In his memoir, Jean-Dominique Bauby conjures the experience of human suffering with the rare beauty and craft of a poet. A great achievement for someone whose rare paralytic condition left him the sole use of his left eye, and meant that the use of an alphabet code, which required that he blink upon the enunciation of each desired letter, was his only means of dictating this book.

In reading his memoir we are plunged into the depths of Bauby’s memory and imagination which occupy his time during his confinement to Room 119 at the hospital in Berck-sur-Mer. This book is not so much about hope as testament to the enduring human spirit and the power of unspoken gestures.  Perhaps it is such gestures - examined by Bauby with agonising clarity - that makes the transition from text to film a capricious one.

Director Julian Schnabel’s film version is undoubtedly a beautifully moving piece of filmmaking, as many of the reviews say. However, considering the insight Bauby gives us into his condition, as well as the lengthy measures that were employed to convey his thoughts, it is remarkable that many of the most evocative and insightful passages in the book have been omitted from the film adaptation.

One of these moments occurs in the Alphabet chapter, where Bauby reflects upon his visitors’ apparent frustrations with the alien code of communication, observing their varying levels of engagement and intuition. His own frustration with the incongruities of this exchange is tempered by the poetic quality one such misunderstanding, when his attempt to ask one visitor for his ‘lunettes’ (glasses) is mistaken for a wish for the moon (‘lune’), thus enchanting his readers with the subtle nuances of language.

It is from Bauby’s perspective, at the entrance to his imagination, that we can gain the greatest insight into his condition, and wherein we can gain access to understanding the broader complexities of the human condition. Whereas the Diving Bell of the title depicts the immutable shell of Bauby’s paralysed body, the butterfly represents transformation. He describes how the butterfly’s wing flutters in his head, where the imagination takes flight: a metaphor for the fragments of life that we catch ephemerally, and that which delights us eternally.

Many of the subtle evocations of the book are lost in their transcription onto film, compelling the script towards sentimentality. In particular, Schabel’s vision gives greater emphasis to the portrayal of Bauby’s relationship with his father. The principle significance of their relationship has a profound basis: they are both ‘locked-in’, each ensnared by their immobility. Yet in the film, Bauby’s father is depicted as wrought with regret and mental fragility, choking through his tears as he speaks on the phone to his mute son, and repeating the line ‘I forget everything I want to say’, a line absent from the original manuscript.

Reduced to a vegetable existence, Bauby’s imagination flourishes within the dormant shell of his ‘moribund frame’. Starved of even life’s simple pleasures, his loss is immeasurable; unable to ruffle his son’s hair, or to stroke the face of the woman he loves.  Yet, although he is ‘locked-in’, Bauby expresses himself virtually always in relation to others. Rituals mark the passage of time, and in Bauby’s memoir it is these eminent details that bring people closer: from the reading of the letters he receives whilst in his ‘cocoon’, to his memory of that ‘legendary forgotten ritual: lunch’.

Every detail of the book takes on a stark resonance in regards to Bauby’s condition: a game of hang-man, a trip to Lourdes, Chinese superstition, divine providence, and calm indifference, all conspire by chance or as a cruel lesson cast by fate. In his cocoon, even Father’s Day takes on a meaning absent from his previous existence. This scene, artfully evoked in Schnabel’s film adaptation, explores a plethora of collective emotions: the strange paradox of his children’s laughter and grief, and his  regret and desire, culminating in his ultimate solitude. His inner voice begs the solemn question, ‘what will you carry back from this field-trip into my endless solitude?’

If it fails to convey the extent of Bauby’s emotion with the aptitude of his first-person account, Schnabel’s aesthetical (anaesthetised) vision offers a more objective account of his experience. The audience is left to indulge their senses with the affecting piano score, whilst a bounty of attractive French actresses parade on-screen, cosseting a ‘mute and rigid’ Bauby (played by Mathieu Almariac). But incidentally, ‘no one’ - as Bauby remarks in his memoir - ‘pays (him) any real attention’. Then, in contemplation of another patient at Berck, and testament to his own precarious identity, Bauby’s inner voice echoes: ‘I know who he is but who is he really?’

How many words does it take to sum up a life?  

Jean-Dominique Buaby: Editor of French Elle, father of two, would-be victim of a plane hijacking, victim of a catastrophic illness in the prime of life, a character in a novel….

When you read Bauby’s moving memoir, you will learn many lessons about life, above all he teaches us that we are myth-makers, balancing listlessly between perception and reality, always at the fringes of life. Poignantly, he reminds us that language and the understandings are ‘fragile thread(s)’ that connect us to life, and to each other.

O come with me my little one, we will find that farm
and grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm.
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am,
O take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb.

With one hand on the hexagram and one hand on the girl
I balance on a wishing well that some men call the world.
We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky,
And lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye.

(from Leonard Cohen’s Stories of the Streets)

By Amanda Carey/MOLI