The Imperial Superreader, or: Semiotics of Indecency

One of the many ironies in the history of literary theory is that Michael Riffaterre remains known for an idea which he abandoned relatively early in his career. Although his name continues to be associated with the concept of the archilecteur (supperreader or hyperreader) in manuals and dictionaries of literary theory, by the time such popularizing accounts had begun to appear (c. late 70s), the archilecteur no longer had a place in Riffaterre's work. My focus in this paper is twofold: first, to examine the idea of the archilecteur in the context of Riffaterrean theory in an attempt to understand why this figure was at once so compelling as to achieve a permanent place in the annals of literary analysis, and yet unsatisfactory enough for its author to have eliminated it from his writing. Second, I take up the concept of the archilecteur in a context never studied by Riffaterre, that of literary obscenity trials, with a view toward construing the function of the government as reader in such trials as similar to that of the archilecteur. I conclude by proposing a historically inflected reading of the archilecteur. One of the reasons the archilecteur survives in outside accounts of Riffaterre's work long after its demise within his own writing--by the time Semiotics of Poetry was published in 1978 the term had disappeared--is that it is used as a key concept in the essay that brought its author to international prominence: "La description des structures poetiques : deux approches du poeme de Baudelaire, 'Les Chats'" (1966). This essay, along with the article in response to which it had been written, Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss's 1962 "'Les Chats' de Charles Baudelaire," has frequently been cited and reprinted, the debate around "Les Chats" marking a crucial moment in the dissemination of structuralism and semiotics as major modes of literary analysis. As a result, the archilecteur, a concept Riffaterre had already coined and which he therefore deployed in his essay on "Les Chats" as an existing interpretive tool, became known as a key element of the new way of reading he was proposing. In other words, Riffaterre remains known for the archilecteur because he presented the latter as a given for his method at the very moment when that method was achieving international recognition. However, he continued developing and refining aspects of that method, and the archilecteur fell by the wayside not long after the essay on "Les Chats," the victim, as it happens, of misreading. The main reason Riffaterre abandoned the archilecteur to its fate as a colorful character in the annals of theory would seem to be that the identity of this figure was doomed to be misunderstood. It was the archi, the super or hyper, that got the archilecteur in trouble. But the misleadingly grandiose archilecteur had started out more modestly as the lecteur moyen or "average reader." In a 1971 commentary on the genesis of the archilecteur appended to the essay "Criteres pour l'analyse du style," Riffaterre explains how this transformation took place: L'archilecteur, dans la premiere edition, etait appele lecteur moyen, puisqu'il restait a egale distance des insuffisances d'un dechiffrement superficiel et des exces de surlectures qui trouvent dans le texte ce qui n'y est pas, en y deversant le contenu de toute une culture, ou l'apport de recherches d'erudition, sans poser la question de leur pertinence aux faits du texte. (1) We see here the shadow of Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, surlecteurs of Baudelairean felines. It seems clear that the archilecteur was to surfer from problems of translation, among others, since the superreader, however much he may have been conceived in direct contrast to the overreader, retained in English at least a flavor of interpreting too much. Riffaterre goes on, in the 1971 addition, to specify that the term lecteur moyen or average reader had occasioned misunderstandings on the basis of moyen or average, which had suggested mediocrity and ordinariness. …