Three men faced the spell of the mermaids, those strange birds that inevitably attracted the sailors with their song: Ulysses, who took the precaution of being bound hand and foot to the mast of his ship, listened and survived; Orpheus, who in the expedition of the Argonauts saw the mortal danger of his music and neutralized it with the notes of his zither; And Butes, navigator and companion of the previous one in the same adventure, that succumbed to the spell and threw itself of the ship. Quignard rescues the act of this marginal character of Greek mythology, "a forgotten of the memory of the world", without ever trying to decipher it. He uses it as a paradigm of the "renunciation of the society of those who speak". While Ulysses manages not to give up anything - he hears the sirens and also returns home - Butes accedes to the great silence by means of an animal music, that is against the beautiful measure of Orphic music. In the same line as Michelstaedter, Quignard raises the dichotomy of choosing between the wild nihilism of the moment or the comfortable death at the hands of social norms by stagnation.

In these times in which even dissidence is defined as part of the renewal of the system, there are fortunately, by way of respite, some old contemporaries like Quignard, one of the few "writers quieter than the others, in more pages. You still change. "