So, to sum up, the first law of Brown’s success is the author’s losing himself in the circuits of his fiction and his return to a novelized reality.
The second law is the vocation to plagiarism going global implies erasing local identities, and this includes the authorship of others
Although Dan Brown’s novels have widely known around the world, Calabrese and Rossi think that their success is merely borrowing the power of global
capitalism. This implicit statement is interesting because it means that the quality of Dan Brown’s novel should be questioned. Furthermore, Calabrese and Rossi state
that: The experience of reading each narrative sequence
in Dan Brown’s novels is characterized by the rapidity of involvement of our interpretive
schemata and emotional response. But in his fiction rapidity joins immersivity. Each micro-sequence carefully avoids to overwhelm the
reader with the cryptologic and cognitive complexity the plot carries along: the writer manages to fool the reader about the complexity of his
texts
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. Calabrese and Rossi seem to resent the success of Dan Brown’s novel, but on
the other hand, they do not deny the fact that the stories of those novels are the story that most people would love. They say that it is natural for people to love riddle.
Therefore, those novels are junk, yet very smart in the term of reader’s psychology. The discussion above aims to give a general overview of the different opinions
on Dan Brown’s novels particularly related to the theme, setting, characters, and time-frame. By understanding the general overview about the elements, the readers
can picture the ideas developed in Inferno. In addition, it also can help the readers to
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S. Calabrese and R. Rossi, “Dan Brown: Narrative Tourism and “Time Packaging””, International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 37
acknowledge and be involved in the discussion of this research since this research uses one of Dan Brown’s novels entitled Inferno.
2. Nothingness
Fight Club is one of the most familiar existential themes and one of the greatest American novels. Robert Bennet on Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club tries to explore
that anxiety of all the characters toward life. He states that “The critical task of this paper, therefore, is to explore both how Fight Club engages existentialism and how it
also subtly adapts existentialism to a new historical context in the age of postmodern capitalism”
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. In Fight Club, Palahniuk uses a narrator called Jack. He is a man with a
psychological problem and he certainly love to “taste” death. For so many times, he
endangers himself in order to feel alive, which in certain opinion it is something abnormal. His life-threatening disease, then, leads him into a club where he finds
other people who have the same “problem”. Palahniuk wrote:
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
We are not special. We are not crap, either.
We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, “No that’s not right.” Yeah. Well. Whatever. You
can’t teach God anything.
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Robert Bennet, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club”, Stirrings Still The International Journal of Existential Literature 2. 2
FallWinter, 2005: 68
The anxiety of the characters is highlighted as the major theme of this novel. Based on the cited part, Jack and all the member of fight club have a unique view
towards God and their life, an existential view. Although Palahniuk novel is not an absurd fiction, the story embodies the spirit of existentialism where man is anxious
with their own existence and try to seek their answer by their own way. Bennet uses two of the most popular themes in existential philosophy;
nothingness and anxiety. He sees all the character based on those two themes. Bennet writes “Jack and Tyler both find immense pleasure in their private troubles and turn
to violence precisely because they find it humanizing rather than dehumanizing”
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. The element that makes Fight Club an existential novel is the restlessness of its
character. Jack and Tyler both suffer from the nothingness and anxiety. They both do not feel the excitement of life when they don’t do something dangerous.
