Michel Chaouli’s recent book “Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins” opens with a scenario familiar to anyone who has taught literature: he stands before a roomful of students, holding a book in hand (Kafka’s The Trial) and finds himself at a loss for words. The problem, it becomes clear, has nothing to do with a temporary lapse of memory or lack of preparedness. He has taught the work several times before (Chaouli is a professor of German and comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington). Yet on this occasion, he cannot bring himself to articulate anything that is not a warmed-over platitude. What initially looks like failure, however, is in fact a sort of victory: he has become utterly vulnerable to the novel’s significance in a way he hadn’t been before.
Chaouli believes that the strained speechlessness was a blessed instance of “poetic criticism,” a term coined by Friedrich Schlegel who wrote that the aim of such criticism is to “replenish the work, rejuvenate it, shape it afresh.” For Chaouli, poetic criticism is not a genre or school of criticism, “but can come into being, and can also vanish, in anything we care to label criticism.” It “seeks a surrender of knowledge,” and entails a “manner of making.” It is intensely participatory and unfolds in three dance-like steps: “Something speaks to me. I must tell you about it. But I don’t know how.” The rough corollaries to the steps are intimacy, urgency, and opacity. Chaouli closely tracks each movement, beginning with the fire-to-firewood feeling of a poetic work sparking something within us, speaking to us. A feeling of urgency — “the wellspring of poetic criticism” — overtakes us, inciting us to act. Yet, as with Chaouli’s encounter with The Trial, poetic criticism can defy articulation. We sometimes cannot fully account for why a work moves us or why it compels us to respond. This opacity may reflect our own interpretative limitations, but it can also open the door to moments of deliciously non-verbal clarity and creativity. “Ways of understanding and ways of making are not opposed,” he writes, but “participate in one another.”
In an age in which critics are often exhorted to think of criticism as first and foremost an act of public service (think of shudder-inducing consumer reports disguised as reviews), it’s refreshing, even rejuvenating, to come across a work that makes an ardent case for a kind of criticism that is not a brute tool for dispensing shopping advice or deflating author egos. Critics are neither parasitic opinion-producers or the “loyal opposition,” a group of shabby and disreputable creatures who ride the blinds of artworks. Chaouli’s book is a refreshing reminder that the best criticism stems from deep intimacy with a work. An intimacy that can be revoked or altered at any time, but can spring up even in the absence of other forms of attachment. We read poetic criticism to experience someone converting her phlogiston of feelings into words, to take pleasure in a writer’s dyspeptic dispatch, to be delighted by a sunlit sentence, a synesthetic turn of phrase, to feel a new idea coiling within us, and to be roused to respond.
Chaouli and I spoke over Zoom in August about his new book. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
How does your idea of poetic criticism diverge or converge with Schlegel’s conception of it?
Schlegel did not work out this idea. He simply suggests it in a sentence or two. The kind of rejuvenation or refashioning that he describes is, for me, a way of making sense. And making sense is a productive activity, a way of making. I don’t get to make anything that I want. I am in relation to something that has urged me into making and I have a responsibility towards it, in the sense of standing in response to it. But the range of ways that I can remake, rejuvenate, refashion is large; in fact, it’s endless. I stand in relation to something that solicits a response from me. I need to do something, but I don’t know exactly what shape that must take. I think of poetic criticism not so much as a set of procedures that one is to follow, but rather as bringing into being something new, some new sense. And the new comes into being retroactively, when it has managed to change other ways of making, your way of making or someone else’s. Poetic making is something that appears socially, between people. These people can be temporally or spatially very far apart or they can be close, but it has to happen within the context of many makers.
How does the critical act “bring a work into the world in a new way”?
The tripartite structure that I came up with is simple. Something speaks to me, which means that something has to matter to me. It can’t just be some enigma in the world; it has to be a mystery, a speech act, or a gesture that matters to me. I am urged to tell you about it. That’s the second dimension. The third is: but I don’t know how. And the reason that I must tell you about it is that I don’t know how. Because I’m stymied in my ways, because I feel exceeded by the work, I must tell you about it in order to find out what it is that I make of it. Making has sociality built into it.
