On the Buses
by Claire Thomson
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 96pp, ISBN 9781913097684, £8.99
Lauren Elkin, No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute
Les Fugitives, 140pp, ISBN 9781838014186, £8.99
Today, taking public transport often feels like taking a calculated risk. A risk that is continuing to shut many people living with disabilities or health conditions out of swathes of public life. The windows of Glasgow’s buses have little stickers on them declaring that, in order to allow for proper ventilation on the bus, they do not close fully. Glasgow’s passengers have proven these stickers wrong. Over the months, perhaps because of the cold or a lack of conviction in the importance of ventilation to prevent transmission of COVID-19, many of these windows have been forced closed. If I am feeling brave, I pull the windows open. Sometimes others close them.
On the 17th of April, Lauren Elkin notes, ‘Someone smells so fucking bad. Is that window open? I ask no one in particular.’ Notes like these, documenting the micro-interactions which punctuate our days, are recorded by Elkin over several months in 2015 on her iPhone. In September these notes were published by Les Fugitives under the title No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute. In the same month, Fitzcarraldo Editions published Tanya Leslie’s translation of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, which takes the form of journal entries jotted down between 1985 and 1992. Some are dispatches from the supermarket queue, while others are set in dentist’s waiting rooms and the quasi-familiarity of a local butcher’s shop. Linking these spaces and thoughts together is public transport, usually the Métro or the RER, and notes and observations on the subtle ways these journeys have shaped the author.
These two books have a great deal in common: Paris, the everyday, public transport. But where Elkin’s deals exclusively with the ‘I’ and how her interior life bumps up against the outside world, Ernaux rarely discusses the events of her own life, instead focusing on how her interior life is shaped by the outside world she documents here. Both books are humane records of the experience of being part of a public, proudly elevating the ordinary experiences of our days. Reading them in this uncertain time feels like visiting a past which we might never access again.
In the midst of a deadly pandemic, a passive aggressive tussle over an open or closed window on a bus can legitimately feel like a matter of life and death. But for Ernaux, these interactions, be they minute battles of will or passing glances, have always been important. They form the people we are at our core. In her introduction to the 1996 edition of Exteriors, Ernaux observes: ‘It is other people – anonymous figures glimpsed in the Métro or in waiting rooms – who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us.’ In Exteriors she sets out to demonstrate that ‘desire, frustration and social and cultural inequality are reflected . . . in anything that appears to be unimportant and meaningless simply because it is familiar or ordinary.’
I found Ernaux’s hypothesis discomfiting. My reflexive internal wince at the man boarding the bus without a mask isuggests that COVID has likely made me a more judgmental and anxious person than I might have been before. Ernaux’s hypothesis here is also an uncomfortable one for any reader who subscribes to the notion that reading life writing or a personal narrative offers a uniquely profound and accurate insight into the interior life of the writer. She quotes a well-known literary critic who wrote that ‘“The notebooks reveal the true writer.” So writing is not enough; there need to be external signs, material evidence to define what a ‘real’ writer is. Yet these signs are available to all of us.’ The reflection of the true character of a writer, Ernaux argues here, is in their writing. Nothing more.
No. 91/92 does not make any such an explicit statements about the the relationship between our outer and inner lives, but Elkin’s deftly woven and observant notes give us the same impression. These notes amount to a reflection of public transit’s almost unique capacity to force our interior lives to bump up against the exterior reality of the city, of its citizens and of its annoyances. Elkin writes about disliking other passengers’ outfits and about experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. What could better summarise the clash between our own worlds and everyone else’s than watching a man sitting opposite you on a bus playing bongo drums as you process your own loss? ‘30/01/15: Friday morning. I keep crying in buses.’
Recently I was on a bus heading south from Glasgow’s city centre. As the bus came to an abrupt halt at my stop, a woman fell badly down the stairs and hurt her leg. Her friend called for an ambulance and for a while the other passengers stayed in the seats and tried not to stare. When we had to get off the bus, the woman apologised for taking up space on the floor. A man on the number 24 from Hampstead Heath to Pimlico once rested his takeaway on my knee on a bus and apparently thought nothing of it.
Though these books are set two decades apart, the experiences of women on public transport they depict are depressingly similar. Ernaux writes of a man exposing himself in the Metro in 1986: ‘This sight stamps out everything else — the vanity of women in fur coats, the determined stride of market conquerors, the subservience of musicians and beggars to whom one gives the odd coin.’ The violence of the sight overrides all else there is to observe and enjoy on the Metro. Any woman who has regularly relied on public transport will likely have experienced something similar.
