For a while, I thought it odd that no books had been shown or mentioned in season 5 of Lost. Then, a doozy appeared when we saw Ben Linus reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in the episode “316.” I enjoyed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the stories I’d read in Dubliners so I gave it a read. Woof.
Ulysses is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set on a single day in Dublin in 1904. Leopold Bloom travels the streets, going about his business, all the while worrying about an affair that his estranged wife may be having at 4:00. Intersecting Bloom’s path is Stephen Dedalus, a young poet whose father is an acquaintance of Bloom’s.
The genius of Ulysses lies not in the story but in the telling. Joyce delves deeper into the consciousnesses of his characters than any other writer I’ve read. At times it seems as though his intent is to record every stray thought that passes through their heads, a technique that sometimes leads to tedium and sometimes the most powerful of insights.
Each chapter is presented in a different style, thus creating slightly different perspectives from which to view Leopold and Stephen. Additionally, each chapter is meant to suggest certain events in Odysseus’ journey back to Ithaca, which Joyce accomplishes at the symbolic level.
By the end of the book, Leopold returns from his wanderings and, though she has had an affair, reclaims his wife from “the suitors.” It’s nothing like Odysseus reclaiming Penelope from her suitors. It’s much more ambiguous and anticlimactic, but therein lies Joyce’s genius.
I admit that this is only the most cursory and superficial rundown of a truly deep book, but it’s not something I can thoroughly describe in a short post where the point is to figure out what it has to do with Lost.
Once again, Lost has led me to great literature and a book I might not otherwise have read. It’s a complicated book, but a joy to read. It’s one of those that throughout reading, I kept wondering, “This is genius. How does a person think to write a book like this?”
My wife suggested absinthe.
On to Lost.
Season 5 is mainly about the return of Ben Linus and the Oceanic Six to the island. It is a long journey full of twists and turns and as with Penelope in Ithaca, the island has many suitors. The question we should be asking about Lost is which of the suitors is the rightful heir to the island: Ben? Locke? The “Shadow of the Statue” people? Alpert? Jacob? Jack? Christian?
It’s easy to assume Ben is the bad guy, but Ulysses reminds us that it is our perspective on events that allows us to make that judgment, and we still do not have a full and detailed perspective on all of the characters. I am inclined to think that Ben is the true heir and though he has been humbled and ordered to obey Locke, this may only be a temporary state and possibly one that is necessary for him to return just as Odysseus had to disguise himself as a beggar and Leopold had to sneak into his house in the dark of night.
Other than that and the fact that Ulysses, like Lost, is full characters with father and fatherhood issues, I don’t have much. Lost has reached a point where the game of analysis has changed. There was a time when analyzing Lost meant trying to understand what was really going on. Now we pretty much know. It’s a time travel show, which I predicted a few seasons ago. The question, now that there aren’t really all that many more questions, is what is going to happen? How will this all play out?
Rather than trying to figure out the island, we are left with trying to predict the choices the characters will make. Lost is truly a story moving toward its climax, which will happen next year in its sixth and final season. The presence of Ulysses suggests that “Ulysses” will return to “Ithaca” and reclaim it by vanquishing the suitors. The question is, who is Ulysses? It’s probably Locke, but I won’t be surprised if it’s Ben. Perhaps the only time he ever told the truth was the moment in the season 2 finale when Michael asked who the Others were, and Ben responded, “We’re the good guys.”
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Lostpedia had some good stuff about Ulysses and how it pertains to Lost. From Lostpedia:
A quote from page 316 of the novel is also hidden in the source code of the Ajira Airways website. The final chapter is named “Penelope”. Fionnula Flanagan who plays Mrs. Hawking is famous for the role of Molly Bloom (a character in the book) in stage and film, including “James Joyce’s Women” and “Joyce to the World.”
