The phrase “Ulysses contract” derived from a strategy that Ulysses adopted on his journey home from the Trojan wars, which took him and his ship’s crew close to the Sirenusian islands. The islands were famous for being home to the Sirens, whose songs were so irresistibly seductive that seamen felt impelled to fling themselves into the waters, trying to reach the Sirens. They never made it. The bones of dead sailors littered the island.
The call of the Sirens can be symbolic for shit loads of things. At one level the siren call suggests an addiction. The sailors' act of diving into the water is the ultimate act of self-destruction. They could not help themselves. The Siren call promised too much to pass up.
And it says something about Ulysses that he wanted to be the first human to hear the Siren song and survive. He was not a puritan: he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. So he instructed his crew to fill their ears with beeswax to block out the sound, and then tie him securely to the mast and to ignore his pleas to be released. The plan worked. Because Ulysses committed himself to a "rational" course of action at a neutral time, (before he could hear the Sirens’ songs), he ensured that he stuck with his decision. This action of pre-commitment was the "Ulysses contract."
But the Siren song was also the song of the immortals. Like Prometheus before him, there is also the sense that Ulysses wanted to experience something transcendent. And the experience transformed him. He carried the song with him in all of his journeys. For in dealing with the gods, the underworld, the Cyclops, there is always the sense that Ulysses was lifted above the mortal realm with the song of the Sirens.
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