Lost as Epic Poem, Part 2

Previously on my indulgences in Lost: I suggested that Lost shouldn’t be dismissed as junk television, but instead should be seen as a kind of literature that lets us live in imaginary worlds. Before that, I built half an argument that Lost should be understood (“read,” if you’re in grad school) as an epic poem.

My first three reasons to think of Lost as a bona fide epic were drawn from a lecture I give to my world lit classes: Lost has a central hero, begins smack in the middle of the action, and puts its major themes right in the first hour of programming. I started the discussion of each aspect with examples from epic poems that have been widely read for thousands of years: Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid.

If you’re not at all interested in Lost (which I hear is actually true of some people), feel free to surf the tags at right or the archive below. If you want to see something cool, though – read on.

Aspect 4: An epic poem takes place across a vast setting

When Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic, sails away from Troy after engineering the strategy that won the war – the Trojan Horse – he makes nearly a dozen stops over ten years before he can make it back to his island kingdom of Ithaca. Although scholars disagree about the exact locations of some of his stops (or even if Homer based the adventures on real places), most can agree that he covered a lot of territory.

Troy is on the northern coast of Turkey, and Ithaca is an island to the west of Greece, so even a direct route would be quite a journey. Because he angers the gods and his men make some foolish decisions, he’s “blown time and again off course” and bounces around the Mediterranean, landing in places as far distant as Sicily and North Africa.

Sure, it doesn't seem like a lot of distance to us. But imagine yourself in a giant canoe with 30 friends paddling, without motors or GPS or the Coast Guard.

In the Aeneid, since Virgil was such a big fan of Homer, Aeneas and his fellow Trojan refugees cover much of the same distance that Odysseus did. Aeneas makes stops on Sicily and in the North African city of Carthage before getting to central Italy, where, according to legend and to Virgil, his descendents founded the city of Rome.

On one hand, there are surface similarities between Lost and both the Odyssey and the Aeneid. The characters are lost at sea, buffeted by forces beyond their control, and they’re trying to either return home or make a new one. The problems of finding food, dealing with hostile locals, and finding shelter are common to all three of the big stories.

The vastness of setting in Lost goes deeper, though. For one thing, the characters criscross the island seemingly a million times – on hikes to fix the radio, go to the Hatch, find the Others, rescue captives from the Others, make deals with the Others. Blow up the Others. Etc.

Danielle Rousseau's map of the island - follow link to enlarge

Even more than that, the flashes back, forward, and sideways cover ground on at least 6 continents. Amazingly, almost all the episodes were actually filmed on Oahu, Hawaii, but individual scenes are set all over the world: in Sydney, Los Angeles, the Australian Outback, Iowa (Kate), Miami (Juliet), Oxford (Farraday), London (Widmore, Charlie, etc), Scotland (Desmond), Seoul (Sun and Jin), Tunisia (Ben and Locke), New York (Michael), the Canary Islands (Richard), Alabama (Sawyer), Baghdad and Tekrit (Sayid), Nigeria (Mr. Eko), Thailand (Jack), Berlin (Sayid again).

This list doesn’t even take into account the characters from other countries who don’t get their own flashbacks. Remember Paolo and Nikki, the diamond-stealing couple from season 2 who piped up one day and whined that they wanted to go to the Hatch, too? Paolo was a Brazilian chef, the “Wolfgang Puck” of that South American country.

Mikhail Bakunin, Ben’s man in charge of the communications station The Flame, was a Russian-speaker from Soviet Ukraine – and a wore an eye patch in a major shout-out to Odysseus’s adventure with the cyclops.

Danielle Rousseau and her team were French scientists before the smoke monster somehow corrupted her team and Ben stole her baby. Dogen, the temple guardian guy (what was his job, anyway?), didn’t like the feel of English on his tongue, even though he spoke it perfectly well, and used a translator from his native Japanese. The online game The Lost Experience reveals that a Danish industrialist named Alvar Hanso provided the original funding for the Dharma Initiative.

If only polar bears lived in Antarctica, all 7 continents would be represented.

Jin, Michael, Walt and Sawyer on their own swift ship

Plus, there are all those airplane and airport scenes, which encapsulate the very idea of “vast distance.” The characters on Lost have the same obsessive need / desire for their airplanes and submarine that Odysseus has for his “swift ships” to sail the “wine-dark sea.” In fact, the first time the characters make a concerted effort to get off the island (Exodus), they sail on a homemade raft much like the one Odysseus used to finally leave the island where Calypso had held him prisoner.

Aspect 5: An epic poem uses epithets or “word handles”

An epithet is a literary device used primarily in oral poetry that is linked to a character’s name or some aspect of nature and performs two basic functions: it makes that person or thing easy to remember, and it provides a shorthand for characterization. Homer was so good at using these little notations that he has a special category named for him.  “Homeric epithets” from the Odyssey include: Odysseus’s “swift” or “slender” ships; the sea is “wine-dark.” His tale includes “the deathless gods,” “rosy-fingered dawn,” “cunning Odysseus,” “Hermes the giant-killer,” Calypso, “the nymph with lovely braids.”

