Space has become a tool to narrate the underlying themes of individuals’ aspirations and agonies. To illustrate this, the article highlights two epic works that metaphorically deal with spatial narratives. The first is the Greek poem Odyssey written by Homer, and the second is the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Told through 24 books, Odyssey tells the story of King Odysseus, ruler of the island of Ithaca, who has left his home to fight in the Trojan War. Following Odysseus’s victory, he sets out for home with a crew of men where they encounter one predicament after another. A journey that was supposed to take a couple of weeks, but instead it took 10 years. Meanwhile, back home, his faithful wife Penelope is still waiting for her husband, not wishing to marry any of the suitors who occupied her house. Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, a 20-year-old young man who has never seen his father, sets out on a sea voyage, with the help of the goddess Athena, to see what has become of Odysseus. In the end, Odysseys and Telemachus journey back to Ithaca, defeat the suitors and are reunited with Penelope and Odysseus’s father Laertes.
Fast forward to 1968 American Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick made 2001: A Space Odyssey which is an epic voyage through time and space. The film moves from the past to the future through a black structure, the monolith, which, after being discovered on the lunar surface, forces a couple of astronauts and their revolutionary supercomputer HAL 9000 to set out to unravel its mysterious origins. HAL begins to display strange behavior, leading up to a tense showdown with the astronauts, and this sets the way for a visual mind-breaking trek across temporal dimensions.
Reflections
The overlapping reflections in both works have been the subject of several scholarly writings, among which were Jerome Agel’s 1970 book, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, and Leonard F. Wheat’s 2000 book, Kubrick’s 2001: A Triple Allegory. Both authors mirror the characters’ journeys and aspirations in their literary and the film works, with Kubrick paying literary merit as a source of inspiration for his movie’s title.
Kubrick’s appreciation of the mystery and remoteness that space embodies for future generations is quite similar to that of Homer’s stretches of the vast sea. Homer and Kubrick explore a diversity of themes, of which both overlap in the idea of unraveling lost time and space, where the events during the Post-Trojan War period in Odyssey were referenced in the time after the discovery of the monolith in 2001.
Furthermore, 2001’s depiction of David Bowman entering the Stargate, when he is sent to a far future, very far that he reappears as a Star Child, is an analogy of the bag of winds in Odyssey that was opened by Odysseus’s crew sending them far away from their destination restarting their whole journey back home.
…there is no Logos which gathers up all the pieces, hence no law which attaches them to a whole to be regained or even formed - Cortázar
Narrative Fragmentation
As an extension to this interpretation, the author highlights the idea of narrative fragmentation that resulted from the different themes in both works.
These fragments are inserted within the story in a way to allows for further fragments to appear. Simply put, events in a narrative allow for later events to occur. In both works, the narrative is made up of episodes, i.e. a sequence of events, which in turn constitute a mechanism. In literary methodologies, a mechanism is the underlying structure of any narrative that keeps repeating itself to construct the spatial and temporal arrangement of events.
What this article proposes is the exploration of other causes and consequences that are not lifted into the narrative, some of which can possibly constitute another narrative.
For example, a major storyline in Odyssey follows the journey of Odysseus back to his home with his crew. What if there is a story where the focus on one of the crew members is highlighted? What narrative timeline would the readers be exposed to if the story shed light on the person who opened the bag of winds that sent Odysseus far from home? In a similar manner in 2001, can the story of Frank Poole, the accompanying astronaut to David Bowman, construct a different narrative?
Have you explored the two works yet? Do you think there is more to them than what is mentioned? Please share your comments, ideas, thoughts, criticism, and/or any sort of information and/or interesting facts. Wait for more in Part 2.