“Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre” or The Master’s Voice from beyond the Grave

Hopefully, Michael (not Michel, SVP) Riffaterre would have smiled at this title. He might also have chuckled just a bit, impishly, as he often did in his classes whenever anyone had the nerve to attempt to out-wit or--comble du culot--contradict him, something he respected greatly. The latter trait was no doubt his most typically "French" characteristic. I can still hear him saying that critics worth their salt need to be able to fight their way out of the many corners in which their adversaries routinely try to put them. On the other hand, he might also have raised a stern eyebrow and admonished me for going too far in writing this title, reminding me instead of the periodic need just to "take a cold shower." In either case, he was not, in my experience, a terribly sentimental kind of guy. Nor was he one to sulk over sad events, such as the one occasioning these words. No more than my ancestors, the ancient Greeks, he wasn't the type to weep over anything inevitable like one's death, whether timely or untimely. Rather, he was a very witty man, in all senses of the word. One who usually appeared to prefer laughter to crying, just like an earlier controversial French character, Alcofribas Nasier, a character we both loved, for whom "le rire, c'est le propre de l'homme." And that, despite the fact that he could easily reduce even the strongest, self-assured readers to tears through the force and forcefulness of his arguments. I refer here to those unhappy few who either despaired over their lack of comparable interpretive prowess while working in the comfort of their own studies at home; or who, instead, stood trembling from head to foot while explicating a text in front of his legendary seminars. Convinced of the intimate and all too often neglected links between humor, critical commentary and poetic discourse, he was also far more Freudian than he or most others would ever have admitted or acknowledged. For between his work on Rimbaud's frequently unconscious or semi-conscious ribaldry and the Surrealists' automatic production of comical associations, there is little doubt that, like Freud, he knew better than most that far more goes on in a text and in speech than first meets the eye or ear. Indeed, were it not for his great ecumenical insight about the pertinence of common readerly responses to various textual stimuli--an insight embodied by his infelicitously named, though highly influential, concept of the Super-Reader or archilecteur--as well as about their crucial role in the formulation of any analysis whatsoever, he might never have shed as much light as he did on the obscure world of so much nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Speaking and writing elegantly, exactingly and, Dieu merci, wittily about the inner workings of "literary" writing, Professor Riffaterre saw and spoke of things beyond the reach of most previous readers, however enlightened they may have been, as if he alone comprehended an obscure textual universe unfamiliar to the rest of us still wallowing in mimesis. And this just burned the hell out of many "weaker" readers, i.e., readers who mistook the world of Literature for literature about the World; readers who mistook other critics' semantic obscurity and undecidability for undeniable genius, and Riffaterre's own hermeneutic clarity and conclusions for epistemological failure. It is no longer de bon ton, however, to evoke the idea of one's master, as I do in my title and imply throughout these inadequate remarks. …