Lost Marginalia

In “Eggtown,” we hear Olivia Newton-John singing “Xanadu,” the theme song from the 1980 movie in which she stars. Intriguingly, the plot involves a character who appears at different places and times and remains the same age. In this instance, Newton-John plays an actual muse, who becomes the inspiration for different male characters, once in the big-band era and once in the disco days. [In the latter, the fellow happens to be an artist.] Another song in the same movie is “Suspended in Time.”

The title comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…”). The same literary reference was used in the 1960s by Ted Nelson for the first use of the word “hypertext” in his Xanadu Project (mirroring Dharma Initiative). In the pre-personal computer era, Nelson envisioned computers as a means of facilitating non-sequential writing. Included in his concept were “zippered lists,” which would involve the creation of compound documents, or “transclusions.” [His intent was connected to copyright and payments for use of creative materials.]. The collectivity of texts is referred to as “docuverse,” which is infinitely expandable. In 1974, he published his ideas in a book, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines,” consisting of two books put back-to-back. Viewed as the conceptual predecessor to the hypertextuality of the internet, Nelson still maintains the Xanadu Project and criticizes the actual workings of the internet. The very nature of “Lost,” of course, is a hypertext, in which references interlink. Plug the viewer response into the internet amplifies the show’s capacity for multiple vectors of association. As a dynamic, “Lost” isn’t a linear text filled with symbols that have deep meaning but a constantly reconfiguring network of nodes or clusters.

 At the end of the 17th century, John Locke put forth the idea that we are the product of experience, a radical idea at the time that quickly became a propelling thought of the Enlightenment. If we are the product of experience, then each of us has a unique self in which we become our narratives. So begins the literary category of the novel, in which the hero or heroine sets out in the world and with each adventure becomes a self. Locke’s idea is clearly seen in William Hogarth’s narrative series of prints, “The Rake’s Progress” (1737). Our hero is depicted in the first print as a callow young fellow with smooth, moon-faced features, or Locke’s tabula rasa. By the 8th and final print, he has descended into madness with the marks of his waywardness visible (or impressed) upon his features. The sequence of time is linear and forward-moving (“and then….”).

We have accepted that Season 4 of Lost includes flash-forwards, but are these future events necessarily determined? Remember the classic narrative device of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” in which Scrooge sees Christmas Past and Christmas Future. With fear and trembling, he asks if this must be his fate, and he learns that changes in the present can alter the outcome. We have the spectral figure of Jacob (as in Jacob Marley) along with Ben (as in Ebeneezer), which doesn’t necessarily situate us in “A Christmas Carol” territory, but viewers might consider that the flash-forwards function differently than the flashbacks.