You write that “If poetic making — hence also poetic criticism — has an essential mark, it is this: an infectious productivity.” The phrase “infectious productivity” suggests a kind of creative contagion. How does poetic criticism spread or transmit creativity?
I put it so starkly to counter the notion that poetry is a genre, either narrowly understood as the lyric, or understood broadly as all kinds of verbal artworks, as though we could have a room or a shelf or a building in which we could house all poetic things. My attempt was to say that the poetic only comes into being in an encounter. What rests on the bookshelf is a book of poetry, which might be very artful, but it’s not doing anything, it’s not making anything. It’s a potential. Only in an encounter in which something actually happens does it become poetic.
Stanley Cavell — one of the thinkers who looms largest in your work — wrote that philosophy is “willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about.” He also often talked about the “display of responsiveness” that a work invites. Can you explain his influence on your thinking?
The affinities between my work and Cavell don’t take the form that they would usually take with another thinker and philosopher, where one can pinpoint with some precision where the debts lie. You can always recognize a Kantian because you can show what kind of philosophical commitments must be in place for somebody to be a Kantian. As with a Wittgeinsteinian or Hegelian. With Cavell, I have to admit that often I don’t know what he’s saying. I lose him. And sometimes I become exasperated because I find the prose self-involved and often precious. But there is a voice and a tone and a mode of generous thinking that itself becomes infectious. In a way, you start humming the melody before you know the words. I don’t mean to criticize him for that, only to say that I could not put my commitments in terms of philosophical propositions. It’s rather more like the way a novelist might become a model for you or an artist. Which is also why I couldn’t find good ways of citing him. It was difficult to find spots, both in my own writing and in his writing, where I could make this bridge. I do manage late in the book to quote him, and he comes up in the introduction, but by and large, it’s more of an echoing affinity than a citational one.
You write that “non-knowing remains the primal condition of poetic making.” Is there a difference for you between unknowing and non-knowing? And is one of these ideas related at all to Keats’ notion of negative capability?
Now that I hear you say it, “unknowing” might have been a better word than “non-knowing.” The “un” in unknowing echoes the “un” in unconscious, which is not the photo negative of the conscious but what is conscious but in a different mode, in a twisted mode. I’m not talking about ignorance as the opposite of knowing, but rather a way of knowing that is not fully master of itself. In that sense, it could connect with Keats. When Bachelard uses “non-knowing,” which is where I get the term, he means that something is ahead of me — something in what I do is more than what I know I can do. My experience writing this book was that often I didn’t know I could write the sentences that I did. This is not self praise; it’s just a statement of fact. I love how Gerhard Richter, the German painter, says he has to jump over his own shadow to get to his painting. It’s not like some ghost is doing the painting. You have to know how to do it, but you also have to do this leaping over yourself in order to get there.
In a review essay of your work, the critic Brian Dillon noted that “a criticism that speaks from the abyss of initial confusion or incomprehension […] sounds like a version of the eighteenth-century sublime.” I also wonder if poetic criticism, in its embrace of non-knowing or un-knowing, is a form of negative theology, which places an emphasis on the unsaid or unsayable? Do you see any connections with the apophatic tradition, or via negativa?
I think it might overstate what I’m driving at. Somebody criticized my project because it doesn’t leave enough space for less flagrant, less showy ways of encountering an artwork. I agree. I didn’t emphasize enough that not knowing doesn’t have to take the form of what I describe in the beginning of the book vis-à-vis Kafka, of being completely tongue-tied. It can insinuate itself in lots of different ways. And this is where it differs from negative theology: it’s not a technique or method. It is something not that I’m “open to,” but something that besets me. I don’t like non-knowing. I actually like to know what’s going on; I like to be in control of things. I don’t surrender these things willingly and easily. When things take hold of me and I don’t know how to go on, it’s a really uncomfortable and often unpleasant situation to be in. It’s not necessarily as pleasurable as the experience of the sublime. Non-knowing is not something that I set out to do; I don’t push aside what I know. No, I know what I know, I know history, I know languages and I know grammar — it’s not that I forget these things. But something gets jammed up in these systems that provokes me to try to say something about it, to unjam it. I give the example in the book of the monuments in the Yucatán of the Maya civilization, which, for me, don’t jam anything up. I simply don’t know what they want from me. They are stupendous, of course, but they don’t speak to me. I don’t speak their language. I could get there perhaps through historical immersion, but they don’t right now.
