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J. Wood’s Otherville Book Club – 5.04 “The Little Prince”

J. Wood — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:48:37 +0000

“The Little Prince” post at Powell’s Books comes with two main texts referenced overall, but those two open up a menu of possibilities.

The main text is of course Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943). Exupéry, a pilot, wrote the book after crashing his plane in the Sahara and being stranded for a couple weeks; it gave him some time to think. It’s a children’s book, so one might not expect much literariness from it. But like the fox in the book says, “words are the source of misunderstandings,” and there are a few tricky elements that can show us something about Lost.

The second main text discussed in the post was hidden away in some code from the latest alternate reality game. That code was dragged back up with the Ajira Airways bottle found in the outrigger, and takes us back to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The line itself was hexadecimal code hidden inside the sourcecode for one of the Ajira Airways web pages: “So off they started about Irish sport and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all of that.”

That line comes from the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses, a famously multivalent and multi-voiced psychological novel that constantly plays with narrative perspective and the relationship of the reader to the text. Many novels/films/etc. have shown multiple voices, but in terms of constantly-shifting perspectives, Ulysses serves as a literary precursor for the kind of variety of perspective offered in Lost. The key is how those voices are shown.

The main ideas that relate to Lost are the multiple perspectives presented; the strange, shifting and somewhat deceptive relation of audience to narrator (which is also seen in a shot from Lost’s pilot episode); hurley; Leopold Bloom’s overinterpretation; a chara/Achara – one is from “Cyclops,” one was Jack’s tattooist/definer; and ghosts.

When talking about Ulysses, you’re also always talking about a library of other books. In this case, the following are discussed:

Homer’s Odyssey: The thematic structural model Joyce used for each chapter.
Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices: Kenner came up with the idea of the Uncle Charles Principle, where the third-person narrator is a little too close to the character it’s narrating. In film/television, we see a similar sort of thing in the way the camera frames a character-specific episode.
- Kenner shows this in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: The Russian critic came up with a theory of the ‘polyphonic novel,’ or the novel of many voices. He started working on the idea at the same time Joyce published Ulysses, and published his theory in 1929. Since then, Ulysses has often been identified as a polyphonic novel.
- The main idea is that traditionally, a third-person narrator’s perspective is privileged over the characters of a work. Looking at Dostoevsky, including Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Bakhtin argued for a new kind of structure where the voice of the narrator is not privileged over the voices of the multiple characters. The audience is left to consider the variety of perspectives and determine for themselves what the meaning of the text is, rather than be handed the meaning from the narrator. (Bakhtin also acknowledges Joyce in his text.) This is very much in the mode of the way Lost presents its narrative; the audience is constantly getting a variety of perspectives on events, we never know which is the privileged or “right” one, and we’re left to debate the meaning ourselves.
- William Faulkner also produced polyphonic texts like As I Lay Dyingand The Sound and the Fury. Many of his texts were set in a fictional Mississippi locale called Yoknapatawpha County, which appears in the document Sun receives in her hotel – see Doc Arzt’s cleaned-up transcription of the page.
Umberto Eco’s Interpretation and Overinterpretation also comes up again in relation to the Ulysses passage, both in terms of what the passage suggests and what it means in relation to Lost (hint; it’s a lot about overinterpretation).

The post finishes with a discussion of a text mentioned in last week’s comments, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906). The main question was about one passage of his book describing the Son of Man moving “the wheel of the world” and being crushed on it (like Ben turning the subterranean wheel of the island).

For Schweitzer, that event meant the “irruption,” or an abrupt incursion, of the kingdom of god into the present. In other words, he believed that Christians were supposed to live as if the future they were waiting for was already at hand. For Lost, the idea is literalized, as the characters constantly irrupt into different points of history as a result of Ben turning the wheel.

Until next week –

J. Wood’s Otherville Book Club – 5.03 “Jughead”

J. Wood — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:03:10 +0000

In “Jughead,” the most potent symbol may have been the crack in the bomb; there was a lot more inside that little episode than there appeared to be, and it leaked out through one little crack—the Others speaking Latin. The Powell’s Books Lost post, SISTE VIATOR, is a bit of a headbanger that is broken up into sections; there’s a list of the sections at the beginning, and you can click on whatever section you want to hit and see the breakdown of the texts. So I’ll break this down according to those sections, and lay out the texts:

The Subtle Reference takes up most of the post.

