The Da Pinchi Code

It is the sign of our times that we have reached a saturation point in our social history that everything that could be said, has already been said, and we are now fighting over how we’ve said what we said.

Postmodern theorists will happily tell you that humanity’s innovation and creativity is no longer possible in this postmodern age, and all that’s left is imitation. They are recently, I hear, excitedly planning to throw a party to discuss the latest developments surrounding the drama unfolding at the London High Court as a prime example.

If you haven’t already given in to the pressure, you might as well submit to the temptation and get your copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code since you won’t escape it anyway. 40 million copies and counting have already been sold, a film starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Sir Ian McKellen is set to be released in May, and surprise, surprise, it’s splashed across all the newspapers too.

Brown has been charged of stealing his plot from the authors Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, of an earlier book titled The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. For those who haven’t succumbed, the now infamous plot is that Jesus did not die, but married Mary Magdelene, the prostitute he saved, and had a child with her, whose line is protected by the Knights Templar and whose secret is desperately hushed up by the Roman Catholic Church. If you think that’s a lot to copy, well, apparently Leigh and Baigent think so too and now want a slice of the 45-million-pounds-in-sales-a-year pie.

Worthy of a blockbuster plot of its own, Leigh and Baigent are suing their own publisher, Random House and have decoded anagrams of their surnames as evidence of direct reference in Brown’s book to them. The villain in Da Vinci Code is a character named Leigh (from Richard Leigh) Teabing (from re-arranging Baigent). It does strike me peculiar, however, that if Brown was consciously plagiarizing their book, HBHG, (which by the way sounds more like a different strain of the avian flu virus than a serious acronym in a high court case), it would seem pure stupidity that he should make that reference. It could be tongue-in-cheek, and it seems more the latter as Brown also mentions HBHG in his novel. The character Teabing owns the book and quotes it as being on “sound” premises. (Teabing on Teabing could be the next title)

As the future of literary plagiarism is being battled out in the courts, it seems to me the verdict is already pretty clear. Intertextuality has become a prevalent characteristic of our modern times. Stories in the public domain have been passed down, used, recycled and reinvented over and over again that to begin drawing finite boundaries around ideas would be a futile exercise. Copyright, as counsel for the defendant Mr Baldwin said in court, does not protect ideas. It only protects the expression and treatment of ideas. That, itself, is hard to determine.

Leigh and Baigent are fighting a losing battle. Authors throughout history have used biblical or historical references extensively, or even borrowed from other writers. For example, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were experimental writers who often drew references from other literary works. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Bunyan and even Disney drew on many public domain stories to create their works. If one has to draw the line around an idea now, where will that lead to? Where will it stop?

Frederic Jameson will tell you the only merit for living artists today is to acknowledge that they’ve used something that existed before in their works, because that will turn your art from pastiche to parody. And perhaps that was what Brown was doing. Not lifting, but intertextualising, acknowledging, and reinventing old material as his own.

I do wonder when Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were writing the four gospels, whether any one of them said to other ‘Oi! You can’t say it in this way, because I’ve already said it.’ But that is beside the point. Together, they drew for us a bigger picture. And that is what authors, ultimately, do for us readers – painting a bigger picture of the imagination.

At the end of the day, if Leigh and Baigent lose their case, they will still stand to gain by increasing sales of HBHG on the back of Brown’s DVC success. If I’m completely wrong, and Leigh and Baigent win their case, it will certainly cause repercussions in the literary world. But really, a few million pounds in damages is hardly going to make a dent in Dan ranked-12th-richest-celebrity-by-Forbes Brown’s fortune. In fact, all this high court drama is set to only make The Da Vinci Code the most widely read book on the planet. Probably even over-taking the Bible.
Now, that’s a cracking good story.