Matthew O. Cory, PhD
Wendy C. Cory, PhD
[T]oday’s psychoanalyst can be expected to say that he decodes before he will come around to taking the necessary tour with Freud (turn at the statue of Champollion, says the guide) that will make him understand that what he does is decipher; the distinction is that a cryptogram takes on its full dimension only when it is in a lost language.
- Lacan
The island is a body without organs. It is a Dogon Egg, a smooth surface suitable for inscription. It is becoming inscribed. It is filling up with signs quickly, to the point of overflowing, signs which are symbols, signs that are in code: the tusk of a wild boar cuts a groove into a tree trunk; a column of smoke rises from the other side of the island; a series of numbers emerges briefly and dives back underground, only to sprout again miles or years away.
The analysand reclines on the analyst’s couch and narrates his dream: “I was lying on the ground in a jungle, but I was wearing my favorite suit. A yellow dog came up to me and then ran away. Then I stood up and started walking. There was a shoe hanging from a tree. Then I was on a beach. There had been a plane crash. The plane was on fire. There were people around it. Some of them were screaming, some of them were walking in a daze, others were lying on the ground dying or dead. I tried to help them, but every time I started to help someone, I saw someone else in greater danger…”
This story begins, eleven times to date, with the augenblick, the moment of thought. Is this eye blink the instant in which the narrative that follows is conceived, the moment in which the entire dream occurs? More likely it is the moment in which the dreamer awakes (we will return to this possibility later). Does the dream belong to Jack or to John Locke? Are parts of the island being dreamed by Walt, or are the castaways being dreamed by the island itself? It hardly matters. The story now spreading over the island happens in the language of a dream, in the non-discursive structure, the peculiar anti-logic of a dream. Its parts are not organs, which is to say they are not organized, not directed toward some productive function (at least, not yet). The island (so far at least) is a celibate machine, intricate and complexly involved, but only with itself, coupling with nothing outside itself, except, perhaps in the production of memory (we will return to this possibility later).
The island’s parts are not organs; rather they are symbols, which operate like those of a dream. At times they appear to be symbols of a meaningful allegory, but the possibility of allegory is merely the bait of a trap, like that of many other traps being set on the island. Signifiers in an allegory exist in a one-to-one relationship with the signified, allowing for an answer to the question “What is this really about? What is really happening?” Each symbol on the island, like that of a dream, relates to many signifieds. Each symbol relates to the other symbols in multiple ways. Most important, however, to the extent that these symbols can be arranged and decoded to produce a message, that message will itself be in a new code. Such decoding does not reveal any underlying truth. Instead, each decoding produces more codes, more decoding, more production. Shannon translates the French transmission: “It’s repeating… ‘Please help me, please come get me… I’m alone now, on the island alone. Please someone come. The others - they’re dead. It killed them. It killed them all.’” The translation requires further decoding from the castaways: Who left the message? What killed them? Why has the message been repeating for sixteen years?
For example, John Locke is multiple. He is a clown, a hunter, a shaman. He is becoming animal: he communicates with the dog, he understands the language of the boars. He is becoming schizophrenic: the island speaks to him. Invisible forces are at work. The castaways have been brought to the island for a reason. Each is being manipulated by something unseen. Meister Eckart says that the eye with which he sees God is the same eye with which God sees him; Locke has seen the eye of the island. Everything on the island is a sign and part of a message intended for the castaways. This is what Locke understands.
Thus he moves at and across the boundaries of two opposed flows. At the moment of the crash, at the augenblick, there is no state. People scream, wander or sit in a daze. The island is without order and without rule, what Hakim Bey calls a Temporary Autonomous Zone. One flow attempts to restore a state and another flow moves against it. Several regimes of signs are invoked to ensnare the castaways, some of which are transparent while some are more mysterious. One of the island’s most fascinating signs, the mysterious numbers, keep the castaways ensnared in the hatch as these numbers must be input into the computer every 108 minutes. The mysterious Zeke encircles Jack, Sawyer and Locke in a ring of firelit torches to demonstrate the force with which he will protect his part of the island, trapping the castaways on the other side. Jack uses a relatively transparent sign, science, as an apparatus of capture. He immediately begins asking questions of the crash victims in order to determine an immediate course of action, then barks orders to other castaways while he administers medical treatment to those in need. Sayid uses technology; within hours he is organizing castaways to help build a signal fire. The actions of Jack and Sayid serve as early steps to ensnare the castaways and form a state. Now Jack will raise an army. Appropriately, he conspires initially with a police officer, reminding us that this army will in fact be a police force insofar as before it can serve to protect a state it must first form a state by policing itself.
