I.
“Alone, what did Bloom feel?” asks the catechistic penultimate chapter of Ulysses (1922), “Ithaca.” The answer is “the cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.” (Réaumur, a temperature scale still used in Joyce’s day, has become almost entirely obsolete over the past century.)
James Joyce retold Homer’s epic poem within the confines of one day in 1904 and one city, Dublin; with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and their team of collaborators brought it to the cold of interstellar space. Joyce reimagines the cyclops Polyphemus in his cave as “the citizen,” a one-eyed Irish ultranationalist drunkenly holding court in his local pub and spewing invective at “that bloody jewman” Leopold Bloom; Kubrick and Clarke reimagine him as HAL 9000 with his glowing red camera eye. Like Odysseus, astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) must outwit and escape from his cyclops. (Homer’s Odysseus was himself a bowman and a pivotal scene in the Odyssey involves the inability of the Ithacan suitors to string Odysseus’ bow.) Both the novel and the film, like the Odyssey itself, end with a kind of homecoming.
Reviewing Ulysses one year after its release, T.S. Eliot called the novel “the most important impression which the present age has found… a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
“A total reality teems vociferously in the pages of Ulysses,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote three years later, in a review that he likens to an account of a voyage of discovery: “I will speak of it with the license my admiration lends me and with the murky intensity of those ancient explorers who described lands new to their nomadic amazement.” Reflecting on Joyce’s death 16 years later, Borges described him as “less a man of letters than a literature.”
In 1998, the Modern Library assembled a team of writers and editors to identify the 100 best English-language novels of the then-waning 20th century. They gave the top spot to Ulysses.
Earlier this year, BFI/Sight and Sound asked more than 480 filmmakers to name the greatest films of all time; 2001 topped the list. A few months ago, the British magazine Time Out released an updated list of their “100 Best Movies of All Time,” with the top spot going to 2001. George Lucas has called it “the ultimate science fiction movie;” Martin Scorsese once told an interviewer that “the religious side of me found an extraordinary comfort in the end of the film.”
Thus, the previous century’s most acclaimed novel and perhaps its most acclaimed, influential film are both, in their own ways, adaptations of a poem written down about 2,700 years ago and based on an even earlier oral tradition of sung poetry. What does that say about us and about our relationship to the distant past?
Furthermore, both the novel and the film — whose titles explicitly evoke the ancient poem — are remembered precisely for being cutting-edge, innovative, forward-looking. Both Eliot and Borges stress the absolute newness of Ulysses, the former arguing that its new style has “the importance of a scientific discovery” and the latter comparing the experience of reading it to that of exploring a new world. Reading Ulysses gave me a feeling similar to the one I had when I first listened to the music of Robert Johnson or Hank Williams, which is a feeling like déjà vu, of having already heard the echoes before the original. The most obvious example that comes to mind is John Updike’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit quartet, which follows Ulysses in its immersion into the minutia and ennui of everyday life. On a much smaller scale I think of the juxtaposition of the medieval and the modern in Raymond Carver’s short stories “Cathedral” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
As George Lucas, Ridley Scott and others have argued, 2001’s Oscar-winning visual effects and art direction have set the standard for later science fiction films; Steven Spielberg famously compared it to the big bang. Star Wars, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Sunshine (2007), WALL-E (2008) and Moon (2009) all have some of its DNA. Alfonso Cuaron intentionally avoided watching it while directing Gravity (2013) and Christopher Nolan did the same while directing Interstellar (2014), both for fear that their films would become copies of it. (“2001 is too authoritative,” in Nolan’s words, “too complete…you have to put it to one side, put it out of your head and just try and do your own thing.”) Its design anticipated the iPad and directly inspired the iPod. It is “the ultimate science fiction movie,” but also an imagined future that evokes the ancient past.
Further still, what does it say about The Odyssey that it can inspire and influence two masterpieces that are about as different as they possibly could be? Both are now canonical classics and both are, to many, somewhat forbidding, the kind of material assigned in a college film or English class. They remain controversial, argued over, both accused of wearing the emperor’s new clothes and passionately defended. But they get there in very different ways.
