20th Century Treasure (And Dan Brown...)

In reading John Buchan’s 1910 novel Prester John, I was struck by its treatment of treasure hunting. The appearance of native treasure in an imperialist is hardly noteworthy; it’s been a regular feature in the literature that I’ve read this semester for my course in British ‘stories for boys.’ Treasure also appears memorably in Treasure Island and, rather improbably, in H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines. Arguably, turn-of-the-century (20th century), Western attitudes to treasure are stripped bare in Prester John, when the narrator Davey Crawfurd explains:

‘I believe that every man has deep in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour. I lusted for that treasure of jewels and gold. Once I had been high-minded, and thought of my duty to my country, but in that night ride I fear that what I thought of was my duty to enrich David Crawfurd.’ (from Prester John)

Crawfurd’s self-indulgence with regard to treasure is almost startlingly open. But what struck me in thinking about this moment in the novel is the assumption that the treasure is out there something. The treasure is consciously associated with empire; one must go out and find the treasure in these foreign countries and native lands.

I won’t pretend that I have made a formal overview of 19th-century literature and concocted that thesis; one might well argue with the claim that 19th-century notions of treasure were rooted in the empire, in the lands of the ‘other.’ In fact, it seems an obvious point that these attitudes towards treasure within narrative storytelling lasted long into the 20th-century. It’s as easy as pointing to Indiana Jones and his treasure-hunting pretenses of scholarly archaeology.

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That said, I think it’s worth noting that there seems—in my mind—to have been a slight shift in attitudes treasure over the past few decades. I’m thinking specifically of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code; I’m harping on the novel not simply for the sake of my argument, but because it is one of the best-selling novels of this (still-young) century and has occupied a large part of the public imagination for some time. Dan Brown’s novel notably doesn’t send its ‘symbologist’ protagonist Robert Langdon to the far reaches of the earth; it sends him to Paris, London, and Edinburgh (technically, the village of Roslin, but who are we kidding? Let’s say Edinburgh!). I think it would be a stretch to cite any of these places as possessing any real kind of confrontation with the ‘other’ in same way as Davey Crawfurd’s adventures.

The final ‘treasure’ (if you feel tempted to cite the Holy Grail in that manner) isn’t buried off in the Sahara or in some stretch of South American jungle…it’s in the Louvre…in the center of Paris. The treasure is no longer outside of Western society; it has become embedded within. The same goes for the embattled, Nicholas Cage-vehicle National Treasure franchise, especially the first film, in which Benjamin Gates et al discover treasure in the middle of freakin’ Manhattan as the subway system rattles the walls around them. 


Of course, the plot resides entirely in historical fantasyland, but it’s worth noting the otherworldly unlikelihood of the premise; does anyone believe—besides film-marketing-gurus Jon Turteltaub and Jerry Bruckheimer and small children—that this treasure den beneath Trinity Church could remain undisturbed for nigh-200 years, what with all the fun tunneling New Yorkers have done over the years?

Anyways, believability aside, National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code herald what might be a new turn in ‘treasure storytelling’; the closer to home the treasure is—the better. It’s no longer about confronting the ‘other’ and retrieving the treasure from some hellish jungle; now it seems to be about confronting ‘us’ and lording the rich find over the innocent souls who ride the No. 5 to work every morning, unaware that several yards away (twice a day!) sits the treasure of a lifetime…