I’ve just finished reading two books, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Francesca Lia Block’s Psyche in a Dress.

I’m not a big fan of thrillers and the The Da Vinci Code is not the sort of book I’m generally drawn to.  I was reading it up primarily as background research for a bit of gay porn I’m hoping to write and I honestly didn’t care for it.  I’m actually rather baffled by it’s status as a best seller.  Brown’s writing is really awful.  He inserts present tense blocks of information into the story, jumps in and out of random character’s heads in an awkward way and his characters are painfully flat.  We know exactly two things about his hero, Robert Langdon-- he fell in a well as a child and he wears a Mickey Mouse watch.  Other then that Langdon reacts to things that happen around him and knows stuff.  Some of this stuff he knows is quite interesting, but he certainly isn’t.  Sophie Neveu, who doesn’t really know much of anything, is even less interesting.  Her only distinguishing characteristic seems to be that she’s a woman and therefore supposed to be representational of Woman in a book that talks a lot about the sacred feminine but doesn’t seem to understand it at all. 

This of course is my biggest problem with The Da Vinci Code.  Its conception of the sacred feminine only extends to women’s reproductive faculties.  Motherhood is an amazing thing, but it’s only a part of the divine feminine, only one of the Goddesses many faces.  The Maiden and Crone, Sibyll and Warrior, Healer and Queen, the vengeful Fury and consuming Kali have no place in Brown’s conception of the Goddess.  In his novel, Woman is significant only in that she is the vessel for man, the chalice that carries on his bloodline. 

Sophie may have a name that means wisdom, but she needs male experts, Langdon and Sir Leigh Teabing, to reveal to her the divine feminine.  I found Sophie’s ignorance both unrealistic and very annoying.  The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003 and describes Sophie as being in her early 30’s, which makes her my contemporary.  She’s a sophisticated, cultured and well educated woman who was raised in Paris by the head of a secret society dedicated to the Goddess.  I was raised by fairly devoted Christians in an isolated household in Upstate New York.  So how is it that at 17 I knew most of the Goddess-lore that comes as a surprise to the adult Sophie?  Further the book mentions her being vaguely aware of the controversy surrounding The Last Temptation of Christ, which her Grandfather was involved in, when she was a “schoolgirl”. I remember this controversy and the issues being debated very well.  And I was in the middle of nowhere at the time, getting only one channel of television with no family members directly involved. 

Another thing that bothered me about the book is the extremely lurid and hateful language Brown used to describe not only Silas, a fanatical monk who is an albino, but Sir Leigh who uses crutches due to polio.  Brown writes about the physical abnormalities of both these characters is a manner intended to arouse horror and disgust in the reader and frankly its pretty offensive.  When Leigh set’s off metal detectors for instance, Brown goes on about how Leigh doesn’t have to worry about the security guards finding his gun because there’s no way they would search his “crippled” body.  Granted these aren’t nice people, Silas is a murderer and Leigh an evil mastermind, but it strikes me as very ugly the way in which they’re treated as monstrous deformities by their creator. 

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Francesca Lia Block’s Psyche in a Dress.  A novel/poem concerned wholly with a woman’s growth into herself and all the different roles she takes on before she finds her own divinity.  Switching between poetry and prose, Block tells the story of a woman who in the setting of modern day Los Angeles manifests the passive heroines of Greek mythology—Echo, Eurydice, Persephone- while simultaneously being Psyche, on a quest to make herself worthy of the love she lost. 

Block’s recasting of classical myth into pop archetypes is sometimes flat—Kurt Cobain as Orpheus done in by Maenad!Courtney Love is pretty glaringly unoriginal—and sometimes fascinating—as with Psyche’s relationship to her father, a film director who makes movies where his wife and then his daughter is tortured, raped and murdered.  This particular bit remained me of Dario Argento, the Italian filmmaker who cast his wife Daria Nicolodi and then his daughter, Asia, in his increasingly graphic horror movies.   Asia Argento went on to become a director in her own right, as does Psyche, though I somehow doubt Francesca Lia Block’s heroine makes movies like Asia Argento’s quasi-porno The Scarlet Diva and her lurid The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.  That wouldn’t quite fit in with Block’s vision of self-realization. 

This vision can sometimes get cloyingly hippy dippy new age lite and sometimes Block gets too caught up in prettiness writing pages and paging of meaningless decorative surface.  She seems to be at her best when writing about seductive evil and poisonous beauty. 

Currently I’m re-reading John Nathan’s Mishima, a biography of Yukio Mishima a Japanese writer who in 1970 seized a government building with his private army and committed ritual suicide.  I originally read Mishima back in college and I’ve always felt a certain kinship to his dark, forbidden fantasies and his hunger to reinvent himself.  The chapters on his early life focus on the stifling environment in which he was raised in.  I was really struck by a quote in which he speaks of how even in this highly regulated environment (or perhaps because of it) he nurtured violent sexual fantasies.  “I was able to fly at the Hell in my mind no matter how closely my grandmother and my father clipped my wings.”  This really reminded me of my own adolescence.  I was raised with almost no information on or exposure to sexuality yet when I was about twelve or thirteen I found myself having sadomasochistic fantasies, usually about men being raped or tortured as well as fantasies about lesbianism.  It really created a split in me.  I was ,  leading a life where sex existed only as something to be disgusted by while at the same time my head filled with these things that I was both ashamed of and thrilled by.