Every novel is of course a collection of words, but Ulysses is obsessed with words in a way that no other novel I’ve ever read is, obsessed with the different registers of the English language and with its evolution, abounding with slang, with puns, with onomatopoeia, with newly coined compound words, curse words, obscure words, quotes and near-quotes from a myriad of sources, untranslated words and phrases from other languages. A deluge of words: more than 260,000, with more than 30,000 distinct words, about as many as in the complete works of Shakespeare and probably more than in any other English-language novel.
Borges, a formidable reader and wielder of words in his own right, aptly described Joyce as “a millionaire of words and styles,” with access to “the prodigious funds of voices that constitute the English language.”
“What is the metaphysical message of 2001?” a Playboy interviewer asked Stanley Kubrick in 1968. “It’s not a message I ever intend to convey in words,” he responded.
2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and nineteen minutes of film there are only a little less than forty minutes of dialogue. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbal pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious.
The nonverbal film and the hyperverbal novel, the epic voyage across time and space and the epic confined to a single city and a single day, the odyssey through outer space and the odyssey through subjective inner reality. And yet both claim inspiration, descent, from the same ancient source. In this post I will try to, if not solve, then deepen this paradox by building on a key insight from one of the novel’s first and most perceptive readers.
II.
In his review, Eliot focuses on an aspect of Ulysses that resonates with his own poetry, the juxtaposition of Homer’s Odyssey with modern life. For Eliot, Joyce’s use of this ‘mythical method’ opens up new territory for other writers:
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which other writers must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
Eliot emphasizes the availability of the mythical method to other authors because, while Joyce was preparing Ulysses for publication, he was himself independently using the same method in his most famous poem. Sylvia Beach published Ulysses in February; The Criterion published The Waste Land in October; 1922 remains renowned as the annus mirabilis of literary modernism.
Just as Joyce’s novel brings Homeric Greece into 1904 Dublin, Eliot’s poem overlays post-World War I London with the grail quest, Upanishads and primitive fertility rites. (The ghost of Shakespeare also haunts both works, which both explicitly quote/copy/homage Ariel’s song from The Tempest.) While not the obsessive preservation of a city at a certain point in time through sheer accumulated detail, The Waste Land is at times also an unforgettable evocation of its city a century ago:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
Both works are polyphonic, multilingual, shifting register from slang to poetry to incantation, colliding the mythic with the real, the ancient with the modern, the epic with the banal. Both authors interrupt their works with the noise of modernity: with the banalities of small talk, last calls at the bar and the sound of horns and motors in Eliot’s case and newspaper headlines, advertising slogans and trams running through Dublin, making “the music of the future,” in Joyce’s.
A century later we remember and celebrate both the novel and the poem in part because of how well they capture the emergence of the world we live in. In a city like Dublin or London you can almost literally travel through time just by walking down the street, where a Starbucks might stand next door to or across the road from a 900 year-old church, where a short stroll can take you through the history of architecture: gothic, renaissance, baroque, neoclassical, neogothic, modernist, brutalist, postmodernist.
I took this picture when I visited London this October. At the center, encased in glass and neoclassical Portland stone, is the London Stone, which was already mysterious and myth-shrouded centuries ago in medieval England. According to one legend, the Trojan prince Brutus — who founded and gave his name to Britain — brought with him a piece of the Palladium, the statue of Pallas Athena that magically protected the city of Troy. (In one myth, Odysseus himself steals it from the Trojans, leaving their city vulnerable to Greek conquest.) Relocated to London, the Palladium fragment supposedly exerts the same protective aura. In the words of one proverb, “So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish.”
William Blake wrote of the London Stone as an ancient altar upon which the Druids practiced human sacrifice; more recent writers have tentatively identified it as a surviving fragment of a first century Roman building.
Today the London Stone sits rather inconspicuously on busy Cannon Street, a few steps away from Pret a Manger, Joe & The Juice, Boots and The Cannick Taps. Behind, above and around it is the Fidelity Investor Centre. Almost surreally incongruous pieces of modernity surround it: symbols (green light, no entry, do not cross) and a profusion of messages (“LOOK BOTH WAYS", “the world of investing can be complex…,” “cinch: cars without the faff”). In my picture a woman works on her laptop one floor above an ancient stone that survived the 1940 German bombing of the 17th century church that once housed it and sits, amidst the cacophony of a 21st century city, almost like the monolith in 2001: “completely inert, its origin and purpose still a total mystery.”