Some will resist. Resistance to a state appeared in the same first moments as did attempts to institute the state. Whereas an initial line of flight from the island on a raft circled back to the island, lines of flight from any potential state were recognized and maintained. Sawyer adopts the trappings of the rebel and the criminal; when he accepts Jack’s authority he does so with an irony and cynicism that indicates his acquiescence is temporary, self-serving, and less than authentic. Jin initially removes himself and Sun from the larger group and resists attempts to communicate. Locke follows lines of flight into the jungle, on a hunt, or down a hatch. Until now such resistance is merely one flow among others across a TAZ, but the initially smooth surface of the island quickly acquired zones. First the beach was distinguished from the jungle caves in the argument as to whether to stay in view of rescuers or move closer to the fresh water. Certain sites acquired powerful valences: the hatch, the Black Rock. Now the island has been clearly territorialized: a line has been drawn across it. Before the army can march across that line, it will first draw a line around the castaways, capturing them. Unwillingness to serve or to recognize the state’s authority will no longer be one flow among or opposed to others. It will require flight from the police state, outside its apparatus of capture.
Locke now moves across and between these two flows, at a limit of each. For the schizophrenic everything is sign. He recognizes the signs being used in service of creation of a state, but he recognizes this regime of signs as one among many others. He recognizes, for instance, signs of a supernatural, outside of and disruptive to Jack’s scientific regime. He participates in the state’s signifying regime but at the same time his devotion to decoding the island’s signs serve to disrupt the state, to prevent its smooth functioning. When Jack returns to the caves with Hurley, Kate, and Locke after opening the hatch and determining it will be impossible for all of the castaways to find shelter there, he explains to the group that they will instead remain in the caves, where they will all stay together and remain safe. During Jack’s speech, Locke gathers what he needs in order to return to the hatch and lower himself into it that night, alone. When Jack calls him out in front of the entire group, Locke calmly informs Jack of his intention and leaves the group.
We move across and between the flows, toward and away from the state, as well. We, too, are becoming schizophrenic: the television is speaking to us; the island is speaking to us through Locke; Locke is speaking to us through the television. We recognize everything as a sign, everything has meaning, everything is part of a secret message directed at us that we are meant to decode. Though the story sometimes appears as a mystery or a puzzle, it is neither, for whither would include inside itself a rational solution. Here, there are only codes hidden inside codes.
Perhaps it is best not even to call it a story but rather to say it is a dream, because it comprises the symbols of a dream and it movements are those of a dream. Certainly, however, it is not the Lacanian dream of wish fulfillment. Quite to the contrary, the Freudian triad is distinctly absent from the island, and attempts to instate it meet with frustration. Only one conventional parent-child relation here preexists the crash, and it serves mostly to disrupt the rationality of this order. Though Walt’s biological father, Michael’s previous relationship with him is so tenuous that Walt hesitates to recognize him as such. Michael seems childish in his early attempts to act as a father, Walt more mature in his ability to see through and resist these attempts. After being kidnapped, Walt becomes part real and part imaginary to the castaways, particularly Shannon. His status as person, ghost, or imaginary being comes into question. Perhaps he has secret powers on the island, unknown to the rest. Jack’s attempts to instate order must in some way establish him as a father to the rest, but this is precisely his difficulty, as he is neither older, wiser, nor stronger than the other castaways, and has no real relation to them prior to the crash.
The Lacanian wish-fulfillment is allowed by the island in the structure of the memories it produces. Whereas the triad has at best specious reality on the island itself, the flashbacks of memory generally assume its form. “Say ‘Mommy-Daddy-Me’ when I speak to you,” says the memory. Now we understand Jack: he’s like this because he has daddy issues. Now we understand Kate: she’s like this because she has daddy issues. Now we understand Locke, Sawyer, Shannon, &c. All attempts to solve a puzzle must return to these pre-crash myths, because it is only here that we are allowed recourse to order, reason, goal-oriented behavior, and a state. These, however, are the fantasy, as they have no bearing on the forces inscribing the island, marking its zones and territories. Whether or not these memories are in any sense true is irrelevant unless we would attempt to solve, which we don’t. We decode.