Lost: The Grounds for the Possibility of a Defense

I. Introduction
This post is written in the wake of watching "Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens" and considering J. J. Abrams's quality as not only a director (SW: tFA), but also as a producer ... in short, his overall contribution, to date, to the literary side of pop culture. Lost is one on which there is disagreement in some sectors. Some of us really love it. Others of us have a predilection for dissing it at every opportunity, casting aspersions on it as fluff (sometimes going a long way for the task, waiting out, sometimes dragging out, long conversations just for an opening in which to do it).

My basic principle is that, before you are allowed to do this, meaning the charge of "fluff" or weakness of artistry, you have to be in a position to know what the project was. Only then can you assess the two further preliminary questions of 1) whether the project itself was worthy, and 2) whether the project was well executed ... and then the final question of what it is doing with that artistry.

That final question is often made up of a number of questions that are difficult to extricate form one another, even though it is sometimes essential to do that task successfully. The questions of the worth and execution of the project can likewise be tricky. But I will try to give a brief example of what I am talking about here. The question you may want to examine may be that of virtue. The work could have a clearly defined concept of virtue and execute the proposal of that definition well (through the framework elements I will list for Lost or through other elements of structure and characterization), but you disagree with the proposed definition of virtue (say, virtue=balls to the wall, cutthroat success at any cost). In this case, you would call the show bad, or, more to the point, you might call it dangerous, all the more dangerous because it executed the proposing of that (bad by your beliefs) definition of virtue very well artistically.

My "you are not allowed ... unless you first ..." above does not preclude situations of intuition in the context of responsibility for the young and impressionable, such as "I don't feel comfortable having my kids watch something that seems to me to have such a sense of bad definitions of virtue." But if you're going to make the charge of fluff or poor artistry, you're going to be held to the same standards as everyone else of having to support your claim with actual analysis (not just the rhetoric of exasperated sighs and rolled eyes, etc, as if you're doing so will cow somebody into thinking "oh no, they're exasperated, that must mean I am being silly").

 The elements I am going to examine here in Lost, which I believe define the project, are: 1) Its nature, in rebuttal to some particular criticisms of the show; 2) its conceptual framework; and 3) its thematic framework. These are often intricately interwoven in such a way that is it difficult to isolate one for focus. The reason for this is not necessarily that Lost is such an exceptional show; it's more just the case of, well ... welcome to human language and literature, junior.

II. The Title of This Post
The language of the "grounds for the possibility of ... " is at least most famous in the works of the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant. It means that you are not yet even making the claim to concretely demonstrate something (in Kan'ts case, metaphysics and ethics); you are simply laying necessary groundwork for any demonstration of its actuality by first demonstrating its possibility.

(Aside: I would class my argument, in a post on this blog, that a belief in ethics of any kind requires belief in not only the possibility of, but also the actuality of, the supernatural and miracles as an argument of this type, since it argues that as the grounds for the possibility of the existence of God. One could categorically deny belief in any ethical system whatsoever, and this would make the argument, as of yet, a moot point ... although I would say it would also probably turn much, if not all, of the speaker's own other statements of commentary on human life into utter non-sense, in the technical sense of the word "sense" developed most notably by Gotlieb Frege in his system of "sense and reference" in linguistics).

I would eventually argue that a solid defense of Lost can be made (that it is a good show in that final sense), but I am here only trying to demonstrate that it has solid elements that can be shown to span and permeate the whole 6-season show (which is usually a first line of attack by those critical of it, the claim that it doesn't hang together well as really doing anything, when it is more the case, I suspect, that those claiming this are uncomfortable with what it does).

I would say that I am making a concrete defense against charges of "fluff," but only laying the grounds for the possibility of a defense on the final level of whether the show is good or bad.

III. The Nature of the Show (non-materialist)
One of the criticisms I have heard, and I think I have heard it a fair bit, is that we were promised finding out the real place of the island, maybe how it originated, and then we didn't get it. My own reading of the situation - meaning the situation of somebody asking that question and then making that accusation - is that it's kind of like looking for spaghetti sauce in the detergent aisle and complaining when it's not there. I don't think it was ever what the show was about.

