Kubrick's Odyssey: Myth, Technology, Gnosis

TLDR: In the modern era, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Stanley Kubrick have taken up this ancient mythos and made it the frame of their greatest works as discussed by the authors, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) exceeded all of these: it would dramatize the origins and destiny of human intelligence.

Abstract: H ‘odyssey’ has long inspired poets, artists, and philosophers. Porphyry, the neo-Platonic philosopher, saw in it the archetypal journey of the soul. From its home in the eternal realm, it journeys through the seas of time and space, resisting and then yielding to the lure of matter, but finally returning in triumph to its timeless home. This essential schema, described by Porphyry in “The Cave of the Nymphs,” found expression in countless Gnostic forms in the Hellenic period and would be enshrined afterward in Christian metaphysics. Dante, who did not know Homer’s poem first-hand, made of Odysseus a figure of the rootless modern: his hero forsakes home because of an unrelenting desire for novelty and experience. In the modern era, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Stanley Kubrick have taken up this ancient mythos and made it the frame of their greatest works. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is a little man, short on heroism but long on humanity, who journeys through a day in June without notable accomplishment. Pound’s Odyssean persona in The Cantos journeys through the centuries and across the globe, witnessing and engaging the rise and decline of civilizations. The temporal scope of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) exceeded all of these: it would dramatize the origins and destiny of human intelligence. Kubrick’s Odyssey holds a unique place in the arc of his films: it alone maintains a largely un-ironic vision of the human enterprise. Positioned between the apocalyptic satire of Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the satire on free will and conditioning in A Clockwork Orange (1971), 2001: A Space Odyssey is an awe-inspiring expression of the sublime reaches and potential of human imagination and achievement. Imag-