Henry Bauchau is one of the greatest Belgian contemporary writers. He started his literary career only in 1958 after having resorted to psychoanalysis to solve some issues. He later became a psychoanalyst himself. His 'cycle grec' novels, "Œdipe sur la route" (1990) and "Antigone" (1997) were followed by the 'journaux intimes', "Jour après jour, journal 1983-1989" (1992) and "Journal d’Antigone" (1997) all written about the same main characters, just as the short stories collected in "Les Vallées du bonheur profond", that could be seen as an important tool to understand the previous works. Bauchau re-writes Oedipus’s and Antigone’s myths, re-elaborates them following a 20th-century logic of destruction and resurrection, and then makes them the paradigm of lives that are guilty of their own existence.
The essay reflects on the marine soul of Oedipus, on the sculpting of the 'barque' as a process of transformation and phenomenological representation, and on the theme of the 'vague', which establishes itself in the artistic realm since the 19th Century as the study and the representation of the blind and awesome force of the sea.