I don't remember what I have heard about interviews etc that happened coming into season 6. I remember there being something about them saying something about satisfactions that would be gotten. I would not be surprised if certain comments in Comicon interviews or whatever prior to season 6 were made about vague things like "resolution" that were then interpreted by some (many?) to mean that we would be finding out where the island actually is (inside Area 51 or some shit like that) and how it actually began, by people who had probably been making that demand of the show long before such misconstrued authorial statements were made between seasons 5 and 6. If the producers did make statements promising those exact revelations, well, that was kind of stupid of them, and my guess would be that it was mainly sort of caving to a lot of rabid fans who are kind of mickey-mouse "scientist" types. I find it hard to believe that they (the makers) ever were really preoccupied with finding a physical location for the island, even in the beginning. I saw nothing in the opening seasons that promised a physical location. I think that there is enough of something solid in what is concretely in the show that, if one has "eyes to see and ears to hear," one can see and hear it without needing to find the material location.

To provide a little better analogy that spag sauce and detergent, it is a bit like Harry Potter assuming that Horcace Slughorn is going to be teaching defense against the dark arts in book 6 (Half Blood Prince). When they find out that HS will do potions, HP wracks his brain to remember because he thought he was sure Dumbledore said HS would be doing DADA, but in reality, he can't remember anytime that was specified ... he just expected it, and so his brain filled it in, and then it was (to him) this huge inconsistency when HS turned out to be teaching potions. But it wasn't the case that Dumbledore ever said anything misleading about HS being DADA; just as it never was the case (whatever concessionary statements the producers did or did not make) that Lost was about the exact, or even proximate, location of the island in our world.

The real crux of what I am getting around to in this section is that I would argue that the show is not materialist. In saying this, I am not talking about whether or not the show puts forth the philosophical tenets of the metaphysical claim known as "materialism" (although I suspect that many who use the "didn't deliver because we never found out where the island is" criticism have been impacted by the modern scientific version of philosophical materialism to a much greater extent than they realize). Nor am I pointing to the fact that it is not enmeshed with all kinds of consumerist marketing plans and "worship" of material goods. What I mean by a show like this being "non-materialist," rather, is that I don't think the show was ever about where the island was geographically, materially. Of course the island is going to bear some relation to our "real world," but the connection it has is by having the same characters in it. It's like they have dual citizenship, but the two countries don't have to know where each other are (although one is in a privileged position on that matter, namely the island, and it can work on the "real world" to a certain extent).

In the next major section (IV) I will talk about the actual relation of the contents of the island story to the "real world" in greater detail, but for here I will say that it is necessary for the island world to have concrete knowledge of the material events of the real world, but as fodder. And it is necessary for the "real world" to have some passing connection with the island, which, in this case, is sort of a Bermuda triangle sort of thing. There has to be some commerce in the form, at the very least, of the mental material those dual citizens possess, since it comes from the "real world" but is the fodder for thought and action in the island world, making it kind of beneficial for the island world to be able to verify that fodder (in this case, as I see it, the "island world" is the viewer who sees the flashbacks, flash-forwards, and "flash-sideways" alongside the action on the island, the viewer who has, in the case of many, tuned in faithfully every week to watch the life of the island world or, in my case, binge-watched the whole thing on DVD while exercising).

I think, in the end, that if you find out where the island "really is," it would become boring very quickly - satisfying only to scientists, and even then only as science, not as literature.

Red Herrings and Symbols.
I have to address one or two elements here that can be misleading, things where it sure seems like real world location is being pointed to or promised, and I am sure some felt like it was held out like the proverbial carrot on the string. The first I will examine is in a webisode that followed the close of season 6. I think it was called "the new man in charge." Here we see Hurley and Ben Linus show up at a warehouse in Guam and shut down the supply flights to the island. We also find out actually in the show that Michael, in trying to find his way back to the island, starts on a ship in Guam (I think this is also where Charles Widmore's freighters make port and leave for the island vicinity). These seem like they are meant to provide a clue to the location, but I don't believe that they are.

I will argue below for a particular novel being the source of the "thematic framework" for the show. That novel is Valis by P.K. Dick (but please don't read that novel until you go through what I discuss below to at least get an idea about it; it is sort of tripped out ... literally ... northern CA drug culture in the early 1970s). Lost is actually the reason I read this work to begin with, because it appeared in the show (as did Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge). I will get into more details below, but I think that seeing it as the thematic frame source for the show explains its appearance in the show as a "hat-tip" AND these Guam references as the same kind of hat-tip. Valis ends with Dick receiving a postcard from Horselover Fat saying that he has a new lead on finding the fifth Messiah, starting with a small chain of islands near Guam. I believe the presence of Guam in Lost material is a hidden reference to one of their models, a salute of sorts, not a clue to the physical (materialist) location of the island.

