Book Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

As you begin reading Jean-Dominique Bauby's 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly', you realize that probably you are holding a minor piece of miracle in your hands. The observative notes penned down with Bauby's eyes are so lyrical and melodious that you take flight similar to the author's imagination like a butterfly. Bear in mind that the author was suffering from Locked-In Syndrome when the book was written, which is normally believed to prevent its victims from communicating at all. Not only is the book a living example of the author's determination to win against all odds, but also it is so beautifully written that you begin to appreciate the book not out of sympathy to the author's condition but out of sheer enjoyment from the written word.

Bauby's condition called the "locked-in syndrome" paralyzed his entire body in such a debilitating manner that the only part of his body that could move was his left eye lid. That he managed to devise a communication pattern with that eye lid in an easy to understand manner is laudable in itself. That he managed to compose all his thoughts and successfully communicate them to an interpreter and get a book published out of it, is another remarkable feat. And that rather than wallowing in self-pity, the book manages to transport the reader to another land of mystic lyricism is a complete miracle. This is a remarkable achievement for a man who was obliged to compose and refine every sentence in his head, remember it, and then dictate it letter-by-letter with coded blinks of his left eyelid - the only part of his body which he could still control. As the author says "My main task now is to compose the first of these bedridden travel notes so that I shall be ready when my publisher's emissary arrives to take my dictation, letter by letter. In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph."

The 'Butterfly' part of the title is referring to the author's active imagination. Which, I don't need to mention again, is the master scripter of this book. The 'Diving bell' part of the title is the author's physical condition, he is imprisoned in this 'giant invisible diving bell'. The author's butterfly apirations lead him out of his desperate situation in his diving bell. This is how the author describes the constant struggle between the Diving bell and the Butterfly: "My diving bell becomes less oppressive and I take flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas' court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions"

Given his condition, it is quite expected that this crucible for the author might have driven him to the deepest gorges of despair. But rather than focus on how bad his situation is, and revel in attention out of self-pity, the author focusses on the beauty of life. How when you have an active and busy life, you do not focus on all those things that just pass by you. How life just happens to you, when you are busy making other plans. How lovely the world is, how beautiful the people are, how things are not so bad even when it seems so. How he is lucky to have at least one of his eyelids functioning, otherwise he would have had to get even his left eyelid sewn like his right eyelid. Now with one eyelid functioning, at least that one is free to blink, he is free to see and he is free to communicate. This is how he describes his inner turmoil when the doctor gets to sewing his non-functioning eyelid:
'I have known gentler awakenings. When I came to that late-January morning, the hospital opthalmologist was leaning over me and sewing my right eyelid shut with a needle and thread, just as he were darning a sock. Irrational terror swept over me. What if this man got carried away and sewed up my left eye as well, my only link to the outside world, the only window to my cell, the one tiny opening of my diving bell? Luckily as it turns out, I wasn't plunged into darkness. He carefully packed away his sewing kit in padded tin boxes.'

Reliant on others for every trivial yet painful detail of his physical existence, Bauby yet manages to joke. "They had to place a special cushion behind my head: it was wobbling about like the head of one of those African women upon removal of the stack of rings that has been stretching her neck for years." or "I can find it amusing in my forty-fifth 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 total lapse into infancy." In one of the chapters he even contemplates the extermination of an irritatingly noisy toy duck. More than anything else, his determination, spirit and inner energy shine through, as he invents film scenarios, travel adventures and a play, he even makes up an inventive new fruit cocktail (the recipe for which is not mentioned in the book).

Jean-Dominique Bauby died in March, 1997, at the age of forty-five, fifteen months after suffering the massive stroke which damaged his brain-stem and left him with an active mind in a paralysed body. He died in a span of less than a week after his book was published. His book is a remarkable achievement by a brave and determined man. His book speaks volumes about the indefatigable spirit of the human soul, which refuses to cow down even in the bleakest of scenarios.