A Language for Sharing

Sumana Roy considers Michel Chaouli’s “Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins.”

By Sumana RoyMarch 8, 2025

• Literary Criticism

THE GENETICS OF the poetic, Michel Chaouli affirms in his 2024 book Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins, lie in the ability to produce response. That kind of shorthand is provocative, in the most poetic sense, and one can imagine many kinds of responses as poetic—a fire and the alarm it sets off, an allergen and the resultant sneezes, the calling bell and the honking of a car, love and the love it is supposed to beget. I don’t mean to suggest that the upset tummy that follows food poisoning also falls into the realm of the poetic (though it well might). What are the literary traditions that enable such an understanding of the poetic—which Chaouli insists we experience, often without conscious awareness?

The inception of Chaouli’s understanding of the poetic lay in his experience of teaching Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1926). He had summarized “the basics” of the novel for his students, read a passage chosen for being “especially rich,” and then felt something every teacher hopes they never do: “I found I had nothing to say about it. Nothing. I tried finessing things by reading it a second time: still nothing. Panic rising, I skipped to another passage I had marked and read it to the class, and then another—always with the same outcome.” Trained in “the path of analysis and interpretation,” the stock-in-trade of literary studies, a seasoned teacher feels they will have something to say about almost anything, and certainly about a text that has moved them profoundly. From this stimulus—the teacher’s urge to share a loved text with students—emerges a philosophical question to oneself that is as true of literary texts as it is of food: why do we feel the urge to share?

Chaouli mentions being “tongue-tied,” and it might have been this that led me to where the tongue lives—inside the mouth, where the “rasa” is. Rasa theory, an aesthetic of emotion proposed by Bharata in the Nāṭya Shāstra treatise (c. 300–400 CE), is based on the plays the sage had seen performed. “Rasa,” which literally means “juice,” is now used to speak of aesthetic “taste” and of the flux of emotions that a work of art produces in its audience. The word would come to acquire great energy over the next 1,500 years, becoming both a prefix (as in the name of one of India’s most well-known sweets, the rasagolla) and a suffix (as in a word like “rasik,” used for a person who can partake of the delights of “rasa”). Why Chaouli felt tongue-tied at that moment perhaps owes to a peculiarity of rasa—that this experience, as unique to us as our fingerprints, cannot be shared with anyone outside the perimeter of our being. We might call something sweet or sour, but that is not enough to characterize precisely the taste inside our mouths, nor does it specify what others might taste. What we share is at best a generic ascription, an assertion of putative generality based on the peculiarity of a personal experience.

It is this, perhaps, that makes sharing, which is the central defining characteristic of what Chaouli calls “poetic criticism,” so difficult. If rasa is unique to every individual, how is one to find a language to discuss art and literature? It is this urge to share that makes an aesthete or a critic search for a language capable of articulating both the exactness and the shareability of one’s experience. Poetic criticism—its impulse, its initiation, its ignition—Chaouli understands as being part of a not-quite-transparent process that involves intimacy, urgency, and opacity. Chaouli’s thesis is simple:

Something speaks to me.
I must tell you about it.
But I don’t know how.

Reading Chaouli’s book, this refrain has run through me. I come to his formulation of the urge to share as someone who tries to write poetry and literary criticism. How does this impulse to share my thoughts about “something [that] speaks to me” differ when I want to write poetry versus essayistic prose? I am, of course, thinking here about language but also about genre. How does genre—and our choice to make a temporary home in one—affect the impulse to “tell you about it”? By extension, how does one know—since this is important to Chaouli’s engagement—how to arrive at this language, and whether this language is appropriate? The difference between rasa theory and Chaouli’s understanding of poetic criticism is this: in the first, it is possible to stop at “Something speaks to me”—the proof is laughter or catharsis, a spontaneous “Wah,” a nonlinguistic response, limited to the perimeter of the self; by contrast, “I must tell you about it” demands an articulation that travels to other minds. The experience of rasa is democratic, available to all; the constituency of poetic criticism is much smaller because one must create a language that is shareable, even as it retains the charge of idiosyncrasy. The difficulty in discovering this language—which is no less than a self-discovery—lies in the exclusive experience of rasa: how can one create a common language that derives from difference?

“Instinctively I want someone to catch my overflow of pleasure,” Virginia Woolf writes in her diary. Rabindranath Tagore, writing on a different continent and in a different language and genre, captures the same neediness of the creative practitioner: “The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someone who hears […] Where there is no love, where listeners are dumb, there never can be song.” Both Woolf and Tagore are writing about “someone” without knowing their passport details. And that is part of the problem Chaouli engages with. I’ve thought of this “someone” with affection and unease: if Robinson Crusoe were a singer or a novelist, would he feel as desperately homeless as Tagore, for not having an audience at all? And yet Crusoe begins with the need to share—in his case, almost as if he were speaking to an immigration officer: “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York …” Whom does one share with? Whom can one share with? In choosing to quote Woolf and Tagore, writers whose poetic criticism isn’t as well known as their fiction and poetry, I want to emphasize the question of language. To “share,” one must have a shared language. What language of criticism would allow for widespread sharing?

