posted on 02 Jun 2018

The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

There are some books that defy critical judgement, the circumstances of their writing being so desperate that to find fault or weakness would be somehow irreverent. But no such special allowances are required by Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for it is a masterpiece, a triumph of the human spirit.

First published in 1997, Bauby’s book topped the bestseller lists and in 2007 was made into a widely acclaimed film. There can be few who know nothing of Bauby’s extraordinary story, even if they haven’t read his book or seen the film.

Jean-Do – as he was called by many, including his family – was the editor of the French edition of Elle magazine. On the 8th December 1995, he was being chauffeured across Paris in a borrowed gunmetal BMW. First he had to drop into the Elle offices, then collect his son. Together they were attending the opening night of a new play and afterwards planned to eat oysters at a favourite restaurant. This tells you something of the kind of life Jean-Do led. But on that particular afternoon he suffered a catastrophic stroke and fell into a coma. He was hospitalised in the giant naval hospital at Berck-sur-Mer and when he recovered consciousness three weeks later it was to find himself completely paralysed, unable to do anything except blink his left eye (the right, which was damaged by the stroke and wouldn’t close at all was temporarily sewn shut to prevent further injury to the eye). Bauby was a victim of what is now widely called locked-in-syndrome, his mind functioning perfectly despite the physical damage, paralysis and disablement.

Over the course of the coming months Bauby learnt to communicate with anyone patient enough to master the same technique he had had to learn. Whoever he was ‘conversing’ with would slowly read a version of the alphabet in which for convenience and speed the letters were rearranged according to the frequency of their use in the French language. At each letter he wanted recorded, Bauby would blink his left eyelid. Slowly, letter by letter, a conversation could be developed.

That in itself is perhaps extraordinary enough. But to master this technique to the extent that he could use it to ‘dictate’ an entire book (albeit a short one) is little short of miraculous.

But if this this book was remarkable only for the adversity in which it was written, then it would be a lesser book. What makes it so deeply special is that it is also a considerable literary achievement, a book for savouring (as hard as that sometimes is), a book to return to, to ponder on.

I have read one reviewer cleverly saying that whereas Proust used the elusive taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea to recover memory, Bauby uses memory to recover the madeleine – and there is a degree of truth in this. As well as being a sort of short and very selective diary of his time in hospital, Bauby uses the deepest reaches of his sometimes dreadful nights to compose and edit and refine the book in his head. As well as an unflinching analysis of his present circumstances, it is also a means of recovering the sights and sounds and tastes and experiences now forever closed to him. He recreates in memory the best meals that seasonal cooking has to offer; the scent of a loved one’s skin; places he has cherished; favourite wines (he is after all French), fine Scotch.

He calls these short episodic chapters “bedridden travel notes”, and they are, in the sense that in his mind he can travel anywhere, at any time, and to any time. One of the finest sequences, in which he contemplates the visit of Empress Eugénie to the hospital on the 4th May 1864, is reminiscent of WG Sebald.

By craning his neck as far as he is able (besides his left eyelid this is the only other movement he can make) he can just see the little pile of his favourite books on the windowsill – Zola, Seneca, Chateaubriand. But today he is unlucky: no one visits to read to him from these works. He holds silent conversations on the phone with his family and loved ones – they can speak to him but he is unable to answer. He contemplates the awful depth of his isolation. He catches a glimpse of a face reflected in a window – a poor, drooling damaged face which looks as if it has “emerged from a vat of formaldehyde”. He realises that the single goggling eye – “like the doomed eye of Cain” – is his own.

If all this sounds too awful to bear reading, then I have done Bauby a disservice, because the most extraordinary thing is that this is not a dreadful or depressing book. Yes, it is moving, upsetting even, but what one is left with, the overriding impression, is one of a great act of human generosity and resilience, of courage, even.

And this is how it ends. In the open handbag of a visitor he is able to see a hotel room key, a metro ticket and a hundred-franc note. They resemble objects “brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live”. “Does the cosmos,” he asks himself, “contain keys for opening my cocoon? A metro line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking.” But Bauby couldn’t keep looking. He died suddenly just two days after the French edition of his book was published.

I first read this fifteen or sixteen years ago and I’m ashamed to say it left little impression. Like so much else, I probably read it too quickly. If you read it, read it slowly. Imagine each letter being blinked into place – and wonder at the book that was produced: beautiful, touched but not overcome by despair, and somehow also very French in its elegance, its lyricism, and its wry stoicism.

 

Alun Severn

June 2018