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Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoirs of an imprisoned mind by JULIET WATERS By age 44, Jean-Dominique Bauby had learned a lot about the good life. As editor-in-chief of Elle magazine in Paris, he had acquired most of its essential ingredients: money, travel, taste, a well-read mind, the love of two children, a respected ex-wife, an adored new girlfriend and countless friends. But like most people in the world, he knew nothing about one of its most important elements, a functioning brain stem. He received a brutal lesson in anatomy when his stopped working on December 9, 1995 after a massive stroke. Bauby awoke from a coma three weeks later, the victim of a rare paralysis called "locked-in-syndrome." Within days his mind returned, strong as it had ever been, but incapable of communicating with his body. He could not move, talk, swallow, taste, smell or even breathe without a respirator. The only thing he could do was blink his left eyelid. Bauby blinked out letters as a speech therapist read through the alphabet. And in under two months he wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was published three days after he died on March 9, 1997, and became an immediate bestseller in France and, after translation, in Britain.
His strength is the magical sense of irony with which he weaves his memoirs. There's the strange coincidence, for instance, of the book he had toyed with writing before his stroke. It was to be a revision of The Count of Monte Cristo, taking place in contemporary times, with the Count as a woman. But by a fluke, Alexander Dumas père's classic contains the only example of locked-in-syndrome in the canon: the sinister character of Nortier de Villefort, who is also only able to communicate by blinking. It's a coincidence he describes with an almost perverse delight, as he continues to attach himself to whatever symbols he can maintain from his former life as an epicure. "If I must drool, I will drool on cashmere," he writes after refusing to wear the jogging suit suggested as the uniform of most of the disabled at the hospital. There is a moment when Bauby catches a glance at himself in a windowpane. His mouth is twisted, his nose damaged, his non-functioning eye is sewn shut and the gaze of his working eye is full of fear. "Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralysed, mute, half-dead, deprived of all pleasure and reduced to a jellyfish existence, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping-up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter--when... we decide to treat it all as a joke." Bauby never ends up dismissing all of his experience as a joke. But he does show how healthy doses of gentle cynicism can be an essential ingredient in the survival of the soul. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Fourth Estate, hc, 144 pp, $24.95 |
My left eye
The book is lucid, funny, very dark and poignant evidence of what a well-kept brain can do to save its owner from one of the worst lives imaginable.