More pertinently, the reference to Ulysses fronts the father-son relationships in the episode and series. In the novel, Leopold Bloom longs to be a father-figure to a son, while Stephen Dedalus struggles with his own identity as son. The events recorded in Ulysses trace Bloom and Dedalus’ wanderings around Dublin as they miss each other, cross paths, cross thoughts, and finally meet before parting. In “Ithaca,” the seventeenth chapter, the narrating voice refers to the shift between the two characters’ thoughts and perspectives as a sort of parallax, an appropriate model for the differences between the perspectives of Lost‘s main characters (as well as a handy hint concerning the Island’s physics?).
Ben’s pithy comment (while browsing James Joyce’s Ulysses) regarding his mother teaching him to read is Ironic, as both he and the Joycean Ulysses character Stephen Dedalus have issues of guilt over the deaths of their respective mothers despite Ben’s mother having died in Childbirth & Dedalus’ much later in life.
Also, the fact that Ulysses is built upon Homer’s Odyssey should cue the viewer into certain observations. First, the events of ’316′ are a re-telling, a re-enacting of earlier events. Second, the viewer is left to wonder whether the Oceanic Six are (finally) returning to the Island as Odysseus returns to Ithaca or just on another leg of their voyage.
I must admit, I doff my hat to whoever is going through and reading the code for the various Lost websites in order to find clues. I thought I was hard core just for reading the books.
The last unread book from Season 4 of Lost was The Survivors of the Chancellor by Jules Verne. I had not previously read any of Verne’s work, and after reading this, I consider that my loss. I’ll have to investigate some of his more famous works like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Around the World in 80 Days.
Published in 1875, The Survivors of the Chancellor recounts the ordeal of a group of people who survive the burning and slow sinking of their ship, a freighter called The Chancellor. They must endure almost 2 months aboard a raft as their food and water dwindle and the remnants of the crew begin to turn against the passengers and one another. Verne’s story takes the reader through many of the classic perils of life on the sea: fire, storms, mutiny, murder, suicide, doldrums, and even to the drawing of lots to determine which of the survivors must be sacrificed and eaten.
It’s a short, brisk read, and thoroughly entertaining.
As to Lost, it appears in the Season 4 episode “Ji Yeon.” It is the book Regina is reading (upside down) moments before she goes on deck and takes her own life. Had I read it or known the book last year, I might have been able to offer predictions about the future of the freighter: that it was doomed, that few would survive, and that there would be a mutiny.
A year later, The Survivors of the Chancellor sheds no new light on Lost. Still, it was a worthwhile read, and a perfect book for Regina to read considering the hopelessness that had begun to take root on board the Lost freighter.
There haven’t been many books in Season 5 yet, but I am working on Ulysses by James Joyce, which is, so far, the only identifiable book from this season. The book Sawyer was reading in “Namaste” remains in shadow as if we are not to know the book. Or perhaps, there was a production error, and he is reading something that had not yet been published in 1978.
by James Brush on February 18th, 2009 | 5 Comments
Season 5 of Lost has been light on literature. I haven’t seen any books featured in the episodes, and only one has been clearly referenced: The Little Prince by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I must admit, I miss the heady days of Seasons 2 and 3 with the hatch library and the book club meetings over in New Otherton. I’ll take what I can get, though, and I like what I got.
A children’s book, Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is a wonderfully created fable about love and friendship, and how once a thing or a person has been loved, it becomes unique in all the world to the one who loved it.
The story begins in the Sahara Desert where the narrator just survived a plane crash (an incident based on a real event in Saint-Exupéry’s life) and is approached by a young prince from the small asteroid B612. The narrator befriends the prince who tells him of his home and his travels.
Asteroid B612 is a small place with 3 volcanoes and a single rose that the prince loves dearly. The rose plays games with him, however, and he decides to leave and see the rest of the universe. His travels take him to other asteroids where he meets various adults who don’t understand or value what is important about life.
Eventually he finds his way to Earth where he meets a fox who teaches him about love and the way love makes the beloved unique in all the world. The fox tells him the great secret:
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
The prince meets other roses, but because he does not love them, they are just roses. Eventually, coming to understand how much he loves his rose for its unique and special nature, he desires to return home.
