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THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JEREMY LEGGATT
BY JEAN-DOMINIQUE BAUBY
BY DAVID FUTRELLE that this book even exists is nothing short of miraculous. In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of the French edition of Elle magazine, suffered a sudden eruption in his brain stem, a massive stroke. Bauby survived the stroke -- his mind did, at least -- but when he awoke from his coma some weeks later he discovered he was trapped within a body that was now frozen in place, paralyzed from head to toe. Bauby could blink one eye; that was it. The doctors described his condition as "locked-in syndrome," and indeed, Bauby felt locked in, feeling as though "something like a giant invisible diving bell" was holding his body prisoner. But while his body was immobile, his mind was still as active as ever, flitting through old memories, dreams and daydreams like a butterfly. Bauby was able to convey some of these thoughts to the world, one blink at a time, through a strange and laborious method of transcription. Visitors slowly recited the alphabet to him -- the letters rearranged to reflect the frequency of their use -- and he blinked to indicate when they'd hit the right letter. By this torturously convoluted method, and with the help of others often not quite as patient as he was, Bauby assembled sentences letter by letter, his visitors filling notebooks with his gnomic utterances (alongside a good deal of "unintelligible gibberish, misspelled words, lost letters, omitted syllables"). And so Bauby was able to write this extraordinary book. Remarkably enough, despite the laborious route it took to get to the printed page, there is nothing laborious about Bauby's prose; his sentences, like his thoughts, flit like butterflies across the page. Still an editor at heart, Bauby spent his time alone writing (and rewriting) sentences in his head, preparing for the eventual arrival of his assistant, notebook in hand, to help him "extract [words] from the void." As a result, his prose is clear, elegant, polished, far from the telegraphed utterances one might have expected (and excused) from a man so completely confined. Bauby ventures into his past, retrieving memories the way a diver might retrieve pearls, trying to capture them and set them down before they're lost completely. He writes about the women he's known, about a childhood friend who invented the details of his life like a skilled novelist, about a desultory pilgrimage to Lourdes in the late 1970s with a girlfriend as stubborn and disagreeable as he was.
Mostly, though, Bauby reflects on his illness, writing about it eloquently and even with a certain humor. (He feels a "strange euphoria" the first time he sees a reflection of his paralyzed face, looking like nothing so much as "the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde." Not only has he been "reduced to the condition of a jellyfish," he notes with a perverse pride, "but I was also horrible to behold.") Even though he's become a sort of immobile monster, drooling on his cashmere sweaters, capable only of pained grimaces and the occasional grunt (extracted with considerable difficulty by a speech therapist he describes as an "angel"), Bauby maintains his composure, and while he makes no effort to hide his frustration and sadness, this is a book remarkably free from bitterness; perhaps Bauby felt he simply didn't have time for it. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is, it goes without saying, a remarkable accomplishment. It's also a wondrous piece of writing. Bauby died two days after the French edition hit the bookstores; it is hard to imagine a more eloquent farewell.
David Futrelle is a regular contributor to Salon. |
