My Proust, your Proust

At first glance the subjects of Elisa Gabbert’s third essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self, might elicit an eye roll. Another essay about Frankenstein? Gabbert’s sixteen pieces, many previously published, spend a lot of time dwelling on books and writers such as Frankenstein, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf – ground trod so well that some might find it untillable. This concern, in fact, is one of the book’s main themes: how should a person move through a culture in which ubiquity can seem to exhaust even books they haven’t read and movies they haven’t seen; in which novelty and familiarity place competing demands on their attention; in which they must decide continually whether to spend their time on the things they want to revisit or on those they want to discover; the obscure or ephemeral vs the renowned or world-historical? In Any Person Is the Only Self the question of what to read – and, more broadly, attend to – is existential.

As with any existential question, there are as many answers as there are people, so all Gabbert can respond with is her own experience. Most of the essays describe her encounters with books and other art, works that do not become objects of argument so much as occasions she narrates alongside whatever else was going on. “Because I had just read [Sarah Manguso’s] Ongoingness, when I started reading Frankenstein, I was thinking about time”, she writes in the Frankenstein essay, which is about the effects of time’s passage in and on the novel. “In the year that I read so much Rilke, I had trouble remembering books”, she recalls in a piece about the Covid-era loss of different reading places – settings whose physical distinctness helped her to retain what she had read in them. (I’m using “about” loosely; the essays tend to be associative and cover so many topics that listing them all would be tedious.) I found Gabbert’s approach a slog in the one essay devoted to a subject – hair metal – that I didn’t already care about. But otherwise I enjoyed bouncing around in her life and mind as they filtered work I already love or think I eventually might.

A theme emerges: Gabbert sees close, personal attention to famous works as an antidote to the weariness their overexposure can induce. In one essay, on writers’ reasons for writing, she describes finally reading Joan Didion’s talk “Why I Write”, the source of the ubiquitous quotation “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking”. Its meaning turns out to be subtler and stranger than Gabbert had understood from seeing the quote out of context; it’s less about articulating arguments than organizing mental images through fiction. In another essay, about the artist Józef Czapski’s prison lectures on Marcel Proust, she takes Swann’s Way off the shelf and is surprised to find that “its obsessive attention to memory, time, the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking” is “not just good”, but “exactly my kind of thing”. The strength of this affinity makes her feel “almost offended” that, while “everyone says you should read Proust”, no one had told her she should read Proust. Theimplication is that a book in the world and the same book in a person’s life are very different – incommensurate, really. “This is why it’s worth reading the classics”, she writes in a piece about a “stupid classics” book club she started with friends. “To spend enough time with a text that a reference to it isn’t just outside you, but connected to your intimate experience of the text and all the other texts it connects to.” My Proust, your Proust, Gabbert’s Proust – they’re all different Prousts. Once we bring them into being, Big Proust becomes a mere backdrop.

But Big Proust, Gabbert might say, needs us to prevent its calcification into meaninglessness. As she explains in the book-club essay:

The older I get, the more likely I am to think, That’s underrated, about stuff that’s completely established canon. (Sylvia Plath? Underrated! Led Zeppelin? Underrated!) It’s not that these artists don’t get enough attention; it’s more that when something good is widely appreciated, we forget to take it seriously. We don’t think it needs us.

The idea that art needs more than fame to nourish its life in the world – that it needs meaningful assimilation into people’s daily existence – is a corollary of the idea that a work’s renown must fade into the background for a person to really know it. So Elisa Gabbert’s reading, watching and listening serve a dual purpose. The heat lamp of her attention incubates her own versions of the art she loves, and in so doing helps to keep it alive for everyone.

Megan Marz is a writer living in Chicago

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