The flashbacks and flash-forwards are another element that it seems to me like some could say fit more with a focus on the actual place, even just in focusing on events in the real world (especially in the case where you have a law agent following Kate into the island construct, but he dies pretty soon). I will describe a deeper significance to those in the section (V) on the thematic framework. But for here, it does introduce us to the theme of variant times, and time variation is one thing I think the makers use to symbolize the non-materialist nature of the island, specifically in its becoming unfixed in time (in season 5). It also happens with Desmond as an individual character, also in season 5 (I think). The unfixing in time, I believe, is symbolic of the island's not being materially fixed at all (as a literary thing), which is only problematic for those with a materialist fixation (double entendre fully intended).

But one of the reasons I think that it is important for there to be points at which some (Ben Linus, Richard, etc) DO have more reliable access in and out of the island (Richard can plan to see Julia in the real word to recruit her; he doesn't have to rely on being lucky and getting bumped on and off the island at the right time) is that I also think that the island does not occupy the "space" in the "real world" that we would call the "floating" space. I would count the "floating space" as a real world space, just a random one. But it would be a consistently random one in the real world, defined by that randomness of material location in the real world. I think, rather, that the "immateriality" of the island means that the connections and commerce between it and the real world are governed by aspects other than real-world materiality (whether consistent or random).

(Sidenote: George Minkowski, crew member aboard Widmore's freighter who dies from temporal displacement, is named after a real-world mathematician and philosopher of time-theory, Hermann Minkowski)

Finally, this is where the whole "purgatory" interpretation thing is a serious red herring. I can't remember if the producers addressed this concretely, and if they did, whether they said that's what they were going for or denied that it is the case (I think the latter but I can't remember for sure)... but at the end of the day, what is there in the show is, I would argue, distinctly NOT that (if they did say, "yeah, it's purgatory," see the final caveat on "authorial intent"). That interpretation is still looking for a "material" location of the island, which is the way many in our days tend to think of purgatory, as a prison with an all but physical location ... you could find it on a "spiritual" map, for the most part in the same way you find a material location on a physical map. I think it's absolutely no good and complete bunk as an interpretation.

In literature, I would surmise that we have two kinds of settings: the real world and mythological worlds. Much literary fiction takes place in the real world: Austen's England, Potok's Brooklyn, Faulkner's and O'Connor's American South, Joyce's Dublin, etc. Mythological worlds in modern fiction include those like Tolkien's Middle-Earth and Pratchett's Discworld. In ancient mythologies the actions of the gods and such were not thought to be fictional in the way we think of fiction, but the "world" in which they took place was also not our "real world." They were in a world before or above ours was formed from its remnants (Marduk tearing Tiamat's body to make the heavens and the earth etc).

The island in Lost, I submit, is an overlay of these two words. It is the mythic dimension of the real world, peopled with the inhabitants of the real world, but acting in that other world. In the next section I will describe more about "myth" in the conceptual framework.

IV. The Conceptual Framework and Its Source: Carl Jung
So, having said that  the island is the "mythic" dimension of the real world, I will now provide what I think is the source of the mythic conceptual framework: the psychologist and literary theorist Carl Jung. The other "father" of psychology, Sigmund Freud, focused on the development of language on the individual level. Jung focused on the role of literature in culture as a group psychology, particularly mythology.

Jung saw mythology as an expression of the subconscious of the "world-self," basically of the collective human race (this is how the well-known "Jungian archetypes" apply to the whole race). There is a key scene where I think the Jungian construct is given away in Lost. In the beginning of season 6, we are on the original Oceanic flight 815, although it never crashes and the cast members reach LAX safe and sound and continue on in a timeline alternate to that established in the crash at the outset of season 1, the island timeline, but this new alternate timeline is viewed alongside the ongoing island timeline after season 5. The camera view goes past Jack and out the window of the plane and straight down into the ocean water, all the way to the ocean floor. Here we see all the things of the island with which we are so familiar, submerged at the bottom of the ocean.

The ocean/sea/deep is very symbolic of mythology. For a summation of that fact by a modern author, think of the scene in book 4 of Harry Potter (Goblet of Fire) in which Harry goes into the lake in the second task of the tri-wizard tournament. On his way to rescue hostages, he passes a rock on which there are paintings done by the merpeople depicting themselves fighting the giant squid. This is not just regular people making "art." This is a primal and primitive people depicting what they see as THE great struggle of existence, characterized by fighting a mythological monster, here in the "depths" of the mythological place (in this case, the lake ... I think the common factor between sea, ocean, and lake, the thing they all have in common as "deeps," is that they are not a water-way, but a water place; you don't go through them or follow them to get someplace, like a river; you go down into them ... and for "places," they sure do move a lot; that is what makes them so dangerous - unsure and unplottable movement under the guise of the stability of "stationary place").

