| Popis: |
It isn't going to take a little time to write but a long time and I don't care, for my bus is something large in my mind. It is a cosmic bus holding sparks and back firing into the Milky Way and turning the corner of Betelgeuse without a hand signal. And Juan Chicoy the driver is all the god [sic] the fathers you ever saw driving a six cylinder broken down, battered world through time and space. If I can do it well The Wayward Bus will be a pleasant thing. (John Steinbeck, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer)I realized I was making a serious mistake. You only go on a long-distance bus in the United States because either you cannot afford to fly or-and this is really licking the bottom of the barrel in America-you cannot afford a car. ... I slept fitfully, that dissatisfying, semiconscious sleep in which you incorporate in your dreams the things going on around you-the grinding of gears, the crying of babies, the mad swervings of the bus back and forth across the highway as the driver gropes for a dropped cigarette or lapses into a psychotic episode. Mostly I dreamed of the bus plunging over a cliff face... .When I awoke there... was a new passenger opposite me, a haggard woman with lank gray hair who was chain-smoking cigarettes and burping prodigiously. . . . The Indian man was still there, looking miserable. ... I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. (Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)Steinbeck's account of the book project that was to become The Wayward Bus surely offers the most sublime vision of buses, bus travel, and bus drivers ever to appear in English. The 1947 novel teUs the tale of a sociaUy diverse group of unhappy travelers, dreaming of Mexico and Los Angeles, who must confront each other and their selves when their bus-familiarly dubbed "Sweetheart"-bogs down on a muddy southern California back road. Steinbeck's correspondence shows how ambitious he was for TTie Wayward Bus, and the book was much anticipated. Contemporary reviews, however, were mostly lukewarm, and the novel has never attracted much interest since. Multiple factors contribute to a text's reception, but I wonder if at least some of the disappointment The Wayward Bus evokes is due simply to Steinbeck's choice of vehicle. The creator of one of American literature's most famous cars, the Joad family's jalopy in The Grapes of Wrath, went on to write about a bus, a plebeian mode of travel associated not only with poverty but also lack of agency. The Joads themselves control their custom-built Hudson, no matter how ddapidated and undependable it may be. Sweetheart's passengers, in contrast, have no choice but to put their faith in Juan, "aU the god the fathers you ever saw."In The Sixth Sense, that the psychiatrist played by Bruce Willis once takes the bus is an important clue that he is actually dead: to show a middle-class American on a bus is to signal that he or she is somehow out of place. Whde The Wayward Bus is rare in limning the transcendent potential of bus travel, its use of the bus as a staging ground for class contact is typical. Indeed, Steinbeck's book reprises John Ford's Stagecoach, a depiction of the earliest American "bus." Throughout their short history, buses have been associated with the nation's working- and under-classes, with a wide and often disenfranchised motley crew. Both Steinbeck's ultimately hopeful presentation of travelers working in concert and Bryson s rueful account share a belief that the bus is a disruptive, potentially violent site that brings people of all sorts together. The hit movie Speed expressly figures the potential of a banal bus journey to erupt into a terrifying ride, as well as the forms of community that can ensue. To ride the bus-an unruly, "wayward" vehicle that in both actual and social ways can stray off sanctioned tracks-is to be out of control.Of course, real American bus journeys are generally innocuous in comparison to those in developing countries, which often entail treacherous roads, overcrowding, breakdowns, on-board livestock, and police or military checkpoints. … |
