| Introduction |
| Chapter one. | "The Da Vinci Code" Seen Through "the Asti Spumante Code" |
| | § 1. | Along and alongside the "servile path" |
| | § 2. | "Accuracy of detail" and the use of abbreviations |
| | § 3. | Proper names |
| | § 4. | Foreign words and phrases |
| | § 5. | Ecclesiastical phraseology |
| | § 6. | "Artistic" descriptions |
| | § 7. | Specialized information |
| | § 8. | Symbols, codes and anagrams |
| Chapter two. | "The Da Vinci Code" Seen Through "The Va Dinci Cod" |
| | § 1. | An undisguised challenge |
| | § 2. | "Accuracy of detail" and the use of abbreviations |
| | § 3. | Proper names |
| | § 4. | Foreign words and phrases |
| | § 5. | Ecclesiastical phraseology |
| | § 6. | English words and phraseology misapplied and/or explained |
| | § 7. | "Artistic" descriptions |
| | § 8. | Specialized information |
| | § 9. | Symbols, codes and anagrams |
| Conclusion |
| List of Literature |
The study of literary texts has always been one of the main aims
of philology. Scholars kept trying to explain the specific
effect such texts produce,
1) singling out the linguistic devices the author of the text
employs,
2) concentrating on the thematic and structural features of it
and discussing the turns of the plot and the possible literary
influences the author of the text could have experienced, or
3) taking into account simultanesouly the thematic and stylistic
peculiarities of a text in order to understand it in its
entirety (that is, working along the lines of linguopoetics [11;
12; 14; 28; 29; 30] -- a branch of philological studies aimed
at assessing the role and function of stylistically marked
linguistic elements in used in an artistic texts for rendering
its imaginative content and for producing aesthetic effect).
In all the three cases just specified comparison as a universal
method of any investigation [26; 31] is implicitly or explicitly
there. Only when speaking about the plot and the structure of
a text the scholar may do without any allusions to the previously
created written matter; even stylistic analysis pure and simple
defies the "rediscovery" of the devices known since antiquity
[13; etc.], while placing the text within the existing literary
tradition is simply unthinkable if a scholar does not explicitly
compare it with the works constituting the said tradition [39].
When one carries out the thematic and stylistic analysis of
a text simultaneously, comparison becomes indispensable for
a slightly different reason. True, it is possible to rely merely
on the lists of devices suggested by Aristotle and his numerous
followers and to describe the content as such, but as in this
more delicate kind of analysis one is expected to assess the
relative significance of linguistic elements for rendering
a certain kind of plot, there always remains a danger of
overlooking something and of overestimating something else.
Hence the analysis initially conceived of a as means of
achieving a better understanding of a text may result in
complete subjectivity and would in no way contribute to creating
a comprehensive commentary to a text.
In contrast to the situations when scholars discuss the history
of ideas the way they are reflected in the content of a text and
when they may disregard the genre and the stylistic affinity of
the texts under comparison, linguopoetic analysis presupposes
a more careful and subtle choice of texts to be confronted [17].
For the confrontation to be at all successful one must make sure
that there exists a considerable thematic and stylistic
similarity between the texts [15], because otherwise what the
investigation would finally bring one to would be no more than
a very approximate list of disarranged features found in one text
and most conspicuously absent in the other. The proverbial
subjectivity of philological papers containing a fair amount of
value judgements in this case will obviously be there, and the
scholar will make himself an easy target for the critical
remarks of those who insist on barring axiology from literary
investigations at all costs [19].
To cope with the above-mentioned problems members of the English
Department of the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State
University have long and successfully been trying to elaborate
methods of philological investigations allowing one to carry out
the research with the minimal subjectivity and with the optimal
results [12; 27; 46; etc.]. Their joint contribution has been
described and further amplified in the third part of the
doctoral thesis by the author of the present paper [14] where
linguopoetic confrontation as a special method of philological
research is described. This kind of confrontation is aimed at
a better understanding of the aesthetic peculiarities of the
confronted texts and should be applied to texts bearing
considerable stylistic and thematic affinity to each other. The
texts under comparison may be totally independent from each
other, though some of them could have been written much earlier
than the others (hence the two variants of confrontation -- in
diachrony [15] and in synchrony [15; 16]), or one of these texts
should definitely be treated as "primary" while other texts
used for the comparison fall under the category of "secondary"
ones [4; 5; 6; etc.], these latter including translation,
adaptation and parody.
When linguopoetic confrontation is based on primary and
secondary texts, it is only in the case of translations that we
may seriously consider the aesthetic potential of the secondary
text [12]. Adaptation and parody are of interest only in so much
as they allow one to go deeper into the peculiarities of the
primary text, their own aesthetic merits being somewhat dubious,
to say the least of it [14]. The text of the parody may be
amusing, but still there is a great likelihood that it will look
absurd, however talented its author may be, if the reader does
not have a preliminary knowledge of the original text. But for
all its obvious limitations, this kind of confrontation is quite
productive, because it gives one a fairly clear idea of what the
artistically significant sides of the primary text are.