◦ Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, a Renaissance precursor to the 20^th century utopian/dystopian novel. Of note is the fact that More wrote it in Latin, its name play (good place/no place) that relates to the island popping in and out of time, the narrator as a mirror twin of the author, social equality (and its failings) that are reflected in the DHARMA Initiative and the Others, and their take on war. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning helps make the case for the narrator being Thomas More’s mirror twin.

▪ More’s book was also pulling from Plato’s Republic, and was on the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s mind when he wrote Second Treatise of Government, a text that is generally appropriate to Lost, but especially its take on slavery, war, and the episode “The Brig .” (The philosopher Locke was also a big proponent of Latin.)

The Overinterpretation Station

◦ Is Locke a hunter or a farmer? Or both? Locke is playing jungle tracker again, throwing knives left and right, yet when it comes down to it, he can’t kill when necessary. The hunter-gatherer vs. the farmer is a trope that’s been mythologized throughout the ages; the trope generally is an allegory of the historical rise of the civilized agricultural man of the city over the pastoral man of the wild, and generally has a woman at the center of the action. This section looks at three of those mythic tropes and their relation to Lost, then makes the argument that Locke is neither a hunter nor a farmer, but rather an embodiment of both. This also makes it clear why Locke gets so easily spun by other people who find a use for him—because myths are generally adapted and used by a culture in whatever way they find them useful.

▪ The Epic of Gilgamesh shows hunter-gatherer wild man Enkidu vs. the builder and king of Uruk, the agricultural man Gilgamesh. This one ends with a partnership until the hunter is killed by a monster. Gilgamesh was already raised in Locke’s crossword clue, “Enkidu’s friend,” and there’s a bit of the Enkidu and Gilgamesh relationship reflected in Eko and Locke.

▪ The Set and Osiris story of Egyptian mythology, as laid out in Plutarch’s Moralia, offers another take on this mythic trope. Set is the wild desert god of chaos, and is represented by an animal. His brother Osiris is a dying-and-rising god of the harvest, the kingdom-builder who makes sure the crops grow. Out of jealousy, Set tears Osiris into pieces and them scatters them. The son of Osiris, Horus, eventually overcomes his uncle and becomes pharaoh of all Egypt, but he comes out of the fight with a vertical scar below his left eye. In this case the agricultural man is killed, but Osiris became the god of the underworld. Horus represents a little of both figures; he’s the son of the son of the civilizer who unites Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom, but is also a war god who overcomes chaos. We’ve seen the Egyptian hieroglyphs a number of times in Lost, there is an echo in Horace Goodspeed, and Locke bears a vertical scar below his right eye, the mirror twin of the left eye.

▪ The Cain and Abel story is the third of these hunter/farm tropes, Cain playing the role of the farmer and Abel the hunter-gatherer shepherd. Cain kills Abel after Yahweh appreciates Abel’s animal sacrifice more than Cain’s grain sacrifice, which flips the Egyptian story. Cain is banished by Yahweh to the Land of Nod (wandering) east of Eden, and puts some sort of mark on him to both show he’s cursed and to warn others from hurting him. Cain goes on to do what any farmer-civilizer figure does; he builds a city, Enoch. Juliet bears a similar mark of Cain for killing Pickett, both Locke and the island are stuck in a state of wandering (Locke even arrived at the island as a result of a walkabout), and given Locke’s luck, he certainly seems cursed.

