Sklenený zvon přehled

03.12.2024

(SPOILER) Tak jsem se konečně kousla a tenhle slavný americký román přelouskala. Překvapivě mi ale dal docela zabrat a to přesto, jak je krátký a čtivě psaný.

Nedokázala jsem se odprostit od toho, co už jsem o životě autorky věděla, a v důsledku jsem příběh četla jako její biografii, což mě vzhledem k jejímu osudu naplňovalo úzkostí. Ironicky to možná přidá čtenářskému zážitku nový rozměr – člověk si pak může snadno dosadit do osazenstva psychiatrické léčebny i sám sebe, protože úzkostné a bezútěšné myšlenky a pocity se zjevně v polovině 20. století řešily jedině elektrošoky a lobotomií. S nesmírným úspěchem, pochopitelně.

Jako literární dílo povedené – Plath byla koneckonců talentovaná básnířka, takže nejen píše, ale taky obratně skládá dílky obrazů. Na opakované čtení to ovšem nevidím, a to vysloveně jen z důvodu, že mi z toho všeho bylo nakonec smutno.


Oblíbené úryvky (pozor na SPOILERY):

"'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
'No, what?' I would say.
'A piece of dust.'
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think youre curing. Theyre dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'"

"I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldnt groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again."

"I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldnt feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldnt have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat--on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok--I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of peoples eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth."

"'We'll take up where we left off, Esther,' she had said, with her sweet, martyrs smile. 'We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.'
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marcos diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordons wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape."

"All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air."

(Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006)

23.11.2024

Novela, která nezmění svět (a ani se o to nesnaží), jen se potácí v zeitgeistu, podobně jako Esther. Doslov byl podivně odkloněný od ústředního tématu, stejně jako kniha samotná. Už je na dřeni, není tedy kam jít jinam než na hladinu a dusit se iluzí nebes s odleskem oken.