In this paper we would like to concentrate on the confrontation
of
1) the now very popular novel "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan
Brown [33] first published in 2003 by Doubleday Fiction and by
May 2006 translated into 44 languages and having more than 60
million copies in print (elsewhere in the paper it is referred
to as DVC) and the two parodies of it both published in
2005 --
2) "The Asti Spumante Code" by Toby Clements [34; ASC] and
3) "The Va Dinci Cod" by A.R.R.R.Roberts [42; VDC].
In the title of the work we have deliberately avoided using the
term "linguopoetic confrontation", for it would imply the
unnecessary debate concerning the aesthetic value of the primary
text at least and provoke an even more intricate discussion
about the limitations of linguopoetics and it being appropriate
to apply the term to the analysis of a text of this kind [12;
14; 18]. If the paper had been devoted to the elucidation of
these points, it would have been impossible to ignore the issue,
but the aim of the present investigation is different. What we
are striving for is to show how confronting parodies with the
source text may help the reader to have a better idea of the
original, its advantages and drawbacks alike. "The Da Vinci
Code" being so incredibly popular, it is only natural for
a philologist to try and specify the more significant thematic and
stylistic features of the primary text by Dan Brown and to give
a tentative explanation of why it was received with such an
enthusiasm by the reading public; to achieve this, using the
secondary texts mentioned may be of great help. It should be
noted specially and emphatically that in a linguistic paper like
this considering the thematic properties of a text is not
something self-sufficient and that style itself is not treated
as something subservient; rather the reverse: style here is
understood very broadly, not merely as a sum total of the
metasemiotically significant elements of the text, but as a way
of rendering a particular kind of content including the
alternation and interconnection of narrative types within the
text. The thematic side of the texts will be taken into account
only in so long as it helps to reveal the linguistic specificity
of the narration, and not for its own sake.
In the subsequent parts of the paper we are going to
1) give the general description of the texts under
comparison,
2) speak about the thematic and stylistic features of the
three texts, comparing the primary one with each of the two
parodies and then, hopefully,
3) arrive at certain conclusions concerning the nature of
the popularity of Dan Brown's novel.
As both "The Asti Spumante Code" and "The Va Dinci Cod" are
detective novels in which action is developed against a certain
historical background (real or imaginative) and as both of them
reproduce the stylistic features of the primary text, there is
absolutely no need for us to go deeper into the history or
theory of parody here -- a question that has been most
thoroughly studied in a number of philological papers [2; 3; 7;
20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 37; 38; etc.] -- and to explain the
subtle distinction between stylization, periphrasis and parody
proper [5; 6]. The authors of both secondary texts do not merely
use some features of Dan Brown's style to create an independent
artistic text (stylization) or to apply them to the description
of reality usually shown with the help of some other linguistic
means (periphrasis); the two secondary texts are definitely
"about" Dan Brown's novel, they are based on it both
stylistically and thematically, hence they may be treated as
parodies proper [5; 6] and used within the type of confrontation
we have discussed above.
The book, very naturally, is meant for all those interested in
matters of style and parody in general, and in Dan Brown's novel
and the parodies of it in particular, but apart from this it
will hopefully have a more specific application. Students of
stylistics are too often provided with manuals giving them ample
theoretical information and a relatively meagre practical
demonstration of how the theoretical postulates may be used in
the analysis of concrete texts. In the present manual we
deliberately tried to reduce as far as possible the volume of
theory offered and further on to turn entirely to the analysis
of protracted literary works. We hope that the present paper
will not be completely useless to the students of English who
want to master the elements of stylistically and thematically
(linguopoetically) oriented research.
Andrey Alexandrovich LIPGART (b. 1970)
Doctor of Philology (1996), Professor of the Department of English
Linguistics, Philological Faculty, Moscow State Lomonosov University
(1998).
The author of over 90 papers on the general theory of linguistics, on
functional stylistics, linguopoetics and foreign language teaching:
"Linguopoetic Confrontation: Theory and Method" (1994), "Methods of
Linguo-poetic Investigation" (1997), "The Foundations of Linguopoetics"
(URSS, 2006). Among his recently published papers the more significant ones
are those devoted to studying Shakespeare's creative work (the articles
"Concerning the Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets" (2004), ""The
Shakespeare Problem", the Shakespeare Canon and the Style of Shakespeare"
(2005) and others).
Lipgart Andrej Aleksandrovich
Doktor filologicheskikh nauk, professor kafedri anglijskogo yazikoznaniya filologicheskogo fakul'teta MGU imeni M. V. Lomonosova. Avtor bolee 100 pechatnikh rabot po problemam yazikovedcheskoj teorii, funktsional'noj stilistiki, lingvopoetiki, prepodavaniya inostrannikh yazikov, istorii anglijskogo yazika i literaturi. Sredi nikh: «Lingvopoeticheskoe sopostavlenie: teoriya i metod», «Metodi lingvopoeticheskogo issledovaniya», «Osnovi lingvopoetiki» (M.: URSS), «Parody and Style» (M.: URSS), «Ol'ga Sergeevna Akhmanova: Ocherk zhizni i nauchnogo tvorchestva» (M.: URSS).
