Dan Brown and Euripides

Oliver Harris begins his TLS review of Theodore Ziolkowski’s Lure of the Arcane by pondering why two million people went out to buy Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol the first week it was out: 

“If those who rushed to consume this tale of ancient mysteries and secret societies were not buying it for its sinuous prose, might their enthusiasm be due to what Ziolkowski describes as the lure of the arcane? The arcane – from Latin arca, signifying a chest in which something is locked away – describes both esoteric knowledge and the closed, clandestine groups that guard it, and it has intrigued writers and their audiences from the age of Greek tragedy to modern conspiracy thrillers. Ziolkowski’s study constitutes an erudite, thought-provoking argument for considering this literary engagement as a sub-genre in its own right; its evolution, like the evolution of the cults and lodges it depicts, reflecting both historical circumstance and a more fundamental human fascination.”

The tradition Brown represents goes back, Ziolkowski says, to Euripides’  Bacchae: “Euripides, no less than Brown, set about exploiting a well-established public interest in cults, in his case the subversive threat of mystical cults in Athens during the fifth century BC. Unlike The Lost Symbol, however, Euripides’ Bacchae is concerned with the lure itself: the hunger to penetrate mysteries from which we’re excluded. The growing desire of the King’s son, Pentheus, to spy on the Dionysiac rites that are occupying Thebes womenfolk arises from their threat to established order, but also something much more profound: a voyeuristic craving. The result – his death, torn apart by his own mother while she is lost in Bacchic revelry – leaves us with a cult that is as dangerous as it is liberating. It is an ambivalence that will define literature’s response to its captivating, arcane cousin.”

The tradition continues through legends about the Templars, the Masons, the Illumninati, and the secret Jewish conspiracy “documented” by the Protocols. The book culminates with a discussion of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, “the literary counterpart to Ziolkowski’s own study,” in which Eco reveals the secret lure of the arcane: “the most powerful secret is a secret without a content.”