As Ernaux establishes from the beginning of Exteriors, thinking about our interior self as something distinct from our surroundings or exterior life is a falsehood. Our interiors are shaped by the exteriors, and our exterior behaviour is where our interiors are reflected and exposed. This makes the violence and invasiveness of male sexual harassment and violence in the public space even more consequential: men’s inappropriate, vulgar and violent behaviour in public invades the personal and psychic space of women. And again, this behaviour forces the expectation of constant alertness, defensiveness and smallness onto women. The sexual violence of men in public forces women to hold that possibility, and very often that reality, in their interior consciousness and exterior behaviour at all times.
A different threat looms over the later sections of No. 91/92, as Elkin considers the impact of two shocking terrorist attacks on Paris, its citizens and the experience of taking the bus. The sections of No. 91/92 set immediately after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which left 130 dead, contain the book’s longest notes. With increased anxiety around taking public transport — ‘Rational friends of mine are avoiding the metro at rush hour’ — comes a deeper solicitude for one’s fellow passenger: ‘I find myself looking at the other people in the city with a new care. They’re no longer people in my way. I would feel badly if one of you got hurt. I would hurt if you were hurt.’ In these shocked and fearful days and weeks, other passengers become at once a potential threat and a person to whom we are more strongly connected.
Elkin describes her friends’ jumpiness, suspicious of the minute behaviours of others and ready to assume the worst of others. Perhaps more of us share this suspicion as we ride the bus during a pandemic. Why isn’t that man wearing a mask? Why is that teenager coughing? In a similar vein, Ernaux describes the difficulty of dissociating a stranger’s behaviour from its cause, in other words, of suspending our judgment:
At the Chambre des Deputes subway station, the ‘De’ has been scratched away: Chambre des putes (Chamber of whores). A sign of Antiparliamentarism. The current belief is that this inevitably leads to fascism. But the person who erased the ‘De’ may have wanted simply to amuse himself and other people. Can one disassociate the immediate and personal implications of someone’s act from its possible future implications and consequences?
This dissociation might be particularly difficult to achieve now. Whether a fear of violence as Elkin describes or fear of a potentially lethal virus, our contemporary anxieties often make the simple generosity of benefit of the doubt difficult to muster.
In both books, Ernaux and Elkin document their takeaways from the day, from their interactions with the public. They have gleaned these snapshots and they present them to the reader as one might display a collection of shells gathered on a beach holiday. In a passage reminiscent of Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I, Ernaux describes a patch of wasteland behind some suburban homes in the new town outside of Paris in which she lives. The wasteland is best described not by the land itself, but by the detritus people have left behind on it:
A paper wrapping for the Dutch biscuits Spirits, a broken Coca-Cola bottle, cardboard packaging for a six-pack, a copy of the local gazette, a length of iron piping, flattened plastic bottles and a white substance with blisters — maybe sodden cardboard — suggesting a cluster of Sahara roses.
An entry in Elkin’s book describes the awful feeling of falling ill in public: ‘And meanwhile rumbles in my stomach and lower abdomen and the chills and oh god this is horrible and I’m late because even though there are fewer cars the bus takes just as long.’ I found it impossible to read this without feeling an intense guilt along with sympathy. If I began to feel ill on a bus, I would immediately worry about what the illness could be. The stakes feel higher now. Not only are all of us on this bus headed the same way, but I am somewhat responsible for your health and that of the household you might be returning to, the customers of the shop you may be visiting or the patients you may be on your way to treat.
In Exteriors’ final passage, Ernaux ponders the unconscious power of other people to hold her memories, components of her self, and reflect them back to her: ‘So it is outside my own life that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the Métro or the RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators at Auchan. . . In the same way, I myself, anonymous among the bustling crowds on streets and in department stores, must secretly play a role in the lives of others.’
While neither of these books was written in the context of the pandemic, they nonetheless articulate a timely sense of heightened collectivity. Above their being slim volumes of life writing, set in the public spaces and transport in and around Paris, what links these books most strongly is their shared repudiation of individualism. Elkin mentions Margaret Thatcher’s comment about all those taking the bus over the age of 30 having failed at life: ‘I have to give that talk on zadie smith and I think I’ll do it on that thatcher quote what was it again? something about being a loser for taking the bus after 30 I’m 36 maggie t would have no use for me at all.’
Such extreme individualism leaves no room for what Georges Perec calls the ‘infra-ordinary’, as Elkin summates: ‘The bus, the metro, the Velib. Everyday ways of getting here and there.’ Observing the infra-ordinary demands a generosity, at least of noticing, towards the other — a recognition of their existence not only in your own day, but on the bus, in the city and in the world. These personal narratives offer a subtle paean for a more humane collectivism. We can stare at our phones, but when we take the bus, our fate and destination is inextricably tied to that of our fellow passengers. On the bus, we all count.