The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
BOOK REVIEW
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby
Torture to read, Bauby illuminates life’s subtleties and showcases the dynamism of the human spirit
Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir is so much more than a regular autobiographical work. At 43 years old, the former editor of Elle collapsed from a stroke while driving his son to the theatre. He spent three weeks in a coma before waking up entirely paralyzed other than the ability to blink his left eyelid. Bauby became one of the best known cases of the horrifying locked-in syndrome, a rare condition which normally leaves the patient with no voluntary muscle control barring vertical eye movement and blinking. This excruciating image is repainted from within an even deeper level of hell because the patient also retains full mental capacities: the brain is able to understand the terror of the situation but the mouth is frozen and cannot scream in fear. Ergo, they are simply ‘locked in’ to their body.
The agony of locked-in syndrome has haunted me since I first heard of it years ago. I suspect it must be something like sleep paralysis, which I’ve never experienced, or perhaps like being buried alive, which I have (up to my chin). I read The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly slowly and intentionally, implementing a reader’s version of method acting so as to empathize fully with this moment-to-moment torture. The harder one concentrates the mind on the state of being paralyzed the faster and more frantically panic sets in. The mind begins to think irrationally and turn on itself, like an angry wasp trapped in a tin. I cannot endure the exercise for more than a few minutes.
“I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”
After certain passages, my imagination even thrust up visuals of my family members with the condition, causing me to feel physically sick. I’ve not read a book whose pages have filled me with as much horror as this.
And yet Bauby does not burden the text with emotional self-pity, but instead describes a series of wonderfully flowing images which hop between old memories and his contemporary hospitalized life. Though I will admit I was hoping for more detail as he processed his new reality in the days after his coma, this is compensated for in each short chapter’s vivid elegance. Bauby vigorously shakes awake one’s appreciation for life - from hugging a loved one to tasting french fries - and demands that we take none of life’s subtleties for granted.
“Does it take the glare of disaster to show a person’s true nature?”
Most overawing of all however, is to remember that Bauby wrote the book from his quadriplegic state. An alphabet system of blinking allowed him to indicate one letter at a time to an assistant who transcribed the whole manuscript from Bauby’s left eyelid. This process must have required such incomprehensible patience and determination that all superlatives would feel insufficient. If there is something, anything, that testifies to the fighting human spirit, this book’s very existence is it. The fact Bauby also produces a beautiful memoir is testament to him as a writer, never to be forgotten.
-NP, December 2021