His wish to go home is what has brought him back to the Sahara and in search of a snake who tells him that one bite will take him home. The prince tells the narrator not to be sad, that it must be this way because his body is too heavy to go back to his asteroid and so he must allow the snake to bite him so he can leave it behind and travel home.
The snake bites the prince and the next day, the narrator awakens to find that the prince has gone.
Despite the prince’s apparent death, the narrator takes comfort in knowing that the prince is still out there and that he has returned home to protect his rose.
It’s a beautiful story with lots of interesting ambiguity. I will definitely be checking out more of Saint-Exupéry’s work.
It is also the story of John Locke.
Ever since the end of Season 4, we have known that Locke must die in order to save the island. He probably has to die to return, and while we don’t yet know the exact mechanism for this, I think it’s clear from the title of the episode “The Little Prince,” John Locke will be coming back to life, and that he had to die to return home to the island he has come to love.
In case the reference in the title isn’t enough, the name Canton Rainier on of the side of Ben’s van, which first appears in this episode, can be rearranged to spell reincarnation.
John Locke, the little prince of the island, is coming back to life.
The reincarnation angle gets extra play with this week’s episode title “316.” I suspect it refers to the coordinates to get back to the island, but it is also a reference to John (not John Locke, though) 3:16:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
The Little Prince, then, is meant to hint at the reasons for Locke’s death, and while we don’t know the reason for its necessity, I believe it is another clear hint that Locke will be coming back in some form. I believe the island grants everlasting life. Just look at Richard Alpert. The question, then, is to whom is this gift granted. It doesn’t seem to have been granted to Ben Linus. And why does it seem to have been given to Christian Shepard?
All this everlasting life business ties into the theories I proposed last year after reading Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, in which I argued that the island projects the dead. This is in fact why Alpert does not age and I suspect Locke will not age anymore once he returns to the island.
There was another interesting reference to The Little Prince in the name of the French crew’s boat: Besixdouze. That’s French for B612, the name of the little prince’s asteroid.
On a lighter note, Annie from The Transplantable Rose sent me a link to this clip some former Austinite friends of hers made when they traveled to Oahu. They visit some of the Lost sets and even reenact a few scenes:
Be sure to check out the rest of my Lost book posts at The Lost Book Club.
… we’re left with A Brief History of Time, yet another book suggesting that the island may exist outside the normal time stream of the rest of the world. The other books that suggest this are: A Wrinkle in Time, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Wizard of Oz, The Third Policeman, and Alice in Wonderland. When The Chronicles of Narnia appears I think the deal will be sealed.
For those who may not know, The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis is a seven-book series about the history of an alternate world called Narnia. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair form the main cycle in the series and together recount the adventures of a group of children who come to Narnia to save it. They are called to return time and again throughout the series, and it is their faith in the other world and its mysteries that guides and protects them.
The Magician’s Nephew tells of Narnia’s origins, The Horse and His Boy is a story of faith in the face of travail, and The Last Battle takes the reader through Narnia’s end times.
Narnia itself is ruled by a benevolent godlike being named Aslan who takes the form of a lion. Faith in Aslan is what The Chronicles are all about.
The books are steeped in Christian thought and tradition, and some of them are direct allegories: Lion, Witch, Wardrobe is the Gospel, Magician’s Nephew is Genesis, and Last Battle is Revelation. For my money, The Magician’s Nephew is the best one.
How does all this connect with Lost? Only through a name. The books have not appeared, but Season 4 brought scientist Charlotte Staples Lewis (CS Lewis) to the island. I suppose we could consider this a reference to any of Lewis’s work, but Narnia seems like the best candidate.
The world of Narnia is like Lost island in many ways. Not the least of which is the fact that the island exists in a time stream apart from ours. I’m especially interested in the fact that Narnia’s time stream isn’t just out of phase with ours, it runs at different rates at different times. For instance 60 or so years go by in our world between Magician and Lion, Witch, Wardrobe, but untold thousands pass in Narnia. Then between Lion, Witch, Wardrobe and Caspian 2-3 years go by in our world, while thousands pass in Narnia. But between Caspian and Dawn Treader only a few years go by in both worlds.
