The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Review Locked in Syndrome

June 15, 1997
In the Glimmer of an Centre
After a devastating stroke, the author dictated this memoir using only his left eyelid
Read the Kickoff Chapter
Related Article: Paris Journal: A Tale Seen in the Mind'southward Eye, Told by the Torso's (March 18)

By THOMAS MALLON

THE DIVING Bell
AND THE BUTTERFLY
By Jean-Dominique Bauby.
Translated by Jeremy Leggatt.
132 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $20.

his is the tongue of the dead homo,'' Sylvia Plath wrote in ''Berck-Plage,'' her poem set in a French hospital complex by the Channel declension. ''How far he is at present, his actions / Around him like livingroom piece of furniture, similar a decor.''

A year and a one-half ago, post-obit a catastrophic stroke and weeks of deep blackout in that aforementioned hospital, Jean-Dominique Bauby gradually ''surfaced'' into a new existence as a victim of ''locked-in syndrome,'' mentally alert but deprived of movement and speech communication. Merely 44 years old, his body useless but still painful (''my hands, lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting, although I can't tell if they are burning hot or water ice cold''), he was forced to recognize that his sometime life in Paris equally the witty, high-living editor in primary of Elle magazine had become as unreachable equally the books and trinkets beyond his hospital room, where he at present lived ''like a hermit crab dug into his rock.''

His time ''as a perfectly performance earthling'' ended, i might say, in the blink of an eye. But it was blinking -- that age-sometime epitome of daydreaming speed turned into literal, concentrated labor -- that saved Bauby from becoming just another object in the room. By moving his left eyelid in response to an alphabet rearranged co-ordinate to the letters' frequency of use, Bauby managed to write a volume as moving as Chore's and every bit expansive, in its way, equally whatsoever composed by the wheelchaired, dizzying Stephen Hawking.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the victim of a stroke that left his listen and one eye performance -- enough to enable him to dictate "The Diving Accommodate and the Butterfly" to Claude Mendibil earlier dying of heart failure. (Jean-Louis Sieff)

''It is a simple enough organisation,'' he explains. ''You lot read off the alphabet . . . until, with a blink of my middle, I stop y'all at the letter of the alphabet to be noted. The maneuver is repeated for the letters that follow, and so that adequately soon yous accept a whole word.'' Adequately presently! Less soon when the amanuensis anticipates and makes mistakes: ''One day when, attempting to enquire for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).''
Bauby allows that his ''communication organization disqualifies repartee,'' merely information technology does beautiful service to all sorts of concrete and emotional clarification. ''There comes a fourth dimension,'' he explains, ''when the heaping upwards of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter,'' but in this strong, slim volume the author displays a writerly control equal to his honesty: ''One mean solar day . . . I can find it amusing, in my 45th year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn's. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this full lapse into infancy. But the adjacent day, the aforementioned process seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls downwards through the lather a nurse's aide spreads over my cheeks.'' There are scenes in Bauby's narrative -- his discovery, in a windowpane, that he is not simply ''reduced to the existence of a jellyfish'' only ''also horrible to behold'' -- that one might be inclined to describe every bit unbearably sad, if ''unbearable,'' thanks to this volume, were not a word ane volition never over again use quite so loosely.

The diving bell of Bauby's title is his corporeal trap, the butterfly his imagination: ''In that location is so much to do. Y'all can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court.'' Childhood fantasies of state of war heroism alternating with elaborate dreams of cooking, in which his pantry is a previous lifetime'southward memories of smells, tastes and textures: ''You tin sit down to a repast at whatsoever hour, with no fuss or ceremony. If it's a restaurant, no demand to call ahead. . . . The boeuf bourguignon is tender, the boeuf en gelee translucent, the apricot pie possesses just the requisite tartness.'' It's as if he'd reversed the most famous moment in Proust and used retentivity to bring back the madeleine.

Calamity turns Bauby into a connoisseur of irony and eeriness. He recalls how, while visiting his aged male parent only days before the stroke, he stood near ''a black-and-white photograph of myself on a miniature golf game course. I was 11, my ears protruded and I looked like a somewhat simpleminded schoolboy.'' When, later, the elder Bauby sends this photo to the hospital, the writer is puzzled until the picture is turned over and he sees that a cruel coincidence has been detected. ''In his stiff, angular handwriting, Dad had but noted: Berck-sur-Mer, Apr 1963.''

Shortly earlier the stroke, Bauby had begun to diet, not knowing he would lose 66 pounds in the next 20 weeks, and he had reread ''The Count of Monte Cristo,'' in which the elderly Noirtier de Villefort ''is literature's kickoff -- and then far simply -- case of locked-in syndrome.'' From his bed, Bauby ponders the fashion he's swapped circumstances with an old friend who spent ''several years in a darkened Beirut dungeon'' as a hostage of Hezbollah.

The author cultivates strong feelings, specially acrimony, to go on his spirit from atrophying along with his limbs. But despite occasional sarcastic eruptions, the volume's tone, in Jeremy Leggatt'southward translation, is dominated by a sweet, fifty-fifty humorous, lyricism. Bauby notes with pleasure how, in his reordered alphabet, ''T and U, the tender components of tu . . . take not been separated,'' and he recounts his applied distribution of all the prayers coming his manner: ''A adult female I know enlisted a Republic of cameroon holy man to procure me the goodwill of Africa'southward gods: I have assigned him my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on the human relationship between my devout mother-in-law and the monks of a Bordeaux brotherhood.'' Continuing pride in his fashionableness makes him insist that he do his drooling on his own cashmere instead of the hospital-issue jogging suit. If a sure sentimentality enters some of his imaginings, such every bit a fantasy reconstruction of the Empress Eugenie's visit to the hospital in 1864 (''I was then merry that I would willingly have risen and invited Eugenie to trip the light fantastic toe''), awe at its very rendition will keep most readers from condemning it too harshly.

During the book's composition, Bauby'southward long-term prognosis was uncertain. He was thought likely to experience some improvement with digestion and respiration, and perhaps even to reach a point where he might ''muster enough breath to make my vocal cords vibrate.'' But he died suddenly on March nine, just two days after the French publication of ''The Diving Bong and the Butterfly.'' His startling book from Berck-sur-Mer is best experienced by remaining mindful of having the luck to be reading information technology betwixt the many blinks of one'southward optics. I myself read nigh of Bauby'south words during an uncomfortable train ride, astonished and finally humbled that he should be relieving my feelings of confinement.

Thomas Mallon's about recent book is a novel, ''Dewey Defeats Truman.''

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