John Currie

In those enthusiastic first weeks, I ended up at an impromptu dinner in Grammercy Park. I was meeting my girlfriend who had a meeting with a Scottish painter. The plan was I would fetch her at his apt. and go have a curry(I use this expression now; even though the spelling is different, the phrase has provocative implications!). In stead, the painter and his partner decide to through together a pasta and salad and ply us with wine. What could be bad? Not much, free food and booze, good company and fine surroundings. As the evening went on, lasting hours longer than any of us our age would admit would tire us, we discussed many things, one being The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Now the proof, the beauty of the evening, that we had a great time, is that I can't remotely remember the finer shadings of literary criticism we were exposing by the third magnum of red wine. But I do remember that our host had read the book, found it fascinating, on the surface but felt the narrative impossible, that it was at best a concept, at worst a lie. There was something in the narrative that somehow didn't ring as true as the author might have liked.

Without summarizing it, I was obviously intrigued by the story before the story of
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, so to speak, what I knew of the author and the necessity that brought this book into being. Sometimes this type of information can enhance or spoil a book, or movie, or play. It sets up preconceptions. And often with the disabled, in particular someone who is "normal" and somehow becomes "abnormal" or as in a play I saw some years ago put it: you become, "in-valid." There is a pressure to sympathize with the person, to somehow be more accepting of weakness in telling because of the obvious strength it takes just to say hello, or good morning, or good night. This, in essence is how I came to this book.

I must admit a bias in that I was trained and worked as a speech therapist and in special education in various capacities. This in itself presented itself as I read this book. I became aware that I had worked with, read about, observed people using alternate methods of communication. I have interpreted for and taught Deaf individuals using American Sign Language to English and back. This influenced my reading.

My essential feeling about this book is, it is a piece of translation and as such presents difficulties. It is a narrative generated by one person, who creates a system of signification that is then communicated, interpreted and translated into French, and then to us, in English. There were many instances in this book where the language simply failed for me. I had a sense there was something insightful being communicated, but the words and the sentences only hinted at this insight. Reading it became unexciting, a disappointment. But perhaps I wanted more insight from this formally normal, and highly positioned editor. Maybe I was just staking the deck of expectation. Or missing certain cultural nuances that different survive the French to English portion of the trip.

The book disappoints due to the distance we are from the actual consciousness of the event. By the time the book is in our hands, we are four or five "levels" from the mind of Bauby. And, at least for me, I felt this as a distraction. Often we can read translations, while aware, seem easy, light despite the heaviness of the subject. Here, the translation felt heavy, effortful. It is a difficult project and certainly, for me, I consider this. Even so, I found the book less surprising than I would have hoped.

Still one can see the book at a deeper level, beyond the specifics of the individual narrative.

What is remarkable, is the book as object, as evidence that any particular destruction is only so strong, that given what little limits we are allowed, we will exploit them. We will tell about it. We have, as many have written about, an instinct for language. Like breath we use without thinking, we cannot stop this biology, this physiology of individuality, our mark, what makes us.

Bauby's story and the need to tell it, in some ways, reminds me of those heroic stories of dogs, who drag themselves hundreds of miles home, beating the odds, only so much at times, but beating them none the less. It seems the story of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly shows this imperative we have, it is in this way, instinctual and responsive. Certainly telling, spending the time, the tremendous effort brings no direct benefit to the life of the narrator, no physical pain is soothed, no particular skill is revived. So why tell it?

In this way Bauby's need to write the story is evidence of our imperative, our biology to share our selves; we have a body, not a reason, per se to converse to let each other know, to get the last word, to tell it like it is, to talk till we get home.