Using the Narnia model for Lost island, we have a way for the outside world and the island to show no correlation between time streams. This gives the writers a lot of freedom as to how much time has gone by in the two places when the Oceanic 6 finally do return, as I suspect they must.
Other than the timestream issues, The Chronicles of Narnia make a nice reference because, as with Lost, a small group of believers find their faith tested and ultimately they will have to be the ones to return to the magical other place in order to save it. Will there be one who, like Susan in Narnia, refuses to believe in the things she has seen? If so, look for one of the Oceanic 6 to pass on returning, thus sealing his or her fate.
Narnia mainly serves as a potent reminder of the importance of faith in Lost. It can be lost, but the island will take a person back who regains his faith (John Locke blowing up the Hatch but coming to see the error of his ways), and sometimes one’s faith must lead to sacrifice (see Ben sacrificing his life on the island in order to save it when he moves the island at the end of Season 4). The question, then, is will Jack find sufficient faith to lead the Oceanic 6 back?
I suspect we’ll have a clearer picture of the Narnia connections in Season 5, which starts tonight. Something tells me The Chronicles of Narnia may join The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Watership Down as a source of recurring references on Lost.
The phrase “unstuck in time” is the how Kurt Vonnegut described Billy Pilgrim’s condition in his classic antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim a young American GI serving on the German front in World War II, is taken prisoner by the Nazis. He spends most of the war living and working in a slaughterhouse (numbered 5) in Dresden where he becomes a firsthand witness to the Allied bombing in 1945, an event Vonnegut considered to be unnecessary to say the least.
But that’s not the whole story. Slaughterhouse-Five follows Billy’s life through his postwar years and even to the planet Tralfamador where he is taken to live in a zoo and breed with porn star Montana Wildhack. It’s a weird book, but brilliant too.
The events that take place in that slaughterhouse in Dresden are largely autobiographical. The parts of the story involving the Tralfamadorians… not so much.
Slaughterhouse-Five tackles many of the fate vs. free will themes with which Lost wrestles, all the while suggesting a universe is which all things are always happening simultaneously, thus allowing someone’s consciousness to ping-pong about in time, remembering the future and experiencing death, but not necessarily as the last moment of life.
The connection to Lost is made in “The Constant”, one of Lost‘s best episodes, when Farraday explains Desmond’s condition as being “unstuck in time.” Like Billy Pilgrim, Desmond’s body does not travel through time, only his consciousness does with the apparent result that he is able to remember pieces of the future.
I’ve said for some time that Lost is a show about time travel, and in the case of Desmond’s time travel (which is different from what Ben appears to do in the Season 4 finale) Slaughterhouse-Five provides a way of understanding what is happening to Desmond, as well as being a reminder that in the world of Lost, as in that of Billy Pilgrim, you (probably) can’t fight destiny.
More than anything, though, I suspect it is a nod from the writers of Lost to Vonnegut who had mined ground similar to Lost years before.
With only 3 days left until the premeire of Lost Season 5, I guess it’s time to round up the remaining books in The Lost Book Club. Today, we’ll take a look at Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
On the Road is Kerouac’s most well-known book and probably the most widely read work of the beat movement. It is largely autobiographical and tells the story of a number of road trips that Keroauc made with his friend, and sometimes nemesis, Neal Cassady across the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kerouac narrates as Sal Paradise and invents names for his friends: Cassady becomes Dean Moriarty, Allen Ginsburg becomes Carlo Marx and William S Burroughs appears as Old Bull Lee.
It’s a wonderfully rambling book about seeking a greater something that eludes easy description but that could potentially be found in jazz, sex, marijuana, eastern religion, poetry, beauty, Mexico, the West, and just generally getting lost in the great American landscape. By the end, Sal is no longer certain he believes in the things he sought or that they are even attainable. It’s ultimately a tale of pursuing unattainable dreams, youthful idealism defeated by age and the unceasing encroachments of the “real world.”
