Interview: Michael Riffaterre

Author(s): Michael Riffaterre

Source: Diacritics, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1981), pp. 12-16
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 INTERVIEW

MICHAEL RIFFATERRE

DIACRITICS:One source of continuity in your critical and theoretical

work over the past twenty years has been your unwavering attention to the
performance of the reader. In your recent work, however, one also senses that
the framework within which you envisage the reading process has been shift-
ing, that it is more clearly predicated on a model of the relation between a
text and the understanding that this text engenders. It is as if the text contains
a paradigm of the reader's transformative praxis. While you still insist on the
way in which a knowledgeable reader will understand certain elements in a
I text (ranging from lexical items through cliches, quotations, and sound com-
binations to syntactic structures), you no longer speak of the super-reader;
and rather than staking claims on the potential normative value of a set of
reader responses, you insist on the over-determination of the reading process
by the text. We would like to know how, in your own mind, you have come to
your current emphasis on the process of mimesis cancellation, on the praxis
, of semiosis, and so forth. Do you envisage your recent books as a significant
break with your earlier work, or simply a revision or theoretical extension?
M. RIFFATERRE: My present work is a continuation of my earlier
research, without any break I am aware of. At first I concentrated on the
heuristic reading stage (the microcontextual determination of the points that
fix the reader's attention). What I called the super-readerwas never anything
like a real reader or his substitute, nor was it a reading norm. I meant a tech-
nique for spotting the segments of the text that drew most reader response.
My next step was naturally to investigate how the network of these activated
segments guides and orients the hermeneutic reading stage. The constraints
imposed on the reader's possible interpretations soon looked to me like being
thwarted, regularly though temporarily, by indirection of meaning, by inap-
COLUMBIA propriateness, and in general by ungrammaticalities I classify as catachresis. I
INDELIBLE
recognized that these blocks (especially poetic obscurity) were affecting the
DRAWING INK
mimesis in many distinct ways, but that looked at from another angle they all
served the same function. This single, all-transformingfunction had to be the
semiosis. My breakthrough was the concept of descriptive system: it explains
3000 D yer. how metonyms are changed into metaphors, and how one marking can by
itself transform all the system's components simultaneously into a code for
KQUTFEL EssER CO. the representation of something other than its "natural" referents.
..U.." g9Yfl;r,UASU
rn.@WWW
U DIACRITICS:What value or function do you ascribe to the distinction of
theory from practice in your work? Would you claim that your theory, just as
much as your reading praxis, is imposed by the poetic text?
M. RIFFATERRE: Certainly. My theory is indeed imposed by the text.
Theory must propose a model that accounts as economically as possible for