I take you on this detour to provide a single illustration of why Ulysses and The Waste Land remain relevant: the mythical method as a perfect method for representing the polytonality of a Dublin, a London, a simultaneously mythic, ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern and postmodern city.
III.
One question kept reoccurring to me as I read Ulysses. What does this parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity say about the modern world? Two answers occurred to me.
Are we to contrast, the epic, heroic, adventurous lives of Odysseus and Telemachus with the limited horizons of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus? Odysseus goes on an epic adventure; Bloom never leaves Dublin. Penelope remains faithful to her husband in the face of incredible pressure; Molly Bloom does not, in a much easier situation. Odysseus confronts and slays the suitors who have taken advantage of his long absence; Bloom avoids any confrontation with his wife’s lover. Telemachus travels to the court of Nestor, who provides him with hospitality, advice, and a push towards the next step of his hero’s journey; Dedalus meets his boss, Mr. Deasy, who provides him with patronizing platitudes and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Is the world of Ulysses one drained of heroic virtue and of meaning? A banal world?
Or is the novel hopeful, a spell of re-enchantment intended to reinfuse the modern world with mythology? Is the comparison ennobling, rather than belittling, suggesting that the disorientation and sensory overload we feel in the modern word is akin to the strangeness of Odysseus on the island of the cyclopes or the land of the lotus eaters, and that it requires Odyssean wiles to navigate through? That life, even now, even when confined in a variety of ways, can be an epic voyage, an adventure? And that the world is still full of wonders if we look at it with the right perspective?
The novel’s famous last word is ‘Yes’ and I think that its answer is Yes to both.
IV.
Composers and visual artists had used the mythical method for years before Eliot coined the term. The James Joyce of classical music, for instance, would have to be Igor Stravinsky, who based his first ballet, The Firebird, on a centuries-old Slavic folktale. His third ballet, The Rite of Spring, a representation of pagan ritual and human sacrifice in prehistoric Russia, caused a riot at its 1913 Paris premiere.
In his schema, Joyce describes the 14th chapter of Ulysses, “The Oxen of the Sun,” as being written using ‘embryonic development,’ a recapitulation of the history of the English language, with each paragraph imitating the style of a particular author or historical period. The following passage, for instance, describes Bloom’s arrival at the maternity hospital in a pastiche of Old English:
Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God's angel to Mary quoth. Watchers twey there walk, white sisters in ward sleepless. Smarts they still, sickness soothing: in twelve moons thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding wariest ward.
Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre (1906) is painting’s closest parallel. A work of both art and art history, it evokes millennia of western painting: the prehistoric cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux; Attic red-figure pottery; Poussin’s pastoral scenes; Watteau’s fêtes champêtres; Blake’s illustrations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Ingres’ odalisques; Manet’s Déjeuner sur l'herbe; Cezanne’s Mediterranean bathers. And, à la Joyce, behind this painting and its sources lies the ancient Greek legend of Arcadia, the mythical, uncorrupted, idyllic pastoral land where shepherds and shepherdesses, fauns and nymphs live in simple happiness. (This is the same place, combined with its close cousin Eden, that Shakespeare evokes in As You Like It. “They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day,” Charles says in the first act, “and fleet the time carelessly, as in the golden world.”)
Both inspired and challenged by Matisse’s masterpiece, Pablo Picasso painted his own collision between the ancient and modern, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) —prostitutes with the heads of African and ancient Iberian masks. (The very next year, the self-taught outsider artist Henri Rousseau famously told Picasso that “you and I are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style and I in the modern.”) Picasso would go on to paint The Dryad, The Pipes of Pan and Faun with Stars, to say nothing of dozens of drawings and etchings featuring the minotaur. I’ve named only the two most famous modernist artists and could list many more. The sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, for example, bear the unmistakable influence of Cycladic figures, which were created more than 4,000 years ago. Some years ago I visited an exhibition of Joan Miró’s paintings, which included a photograph of him gazing intently at a millennia-old Sumerian or Babylonian figurine.
