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The Ulysses figure in «Le vestibule des lâches» | philippe fretz

The Ulysses figure in «Le vestibule des lâches»

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watch the movie "Finding Botsky" (E)

a-t-l-a-s.hautetfort.com, samedi 8 août 2015

About Le vestibule des lâches by Philippe Fretz, art&fiction, 2015, Lausanne
By Professor Edward Botsky, founder of the «Società Dante Alighieri di Orvieto», Orvieto, Italy,
author of Seven borgesque Essays about Dante, Sulla Scala, 2015, Roma

 

 

Dante's Ulysses is very different than Homer's.

Dante never had a copy of the Iliad nor the Odyssey, he described the hero on the basis of Virgil's Aeneid and various references to Homer in medieval sources, and of course his own inventive genius. Dante the pilgrim meets Ulysses in canto 26 of the Inferno. We are in the 8th Circle, 8th bolge in the middle of the false counselors. Ulysses is condemned to hell, when he was a mythological hero through the whole of antiquity, because he brought about the fall of Troy by his most brilliant strategem of all: the perfidious deceit of the Trojan Horse.

That's unforgivable.

There is more: Dante’s Ulysses never even returns home to his faithful wife Penelope, Telemachus his son and Laërtes his father; nor does he show any repentance for this failure of familial duty. Dante invented an entirely different ending to his story.

He imagines that Ulysses had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules – the Straits of Gibraltar – beyond the Mediterranean Sea to the end of the world, a journey forbidden to men, and tried to reach a mysterious mountain in the middle of the Ocean. It is evident that this Mountain is nothing less than the Mount of Purgatory itself. In a sense, we might say that Dante accuses Ulysses of attempting to steal his salvation, not be the way of penitence for his sin, but through outwitting God. So Ulysses becomes the symbol of an immoral curiosity and of lust for forbidden knowledge, as opposed to the virtuous desire for a spiritual illumination whose source is God.
Dante used the heroic figure from antiquity to express a sharp distinction in thirteenth-century thought between the kind of human knowledge driven by curiosity –
Curiositas – and a knowledge given by God in a descent of the light into the soul.

 

In his recent novel, Le Vestibule des lâches, Philippe Fretz's, has introduced a noticable dantesque Ulysses figure into contemporary literature.

The short novel tells the encounter of its hero Jeremy Carter with the character of the Villain, Michel Barquet. The «vestibule des lâches» literally the «vestibule of the cowards» – places us in a dantesque frame of reference. This vestibule of Hell is the place where those who never chose between good and evil are continually stung by wasps as they run aimlessly after a meaningless flag.

But the plot itself has several parallels with that of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The character of Carter is a clear Dante figure, accompanied by Bertram Rothe, the editor who holds the book, a figure like Virgil is to Dante, the holder of knowledge.

The beginning is a reference to the «Selva oscura» of the first tercet of the Inferno. Carter, like Dante, seems lost in the middle of our life; wandering in a gallery during an opening and is surrounded by maze of high reeds. «Les hauts roseaux sur fond de paysage alpestre formaient un labyrinthe.»

The next space they enter is a restaurant called the «Mortimer». It's a direct reference to hell, where death – la mort – is orchestrated in an endless timer, condemnation. Carter will go through hell during the time of a banquet – a Convivio (the title of Dante’s major treatise) where his soul will be weighed.
The location of the scene is very specific, the restaurant is located at the 8 of the «rue Verdaine», which corresponds to the 8th circle. Later, the description of the waiter that seats them group. «Le garçon au visage honnête» («the honest face») corresponds to a characteristic of Geryon who weighs the condemned souls. He is described by Dante with the body of a winged snake, a long tail and... an honest face. He will seat Carter and Bertran Rothe at the table number 8, which is the 8th bolge of the 8th circle, the bolge of the perfidious counselors.

 

An other key to Fretz's novel is the relationship between Barquet father and son with the son’s confused loyalty to his father. In fact, the one guilty of an act of false counseling – of a vast falsification operation – is Barquet the father. Look at what Edouard Barquet is after: to use a valueless stock option in a company called «Tango Troya» to defraud HSWC out of 120 million. The name of the company «Tango Troya» lets us think that it’s Barquet’s version of the Trojan Horse trick. His little «Trojan Tango» is a masterpiece of duplicitous counseling allowing him to hit the jackpot. The son only stares passively at his father's swindle.

Barquet the father pursues the object of his fraud that he considers as the way to his salvation. It's the paradise atop Mount Purgatory. Ulysses was pursuing a similar paradise when he sailed through the Straits of Gibraltor, beyond the confines of the Mediterranean, in search of a salvation that he could take by force. He will be punished before he can reach. His ship will sink into the Ocean and he will never be heard from again. There is a direct allusion to that when Edouard Barquet meets Gogol in an HSWC office to prepare their felony. They sit around a glass table which is a figure of the Mediterranean Sea. A secretary brings two bottles of water, one from «Rochers de Calpe» – that’s the Rock of Gibraltar in Latin – and the other from «Mount Abyle», which is on the North African side. They represent the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which lies the unknown and forbidden world. For Barquet the father, they represent the limits of legality, which he will trespass morally and physically when he will flee to Argentina to get his money.

 

Le Vestibule des lâches is a condensation of Dantesque topography. When Carter and Barquet leave the «Mortimer», they continue down rue Verdaine until they reach the lake. This is Lake Cocytus, the frozen lake of the ninth Circle. Notice the sentence: «Les drapeaux de Fabrice Gigy claquaient, quelques cygnes glissaient insensibles au froid sur l’huile nocturne et cobalt du Rhône.» The river sinks into the lake at this very place. The closeness of the words cobalt / cygne can be seen as an allusion to the French Cocyte / Cocy-tus in English. Plus Fabrice Gigy's flag is a hint. Fabrice Gigy has installed on the bridge a series of white flags with a black circle on the bridge – the point at the bottom of the infernal cone.

Other sentences like «Ils traversèrent l'artère au feu rouge et remontèrent la rue de la Terrassière» show hints for the terraces of purgatory that Dante and Virgil climb after they have come out of the Inferno. «Ils traversèrent au feu rouge» reminds us of the purification by fire. The 7th Terrace is surrounded by flames. Dante walks through the fire at this moment. Just before he enters the terrestrial paradise.

 

Finally the last scene takes place in the central hall of a train station. Bertram Rothe, the Virgil figure, is about to part from Carter just like in the earthly Paradise, on the top of Purgatory. The train that leaves to take away Rothe gives us obvious allusion. «Ils regardèrent encore la grande horloge Mondaine qui indiquait presque 10:50. Il restait dix minutes jusqu'au départ du train. Et cinq jusqu'à l'éclosion des étoiles.» We have clear reference to Beatrice's magical number. «Cinquecento diece e cinque» and the star, «l'étoile» is of course the last word of each book of the Divine Comedy.

In short, the dantesque elements that we find in Fretz's Vestibule des lâches show his effort of confronting his main character, Carter, to an enemy, Barquet, who is a possible other self. Ulysses is also a mirror of Dante. He represents what Dante is afraid he might become through his own Odyssey to God. Dante says it in the second canto of the Inferno, «I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul.» What is his legitimacy for doing his journey? Both Dante and Ulysses seek a greater good; the tension is in how they choose the way. Carter and Barquet are also seeking a greater good, survival in the contemporary art world. Thanks to Barquet, his enemy’s cynicism, in which Carter recognize himself, the hero will turn away from his own compromises.

In that way, the novel can be looked at as the narration of a fragmented mirror tile as much as a moral tale.

 

Edward Botsky, Orvieto