By Eliza Goodpasture.
Lauren Elkin, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute (Les Fugitives, 2021)
By many accounts, the bus is a dying mode of transportation, and has been one since before public transportation was decimated by the pandemic. The decline of rural bus services in Britain, leaving elderly village residents increasingly isolated, is a well-documented by-product of austerity. But even in cities, bus ridership is declining. Selfishly, I enjoy this, because it means my time criss-crossing London by bus is reliably un-claustrophobic and pleasant. Of course, there is no long-term upside to a decline in bus ridership, because it can only lead to a decline in bus services, which is a loss to us all — bus lovers or not.
Lauren Elkin’s latest book, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, is a bus diary, but it is also a sort of manifesto to the bus, and to urban existence. She writes about Paris, not London, where there are fewer buses overall but no parallel loss in ridership (pandemic notwithstanding). Elkin set herself the project of recording her experiences riding to and from her work teaching university students English on the eponymous 91 and 92 bus lines, and she kept to this assignment, more or less, for the full academic year of 2014-15. There are a few entries written from the metro or the back of a taxi, but mostly, the reader falls in with Elkin’s routine of catching the 8:12 in the morning (or just missing it) and beating rush hour in the afternoon. She took these notes on the Notes app on her phone, though she also criticizes her fellow passengers for getting so into their phones that “they forget where they are.” According to her introduction, the text has only been lightly edited for spelling and punctuation, making them true records of the day they were written.
Some entries really do simply describe the experience of sitting on the bus — for instance, she has a series of fun single-line entries in which she responds to the outfit of a fellow passenger, including this one: “Your glittery sandals are awful but the rest of your outfit is good.” But more often, she describes her own internal monologue. The book takes a narrative shape that is quite unlike a series of observations of passers by, though this does raise the question: does life naturally follow narrative arcs? Or, to phrase it the other way, are narrative arcs mundane? Elkin’s arcs are many, and they are both personal and political. Over the course of the year she records, she recounts her struggle to become a French citizen, her pregnancy and the grueling and heartbreaking loss of it, and two horrific terrorist attacks in Paris — at Charlie Hebdo and at the Bataclan nightclub. Elkin folds her daily commute around these developments, the routine of it reminding her and the reader that the quotidian is constant. Her prose is varied, jumping from an entry of short fragments into one of graciously crafted sentences, which only adds to the sense of immediacy and of time passing.
In Elkin’s earlier work, most notably her 2017 book Flâneuse, she fleshes out her attitudes towards urban space and a woman’s place in it. She describes the flâneuse, an invented feminine form of flâneur, as someone “saturated with in-betweenness,” who walks the city streets “side by side with the living and the dead,” transgressing into spaces reserved for men. Mostly she walks, but “she may take the bus or train when she’s tired.” In a 2016 article in Women: A Cultural Review comparing the works of Jean Rhys and Gwen John, Elkin wrote that these women’s creative work in and about cities “collapsed…boundaries between a woman’s private and public life.” One feels that Elkin’s work does the same — there is no boundary between her private and public lives. She is a denizen of the city, regardless of the space she physically occupies at any given time. The bus is as much a site of her selfhood and inner life as it is a place in which she enacts her performative public-facing persona. In fact, Elkin suggests that these identities are indistinguishable: we are simply ourselves, all over Paris.
There are traces of Elkin’s flâneuse-y love of walking in No. 91/92. In her epilogue, written days after the Bataclan attack, she writes, “I’m not afraid of the train, I’m afraid of the destination. What are we heading towards, stop by stop? What’s just down the track? It’s enough to make you want to walk everywhere. Slow it all down. Even if we’re not safe on the streets we can go at our own pace.” Flâneuse was published in 2017, and the entries in No. 91/92 were written at least two years before this. The timeline confuses any conclusion that Elkin began with walking and graduated to the bus, or vice versa. These modes of transport all allow the traveller to move through the city fully aware of their surroundings, watching and being watched, and for Elkin, they can confer the same types of meaning.