For an ancient instance, I will draw on critical scholarship of Genesis 1 in the Bible. In Gen 1:2, we find the Spirit of God "moving" over the face of the "deep," which is usually taken to be some sort of waters of chaos. The name is, however, likely etymologically drawn from the name of some mythological sea dragon that represented chaos. The earliest version of this theory coincided with the original version of the 4-source theory of the Torah, which said that it was all put together after the Babylonian exile, and thus the Hebrew "Tehome" ("deep") came from the name of the Babylonian sea dragon goddess, Tiamat, who represented chaos. More recent studies have tied it to other sea dragon creatures closer in time and place to Moses, like those in Ugaritic mythology, Ugarit being a major Canaanite port citry. The salient point here is that, along Jungian lines, the ocean depth is the place of myth and mythological chaos monsters and represents the volatile chaos capability of the subconscious of the world-self, human psychology (emotion, experience, etc).

(ASIDE: I can stop here only briefly to try to answer an objection that will likely arise for some over whether the source of the things in Gen 1 is mythology or Revelation to Moses. Even in orthodox Catholic interpretation, it is possible to believe that, for at least chunks of the Torah, inspiration was not necessarily simple verbatim dictation, but inspired guidance in selecting, editing, and compiling fragments from religious mythologies in existence before Moses. But even apart from this, in the Hebraic mind of the Old Testament, such a dragon name/element is transfigured; it is now just an element controlled by God, not a god ... but the "deep," including the name, still represents chaos, just not a powerful god of chaos ... and this is regarded by some very credible scholars to be part of the religious rhetoric of Gen 1 - in our God's story, your gods are just elements to be used and molded.)

Myths are often about the generation of life or of a specific place of life. I think that this is what the cave/well in the island and its glowing light are all about. I think it is basically the well of life in a mythic setting.

I would submit that, as buried in the waters of the deep in an "alternate timeline," which is actually sort of the "real world timeline," the island is Jung's world of myth as the subconscious of the human race, the "world-self," in which the actual core of what is going on in the real worlds is seen in what is going on in the mythic island world (season six is the place we really see this "side-by-side" structure in the "flash-sideways," but see below for how I think the flashbacks and flash-forwards fit the schema as well).

Dr Linus: an Example of the Construct
To show what I mean by this, I will give the example of the episode from season 6 that made me realize it, that made me realize the quality of "the real core of what is going on" of which I just spoke. The episode is called "Dr Linus." On the island, the man in black, disguised as Locke (who is now dead) convinces Ben Linus to turn on the good side, led by Ilana. Black-Locke tells Linus where there is a rifle in the woods, and if he runs and gets to it, he can turn it on Ilana and get away. The scene basically sums up the fallout of all of Linus's machinations and scheming across the series. He reaches the gun and has the drop on Ilana. She asks him, "why are you doing this? Why do you want to go back to Locke?" Linus, half-tearful in a way only Michael Emerson can pull off without seeming sappy, replies "because he's the only one who will have me!" Ilana simply says, "I'll have you," and Linus, forgiven and accepted in spite of his past, goes with her (of course, about 5 minutes later the producers blow her up in a dynamite accident, same as they did with the chemistry teacher in season 1 ... no clue why they did that; still baffles me).

MEANWHILE, back in the real world, Dr Ben Linus is a highschool history teacher in LA, who is obviously teaching at way below his potential, but who has a brilliant female student, Alex (his "surrogate" daughter on the island, where she is already dead because of his tactical play against Widmore's man, Keamy). In that LA school in the real world, there is a corrupt superintendent who is a real jerk who always short-changes teachers on things that would help with good teaching etc, and Linus gets some dirt on him having an affair with a school nurse. So, Ben has a plan to get a better setup for teachers and get himself a little better career than a simple teacher - blackmail the superintendent. The one hitch is that the super went to Yale or Harvard and could write a very helpful recommendation letter for Linus's student, Alex, but says he will not if Linus blackmails him. In the end Dr Ben Linus remains a simple teacher and lets go of his personal dreams for the sake of his student, just as Ben Linus on the island gives up his gun and accepts forgiveness.

