally watched some special on "the real king arthur" last night.

*guilty*

I don't ever write about the books I read - it's an interesting idea. My tastes are all over the place as well. I have been having a dry reading year though. I have hundreds of books at home waiting for me to turn off the glowing idiot boxes. Right now I am reading.

The death of god the father - by Mary Daly
Braided Lives - Marge Piercy
Walking on water - derrick jensen
the will to change - bell hooks
indian killer - vine deloria
and
A Little Matter Of Genocide - ward churchill

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

So you read multiple books at the same time, too. I usually have at least two or three on the go at once myself, sometimes more, depending on what they are and how they're asking to be read.

I'm not sure why I started a book journal. Mostly for myself - it's foolish vanity to keep an internet journal on the assumption that anyone is going to read what you've written, even though one may hope that they will.

I kept a journal when I was younger, or possibly the closer work is commonplace book, because it wasn't a record so much of what I'd done,but things I'd heard or seen or read and wanted to remember. I think the book journal is somewhat of a similar intention. The books I read, even the fluffy, mind-candy books, affect me and make me think about things, and I want to have a place to collect, and recollect, some of those things.

[pretzelsalt.livejournal.com]

That makes sense - I kinda do the same thing in a very ADD scribbled corners on receipts, envelopes, and other bits of paper I will never see again.

I got the several books at once thing from my pops. When I was a kid if he made me mad I would move all his bookmarks. I secretly live in fear now that someone in my life will figure out that dirty trick.

The many books at a time thing is problematic right now though since I am reading so little. If you spread that many stories open in a huge swatch of time things get fuzzy.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I tend to deal with the "spreading stories over a huge swatch of time" by reading the fiction fairly quickly and only having one or two fiction books on the go at once. I find non-fiction is easier to read in small batches.

Of course, it also helps that I have a phenomenally fast reading rate. It's not uncommon for me to read a fair-sized novel in an evening. Non-fiction I take a little longer with, becasue I usually stop often to think about issues raised in the book, and perhaps discuss them with my partner if he's interested in the topic as well.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

I think the book journal's interesting.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm glad that someone else is enjoying my literary musings.