· Other(s) Texts

◦ Utopia gives rise to a few books that are important to Lost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island, and George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley wrote the utopian Island decades after the dystopian Brave New World as a way to balance it out; a number of elements from Island are found throughout Lost, like the Pala Ferry (which is the name of Huxley’s island), and even the opening shots in the pilot episode of Jack waking up in the jungle. Huxley was a significant influence on Orwell (he was Orwell’s schoolteacher at Eton), and 1984’s Room 101, the re-education room that played on a person’s deepest fears, had a lasting literary influence. One sees that in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, where Alex is re-educated through drugs and audio-visual simulation to make him physically revolt from violence (and thus suggest a method toward helping create a utopian society). In Lost, we get Room 23, where Karl is similarly re-educated through drugs and audio-visual stimulation in order to fall in line with Ben’s utopian vision.

· Heterotopia: Other Place

◦ A relatively new take on the idea of utopian and dystopian visions is the heterotopia, or other place. The idea was first laid out in a 1967 lecture by Michel Foucault (no relation to Foucault’s Pendulum), “Of Other Spaces.” You won’t find this in a book, but it was translated and published in the journal Diacritics 16:1 (available online, but library access is required.) There is a lot in the theory that relates to the themes of Lost, but maybe more significantly, it influenced some 1960’s and 1970’s science fiction writers who have already been seen. Neil Easterbrook’s essay “State, Heterotopia,” collected in the volume Political Science Fiction, gives a great overview of the idea in science fiction. Given this, Lost could arguably be read as a mass-media presentation of competing heterotopias.

▪ Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress; we’ve already seen Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land in the episode of the same name, and Easterbrook argues Heinlein was influenced by anarcho-capitalism and people like Ayn Rand of The Fountainhead (which Sawyer read).

▪ Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia,” is in part a response to Dostoevsky’s anarchist novel The Possessed. Her novel presents a more productive form of anarchism, and is closer to More’s Utopia. Her book The Lathe of Heaven has been noted as a precursor to Ben’s magic box, where thought can be manifested into reality.

▪ Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, subtitled “An Ambiguous Heterotopia,” is in part a response to The Dispossessed, and dislocates political action from social groups to the body itself. We see that kind of physio-techno politics in Room 23, in some of the attempts to solve the Valenzetti Equation (parapsychology), some of the Skinner experiments, and sending people back in time to try to re-engineer history.

· The Narrative Sandbox

◦ “Jughead” is of course a comic book character, but it was also the codename for a March 22, 1954 hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, part of Operation Castle. The first test was codenamed “Shrimp,” and Jughead was a backup. Shrimp worked, and resulted in wide-spread fallout that poisoned islanders and Japanese fisherman. This is all documents in The Bomb: A Life, by – get this – Gerard DeGroot, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. No, he’s not the missing founder of the DHARMA Initiative, but his scholarship coincides with many of the same eras and themes that sparked Gerald DeGroot to establish the DHARMA Initiative in the 1970’s.

◦ Doc Jensen made an interesting connection from Jughead to the quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler, the person who coined the term black hole, wormhole. Wheeler also devised the delayed-choice experiment. It was already known that a photon would either present itself as a particle or a wave depending on what instrument the experimenter chose to use. Wheeler showed that an experimenter could choose the measuring instrument after the photon was fired, and the results would still depend on the choice of instrument; in this way, the experimenter took part in creating the past. From this, he suggested that between the start of the photon and the end of its track as a “great smoky dragon, it’s tail at the firing point and its teeth on the measuring stick. Much of this is laid out in his autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.

◦ Faraday is starting to seem a lot like Dr. Manhattan from Alan Moore’s Watchmen. We know that Faraday went back to the DHARMA Initiative sometime back in the 1970’s. If he can travel to the past, he can probably also travel to the future. Maybe this explains why he’s so cryptic about things like Charlotte’s sickness; he keeps telling her she’ll be alright, possibly because he already knows how she’ll turn out. He’s also already said that they can’t change time – whatever happened, happened. It’s all reminiscent of Dr. Manhattan, who can experience all time at once, and when asked why he didn’t stop an assassination attempt on the president, says “I can’t prevent the future. To me, it’s already happening.”

J. Wood in his own words: I’m working on my PhD in English at the University of Virginia (I’m ABD), directed the UVA Writing Center for two years, did an M.Phil in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College – Dublin, and with respect to John Hodgman, my posts generally have more information that the audience requires. My first book on Lost, Living Lost was published in 2007 by the Garrett County Press, and is probably still relevant up to the third season.

