Andrew O’Hagan
THE DIVING-BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY by Jean- Dominique Bauby (Fourth Estate, R99,95)
THERE have always been writers capable of rising to the occasions and complications of their illnesses, and some of them – Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Moore – might be thought to have been at their best when doing so.
Not all writers respond to physical disability by turning their degeneration into a subject, though: some (Marcel Proust, RL Stevenson) rather find a new imaginative strength in the midst of all their shivering and hacking.
Paris Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby had a massive stroke while test-driving a new BMW in the winter of 1995. He describes its results thus:”Paralysed from head to toe, the patient is imprisoned inside his own body, his mind intact, but unable to speak or move. In my case, blinking my left eye is my only means of communication.”
Bauby becomes a Robinson Crusoe of the senses: he is stranded but has all the mental stuff with which to build something of a bearable life. And one day he sees footprints, and the promise of something to take him out of himself.
What he finds is a friendly new alphabet. All the most frequently used letters in French are arranged in order, so they can be read out by someone and Bauby can blink at the appropriate letter. He gives a lot of himself away describing this process, with its irritations, its confusions, its dreadful slowness.
This laborious work only adds to one’s sense of the power and beauty of his book. The writing itself – so full of the world’s noise, the day’s pattern across the wall, the mind’s agility and quietness, the man’s courage and decency – is what makes this book so great.