In modernist literature, classical music and art, then, we find examples of the same paradox: hypermodernity not in spite of but because of a return to ancient styles and subjects. Why? There are many reasons, of course, but one major reason is that all of these artists, writers and musicians were working in the early 20th century, a century of almost unimaginable technological transformation of every aspect of life. In the context of an increasingly artificial and future-focused world, something truly ancient, truly mythic, truly primal would have had a deep and even countercultural appeal. (Another key contributing factor is the rise of archaeology and of the museum, which gave and gives modern/postmodern artists unprecedented access to the art of the ancient past.)
Returning again to 2001, we find that it too employs something very similar to what Eliot defines as the mythic method, its parallel between antiquity and contemporaneity being that between the voyages of Odysseus and humanity’s first voyages into outer space. In his foreword to the 1999 hardcover edition of the 2001: A Space Odyssey novel, Arthur C. Clarke situates the project in the 1960s space race, noting that he and Kubrick had begun writing in 1964, between Kennedy’s promise of a man on the moon and the successful Gemini spaceflight program. “We wanted to create something realistic and plausible,” Clarke writes, something “that would not be made obsolete by the events of the next few years.” (Clarke notes that “the Apollo astronauts had already seen the film when they left for the moon.”)
In 1965, while working on a film then entitled Journey Beyond the Stars, Stanley Kubrick told The New Yorker writer Jeremy Bernstein that he preferred to think of the film as ‘a space odyssey’ — its eventual title — rather than as ‘science fiction’ with that phrase’s b-movie connotations. The film would be “comparable in some ways to the Homeric Odyssey,” Kubrick told Bernstein.
It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation, and that the far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them than the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us.
As with Ulysses and The Odyssey, the mythical method of 2001 is a two-way street, a dialogue. Going forward in time, it gives space exploration, which we tend to think of as the triumph of a modern rational, scientific, empirical mindset, something of the flavor of the pre-modern, magical, visionary mindset.
In Kubrick’s words, a sense of “mythic grandeur,” an experience grand enough to give Martin Scorsese a spiritual experience of “extraordinary comfort.” One major reason why it has lived on for well over 50 years after its first release is because it is the epic of the space race. It mythologizes the hopes and fears of 1960s space age America just as Moby-Dick did for pre-Civil War America.
Going backward, the film’s mythical method helps restore some of the sense of sheer distance and alienness to Homer’s Odyssey. I remember reading about the voyages of Odysseus as a boy and wondering how one could possibly spend ten years sailing through the Mediterranean Sea, which seemed very small to me compared to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on the world map. (In the actual Odyssey, Odysseus spends seven of those ten years under the enchantment of Calypso, a prisoner on her island.)
Just this October I flew from London to Los Angeles — 5,456 miles or 8,781 kilometers, for my European readers — in about eleven hours, departing and arriving on the same date. I’ve flown across the Atlantic and across the Pacific, in both cases over significantly longer distances than the Mediterranean from east to west or north to south. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people take similarly long flights every single day; they are normal, not extraordinary journeys to be commemorated in epic poems. Cruise ships take a leisurely week or fourteen days to cover expanses of the Mediterranean that held many adventures for Odysseus or Aeneas or Jason. Our world is simply so much larger, so much more interconnected, so much better mapped and so much easier to get around than that of the ancient Greeks, who thought of the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) as the end of the known world.
But the likening of the Mediterranean to outer space, its islands to planets and the voyages of Ulysses to spaceflight provides a glimpse of the sheer size of the Mediterranean as perceived in the bronze age, and of the mysteries and perils it must have held for those ancient people.
V.
One author who obviously pursued Joyce and Eliot’s method was Joseph Campbell. Indeed, Campbell’s first book was A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), an analysis of Joyce’s last novel. (Campbell’s writings on Joyce have been posthumously compiled in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, edited by Edmund L. Epstein.)
In his most famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell quotes all three of Joyce’s novels and The Waste Land. In the book’s first chapter he uses an image that deeply resonates with both writers’ mythical method. We might lack the kind of comprehensive, society-wide mythology that gave meaning to earlier generations, he argues, but we still encounter mythic archetypes in our own “private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream:”
The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.