Other examples:
More concrete examples can be found of actual historical mythic elements. But first I must note that here I use "mythic" to cover both the mythologies we (at least those in my own religious sector) believe to be entirely historically false and narratives we believe to be historical but told with mythic tropes (although the things could be also historically accurate, albeit a slightly different view of historicity than the modern scientific one, they also fit standard mythological tropes). I have no time here, however, to get into the intricacies of the concept of the mythic, how for Aristotle, "muthos" was the plot of a narrative or how Paul Ricoeur agreed with "demythologization" but not with "demything."

For instance, we have the smoke monster who dwells in a temple, is unpredictable, and scares the daylights out of the people. Never forget that, while the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day was protective of the people of Israel, God was not always a "safe" god. He has Moses tell the people not to break through and touch the mountain, lest they die. And when the ark was being carried at one point, a man stretched out his hand simply to steady it, to be helpful .... and died from touching it. Of course, this "god" image does not carry across the whole of the series as the biblical image because we find out who smoky/the man in black really is, and he's not the ultimately protective God of the Old Testament (this may be a place where one might want to ask whether or not the conceptual framework is executed well or whether  what is done with the elements is good or bad, but I have not thought this one out thoroughly enough to give a response here).

Another example from the same literature is the fact that the most recent leader of "the others" before the arrival of the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 is named Benjamin, and he takes his orders from a man named Jacob, who lives in the shadow of the ruins of an Egyptian statue. That statue, when the full form is seen late in the series (in the scenes of the back-stories of Jacob, the man in black, and Richard Alpert), is the only fully recognizable mytho-religious thing that I can think of that is already in existence on the island when they arrive. So, right there, you have 3 or 4 from the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East (Smoke "monster" and temple, Jacob and Benjamin, and the Egyptian mythic religion from which the family of the real Jacob, including the descendants of his twelfth son, Benjamin, fled, and in the shadow of which the island Jacob lives).


Another Conceptual Framework Source (I don't think they know of though):
I must admit that I am here and above (in the whole dual citizenship and overly of the mythic and historical worlds things) drawing on another conceptual framework source, one about which I highly doubt the producers of Lost know. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they did, but somewhat surprised. I say this with caution, because, to be honest, I get annoyed when some people who don't really know all that much themselves toss around the "fluff" accusation at some screen-writers who, from what I can tell in what they do and the kind of literary knowledge they display in commentaries, are much more educated on the technicalities the arm-chair critics claim to judge them by, more educated than the arm-chair critics themselves ever will be (I am thinking here of the screenwriters, Terry and Ted, of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, who enjoyed an unusual experience in being on set for filming and who got an alongside commentary track on the DVDs). But the source I am drawing on myself here is somewhat esoteric and unknown, although close neighbor to some very well-knowns, but the neighbor relation is not well known. Charles Williams was an academic friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; supposedly they used to sit around in one of their offices at Oxford/Cambridge and read their work in progress to each other. One of such pieces was Williams's essay "The Figure of Arthur" (as in legendary British king). While the essay never was totally finished and published by Williams, its latest form does appear in a volume with his two volumes of Arthurian poetry (which, between them, tell the whole Arthurian cycle through the eyes of Talesian, the court minstrel). Lewis borrowed some of Williams's thoughts on the "kingdom of Logres" in That Hideous Strength (the volume with Williams's essay and poetry, often referred to as the "Arthurian Torso" for some reason, also contains an essay by Lewis on the Williams's two volumes of Arthurian poetry).

Williams's formulation of the pertinent material on the Fisher King is that there are three "lands." Again, keep in mind here, I am writing all this in an examination of Lost in a post in which I started out by making a point of discussing the non-materialist nature of the show ... so don't go slipping back into strictly materialist geographical concepts as soon as you hear a word like "land." In fact, here, in what is really happening as William's describes it, they are really all three the same land. Britain is the political land, ruled by a political king. Logres is the mystical land, ruled by the Pendragon. Between them is the wood that symbolizes the tension between the political and the mystical, Broceliande, and it is ruled by the Fisher King, who is wounded in the thigh and whose land lies fallow. The Fisher King represents the tension over whether or not Arthur will be merely (and thus eventually corruptly) the political king of a nation, or the mystical, almost father-like, Pendragon of a people. In Lost, there isn't really a tension between whether the key characters will be the "real world" version of themselves or the island version except in season 4 or 5 when Jack is trying to get the Oceanic 6 to go back because they never should have left. But in both places (island and real life), I would argue that they usually in some way or another live in the tension of the Fisher King's chapel, usually a tension between serving self and serving others.

