When in a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis Stanley Kubrick was asked to describe 2001, he said that: “2001 is basically a visual, non-verbal experience. It avoids intellectual verbalization and reaches the viewer’s subconscious in a way that is essentially poetic and philosophic. The film thus becomes a subjective experience which hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting.” Arthur Clarke, who wrote the script with Kubrick and later on he turned the script into a novel, declared that “we set out with the deliberate intention of creating a myth”. (1972) However, there is already a myth or better say an archetype that the film borrows as a starting point in order to develop its own. The notion of the odyssey, as the title also suggests. Of course, Kubrick and Clarke treat this notion differently than Homer and someone has to try hard to connect these two approaches. And if we want to trace common ideas or elements in James’ Joyce Ulysses, then our task becomes more complicated.

James Joyce had written that he had put so many enigmas and puzzles in Ulysses that it would keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what he meant (cited in Richard Ellman’s James Joyce). This means that what he wrote is open to various interpretations and as Kubrick said “Reactions to Art are always different because they are always deeply personal”. (1969) Nevertheless, there is a significant difference between Joyce and Kubrick’s work. While Joyce relies heavily on language, being its main tool of expressing and creating his world and having an almost touchable quality, Kubrick eliminates the role of language and gives major importance to the image. Actually, Kubrick believed too many people are word-oriented rather than picture-oriented and he considered that to be a negative point as far as cinema is concerned. His opinion was that a film should stir subconscious emotional reaction from the audience. “A film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication”. (1969)

Critics for both Joyce and Kubrick were negative in the beginning. James Joyce has taken the high cultural form of the epic and mixed it with everyday language and description of actions such as urination and masturbation that were never before depicted in a novel. However, the result was not a popular culture product but on the contrary, a very demanding text that few people were able to fully comprehend. Ulysses has been described as the “most modern of the modernist texts”. Written from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, some unknown or undiscovered by other novelists, Ulysses, according to Joyce “would be enough to upset anyone’s mental balance” (Letters, 1962). Furthermore, those who thought that Ulysses would be a reproduction of the Homeric Odyssey found out that Odyssey did not control the text but instead was a kind of schema for reading. Even this way, however, the correspondences, parallels and echoes from the Homeric epic were posed in order to be subverted, skewed or frustrated. The culturally determined hero of the Odyssey, noble, dignified and faithful has given its place to a perplexed, complicated, “womanly man” hero, whose identity is questioned throughout the novel. Stanley Kubrick has been also confronted with much negative criticism especially from conservative East-coast critics. Unlike earlier cinema spectacular films, 2001 lacked a traditional Hollywood structure, dialogue or resolution. It made no attempt to explain things to the audience. Parts of the film were described as “crashing bore”, “morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long”. Should the problem be the one that Arthur Clarke claims to be? “Those who remain hostile have a difficulty facing the film’s religious implications” (1972). As Kubrick argues “The God concept is at the heart of the film […] the religious implications are inevitable, because all these essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligence are the attributes we give to God” (1969). On the other and, West coast critics together with young film critics from campuses had a lot of positive to say, characterizing the film as “a milestone, a landmark in the art of cinema”. Driven by the film’s commercial success and by the above enthusiastic reviews, some of the critics went back to see it again and wrote positive reviews, especially after Kubrick cut some scenes, reducing the film’s length. The same way with Ulysses, 2001 reveals its hidden meanings slowly, requiring several viewings but above all, an open mind.

So, how the concept of the Odyssey fits in the film? Someone could argue that the film is about man’s quest to find God. What we see in the film, and more specifically in the second and third art of it, is man’s galaxy quest. Starting four million years ago, in “The Dawn of the Man”, 2001 shows our distant ape ancestor living in nature, surrounded by natural shapes of earth, sky and weathered rocks, confronted with the shock of the out of the blue appearance of a black monolith. Its straight edges, square corners and black color stand for Perfection, thus for God. After its appearance, apes discover how to use bones as tools for food but also as lethal weapon. Cutting to the near future, in one of the most impressive cuts ever made (the bone that the ape throws triumphantly to the air is transformed to a spacecraft),we meet a scientist who travels to the moon because a monolith has appeared there, sending out a powerful signal. The film then skips eighteen months later, where the astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, together with HAL, the super intelligent 9000 computer that runs the aircraft, travel towards Jupiter. Dave disconnects HAL when it makes an error and when he arrives at Jupiter he discovers another black monolith. The monolith makes Dave experience a 23-minute journey through light and colors, a so-called “psychedelic trip”, before ending up in a room where he ages rapidly. The monolith appears in that room and transforms Bowman into a new born “Star Child” that travels through space and returns to Planet Earth. During these scenes, Strauss symphonies with leading one the “Thus Spoke Zaratustra” contribute to the magnitude of the images. Is this travel from Earth to the outer space and then back to earth an odyssey, a quest for God or meaning? Is this cycle from birth to death and then to rebirth a cycle leading to eternity and infinity, as the subtitle to the third part of the film “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” suggests? Does the return of the “Star Child” on Earth stand for the return to Ithaca? There are as many answers as the people who will think about it. Because ambiguity is not only inevitable but also valuable in a film where the audience is invited to “fill in” the visual experience.

We find ambiguity in Ulysses too but Bloom, whose Odyssey is narrated, has found his Ithaca, even if it is completely different from the Homeric one. Molly is not Penelope, the faithful wife, Bloom accepts his role as a cuckold and does not kill the treacherous suitors and Stephen Dedalus refuses to be Telemachus and substitute the son Bloom seeks. Despite the fact that this is not the happy ending that Homer’s Ulysses achieves, the point is that Bloom returns home after is 24-hour wandering in Dublin and since the book ends with the word “yes”, we are left with an optimistic feeling.

All three heroes had to fight in order to return to Ithaca. All of them had to travel. For Homer’s Ulysses the traveling took place at the dangerous sea, the encounters were with semi-gods, monsters and mythical creatures and his reward was his palace, his wife and son. For Joyce’s Ulysses, the journey was mostly psychological and the demons were personal, internal. He had to find a way to compromise his two identities and we are still not sure whether he could ever achieve this. His Ithaca is his home but it is not an ideal place because in real life there are neither Homeric Ithacas nor faithful Penelopes. And as far as Dave Bowman is concerned, his journey is in the infinity, Ithaca may be Earth but may very well be Death. Man will always look for God or for this omniscient and omnipotent power (the monolith?) that can provide him with inspiration. But he will never succeed in understanding the incomprehensible because his limited senses cannot comprehend what lies beyond the visible, touchable world. In a way, Man in 2001 is condemned to travel without really knowing how Ithaca -his final destination- will look like.