For Joseph Campbell, following in the footsteps of Carl Jung, myths come from the collective unconscious and express our desire for self-actualization and need to pass from one stage of life to another; for Robert Graves, they are distorted echoes of ancient rituals; for others, they are outdated, proto-scientific explanations of natural phenomena or fanciful, embellished retellings of real history. Whatever they are and wherever they actually came from, one thing is clear: they continue to have an incredible hold on our imaginations.
Adults may have abandoned fairytales as unfashionable, as J.R.R. Tolkien famously argues in “On Fairy-Stories,” but children continue to love them, to consume them as movies, theme park attractions, fantasy novels and video games. And more than just children love and immerse themselves in the neo-fairy tales known as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and their progeny. (A holiday drinking game: read a few George Lucas interviews from around the time of A New Hope and take a shot every time he refers to Star Wars as a fairy tale for the modern world. To be followed, perhaps, by a viewing of the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special.) Elsewhere on this Substack I’ve explored the ways in which Pokémon serves as a kind of modern bestiary, satiating the universal and undying human appetite for mythical creatures.
We live in a world that would be unrecognizable to Homer, or Chrétien de Troyes, or the bestiarists, but as writers and artists and filmmakers we have refused to stop retelling their stories, refused to let them die. Cut off one of the hydra’s heads and two more grow back. Myth keeps bubbling up from the depths of the distance past and emerging at the surface, whether as children’s kitsch or the cutting edge of the avant-garde.
I think of a poem that would have been a centuries-old relic of an ancient civilization in Homer’s day, and which itself looks back to a distant past. Herbert Mason’s translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh begins with the following two lines:
It is an old story
But one that can still be told.
Author’s Note: It’s been about a year since I started this Substack. Writing it has been a fantastic experience; I’ve always had ‘ideas’ but having the obligation to publish something semi-regularly has pushed me to just write more. My thanks to everyone reading this. I sincerely hope you’re finding something to enjoy here.
The information on the London Stone — and my inspiration to visit it in the first place — comes from London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, a big brick of a book that I’d recommend to anyone living in or visiting London. Other key sources were the anthology Stanley Kubrick: Interviews edited by Gene D. Phillips and the online Joyce Project.
A great read! The paragraphs at the end of IV particularly stood out to me, as both a classicist and a fan of sci-fi. Definitely hit the nail on the head, in Classics it is very easy to liken epic poems with our modern sci-fi blockbusters because they fulfil very similar areas, adventure into the unknown yet still feasible and human. Also, for fans of both Greek Mythology and Sci-fi, check out Lucian's 'A True History' (if you can find a copy, it's quite rare). It is an actual sci-fi written in Ancient Greece which is both as wacky and as wonderful as it sounds! (I will publicly commit to writing an article on it for my own substack, but only when I have finished my translation of it)
A delightful read, thank you.
I've been wanting recently to rewatch Space Odyssey, indeed as so called "research"/ source of inspiration for a piece in the works, my own "space fantasy." I've demurred partially out of worry that it might be dated, but writing this down I recall my admiration for all of Kubrick's work.
Despite the name, I never thought about it as an adaptation of Homer's work.
As for Ulysses, I've been more hesitant, partially because of the difficulty I have had with his other works (Portrait of a Young Artist, that is), and partially because a good friend of mine was not a fan. I recall, too, Nabokov's provocative assertion that, despite others' claim that to properly comprehend the work one should have a knowledge of Irish history (or was it indeed of the Odyssey? I can't remember which), it is Dublin's geography that one should have a grasp on. And which I don't. I have been, however, giving Finnegans Wake some attention lately, encouraged by a reading (audio book like) of one youtuber. He has not finished the project and I wondered if I could prod him to do so by setting up a gofundme kind of production.
I appreciate this piece of yours, too, because it encourages me to go salvage something from my own writing. A decade ago (how time flies) I was working on a novel that I did not and likely never will finish. There's a chapter there that, too, looks both ways. Backwards it models itself after a part of Alice in Wonderland (as does some of Finneganse Wake, as it happens). I am yet to see if it's going to be one of the cases when I look at old writing of mine and find myself delighted by the reading, or one of the other cases. If the former, I think it could rather easily be made a stand alone short story.