Bus Stop: American Eye vs. Small-Town Ear

Bus Stop: American Eye vs. Small-Town Ear WILLIAM E. H. MEYER, JR. "Traveling is a fool's paradise." R. W. Emerson, "Self-Reliance." Bus Stop - both the play and the movie - is an attempt to dramatize what is pre-eminently undramatic, viz., the evolution ofsmall-town hyperverbality into American hypervisuality. This shift in sensibility or revolution in "taste" is an extremely difficult phenomenon to depict - the playwright, William Inge, here choosing to employ the more demonstrable theme of love/sexuality in order to express or encompass this New-World evolution. Indeed, so vital but protean and mercurial is this problem of the shift from ear to eye, from traditional authority to self-reliance, that such well-known anthologists of American culture as Blair, Stewart, Hornberger and Miller, in their The Literature oj the United States, have missed the contribution of Inge altogether and have dismissed his work as "popular" and "lacking depth.'" Yet, Bus Stop remains a profound portrait of the Emersonian/American "transparent eyeball" in transit - the superseding of "small-town" values for Ishmael's passion "to see the world"2or the Stevensesque ephebe's command to rise above any municipality in order to "see the sun again with an ignorant eye."3 All the characters of Bus Stop - from Bo to Grace - are confronted with this American hypervisuaJ rite de passage, no matter whether they are "lucky" or "unlucky" in love. Act I. then, introduces us to the "bus stop" or small-town restaurant where the hyperverbal small-town crew and also the little band of travelers must confront the wider concerns of hypervisual America - where such cliches as "March comes in like a Lion" or the later-employed famous Shakespearean rhetoric of the Old World must face the New-World "great window" and be still before "the sweeping wind and flying snow.'" Not for nothing does the curtain rise upon Elma standing and "looking out the large plate-glass willdow , awed by the JUly oj the elemellls"; and not for nothing are the fIrst Model'll Drama, 35 (1992) 444 Bus Stop 445 words utlered directed to the play's ensuing dangerous command - "You should come over here and look out, to see the way the wind is blowing things all over town" (p. 6, italics mine). Grace, however, prefers to concern herself with the tele-pholle - not tele-visioll - and she will be one of those characters destined, at the play's end, to fail to grasp the necessity to transcend local talk via national vision. The stonm itself, of course, represents the awesome and ungovernable power of America itself - what Emerson called "Nature" as he was confronted by the god-like power of the wilderness wherein he felt himself both diminished and aggrandized: "I am nothing; I see all; ... I am part or parcel of God.'" Here, Will, the "local" authority or small-town sheriff, can only fume at his own impotence: "A stonm like this makes me mad.... It's just like all the elements had lost their reason ... I like to see things in order" (p. 8). In the face of this awesome display of power observed through the "large plate-glass window," all Will can do is fall back upon the above cliche of how "March comes in like a Lion." And all Elma, the young waitress, can do is rely upon parental security: "Nights like this, I'm glad I have a home to go to" (p. 6). Yet, indeed, in the early lines that Elma speaks - "I shouldn't think anyone would take a trip tonight unless he absolutely had to" (p. 6) - we find the primary thrust or ironic "theme" of the drama - the absolutely necessary hypervisual rite de passage which every American is forced to make at some point in his or her life. Walt Whitman put it thus: "You must travel that road for yourself.'" And Emerson clarified the nature of that journey with the reprimand: "Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry!''' (italics mine). Here the passengers and the small-town locals are rendered equals by the stonm - by the irrational but ultimately vivifying power of our "genius...