Redstick SF

So, I’m researching some stuff for the dissertation and I roll across a letter Aldous Huxley wrote his son in 1959 while he’s writing Island. Those of you who have been paying attention know that Huxley’s Island was one of the many literary works alluded to by the show. In this particular case, the second season finale ended on “Pala Ferry,” an allusion to the utopian island of Huxley’s novel.

Before I dive into the interesting contents of this letter, check out how Lost obliquely mirrors the plot of Huxley’s novel: In short, Will Farnaby, a journalist, arrives on the isolated island of Pala as the agent (under cover as a shipwrecked sailor) of Joe Alehyde. Alehyde, a magnate and one of several parties greedy for Pala’s natural resources threatens the utopia that has developed on Pala.

If the mysterious struggle between Ben (and the others) and Widmore jumps to mind, you can’t be blamed.

Here’s the excerpt from Huxley’s letter:

I am working away on my Utopian novel [Island], wrestling with the problem of getting an enormous amount of diversified material into the book without becoming merely expository or didactic. It may be that the job is one which cannot be accomplished with complete success. In point of fact, it hasn’t been accomplished in the past. For most Utopian books have been exceedingly didactic and expository. I am trying to lighten up the exposition by putting it into dialogue form, which I make as lively as possible. But meanwhile I am always haunted by the feeling that, if only I had enough talent, I could somehow poetize and dramatize all the intellectual material and create a work which would be simultaneously funny, tragic, lyrical and profound.

So Huxley writes this letter in which he complains to his son that he’s not writing the novel as well as he’d like to. The problem, says Huxley, is that the utopian novel, of which Island is definitely one, is necessarily didactic and expository. In other words, if utopian novels are concerned with articulating the perfect society, you have to, at some point, articulate what is perfect (didactic) and illustrate how the society fits the definition (expository).

But what really strikes me about this letter is Huxley’s coming to terms with his own limitations as a writer. And while he wasn’t able to reach a place where he was able to create a work of literature that could accomplish all of these goals, perhaps in his attempt to articulate what it SHOULD be, he laid the groundwork for the attempts of later artists.

It’s hard for me to read his last line without thinking that it succinctly describes Lost’s accomplishment. It is concerned with the same questions as Huxley’s novel (and utopian literature as a whole, for that matter) and it does so with the artistry that Huxley found just out of his reach. Lost, unlike many television shows is enjoyable AND important, entertaining AND meaningful. In these ways, “simultaneously funny, tragic, lyrical and profound,” Lost, you could argue, completes the errand on which Huxley set out some fifty years earlier.