V. Thematic Frame and Its Source: P.K. Dick's novel, Valis.
This is a tough section to write because it would take so much to contextualize the novel Valis. So I will start from the backside by giving the central theme in the terms in which is it given in Lost. It was was hidden in the DVD extras, but once I saw it, I instantly saw how it ran through the series as a theme (similar to how, once the Suzerain covenant treaty formulary of the ancient Near East was discovered in OT biblical studies, it shed light on soooooooo much in the Hebrew Bible/OT ... for a very good account of that, see Jon Levenson's Sinai and Zion).

In the DVD extras for either season 1 or season 2 of Lost, all of the content written in black-light ink from the blast door in the hatch is given. There are maps to things around the island like the swan hatch etc. But there are also a whole host of things from intellectual, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical history in the West. One of these is significantly altered. I don't mean substantially altered (the sense often used for "significantly," as in to a great degree or in a great amount), but in a way that signifies a new meaning. Renee Descarte's most famous statement is called his "Cogito," his Latin phrase, "Cogito ergum sum" ... "I think, therefore I am" (it is his beginning for what many consider to be the last failed attempt to categorically prove the existence of God, and also the basis for his category of reality he calls "res cogitens" - "thinking reality" - see my post on the creation-evolution debate for more on that).

On the blast door in the hatch in lost, though, it reads: "Cogito ergo doleo" ... "I think, therefore I suffer." Being able to understand the world we live in makes one suffer. I take this to be because this world we live in already contains so much suffering and the attempt to make sense out of it brings more suffering. But part of that interpretation comes from Valis, so I can no longer avoid addressing that novel.

Valis
This novel is introduced in Lost when Locke has Ben Linus "imprisoned" in his own basement (which is pretty nicely furnished). I put it in quotes because Locke brings him homemade meals and reading material form his own library. One of the books is Valis, at which point I ordered a copy of the book and read it. Linus quips snidely how nice it is to be given books from his own library and then says he has already read it, to which Locke replies that maybe he will get more out of it, or something new out of it, or something like that, on the second read.

The novel is set in the drug culture of northern CA in the early to mid 1970s. Dick has a friend named Horselover Fat, which is basically a translation of Philip Dick's own name (Phil = love, (h)ip = horse, Dick = German for "fat"). There is a movie/rock band/artist they know of who turn them on to a conspiracy theory of a trans-temporal super-intelligence called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) that facilitates communication between humans and aliens. Fat believes that visions that he has had come from Valis and he and his friends team up with the rockers to find the "fifth Messiah" they seek, based in certain Gnostic teachings.

(Sidenote: one of the other salutes that indicates the makers of Lost has Valis on the brain was the ship site they call "black rock," reminiscent of the The Black Iron Prison referenced by Fat ["a concept of an all-pervasive system of social control postulated in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis included in VALIS" - from wikipedia, which has a quotation of the relevant passage from the actual novel])

Valis in Lost
That's all the "basics" of the novel, but the connections with Lost involve further details and a "spoiler" on Valis. Dick's and Fat's names mean the same thing because they are the same person. Dick created Fat by basically walling off certain parts of himself - the part that suffers and the part that thinks about suffering and tries to understand it. His dope-addicted friend Gloria committed suicide before the time of the novel. Dick couldn't take it any more at the funeral and climbed in the back of a VW bus to get away and to cry, and the person who emerged was Horselover Fat, the guy obsessed with his visions and experiences that he believes are trans-temporal, and with ancient Gnostic theories that he thinks explain them. Dick reveals the dual identity at the outset of the novel, but the spoiler is that, when they find the current fifth Messiah, a two-year-old girl named Sophia, she forces Dick and Fat back into one person, which is very painful for him.

Here is where all the philosophical names that appear in Lost fit in(Rousseau, Locke, D. Hume, and others ... Sayid's name is not only a form of an Arabic word in a phrase for "blessing," it is also the pronounced the same as the last name of Edward Said, a pioneer in a school of literary and philosophical thought known as "post-colonialism" ... and in whose thought, by the way, one of his central terms is "the other/s").  These names from philosophical history represent reason trying to understand the world, but ultimately the suffering in the world defeats reason and only causes the thinker more suffering. A similar thing can be found in John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - when Smiley realizes that all his attempts at rationalization and making sense are shattered to pieces on the rocks of the insane paranoia and cruelty of the cold-war world. Even the numbers in Lost fit into this category. Some of them have numerological significance in the history of Western philosophical and religious thought, and it almost seems like you could figure out a system to them based in that historical background ... but you can't (at least I have never heard of anyone doing it). They taunt and tease you with the glimpse of a logic, but then it evades you.