I realize as I’m writing this that there are echoes of On The Road throughout Lost. The book itself does not appear, but it is referenced in the alias used by Ben Linus in “The Shape of Things to Come” and shown on his fake passport in “The Economist.” The alias is Dean Moriarty, described in On the Road as “the holy con-man with the shining mind.” If that’s not Ben Linus, I don’t know what is.
Ben’s first alias was Henry Gale (a reference to the wizard in The Wizard of Oz), a name that seemed appropriate for the mastermind behind the mysterious Others. As of Season 4, however, Ben is no longer in charge. He has lost his island and his home. He is a wanderer in an unfriendly world, and much like Kerouac’s anti-hero, Dean Moriarty, he is seemingly forever on the road. It is worth noting here, that by the end of Season 4, it is the character named Jack to whom Ben turns when he needs to return to the island, to go on the road, as it were seeking those elusive things that the island provides. I suspect Season 5 will be something of an on the road season.
It must be mentioned, especially in the context of Ben Linus, that the name Moriarty also suggests a certain character from Sherlock Holmes (via Lostpedia):
Alternatively, “Moriarty” evokes Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis and widely considered fiction’s first “supervillain,” creating the archetype of the brilliant criminal mastermind.
Brilliant criminal mastermind? That sounds like Ben Linus. Unless Ben really is the “good guy” as he has claimed since Season 2.
As I think about this, I can’t help but wonder if another Kerouac novel might show up sometime. Wouldn’t The Dharma Bums be a perfect addition to The Lost Book Club. It’s a better book than On the Road as well.
Somehow, I forgot to post this after I wrote it 2 months ago…
I had to resort to interlibrary loan to get my hands on an English translation of Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novella The Invention of Morel. The book I received also included six short stories from La Trama Celeste, a few of which I enjoyed more than the novella.
The Invention of Morel is about a man stranded on a bizarre island quarantined due to some mysterious disease. He has fled to this island to escape prosecution, and believes he has found the perfect hideout. There are strange machines on the island along with a chapel, museum and a swimming pool. There are also people who seem unaware of presence as if they occupy a reality all their own.
As the tale progresses, the narrator comes to understand that the people on the island are reproductions coming from a projector that one of them, a man named Morel has invented. His invention records every aspect of a person even, possibly, his soul and then replays that person over and over throughout eternity.
Morel had invited his closest friends and the woman he loved, Faustine, to spend a perfect week on the island. He recorded their perfect week so that it would run in an endless loop for all eternity. Since the machine also captures soul, it effectively made those who were recorded immortal.
The side effect, of course, is the problem. Once recorded, the subject suffers dissolution and death. Morel thought that this was a fair price for his immortality, and the strange deaths would create the illusion of disease that would keep people away from the island so his machines could run along happily forever.
It takes a while (and the appearance of two suns in the sky) for the narrator to understand that the people on the island are not really alive, but rather, that he is witnessing the superimposition of Morel’s recordings on his reality. In this time, though, he too has come to love Faustine.
By the end of the story, the narrator chooses to record himself so he can live forever with Faustine in the perfect eternity of Morel’s recording, knowing full well that he will die, but by recording himself he will also have everlasting life.
The other stories in the collection are equally interesting. They tend to involve elements of the supernatural, particularly temporal paradoxes, dreams and visions, and alternate realities, “The Idol” and “The Celestial Plot” being particularly good. I’ll definitely read more by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
On to Lost. Sawyer is seen reading The Invention of Morel in the Season 4 episode “Eggtown.”
“Eggtown” is a Kate-centric episode. Like the narrator in The Invention of Morel, Kate is a fugitive from justice trapped on a strange island. I didn’t notice much in this episode that directly relates to The Invention of Morel, but it does provide hints about the island.
After reading The Invention of Morel, I began to wonder if the visions of the dead (and from the past) that we see on (and now off) the island are really projections that, like those projected from Morel’s machines, appear real in every way and even appear to have souls. The island, of course, does not need to record the person while he or she is living as it can possibly extract things from people’s memories. Thus we have Christian, Charlie, Libby, Dave, Yemi, Kate’s horse, Sayid’s cat, Ben’s mother and the others (lowercase o).
