s everyone knows by now, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is about a detective hero (Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon), a murder, and a freightload of arcane and sensational speculations about secret societies (Opus Dei, the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion) and their mischievous, malicious role in world history. The novel also seeks to educate its readers about the (factual) role of gnosticism in the early Christian church and the (dubious) erotic relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This narrative line culminates in the notion that the Holy Grail is actually a metaphor for the holy bloodline created by Christ and Magdalene and perpetuated in the descendants of the Merovingian kings. Thus the novel's most sensational suggestion (aside from fantasies about Jesus and Mary in flagrante) is that people still walk the earth with the messianic DNA.

What The Da Vinci Code has created should interest us, but not because Brown is right about Da Vinci or the infamies of the Catholic Church or powerful secret societies or the real role of Mary Magdalene as apostle and lover to the Christ. The Da Vinci Code is important as an expression of a desire for a spirituality that cannot be had within the confines of the institutionalized church. More simply yet, it is the popular expression of a desire for a kind of meaningfulness to life that is missing for most of us. And certainly, it is the scandalous expression of a willingness to be disobedient to achieve the heretical end of a salvation outside the confines of the church. Through this novel we express our fundamental disgust with our institutionalized lives, and we suggest shocking things that we might previously have imagined were unsayable. The novel offers the unexpected opportunity to flee the dominant culture of Truths-That-Make-No-Sense for the Secret, the Unsayable, and the True. From my point of view, there's nothing wrong with imagining that something's fraudulent about the way our lives are ordered, nothing wrong with wanting to go beyond the illusory in order to know the truth. Beyond the scandal and the sensation and the heavy-handed fiction, it is this assumption of our shared sense of spiritual fraud and the assumption that we're willing to think heretically in order to escape that fraud that makes Brown's deepest appeal to his readers. He promises us liberation, and our eagerness to take up his offer reveals much about our spiritual as well as our political condition.

In other words, the interest in gnosticism and alternative forms of Christianity that The Da Vinci Code has stimulated holds the possibility for a kind of seriousness that few other creations of popular culture can claim. But as with most "serious" matters in mass culture, the opportunity to have real consequence is abolished in the same moment that it is extended. The Code and its many commentaries (like Dan Burstein's Secrets of the Code) offer two contradictory possibilities. It is the expression of an authentic longing, and it is the incredulous insistence that we can't really mean what we seem to be saying. To really mean this business about the hidden history and the unconfessed malice of the Catholic Church, about the relationship of a secret society like Opus Dei to the administration of the federal government, is too scary to be taken entirely seriously. So our anxiety about seriously proposing the critique as an alternative to the religio-corporate present, is immediately effaced by the assurance that—not to worry!—it's just pulp fiction. It's just a scandal/commodity. It obliges us to nothing more than a familiar and ephemeral enthusiasm and a willingness to stimulate a "market" (in this case, the ever beleaguered book market that staggers from year to year only on the strength of the next Harry Potter adventure, novelistic sensations like the Code, and tell-alls by disgraced politicians and celebrities).

Let's take, as an instance of the Code's ambiguity, the revelations about Mary Magdalene and her sexual relationship with Jesus. She represents, on the one hand, a critique of the church's misogynist and patriarchal past. Moreover, she offers not only a secret history but also a secret and erotic spirituality. But she also represents the scandalous and merely lurid idea that she and Jesus did the nasty together. Which option is it that has the greater power to explain the interest in a book like The Da Vinci Code? In some ways, the two aspects work together, entertaining and instructing as Horace put it in his Ars Poetica. But I would contend what Horace never suggested: The entertainment makes the instruction possible, but it also destroys its meaning. The Da Vinci Code makes political and spiritual notions of great potential power broadly available but only with the tacit assurance that these theses will not be made real. They will never be nailed to a church door. It's like the Mission: Impossible message that self-destructs after a first reading. It's the cultural equivalent of computer code on a CD that makes it possible to play the CD but not to reproduce it. Cultural meaning is created but only on the condition that its impact will be carefully limited.

Let me put this another way. The authentic social function of the imagination operating through the arts (especially the novel) is to submit to destruction the standing assumptions of the moment but then to redeem that destruction through a process of rebuilding and reimagining. That's what art does. As Wallace Stevens put it, "Poetry is a destructive force." It destroys and redeems, wipes the slate clean and then re-creates. But a work like The Da Vinci Code does just the opposite. It first holds out the possibility of a vast reimagining only in order to betray it in the end through a re-establishment of the familiar (in this case, the jaded world of the bourgeois scandal/commodity). In short, it suggests redemption without ever having the courage to destroy anything. In the end, its real formal function is to reassure, to console, to make one comfortable not with the new and blasphemous but precisely with the most familiar: the pulp of the pleasure-commodity.

Thus, The Da Vinci Code's seriousness is deeply unserious. Its promise of truth is broken in the moment it is made. The culture's habit of finding "seriousness" acceptable only if offered by people who are finally not serious is yet another way that the culture makes certain that nothing alarming will come of our newfound interest in heretical ideas. On the other hand, this is all only as it should be in a culture that believes it can learn about theology by reading a pulp novel.

Ah, dysfunction.

Curtis White's books include The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves and a new novel, America's Magic Mountain.