The term I use for what Dick does in creating Fat is "bifurcation," and I take it from the third movie of the old Batman series, when Jim Carrey, as the Riddler, says to Tommy Lee Jones's Two-face, "oh bifurcated one." It is also the literal meaning of "schiz" in the word "schizophrenia": "phren" is a Greek word for head or mind ("phrenology was/is a pseudo-medicinal practice of measuring the skull and, if I remember rightly, observing bumps on it as a way to figure out what is wrong with a person's mind), and the Greek verb "schizo" means to tear asunder (in the story of the baptism of Jesus, the clouds are "torn apart" when the voice of the Father speaks, and particular when Christ dies on the Cross, the Temple veil is "torn apart" with the same word, in two pieces, from top to bottom). To be just a little weird by quoting Julian Cope: "come on, split my head wide open, scoop out a little of my brain, somebody to the kitchen, said 'Julian Cope, the very same," ... and this is not a dainty world to set before the swine, cuz it looks like I'm hanging out and hung up on the line." (It's a bit weird, I agree, but I think that, in addition to the head splitting, it captures some of the island's "un-dainty" quality and the islanders having nothing to do but "hang out" there ... Martin Heidegger is a MUCH debated philosopher in the 20th century, not least of all because of his membership in the National Socialist Party, but he had some deep things to say on existential angst - he said it is the nature of human experience, what he called Dasein, literally "being there," to be he suspended out into or over the "nothing," the Germ abgrund, the abyss ... the "deep").

In all of the relations and actions of the people on the island and in the real world - all the betrayals and lovers triangles, the difficulties of a married couple like Sun and Jin - in all of that, I think we see people who are bifurcated into two selves. As I said, the dual-self motif is clearest in season 6 with the "flash-sideways" thing, but I think it is also the thematic structure of the flashbacks and flash-forwards. In each episode we see two versions of the same selves working through the same issues.

(I use specifically the "romantic scandal" instances here because some like to criticize the "romantic" content in the series as being just a soap opera, and I make the same defense here that I make of the long, drawn-out teenage romantic angst in the 5th Harry Potter book, which I refer to as "the long dark teatime of the soul" [borrowing a Douglas Adams title and referencing the agonizing scene with Cho Chang in Madam Puttyfoot's Teashop] ... life is made up of those things too on a very real level. There may be a point to saying that they should dial back the heat and exposure, as there would be with a lot of contemporary material. But if we're going to criticize all things of romantic intrigue, Jane Austen goes right down on the bottom shelf, along with half the Arthurian material. And if we're not, we can't just pull that out of the bag when we're looking for ammunition against things we dislike for other reasons altogether.)

Back to the subject of psychology (Jung), incorporating this thematic of understanding as suffering (Valis), I would simply quote two lines from 90s pop/indie rock: "pain is the healing, and tears sting like alcohol" (Toad the Wet Sprocket); and "digging in the dirt, find the places we got hurt" (Peter Gabriel). Understanding brings suffering that can bring healing.  If the purgatory interpretation has any value to it, it is on this figurative and thematic level, not as a "material" location. This is the place that Jack finds himself coming to at the funeral that is both his own and his father's, where Ben Linus waits outside for a while to try to process and apologizes to Locke, and tells Hurley he was an amazing number 1, and maybe the reason why Jin and Sun smile as they leave the hospital together even though they know they are dead in the submarine. This may be the answer to the suffering. I'm not saying the series is distinctly Christological (even with a character named Jack Shepherd), and therefore, for me, it could not be a full answer to suffering. But I also think that in its general nature and elements it can be a partial answer that is consonant with that fullness of truth.

Conclusion: a Caveat on Authorial Intent:
After reading what I have to say here, a further objection might arise saying that it doesn't count if they didn't intend it from the outset. In short, I do not believe that the only two options for seeing elements such as I am have described being in a work (covering the whole scope of the work), are complete forplanning on the part of an author or complete eisogesis (reading in) by an audience. The preoccupation with "conscious intent" is, I believe, a creation of modern thought. I believe an author can begin a work with a general disposition and then the work develop in such a way that that general disposition is fleshed out concretely well, including in a distinct overall shape and structure in the work (although this is not always the case; many authors have a very clear gameplan going in).