My empathy and instinctive support for Chaouli’s project—as for Jonathan Kramnick’s similarly pitched Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (2023)—derives from his wholehearted belief that the language of criticism must be of this world and made of this world, must be widely accessible, neither monastic nor reified nor limited to academic critics. This affirmation of literary criticism as a language of life might be one of the most revolutionary things to believe and practice today, particularly in the classroom, not to mention in academic journals. And it is not just practitioners of literary criticism who have been thinking from this space. K. G. Subramanyan, one of modern India’s best artists, after criticizing the sapless language of journals and magazines in his 1987 book The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art, turns to the question of language just as Kramnick and Chaouli do. “A completely aesthetic purpose for art is, as we know, a rather recent concept,” he asserts; “it is only over the last few centuries that the aesthetic and the functional have been condemned to isolated polarities, needing special efforts at reconciliation.” As he reminds us, the most beautiful art objects were made to be used.

Is the language of the academic humanities, of literary studies, functional and beautiful anymore? “[S]cholarship and exegesis lead but a zombie existence when they fail to be animated by this simple, headstrong urgency to share what is still too unformed to be called an experience,” writes Chaouli, diagnosing the current state of secondhand, recycled, and spiritually inert language produced to get tenure, a language as canned as studio laughter. Chaouli goes on to quote the poet and philosopher Stanley Cavell: “I want to tell you something I’ve seen, or heard, or realized, or come to understand, for the reasons for which such things are communicated … I want to tell you because the knowledge, unshared, is a burden.” So is this, then, the reason we share—to pass the “burden” as one passes a parcel in a party game?

But what exactly is it that we feel the need to share? “Why do certain things rouse it but not others (some books or pictures, say, but very few spoons)?” Chaouli asks. He takes us through an unexpected collage of sources, on different continents and from various literary and artistic cultures, not like a tour guide so much as someone seeking to pass a fire. His essential understanding of poetic criticism is as a kind of contagion, something that has the power to infect. It’s also perhaps the reason we kiss—to share ourselves in synecdoche?

Chaouli would be aware that this idea of poetic criticism belongs to a tradition of thought and practice that has long existed outside the Anglo-American academy. “[T]he three-step of poetic criticism,” he says, “is less like an algorithm and more like a dance, where discrete steps—first one, then two, then three—melt into one fluid motion as I get the hang of it: one-and-two-and-three.” This fluid motion also characterizes the rasas, whose nature is to flow. But the open-mouthed “aha” or “aah” or “ooh,” the sweat on the palms and in the armpits, the fear between the ears—it is all too private. Criticism and aesthetic judgment are public acts. To keep one’s thoughts to oneself isn’t enough. “The aim of criticism,” Chaouli writes, “is not understanding but action, yet because my action is always caught up with sense, ways of doing (or making) are always entangled in ways of understanding.”

Responsiveness, which pioneering scientists such as Jagadish Chandra Bose characterized as a sign of life and intelligence, Chaouli understands as the hallmark of poetic criticism. The fact that he sees sharing as crucial to this experience might be part of our zeitgeist. For example, Oliver Jeffers, in his 2023 bestseller Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go—Our Human Story, So Far, asserts that “we enjoy giving the right thing / more than having it. / and the first thing we do after laughing at a good joke / or hearing a good story, is think […] Who can we tell it to?” Again, the same question as Chaouli’s: “I must tell you about it.”

What, then, about sharing on social media? Is the “share” button poetic criticism? Sometimes one shares with comments, sometimes without. Which of these is poetic criticism? Is trolling, the most prolific form of criticism of our times, truly poetic criticism? Chaouli doesn’t consider these questions, but he does offer a kind of answer:

[P]oetic criticism demands tact, and tact is something that we who study, who write about and instruct others on poetic works mostly lack. We arrive with gear. We find things “problematic.” It does not embarrass us—on the contrary—that our ideas are ungainly and our tone entitled.

The critic as troll?

The urgency to share, to find a language in which to share—why does that bring us what Chaouli calls “happiness”? I’m thinking of an anonymous gift left in our postbox when I was a teenager—a Hallmark plastic cup that bore the words “Everything beautiful I see I want to share it with you.” What is it about the genetics of beautiful things that makes us want to share them? Chaouli takes this basic need, this urge to be part of a process not very different from contagion, as something that connects us (particularly lovers) to religious missionaries. It is quite moving, both intellectually and emotionally, to follow Chaouli’s quest for a language that does justice to this quintessentially human urge. Like god, the poetic seems elusive, deeply felt but hard to characterize, necessary but without guarantee. Its purpose—the reason we feel we must share—remains unknown, but not in the way university administrators cannot see the purpose of literary studies.

The virtual disappearance of poetic criticism today might have something to do with the academic undermining of the theoretical capabilities of poets and fiction writers, their relegation to a second-rung status when compared to academic critics. “[G]enuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” T. S. Eliot wrote about Dante. “What can be explained is not poetry,” said Yeats. “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” writes Emily Dickinson. This vocabulary of intuition and urgency Chaouli characterizes as poetic criticism. From time to time, one needs a Chaouli (as one once needed a Sontag) to remind us of the obvious, of the need for an embodied, sweaty language for literary criticism. As Sontag put it, “My model for prose is poet’s prose”:

Something speaks to me.
I must tell you about it.
But I don’t know how.

I recently lost a friend with whom I used to share everything that spoke to me, a friend who made me take screenshots that implied “I must tell you about it.” I can’t share anything with them anymore. I often feel the fear and sadness that attends this denudation of the poetic from my life.