Throughout Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir of “locked-in syndrome,” the only resource at his disposal in the face of paralysis, isolation, and the end of his days as a wealthy, powerful Paris magazine editor is his mind. Through the power of his memories and the bravery of his imagination, Bauby manages to find freedom even in the confines of the “diving bell” he feels his body has become—and argues, through the memories, dreams, and fantasies he recounts in his memoir, that people can find freedom, relief, and indeed escape through their minds.
Though much of the memoir concerns Bauby’s day-to-day life as a stroke victim and “locked-in” patient at the Berck-sur-Mer hospital in France, its most detailed, joyous, and profound sections involve his memories and his imagination. Through these short chapters, Bauby demonstrates the power of the human mind and suggests that he is not only finding escape or distraction through his memories and flights of fancy—he is truly healing himself from the inside out and finding shelter in revisiting his memories, learning lessons from his past, and using a combination of memory, historical knowledge, and whimsy to envision an alternate present (and future). Bauby looks back on his memories of the most beautiful and painful parts of his life to fill the void of experience which faces him each day—and to try to make sense of the man he has been and the man he is. For example, he revisits a painful series of mean fights with an ex-girlfriend, Joséphine; thinks longingly about botching a lucrative tip about a horse race alongside one of his old friends and coworkers, Vincent; and he even recounts in great detail the ordinary December day that became the most fateful of his life—the day of his stroke. By retreading old memories, even the difficult ones, he engages in a form of entertainment and escapism—but he is also doing the difficult, necessary work of understanding his life in retrospect and confronting the sum of his experience on earth. With hours on end and no way to entertain himself other than through his own memories, Bauby decides to use the power of his mind for good rather than idleness—and uses his memories to seek out moral lessons, to reexamine what kind of friend and lover he’s been, and to find symbolism and meaning in events that previously seemed mundane or quotidian.
Bauby also uses memory and historical knowledge to invent alternate presents for himself. When he’s being fed through a tube daily, he imagines what it would be like to eat something off a real seasonal “menu” that he curates and rotates with the changes in weather. Depending on the season and his mood, he pictures juicy melons, decadent oysters, warm beef stews, or the succulent sausages he loved as a boy, allowing his memories of taste and texture to elevate his drab present moment. When he’s being perfunctorily sponged down each Sunday, he luxuriates in recollections of long, lazy soaks in the tub, a glass of Scotch or a good book in hand. While sitting outside on a lonely terrace, he imagines himself at Cinecittà, one of Europe’s largest and most lively movie studios, directing his dream pictures. Bauby’s imagination—symbolized by the fluttering wings of butterflies—allows him to pass the long hours that define his dreariest days. These flights of fancy show that Bauby yearns to have his old life back and is wistful for all he’s lost, but they also create a larger existential question about felt experiences versus imagined ones. When he looks at a calendar one day and realizes that all of his Elle magazine colleagues are at a global fashion conference in Hong Kong, it isn’t difficult for him to imagine the things they’re doing, the sights they’re seeing, and the people they’re interacting with—even though Bauby himself has never been to Hong Kong. The rote routines of his past—a work trip which might have been seen as more of a hassle than an opportunity, a drive through the streets of Paris in heavy traffic, a meal at a seedy luncheonette above a racing track—are suddenly brilliant in texture, color, and scope, and Bauby’s longing to be part of the world is at least somewhat sated by his intense imaginings.
Given that his inner world is really all he is able to count on after his stroke, Bauby dedicates an enormous amount of time to reliving memories, getting lost in fantasies, and thinking through difficult existential questions. Bauby’s day-to-day challenges are enormous and his circumstances are extraordinary to say the least—and yet his journey through his own mind says a lot about the power of any human to find refuge, clarity, and strength in the power of their own experiences, their own thoughts, and their own deepest dreams.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory, Imagination, and Freedom ThemeTracker
Memory, Imagination, and Freedom Quotes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day. My heels hurt, my head weighs a ton, and something like a giant invisible diving bell holds my whole body prisoner. My room emerges slowly from the gloom. I linger over every item: photos of loved ones, my children’s drawings, posters, the little tin cyclist sent by a friend the day before the Paris-Roubaix bike race, and the IV pole hanging over the bed where I have been confined these past six months, like a hermit crab dug into his rock.
My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes 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’s 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.
One day, for example, 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. But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse’s aide spreads over my cheeks. And my weekly bath plunges me simultaneously into distress and happiness. The delectable moment when I sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia for the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life.
A strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter—when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke. My jovial cackling at first disconcerted [the Empress] Eugénie, until she herself was infected by mirth. We laughed until we cried.
By means of a tube threaded into my stomach, two or three bags of a brownish fluid provide my daily caloric needs. For pleasure, I have to turn to the vivid memory of tastes and smells, an inexhaustible reservoir of sensations. Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.
“Listen, there’s no way I’m going to wait in this!”
“Pity,” Joséphine snapped. “It would do a sinner like you a lot of good!”
“Not at all. It could even be dangerous. What if someone in perfect health happened to be here when the Madonna appeared? One miracle, and we’d end up paralyzed.”
Thus was born a collective correspondence that keeps me in touch with those I love. And my hubris has had gratifying results. Apart from the irrevocable few who maintain a stubborn silence, everybody now understands that he can join me in my diving bell, even if sometimes the diving bell takes me into unexplored territory. I receive remarkable letters. […] I carefully read each [one] myself. […] I hoard all these letters like treasure.
This afternoon, Claude (the young woman to whom I am dictating this book) and Brice are with me. I have known Claude for two weeks, Brice for twenty-five years. It is strange to hear my old partner in crime telling Claude about me. My quick temper, my love of books, my immoderate taste for good food, my red convertible—nothing is left out. Like a storyteller exhuming the legends of a lost civilization.
Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing.
I should not feel morally superior to Olivier, for today I envy him his mastery of the storyteller’s art. I am not sure I will ever acquire such a gift, although I, too, am beginning to forge glorious substitute destinies for myself.
Like millions of Parisians, our eyes empty and our complexions dull, Florence and I embarked like zombies on a new day. […] I mechanically carried out all those simple acts that today seem miraculous to me: shaving, dressing, downing a hot chocolate.
I have indeed begun a new life, and that life is here, in this bed, that wheelchair, and those corridors. Nowhere else.
September means the end of vacations, it means back to school and to work… […] But here at Berck I hear only the faintest echoes of the outside world’s collective return to work and responsibility…
[Claude’s] purse is half open, and I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking. I’ll be off now.