Furthermore, instead of using one particular character as his research subject, Bennet insists on using every single character in the novel and determines all of their
action related to the theory that he uses. He tries to see the whole novel as an existential novel and tries to connect it with postmodern capitalism. Bennet connects
the existential perspective with Marxism. This work shows that existential philosophy, as a medium of exploring literary work, can be combined with other
literary theory. The elaboration that develops by Robert Bennet shows that it can be such a
great exploration if other writers can find a perfect combination of existentialism and
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R. Bennet, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club”, Stirrings Still The International Journal of Existential Literature, 69
other theory. Besides the theory combining, this works shows a character of analysis that appears in the existential literary critic. In this work, Robert Bennet explores the
nothingness, despair and absurdity of the characters. He states that “Within such an existentialist context, Fight Club
’s recurring explorations of suffering, death, nothingness, and absurdity take on a very different meaning that makes these themes
more integral than tangential elements of the text”
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. Therefore, this work is very important for my thesis as the example of the
analytical form. Bennet’s work shows how to extract ideas of existentialism by looking at the action and translate it into an
existential analysis. The other study that explores certain literary work through the scope of
existentialism, especially based on the idea of nothingness, is the study of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Happy Days. Tjen Tan uses that concept of nothingness to
see both plays. Those two plays are listed as the part of Theater of the Absurd and have been seen as two very best in the realm. Those plays are usually seen through
the scope of absurdity, but Tan insists on seeing it in the scope of nothingness. He states that:
Beckett’s drama is based on his perception of human condition, that is, being born and mostly living in pain, suffering ordeals, a short rough and
unpleasant existence. Man’s needs and desires are all reduced. That is to say, for Beckett, there is neither meaning nor explanation; there is and
there remains only nothingness, which puts him close to the Existentialists
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.
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R. Bennet, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club”, Stirrings Still The International Journal of Existential Literature, 71
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T. Tijen, “Existentialism and Samuel Beckett’s Two Plays: Endgame and Happy Days”, 21
Tan exposes the notion of nothingness through the mechanic and words of the play. H
e states that “Becket’s play is primarily focus on depicting the men’s existence”
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. Becket’s characters are all trapped in their consciousness. It leads them into indescribable circumstance, which is nothingness. Tan argues that most of the
dialogues expose the notion of nothingness through its word selection and form of sentences. He uses the absurdity of the dialogue to portray an ambiguous anxiety
which leads all the character into the state of nothingness. This work is important to my thesis because it briefly explains the idea of
nothingness and how it can be extracted from a dialogue. Tan provides theories and techniques that are very helpful for this thesis. Since Bertrand Zobrist also employs
certain absurdity, the theory and the analytical techniqu e that used in Tan’s work will
be very helpful for my thesis. However, Tan uses the mechanic of the play as the element of his research because it contains absurdity. However, there is no absurd
dialogue in Dan’s Brown’s Inferno. Therefore this thesis will analyze its mechanic. This thesis will focus on the event in the story.
3. Anguish and Anxiety
One of the major themes in existentialism is anguish. In the conception, alienation can be seen as the effect of total freedom, but freedom itself is always a
problematic state for men even when they do not realize that this state is, in some points, very problematic. One probably suffers from the perplexity of self and the
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T. Tijen, “Existentialism and Samuel Beckett’s Two Plays: Endgame and Happy Days”, 24.
anguish of freedom. Katrin Dahlbäck on her take on Harry Potter exposes a combination between existentialism and Freudian psychology.
This thesis is created for Master Degree Project at Stockholm University. It consists of a comprehensive character analysis of the protagonist and antagonist in
the Harry Potter series. The idea of this thesis is to see Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort as individuals that represent the ideology of the writer. The important part
of this study is to see Harry and Voldemort as individuals that trapped in their destiny because of their past life. There are some circumstances where harry expose the
notion of anguish. Dhalback states that: The paralysing anxiety one feels when confronted with death is one of
the basic existential facts that one must accept in order to exist completely. I
n Rowling’s series, this is most clearly symbolised by Dementors: creatures who “suck the happiness out of a place” Rowling,
Prisoner 76 as they cause “a person to relive the worstn memories of their life” Order 33. In order for this portrayal to be effective, Harry’s
reaction to the Dementors is the most powerful one by far. In existential psychology it is claimed that “[a]nxiety shows that we are in the presence
of our supreme dread, anguish
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.
Dhalback sees Harry’s reaction when he meets the Dementor as the reaction that is affected by his anguish. She uses such condition as the exhibit of her analysis.
Dahlbäck sees Harry Potter and Lord Voldermort as an individual that should be seen through both existentialism and psychology. The highlighted part of this dissertation
is the anxiety of death. She states that “By accepting his inevitable death, Harry has arguably confronted nonbeing and the anxiety that comes with it, and is able to live
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Katrin Dahlbäck, “The True Master of Death: An Existential Reading of Harry Potter” Doctoral Program in Stockholm University, 2015 18