You write that “the shape and intensity of my poetic encounter cannot be derived from nor reduced to what at any given time is taken to be my social identity. (Starting with “As a…” is a nonstarter.)”
This goes back to the logic of unknowing or non-knowing. Of course I don’t leave behind my personhood. I continue to be a man and continue to have the biography that I have and occupy the place in the world that I do. But what is significant in the [poetic] encounter is not controllable by these markers. The markers always will play a role as any historical truth will play a significant role, as technology plays a role, as power plays a role. These are not things that one can ever subtract from any kind of human encounter. But the poetic moment is never reducible to those markers; you cannot lay claim to its truth or untruth by reference to one of these markers.
Is poetic criticism more inclusive or democratic than other forms of criticism?
It might be. Certainly, it doesn’t have the same gatekeeping mechanisms as academic criticism. But I hesitate because there are no clear methodological yardsticks that will take you there. For that reason it can feel mysterious and therefore undemocratic. Things are democratic if rules of access are made clear: you could pass this exam for your driver’s license if you fulfill these requirements. The rules are the same for everyone. This, to me, is a version of egalitarian access. This is not how criticism works, though, and in that sense, it can feel aristocratic or mandarin or exclusive. When students come to me and say, “I got a B on this paper, what do I have to do to get an A?” I cannot give an answer the way I would for the driver’s license test.
You wrote a short piece for the Point magazine about Kant’s notion of “the immeasurable field.” As far as I recall, this phrase does not appear in your book, though you do mention Kant’s ideas of subjective universality and aesthetic judgment. Do you want to say more about “the immeasurable field” and how it links up with the idea of poetic criticism?
The reason that passage is so electrifying to me is that Kant acknowledges for the first time that it is possible to have an intellectually coherent response to something — which is to say, not madness, not delusion, but something that is entangled with concepts and ideas — but that will still never come to a rest in any given concept, in any given idea. Yet this not coming to a rest will not be experienced as either a pathology or as a displeasure, but will be understood as a form of taking pleasure and thinking. I couldn’t really think of a better definition of what the poetic is than that: something constantly redone, reconfigured, rejuvenated in which we take pleasure.
No one would accuse Kant of being a poetic critic, but we’ve talked about others who do work in this mode: Cavell, Barthes. You also write at voluptuous length about Eve Sedgwick, Pauline Kael, Sontag, James Baldwin, Adorno. Are there other writers working today either in or outside of academia who you think of as practicing poetic criticism?
Sometimes when I get stuck, I pick up an essay by Peter Schjeldahl, a former art critic of the New Yorker. For me, he’s like Kael — an exemplar. Sometimes he’s so good that I become discouraged: he starts where I couldn’t even dream of ending up. In the academy, I love Emily Ogden’s and Sianne Ngai’s work and writing. I have now come to learn a bit more about the writings of Merve Emre. What I have read, I found inspiring in the ways that we’ve spoken about.
Are you familiar with Merve Emre’s book on collective criticism [“The Ferrante Letters”], which she co-authored with Sarah Chihaya, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards?
No, I’m not.
I think it originally took the form of letters that were published on Post45 on Ferrante’s novels that was later published as a book by Columbia University Press. And Sarah Chihaya has a book coming out next year, which I just read. It’s called “Bibliophobia” and shares certain affinities with your own work; she talks about being a voracious reader, does close readings of works by Helen DeWitt and others, but also talks about the onset of her depression, failing to produce a scholarly monograph, etc.
That sounds marvelous.
One last question: are you working on anything new?
Last summer, I started writing short essays, quite personal essays, about modes of reading — adventures and misadventures of reading fiction — that are not acknowledged in academic or serious criticism. I’ve written one about forgetting as you read and on misremembering what you read. There’s one on rereading. Just this morning I was working on a piece on non-reading, on all of the ways in which we relate to books without having read them or without having read them fully. Last week, I was writing one on daydreaming while reading. Basically a series of essays on the phenomenology of reading.