Portrait · Mind & body · 1997
Plate · Generated interpretation
A Blink for a Letter
After a stroke, a man can move only his left eyelid. He dictates a book that way. The mind on the page is not the body the ward can see.
- Berck-sur-Mer, Hôpital Maritime
- Late 1990s France
- 50.41°N 1.56°E
A dark screen. What would one letter cost?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / –:–
Room 119, Hôpital Maritime, Berck-sur-Mer, on the Channel. January 1996. Jean-Dominique Bauby, forty-three, editor-in-chief of French Elle, has come out of twenty days of coma. A brainstem stroke on 8 December 1995, on the road with his son, has left him able to move, of the body the ward can see, only his left eyelid. The right eye is sewn against irritation. Locked-in is the medical name. He is asked to blink once if he understands. He blinks.
His speech therapist, Sandrine Fichou, orders the French alphabet by how often the language uses the letters: E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, then the rest. Claude Mendibil, a freelance editor sent by Robert Laffont, sits by the bed and recites. Bauby blinks when the letter he wants arrives. A missed blink is a return to the start of that letter. He has composed the paragraph in his head first. She writes it down. Partner-assisted scanning is the later clinic’s name. In the ward it is three hours a day, seven days a week, through the summer of 1996, a 130-page manuscript paid for one letter at a time. He was born in Paris in 1952. Before the stroke he had already signed a contract for a book. This is not that book.
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. Paris: Robert Laffont, 7 March 1997. He dies of heart failure on 9 March. The diving bell, in his figure, is the body that will not answer. The butterfly is what still moves. The medical name is locked-in syndrome. Later clinical work on interior life in locked-in patients is a different field. These pages are not that field’s data.
The first printing, 25,000 copies, sells in a day. Ibn Sīnā imagined a man floating with no body. Bauby had a body that would not answer. The thought experiment and Room 119 are not the same object. Mendibil does not invent the sentences. She waits. He blinks. The letter is written down. The later film is another telling. This plate stays with the dictation: a window on the water, a visitor, a sentence that costs.
The book exists. The method is described in it. A self was dictated, letter by letter, with a collaborator who did not invent the sentences. That is not the same as saying a self is only a sequence of letters. It is to say the sequence got through.
Whether a blink can carry a self is not a riddle. It is a fact in this case. What it does to our picture of mind is the leftover.
Distant echoes
Echo
Islamic Golden Age · On the page, from Bukhara to Hamadan to Isfahan
The floating man
Ibn Sīnā suspends the body to find a self. Bauby’s body is present and mostly silent. Two tests.
Echo
Late Roman Republic · Italy, on the page of a poem
The soul that can be cut
Lucretius says mind and body fail together. Bauby’s mind stays while the body will not answer. Two materialisms, two rooms.
One question remains
Mind & body · How does experience live in matter?
If a self can be dictated one letter at a time, where was it while the letter was waited for?