These projections are not hallucinations; they can be seen by more than one person, and they can slap people upside the head as Charlie and Dave have both done to Hurley to verify their reality. This also explains why Richard Alpert doesn’t age. He’s not immortal. He’s dead. The island projects him for reasons yet unknown.
Since we know the island can project a Charlie that can be seen by others, it’s logical to assume that it can project Richard into the off-island world to recruit people like Juliet who would never have any reason to suspect that Richard died long ago. It also explains why Jack still sees his father in the Season 3 finale.
I also suspect that the voices occasionally heard in the jungle have to do with the superimposition of one reality (the projected one) over the real reality that our survivors experience.
The Invention of Morel leaves me wondering if the island’s strange properties are not so much supernatural as they are the result of some technology. Of course, sufficiently advanced technology would appear as magic to those who do not understand it.
* * *
Now that Season 4 has concluded with the excellent three-part finale “There’s No Place Like Home,” I am more convinced than ever that Alpert is dead. I think the appearances of Claire and Horace Goodspeed in “Cabin Fever” are further proof of the island’s ability to project the dead.
It was especially interesting watching Goodspeed repeatedly chop down the same tree. Even if it was only a dream, the repetition and circular nature of the scene was very much like The Invention of Morel as well as another Lost book from way back in Season 2: The Third Policeman, in which the characters are all dead and in Hell where everything repeats (“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.”)
Of course, what do I know? I was way the hell off on my analysis and theorizing after last year’s season finale. I suppose I was sort of right about the time travel thing, but not in the way I thought. Of course, being wrong makes it all the more fun because everything is more surprising than it would be if I had it all figured out.
Here’s a throwaway prediction based on Morel. Locke chooses to die so he can have the “immortality” of being resurrected by the island. Like they sang in Jesus Christ Superstar, “To conquer death you only have to die.”
For more, visit Heather for her thoughts on the Lost Season 4 finale. She was right about who was in the coffin.
by James Brush on February 27th, 2008 | 6 Comments
“Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.”
-Philip K Dick, VALIS
Sound like certain members of the Oceanic 6?
I can’t even begin to say how thrilled I was to see the book that Locke pulled off Ben’s shelf to serve with his breakfast in last week’s episode of Lost, “Eggtown.” That book, VALIS by Philip K Dick, is one of my favorite novels.
Truth be told, I’ve been wondering when Dick would make an appearance on Lost. I even speculated in my post on the Season 3 finale that come Season 4, we’d see Jack reading Dick. He had, after all, turned into a bearded drug-addled nut, a description often attached to Dick, the brilliant writer responsible for the books and stories that gave us Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, and Minority Report. A man who apparently had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy. A man who was convinced that They (with a capital T) were watching him.
VALIS tells the tale of Horselover Fat and his attempts to understand a possibly spiritual experience he has had. Dick shifts between first and third person narration “to gain much needed objectivity” while Fat remains mostly unaware that he is, in fact, the narrator. They argue their way through Gnostic Christianity, paranoid conspiracy theories, philosophy and everything else Dick can think of in this novel that attempts to make sense of the notion of God. It is at once sad, troubling and hysterically funny. Dick’s answer is found in the title: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. A paranoid science fiction writer’s vision of God as revealed to him by a pink laser.
At the end of the book, there is an appendix containing Fat’s journal entries and his conlusions. I’ve included a few of the shorter ones that pertain to themes on Lost and make me think especially about Jacob:
1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.
3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.
9. He lived long ago, but he is still alive.
Okay, enough about VALIS. It’s great. Brilliant. Read it. Not just because I say so either. The Lost writers have suggested we bone up on Dick’s VALIS trilogy (h/t Brian), which also includes The Divine Invasion (okay) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (beautiful) as well as what is sort-of a first working out of the ideas in VALIS, a posthumous little book called Radio Free Albemuth, less heady, but somehow warmer than VALIS.