Yet there is something distinct about Elkin’s position as a commuter in No. 91/92. She is not wandering aimlessly, exploring, observing, creating. She is travelling from home to work, and one gets the sense that, like all of us, sometimes she would rather not. The rush and crush to catch the right bus, the dread when it fails to come on time and the knowledge that one is late as the bus lurches slowly through traffic, the crowds of strange and unpleasant fellow passengers — these are grating in their familiarity. The repetitious structure of Elkin’s book — every morning, every afternoon, we go with her on the same route — evokes the daunting endlessness of commuting back and forth from A to B. Elkin doesn’t draw any big conclusions about this back and forthness, she simply transcribes it.
A foreboding sort of hindsight pervades No. 91/92, because it has been a long time since many of its readers have commuted at all, or certainly with the regularity of Elkin in 2014. She reflects on this in her second epilogue, written in March 2021. “Something about being yanked out of the public sphere, and resituated, inescapably, in the private sphere, made me want to revisit this text, which is so steeped in the outside world,” she writes. She was nostalgic for the “fleshy reality” of public transport. Reading Elkin’s viscerally fleshy descriptions of the strangeness of physical togetherness coupled with anonymity made me nostalgic for the Before Times, too, but it also made me feel alienated from that past reality. I do not miss sweaty commutes in the darkness of winter mornings, I do not miss running for trains, I do not miss arriving at my bus stop as the bus pulls away. I very much miss the £17.70 I used to spend daily to commute to my office in Zone 9 (is this even still a zone?), which I will never get back.
There is a sadder nostalgia in No. 91/92 for the deep horror the world felt in response to the two terrorist attacks that happened within its timeline. Now, I think, they have blended together into an endless stream of deadly events. I Googled “Mass shootings in the 21st century” to confirm this, and there were several on the lists I consulted from the past five years that I had no memory of, perhaps had never even heard of. More than anything could, this confirms our inundation with violence. Some events stand out to me — the Nice truck attack in 2016, the Manchester concert bombing in 2017, the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016, every school shooting in the United States (I hope, and yet they are so numerous that they begin to fade into each other). But we are inundated with events like these, with mass death and violence, and I wonder if the sort of international, and certainly city-wide mourning that Elkin witnessed in 2014 and 2015 is impossible now.
In the introduction to this book, Elkin writes, “Other people are an immense mystery. We cannot right-click on them and download their history. We do not know where they have been or where they’re going. But that they are going together, while companionably ignoring one another, seems of paramount importance. I believe this is called community.” This going together, travelling through the city in fellowship with strangers, is the true subject of Elkin’s book, and the most poignantly drawn element of it. It is also the most lost — the thing we no longer have, or at least, can no longer enjoy without jumping when someone coughs or desperately trying to avoid touching any surfaces. It remains to be seen what the urban experience will look like post-pandemic. Will we settle back into the way it was before? Will we grow into something better? Or are we at a point of rupture, of continued destruction before we can build again? No. 91/92 is a time capsule of what we had before, a love letter to urban living, to Paris, to buses, to the frustrations of existing alongside millions of other souls. It is a brief, fleeting book, and it shines best when read in the company of Elkin’s other writing about urban spaces.
The big question that Elkin’s work asks, in this book more so than any of her previous work, is this: does “the transcription of world into text” itself create meaning? She has explained the way that the work of George Perec gave her permission to understand simply recording life as valuable, as enough. No. 91/92 is the first time the public has had an opportunity to read her recordings. I think it has benefitted from timing — a book about the experience of a commute coming to us as we are thinking so deeply about the future of urban spaces, work, and travel feels obviously meaningful. Does this answer the question then? Is the transcription of world into text inherently meaningful, because in this case it has arrived at a time that bestows meaning upon it? If we wait long enough, will anything, and therefore everything, become meaningful? Elkin makes a compelling case that it will.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eliza Goodpasture is a writer and art historian. She is currently a History of Art PhD candidate at the University of York, where her research examines female friendship among artists working in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She writes a bi-weekly newsletter called Runaway and is the Editor in Chief of Aspectus: A Journal of Visual Culture.