Virgil doesn’t use epithets as frequently as Homer, but he doesn’t need them quite as much, since the Aeneid was written down from the beginning, rather than memorized and recited. Still, Virgil has enough respect for Homer that he throws in an epithet now and then. Aeneas is referred to as “duty bound” in his mission to found the “high walls of Rome.”

In Lost, of course, the medium is different yet again from oral or written poetry. The audience doesn’t need tags as much as Homer’s or Virgil’s audience might have; we can see characters’ faces and hear their voices.

It’s quite fascinating, then, that epithets are still abundant. It’s just that one character seems to have been given all the responsibility for manufacturing them: Sawyer.

I won’t make an exhaustive list of nicknames here, because that really would take you away from whatever you were doing before you started reading this, but enjoy this montage from Seasons 1-3. Spend a little more time on YouTube with the search terms “Sawyer” and “nicknames” for at least a good hour of entertainment.

The use of epithets in this way, granted, does more to characterize Sawyer than it does the people he’s mocking. But Sawyer does what Homer does: he seizes on a single aspect of someone’s looks or behavior and uses that as shorthand for the entire person. He’s not always kind, but he’s certainly consistent.

Aspect 6: An epic poem invokes a muse

The Muses were 9 daughters of Zeus who were each the patroness of some aspect of creative endeavor. Dance, lyric poetry, and sacred song, for example. At the beginning of an epic poem, the writer would include a short snippet of prayer asking for the help of the patroness of epic poetry, or invoking her. The invocation passage, as discussed in part 1, also gives an overview of the main themes of the epic.

The Muses dance with Apollo

In the Odyssey, Homer begins: “Sing, muse, of the man of twists and turns, blown time and again off course.” His Iliad starts in a similar way: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus.” Virgil starts the Aeneid a bit differently, putting himself center stage – “I sing of warfare and a man at war” – but he does invoke the goddess in the first 30 lines or so.

In our day, of course, there’s no patron goddess of television that writers can invoke when they begin a new series. (At least that I’m aware of.) But look at it this way: What does a muse do? Answer: a muse inspires and guides creative endeavor.

If we take that slant – that a muse is something that inspires and guides – then it’s actually possible to say that Lost has multiple muses. A plethora, even. Every time the producers/writers allude to some other book or film, they might be said to “invoke” the thing they’re quoting.

Consider, as just one example, all the philosophical ideas invoked by the names of characters: John Locke references the English philosopher of the same name, a man whose ideas about social contract influenced the American Declaration of Independence. Locke also argued that at birth the human mind is a tabula rasa – or blank slate – and that all knowledge is gained through experience. Lo and behold, “Tabula Rasa” is the title of one of the earlier season 1 episodes.

Charlotte Staples Lewis points us directly to C.S. Lewis, who penned The Chronicles of Narnia, which are about a series of mysterious journeys to another world. The church Eloise uses to help the Oceanic Six get back to the island is a Dharma station called The Lamppost, another nod to Lewis and Narnia.

Daniel met Charlotte when she was just a wee Dharma kid, swinging with chocolate

Daniel Faraday’s name is borrowed from Michael Faraday, a real-life physicist who did work in electromagnetism. The name of Faraday’s mother, Eloise Hawking, is link to the field of physics, specifically Stephen Hawking, the scientist who recently suggested we might just want to stop trying to contact aliens. Before that, though, he was best known for ground breaking work in the study of quantum gravity and for writing A Brief History of Time… which is one of the books Ben has in his bedroom.

In addition to the names, though, the show references a whole library of interesting reading, from Stephen King to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Some references are made subtly, through plot ideas or characterization, and some are made more explicitly when books actually appear on screen.

For one thing, the number 42, which appears in the sequence the Losties have to enter into the hatch computer (4 8 15 16 23 42), and which Hurley used to win the lottery, seems to at least nod to Douglass Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In that book, a “race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings” build a supercomputer to calculate the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After a million or so years, the computer is still thinking. Eventually, it comes up with the answer “42.” Frustrating? Sure. But that’s nothing compared with the way Lost viewers felt when we had to wait all that time to figure out what the smoke monster was all about.

See class? I told you reading was sexy.

In addition to plot points and characters drawn from other literature, books also appear as props in the show. In a delicious twist on stereotypes, the Southerner everybody assumes to be no more than a criminal and a redneck – Sawyer – turns out to be the show’s biggest reader. (His name, of course, comes via the conman who caused his parents’ death from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer.) At various points in the show, Sawyer is seen reading Watership Down; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; and A Wrinkle in Time, among others.

Ben is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on the Ajira flight that takes the Oceanic Six back to the island. Ulysses, you may know, is a book about the ebbs and flows of consciousness. Ulysses is also the Latin version of the name – wait for it – Odysseus.

Heck, even the Others have a book club. Juliet was hosting a discussion of Stephen King’s Carrie the day Oceanic 815 crashed.

Convinced yet? Check in and tell me what you think.

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