J. Wood’s Otherville Book Club – 5.01 and 5.02

J. Wood — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:18:00 +0000

Doc’s Intro: Soon a new J. Wood post will grace Powell’s to liquefy your brain with intellectual cross examination of LOST’s time-hopping testimony. As often as possible, J will be publishing “J.Wood’s Otherville Book Club” exclusively here at DocArzt & Friend’s LOST Blog. “J.Wood’s Otherville Book Club” is a bibliography of sorts, running through the books, films, and country music songs – as appropriate – mentioned in his Powell’s posts (the latest of which can be read here) with an enlightening passage on what each entry has to say that might be of interest to those trying to wrap their brains around LOST’s narrative trickery. And now, I pass the mic to J. Wood.

Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys

A film that gets straight into the stresses and possible paradoxes of time travel

A brief recap of time in Lost:

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Kip Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps

Madeleine L’engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Briefly referenced in regard to previous posts; all three texts deal with the nature of time and how to alter it.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative

Philosopher and literary critic who wrote three volumes about how a narrative was the best model we have for how we experience time as a phenomenon

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .

Jekyll Island beer? It doesn’t exist. So why focus on the bottle? Might have something to do with Hurley’s wanting to be a Hyde, but can’t help being Jekyll.

Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather

Briefly mentioned by Hurley; can’t take Sayid to the hospital because that’s the first place they’ll be found.

Orson Welles, Citizen Kane

Another film that, structurally and in the way it plays with shot composition, is a precursor to techniques seen in Lost.

Philip K. Dick, Valis

One of the notorious symbols is seen in the background of Hurley’s house, in the doorway. When the door opens, the symbol turns into a vesica piscis, the Jesus fish symbol. This is a key symbol that triggered Philip K. Dick’s mental divergence while in extreme pain, which he writes about in his essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” That and his journal, which he called his Exegesis, explored the symbol, and he used that material to write Valis, the book Locke gives Ben to read when Locke held Ben prisoner. Ben says he already read it, and Locke tells him he might catch something he missed last time. Sounds like tip.

Gerald Massey, The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ

Gets into the history of the vesica piscis and how it was related to a number of ancient world gods before it became the Jesus fish. It’s also related to the Greek mathematician and Hermetic mystic Pythagoras, who predated Jesus by nearly 500 years. Pythagoras believed fish were sacred, and the vesica piscis itself was derived from the mirroring of the monad, or a symbol of god (a circle with a center point). The vesica piscis is filled with sacred numbers, including a length-to-width ratio of 265:153. That number 153 is important in a number of ways; the ratio is the square root of 3, and was used by Archimedes in determining the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, or π.

Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library

Tells a story about Pythagoras guessing the number of fish some fisherman have hauled in that is strikingly similar to a story of Jesus in the Gospel of John. In the John story, the number of fish is 153—known as the measure of the fish.

Archimedes, The Works of Archimedes

Possibly the ancient world’s most brilliant mathematician, he developed the notion of π among a host of other breakthroughs. Without π, Leon Foucault cannot develop his pendulum that proves the rotation of the earth.

Sir Thomas Little Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics

Shows the steps Archimedes too get get from 265/153 < √3 < 1351/750 to π.

Amir D. Aczel, Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science

History of Leon Foucault’s proof of the rotation of the earth with a simple pendulum.

Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

An intense dive into conspiracy theory, Hermetic mysteries, and narrative meltdowns. The book follows three friends who decide to make a fake book of esoteric knowledge that reveals the Universal Plot to take over the world. They base their book on a story heard from an old colonel about the Knights Templar and their access to an incredible source of power located at the Umbilicus Telluris, or the earth’s navel. The more they work on their book, the more they find outside evidence confirming their fake ideas, and the boundaries between fiction and reality become very shaky. The Plan revolves around using a Foucault pendulum and a map to discover the Umbilicus Telluris—which recalls what Ms. Hawking is doing in her secret lair.

Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation

A book of essays by Eco about the limits of interpretation and the logic of similarity and overinterpretation.