I have been reading Ulysses at random, and having now reached one hundred Casts, I’ll take this as a kind of landing—pausing briefly and allowing myself a digression.
Published in 2018 to mark the 50th anniversary of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 2001: Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (by Michael Benson) is a documentary account tracing the film from conception to release, and I found it fascinating. The opening prologue begins like this:
The twentieth century produced two great modern versions of Homer’s Odyssey. The first was James Joyce’s Ulysses. … The other was Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Ulysses (1922) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (hereafter “2001”) are my favorite works in their respective genres, and reading this made me realize that both take Homer’s epic as a motif.
First, a quick check of proper names. The Odyssey is the ancient Greek epic traditionally attributed to the poet Homer, centered on Odysseus. Odyssey is its English form. In Latin, Odyssey becomes Ulixes or Ulysseus, and from there the English form Ulysses is derived.
When you think about it, the two works share a surprising number of similarities. I’ve listed a dozen below. Points that are obvious simply because both are based on The Odyssey are omitted.
I should note that although I checked several sources, I could not confirm that Kubrick or Clarke used Joyce’s Ulysses as a reference. These similarities are therefore coincidental, and I’m simply enjoying the comparison.
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① Three-part structure
2001 consists of three parts: Part I “The Dawn of Man,” Part II “Jupiter Mission,” and Part III “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.”
Ulysses also has a three-part structure: Part I (Episodes 1–3), Part II (Episodes 4–15), and Part III (Episodes 16–18).
② A protagonist marked by Jewish identity
The human protagonists of 2001 are Dr. Heywood R. Floyd and Captain David Bowman.
According to 2001: Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, the name David Bowman was decided around August 1964. The connection to Odysseus, a master of the bow, is said to be coincidental. Though not mentioned, “David” derives from the ancient Israelite king. It’s unclear whether Bowman is Jewish.
As for Dr. Floyd may be reminded of Sigmund Freud, the Jewish psychoanalyst, though the spelling differs. “Floyd” appears to be a Welsh name.
One of the protagonists of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom (born 1864), is the son of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant to Ireland.
Thus, the protagonists corresponding to Odysseus both carry a kind of Jewish marker.
Speaking of Hungary, György Ligeti (1923–2006), whose music is used in 2001, was a Hungarian Jew. Kubrick himself (1928–1999) was also descended from Jewish immigrants of Central European origin. They would be roughly of the generation of Bloom’s grandchildren.
③ An ordinary protagonist
Dr. Floyd and Captain Bowman are not especially distinctive as film protagonists. Each time I watch the film, I find myself amused by how empty Floyd’s speech at the lunar base is.
“Bowman” even echoes “no-man,” and though likely coincidental, recalls Odysseus, who called himself “Outis” (“Nobody”) when asked his name by the Cyclops.
Bloom in Ulysses is likewise presented as an ordinary man, hardly the typical hero of a long novel.
④ Beginning at dawn and ending in bed
Part I of 2001, “The Dawn of Man,” begins with the sun rising over the Earth. The second-to-last scene shows Bowman lying on a bed in a white room. This room is described as “Louis XIV style in Rococo”, that is, an 18th-century style.
Ulysses, being a one-day narrative, begins with a morning scene at the Martello Tower where Stephen Dedalus lives. The final episode takes place in the Bloom bedroom, ending with his wife Molly’s half-dreaming consciousness. The Bloom house at 7 Eccles Street is built in late 18th-century Georgian style—less grand than the film’s room, but comparable in era.
"Image" by jrmyst is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
⑤ Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In 2001, the opening of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (“Sunrise”) is used. This matches the imagery and also aligns the film’s themes with Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and the rising sun.
In Episode 1 of Ulysses, Stephen’s friend Mulligan jokingly refers to Nietzsche’s “superman,” likely reflecting a popular idea of the time (1904). “Kinch” is Stephen’s nickname.
—My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Űbermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen.
⑥ The appearance of a panther
In Part I of 2001, apes are attacked by a leopard.
In Episode 1 of Ulysses, Haines, the English lodger at Stephen’s tower, dreamt of a “black panther” the previous night and waved a gun about.
⑦ Meals and toilets
It has often been noted that 2001 contains many scenes of eating.
Apes eat grass, water, and tapir meat.
The leopard eats apes and zebras.
Soviet scientists drink something like alcohol on a space station.
Floyd and crew eat in a moonbus sandwiches and coffee.
Bowman and Poole eat space meals aboard Discovery.
Bowman eats what seems to be French cuisine with wine in the white room.
As in Kubrick’s other films, toilets are also depicted: Floyd uses a zero-gravity toilet, and there is one in the white room’s bathroom.
In Ulysses, Bloom’s meals are carefully described:
Breakfast: fried pork kidney, bread, and tea at home.
Lunch: gorgonzola sandwich and burgundy wine at Davy Byrne’s.
Evening: liver and bacon with cider at the Ormond Hotel.
At Barney Kiernan’s: a cigar.
After the maternity hospital: ginger cordial at Burke’s pub.
In Nighttown: chocolate.
Back home: cocoa in the kitchen.
Bloom’s bodily functions are also mentioned:
Morning: defecation in the backyard toilet.
Daytime: urination at Davy Byrne’s, and again after visiting the Dignam household.
At night: urinating together with Stephen in the backyard.
⑧ Communication with a daughter
Dr. Floyd speaks with his daughter on Earth via videophone; she asks for a monkey for her birthday.
In Ulysses, Bloom receives a letter from his daughter Milly, who has just turned fifteen and is working at a photography studio. She thanks him for a birthday hat.
⑨ The death of a close figure
The death of Frank Poole, Bowman’s colleague, is a major event in 2001, and Bowman disposes of his body.
For Bloom, the day’s main event is attending the funeral of his friend Paddy Dignam.
⑩ Story and embryology
The Discovery spacecraft heading to Jupiter resembles a sperm. Whether intentional or not, it seems connected to Bowman’s transformation into the Star Child.
In Ulysses, Episode 14 takes place in a maternity hospital and traces the history of English prose style. Joyce described this in a letter to Frank Budgen:
Scene, lying-in hospital. Technique: a nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude (the unfertilized ovum), … Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.
⑪ Celestial bodies and the fetus
2001 ends with Earth and the Star Child beside it.In Episode 17, the penultimate episode of Ulysses, Bloom slips into the bed where his wife Molly is sleeping and lies beside her buttocks—described as hemispheres—in the posture of a fetus (childman).
Then?
He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.
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In what posture?
…the childman weary, the man child in the womb.
Joyce wrote of Episode 18 in another letter to Budgen:
The first sentence contains 2500 words… It begins and ends with the female word yes… It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning.
⑫ A film about God; creation by the artist
Finally, a more subjective point.In 2001, a godlike director creates a film as real as the world itself—and it is also a film about God.
Kubrick: “At the core of 2001 is the concept of God—but not in any traditional anthropomorphic sense.”
1968 Playboy interview
He placed the monolith, like a divine avatar, within the work.
Remarkably, Bowman’s breathing sounds were recorded by Kubrick himself.
In the Old Testament, “spirit” means God’s breath or wind—the principle of life. The New Testament’s “pneuma” corresponds to this.
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Genesis 2:7
Joyce conceived the creation of God and the creation of art in parallel, and sought to create a work rivaling the world itself—that was Ulysses (see Cast 30). And he placed within it Stephen, his own alter ego, as a character.
Monolith as displayed at the École normale supérieure in Paris, France.
File:ENS 2001 Monolith LILA.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
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