So why is VALIS on Lost?
Season 4 has delved deeper into themes of madness and the fluid nature of time and VALIS is certainly a book about these things. More importantly, though, VALIS is a “theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime” (according to the cover copy). Considering the seeming omniscience of the island and its ability to reach out to the characters even after they’ve left the island, I can’t help but think that VALIS – Vast Active Living Intelligence System – is the perfect way to understand the island. I think it’s that simple. The writers are telling us what the island is.
And, as with Horselover Fat, perhaps madness is the price of knowing it. Madness is another of Dick’s great themes and when I think of madness and Lost, I always come back to Hurley and his tenuous grip on reality. Perhaps someone should point out to him that, as Dick wrote in “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” and (I think) reformulated in VALIS:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
In the Season 3 finale Jack talked about seeing his father. That led me onto the alternate futures theory track, but after the first few episodes of Season 4, I realize that’s not the case. As to Christian Shepard… Jack has been seeing his dead father just as Hurley has been seeing dead Charley. It’s driving him crazy, and I suspect when he realizes that it’s real, he’ll get his act together and find his way back to the island. Believing in the reality of the island is the key to salvation. Jack, Hurley, Kate, and Sayid never really believed. Never showed any faith in the island. Is that why they are 2/3s of the Oceanic 6? Is that why they are back in the “real world,” a place Dick describes in VALIS as “the black iron prison?”
“In those days, Pala was still completely off the map. The idea of turning it into an oasis of freedom and happiness made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society.
[...]
Meanwhile, the outside world has been closing in on this little island of freedom and happiness. Closing in steadily and inexorably, coming nearer and nearer. What was once a viable ideal is now no longer viable.”
Finally, I’ve reached the end of the Lost Book Club, at least until more books crop up in Season 4, which starts tomorrow. The last one was Huxley’s Island, a book that was never seen, but was referenced in the Season 2 episodes “?” and “Live Together, Die Alone.” The reference is in the name of the pier where Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken prisoner by the Others. It’s called the Pala Ferry, and Pala is the setting of Island, a book Huxley wrote as a counterpoint to Brave New World.
Island is the story of a journalist named Will Farnaby who is shipwrecked on the island of Pala where an ideal society flourishes. Palan culture is a perfect blend of Eastern spirituality and Western science created through an alliance between a nineteenth century Scottish surgeon who came to the island to save its Raja’s life. The two developed an ideal for living laid out by the old Raja in Notes on What’s What, a book within the book. In short, it is a healthy combination of Buddhism, modern psychiatry, psychedelic drugs, limited industrialization, Enlightenment style reasoning, and free love.
Will arrives on the island as an agent of a major oil concern that wants to take over Pala, industrialize it and exploit its abundant natural resources. The inhabitants of Pala fear this as it will lead to the kind of overpopulation, militarization, and systemic poverty (both material and spiritual) so rampant in the outside world. Over the course of the novel, Will comes to love the island and its inhabitants even as the dictator of a nearby island plans his invasion so he can auction the island’s resources off for cash to fight his wars.
It’s a good and heady read that falls in nicely with certain other “ideal society” books that have shown up on Lost particularly Stranger in a Strange Land.
What most gets me is how it provided a possible framework for thinking about the Others. The Pala Ferry references came at the end of Season 2, a time before we met the others. It would have been fun to have read this one before Season 3 as it contains some clues as to what to expect about the Others.
The Connections:
1. In Island, the secular surgeon, Dr Andrew, is brought to Pala to operate on Pala’s leader, who is suffering from a horrific tumor. This is precisely why Jack was taken in Season 2: to save Ben, the Others’ leader, from a tumor.
2. Pala, like Lost Island, is a place that is essentially hidden and off-limits to the outside world, but as with Pala, there are people who want to come to the island, and the Others, like the Palans, fear this above anything else. They believe it will be the end of their way of life. We won’t know for sure until Season 4 gets underway tomorrow, whether the outsiders on Not Penny’s Boat have good or ill intentions, but the title of the Season 4 opener, “The Beginning of the End,” suggests Ben’s fears may be well founded.