It is fairly well known that the creators of the Lost have plainly said in interviews that they did not have a gameplan in creating the show. For instance (from what I heard from the person who introduced me to it), Jack was supposed to last only a few episodes. But, along the lines of what I just said, I do not believe that this means they could not have ended up with a work that does have a clear conceptual and thematic framework and that does, in the end, have a discernible that is roughly cohesive across the span of the series and reaches a clear and decisive endpoint (in Aristotle's terms, has a distinct beginning, middle and end, with a clear course of plot). I believe that the way that  the final scene of Jack laying dying in the trees mirrors the opening shot of season 1 has a cohesion to it, even if it only occurred to them to do it going into season 6. 

I have written things to this effect before on this blog. In particular, I talked about Raising Steam, the 40th novel in the Discworld series by Terry Pratechett, as possibly the final book in the series (before TP died and it became definitely the final book) and its fittingness as such, giving a certain arc to the series as a whole. Along the way, I talked about the eight books of the Sam Vimes/Citywatch subseries as having a certain structure: 4 introductory books leading up to a trilogy (a 7-book structure, popular with a couple "fantasy" authors I consider to be good, such as C.S. Lewis, or at least their series - here distinguishing between the Harry Potter series and Rowling as an author post-HP), but then an 8th book (Snuff) being added "beyond" (drawing on the 7 days leading to the 8th day structure in the thinking of the Christian tradition and TP's own fascination with the number 8). But the publication history of the whole Discworld series shows a sporadic pattern, coming out with books randomly jumping between protagonist sub-series, maybe depending on for which protagonist he simply felt like writing another book. But I still maintain my observations. I go more on what is actually discernible in the work itself than on statements of "authorial intent."

As I plan to write in other posts soon (on the Dumbledore as gay issue), I do not think authorial intent, meaning  concrete conscious intent, is the important issue that we moderns, to whom Enlightenment rationalism (beginning especially with Descartes) passed on an obsession with our own consciousness, think it is (at the very least, our way of thinking of it is in error). Sometimes authorial statements of source material can be revelatory, but even in those cases, we have to ask the question of whether or not they executed well in working with that material for their intended goals. And sometimes we can discover something, and once we know of a real world referent and can see an overwhelming number of clear distinct correlations, it is a pretty safe bet (only a bet because of no authorial statement, but a pretty safe bet nonetheless) that the author used the real world instance as a model for the fictional. I am thinking in particular of an excellent piece by a guy named Travis Prinzi on the real-world Fabian Society being the referent for the Order of the Phoenix in Harry Potter. A number of names of members of the Order of the Phoenix match names of known members of the Fabian society, including the name of Molly Weasley's deceased brother Fabian Prewett. More importantly, the Fabian Society's gameplan for gradual change as a way to achieve socialism ( as opposed to the fast bloody revolution of the Bolsheviks) matches Dumbledore's methodology of slow gradual change (in things like social equality for the house-elves). But as far as I know, Rowling said nothing about this ... and if she did, Prinzi did not seem to be aware of it, since he was not appealing to authorial statement; he was arguing by lining up good evidence from the texts ... this is what we in the business call "literary analysis."

Another example of a general principal materializing in ways not "intended" is an example from my own studies of Hebrew. When I learned about chiasmic structure (ABBA; ABCBA; ABCCBA; ABCDCBA; etc), I got all excited about it. And in class one day we were reading a passage and I asked the professor, "hey, this is a chiasm isn't it?!?!?!" His reply was that, "well, yes ... but, they had chiasm 'on the brain.'" In other words, there minds were saturated in in and it didn't necessarily have to be "intended." Sometimes it was, but other times not. And it didn't have to be either "fully" chiasm or not at all; it could be distinctly loosely chiasmic (this is akin to an error I have heard made by literal 6-day creationism in saying that because there are no tight and obvious parelellism structures present in Gen 1, the structure that defines formal Hebrew poetry uniquely, the chapter is not poetic by other means - they want to avoid a claim of poetic thought, in favor of "scientific" thought in order to avoid any claim of the chapter being "figurative). The Enlightenment rationalist schema of a clearly delineated and thoroughly detailed plan followed by strict and full execution is simply not how human minds work. We have subconsciouses. We have the ability for patterns to saturate our thinking to such an extent that we do not have to consciously "plan" in order to wind up doing things in a certain way.

This is the type of thing I am talking about happening with Lost, and it is my argument that, in its final form, the show Lost has the elements I have listed (non-materialist nature, distinct conceptual framework, and distinct thematic framework) concretely and strongly.