3. Both islands have a temple. We haven’t seen Lost’s temple, but Ben did mention it. This hints at a society with roots that go far back, perhaps as far back as four-toed beings? Who knows. Also, both the Others and the Palanese wear white muslin outfits for their ceremonies.
4. At the end of Season 2, we didn’t know that the Dharma Initaitive and the Others were not one and the same. We did know, however, that Dharma like Palanese society, was a fusion of sorts between Buddhism and western science.
5. As on Lost, Pala has scientific research stations scattered around the island geared toward discovering saner ways to live.
But unlike with Pala, something has gone wrong. The Others carry guns and kidnap people. They con and torture. Theirs is a corrupted island, a twisted version of Pala, that must be healed and made whole again. Perhaps, that is what John Locke must do, and what Jack seems to have realized in the Season 3 finale only too late.
The world of the Others is nothing like the perfect society of Pala, but to the Others it is. It is perfect, and it is in danger, especially now that it has been found. Their ideal society is threatened, and the survivors of Oceanic 815 are going to have to decide between protecting the island and going home to a world that might not be the one they left.
Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun is a Hercule Poirot mystery in which the intrepid detective finds himself working a murder on a resort island off the English coast. There is a large cast of potential suspects and one body, that of a promiscuous actress who had been blatantly carrying on with a married man. In short: murder, most foul.
It wasn’t as good as the only other Christie novel I’ve read (Murder on the Orient Express) but I did enjoy it, although I started to have a sense of how the murder had occured before Poirot figured it out.
Sawyer is seen reading Evil Under the Sun in Season 3 of Lost in the Nikki and Paolo episode “Expose,” an episode that is essentially a muder mystery.
Like Lost, Evil Under the Sun has a large cast and takes place on an island. There aren’t any big clues about Lost’s mythology hidden in the pages either, which seemes appropriate as “Expose” represents a break from reveals about the island, serving mostly as just good, albeit twisted, entertainment. Kind of like Christie’s novels: nothing earth shattering, but loads of fun.
There is, however, a clue in the book that hints at the way the episode plays out. In Evil Under the Sun, (watch out, here come spoilers) the actress’s corpse is found on the beach. Her lover goes to try to save her, while the woman who discovers the body with him runs off for help. Eventually, we learn that the “body” was a ruse; it was the murderer’s female accomplice. Now he can murder his lover, the actress, while the woman who went off for help can vouch that he was with her the whole time.
In “Expose”, Nikki, an actress who may or may not be promiscuous but is a murderer,� shows up seemingly dead on the beach. The episode revolves around finding out who killed her and her lover, Paolo. Only at the very end, do we learn that she wasn’t dead. Unfortunately for her, only the audience sees her eyes open as Hurley and Sawyer are busy shoveling sand on top her in the island graveyard.
In this case, the inclusion of a book served to signal the type of episode we’re seeing (murder mystery) and offer a possible clue. Perhaps if Sawyer had read it more carefully, he might have realized that while Nikki seemed dead, she might not really be dead, but as we learned with the whole Of Mice and Men incident, Sawyer doesn’t always read that carefully.
Season 4 of Lost starts on Thursday with “The Beginning of the End.” Sometime before then, I will post my thoughts on Aldous Huxley’s Island, the last of the Lost books on my list. In the meantime, Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever has a great preview with no spoilers and lots of good theorizin’.
Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is available in paperback on Amazon and at my e-store. E-books can be downloaded from the Kindle store, and the iBookstore.
A Place Without a Postcard is available on Amazon.
2010: Nature Poem — My students freeze—
how out of place
that slope-intercept
equation on the whiteboard
in this literature class.
Scrawled in blue, graphed
and correctly worked.
It’s poetry, I [...]
2010: Two New Poems in the World — Two of my poems are up over at Carcinogenic Poetry. They are “I-10 Eastbound” and “Miles (Never Once Imagined).” I’m [...]