DIACRITICSVol. 11 Pp. 12-16

0300-7162/81/0114-0012 $01.00 @ 1981 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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phenomena, for the interaction among them, for their mutual dependence as components
of a system and the consequent predictability of their functions. The literary text is first of
all a grid of constraints upon and directions for a very special type of reading behavior.
Theory must therefore explain the reader's reactions and the assumptions (e.g. literature
has esthetic intent) dictated to him by the literarywork of art; theory must make clear the
universals, not just the texts actualizing them. We must have a theory of literariness rather
than of literature. It should focus on functions, not on the corpus. Since reader-
assumptions give rise to generalizations that in turn inform the reading praxis, I have also
tried to build out of these preconceptions and rationalizations and to account for text pro-
duction as a response to reader expectations. I am thinking here of the concept of genre,
for instance; or, again, of the transformation rules I proposed for the semiosis; they should
explain why a text, however varied and complex, is perceived as an "esthetic" unit.
DIACRITICS:Your stress on the integrity of the text is especially forceful when you
confront the notion of literariness. You mobilize the notion of the text as a monument and
perceive the uniqueness of literary communication in the properties of textuality. Now
some who would resist the uncompromising rigor of your formalist strategy would hasten
to object by interpreting the accent on textuality as a kind of hypostatization of the
literary. You would be accused of closing yourself -your discourse on literature-off in a
rarefied space from which the referent, treated as the operator that would give critical
discourse an incidence on the real world, has been banished. This kind of objection often
carries with it, of course, express or implied suggestions of escapism, apolitical posturing.
Could you tell us both how you situate and understand this kind of resistance (is it just a
misunderstanding?), and indicate how you respond to it?
M. RIFFATERRE:My emphasis upon textuality as an essential constituent of
literariness is demanded by the need to go beyond the concept of literary discourse. As a
general rule, poetics has centered upon literary discourse. This is the wrong approach, I
fear. In everyday usage we find different types of discourse (including the political) with
many if not all the features of literary discourse, yet they are not literature. At most they
will borrow from literature certain techniques, use certain of its devices to control the
audience. Writings made of such discourse nonetheless remain ephemeral, and their
validity is limited to a context of circumstances soon forgotten. In contrast, textuality,
defined as what makes a text a semiotic unit, is the quality conferring the immanence and
permanence essential to literature. This may indeed be a hypostatization of the literary.
But far from excluding the "real" world or the relevance of verbal art to the real world,
hypostatization recognizes that literature has peculiar formal features besides its applica-
bility to the external, besides its reflecting of the external. Hypostatization also recognizes
that readers may perceive and practice literature without necessarily espousing or reject-
ing its ideological implications. Only the fact that the text and the very ideology it embod-
ies are always separable can explain why the literary work of art survives the society that
fostered it, or why works with ideological aims other than "pure literature" (philosophical
treatises, for example, political pamphlets, history, and so forth) may live on as literature
long after their ideological relevance has faded away. To endeavor to understand the
workings of the text's self-sufficing machinery, and to make a fuss, as I do, about the
referential fallacy, is not to deny that referents do exist. It is to make the necessary distinc-
tion between referent and reference. Referents are perhaps reality. Reference is a func-
tion, a verbal construct parallel to reality: it presents an image of reality, eventually
substitutes for it, and lasts longer than this particular piece of reality. This model should
not divorce literature from ideology but rather explain how literature manages to confer
upon ideology its own unique imperviousness to transience and conditionality.
DIACRITICS:Your work may be susceptible to some polite resistance from critics
who very much approve of your combat against externally based explanation and your
advocacy of a strong notion of the text. One may, as a matter of fact, appreciate a certain
kinship between your reading practice and that of American new critics, who also sought
to respect the integrity of the poem while reading it closely and through the binoculars of
a vast literary culture. But one of the problems your sympathizers inevitably encounter
lies precisely in the phenomenal learning and memory that must underlie your ear for
cliches, quotations, cultural or mythological codifications. One is not reassured when you
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comment on your own search for keys to poems by Ronsard and Magny in Ariosto: "Diffi-
culty," you note, "however surely and however often overcome, remains a component of
literariness." In the case of this example, what seems to be at stake are the procedures for
discovering the hypogram. Can they be delineated systematically, or must they be an ad
hoc function of experience in readings? Do you claim to demonstrate theoretically that
accomplished readers have to agree on what constitutes the matrix and the hypogram?
Recognizing the typological variety of both the hypograms and the matrices that you
uncover in your analyses, can one hope to follow your lead without commanding an enor-
mous store of literary knowledge?
M. RIFFATERRE:Two distinctions are in order here. We must first of all differentiate
between the reading-act proper and whatever analysis and demonstration may be made of
the way the reading process works. The analyst will be using his special knowledge and
training properly when he offers, references in hand, to prove that the intertextual linkages
he says account for the reading process do in fact exist. The reader experiences the
reading process without always being able to put his finger on just what is going on in his
mind and exactly where the intertext his memory nudges him with is located. If the
analyst's mind worked differently from the reader's- if he were gathering his intertextual
evidence through the help of concordances -then your objection would be valid. But I
use artificial methods only to locate more accurately what texts, or to pinpoint more
precisely what textual references a native sense of language and human memory have
already tracked down--albeit imperfectly or vaguely. And even with these assistant
devices, I never aim to do more than verify what any reader can work out on his own,
within the limits of his particular linguistic competence.
My second point: there is a vast difference between discovering the hypogram and
positing a matrix. Finding the hypogram is a matter of perception: the reader simply can-
not identify it unless it has already become part and parcel of his culture, unless he
already knows the other text wherein it is contained. If it is part of his heritage, the reader
will sooner or later catch the connection. It matters little that he may hit upon the
hypogram only after reading the text it overdetermines: with such delayed identification
reading will be correct, that is, pertinent to literariness, only after he has remembered the
intertext that contains the hypogram. What I must emphasize is that even while the
hypogram remains unidentified, the text's troublesomeness keeps pointing to this need:
the hypogram must be found, a solution outside the text must be found, in the intertext. In
your example, with Ariosto serving as intertext to Ronsard, the mimetic anomaly in Ron-
sard works on our imagination even if we do not have the key to it. Conversely finding the
key nowise eliminates or palliates the distortion in the mimesis of feminine beauty that the
Ariosto hypogram inflicts upon the Ronsard.
As for the matrix,we are not dealing here with natural reader-perception but with the
analyst's logical inferences from the text. Hence rules can be formulated to guide us in
reversing the text production process and working back to its generator. Analysis is obliged
to find the matrix sentence that most economically accounts for the greatest number of
formal and semantic features in the text. Normal readers need not agree upon what con-
stitutes the matrix because the matrix is a concern of analysis: but such readers should be
able to agree upon what has actuated their reactions. In practice I have been trying to use
as matrices more and more of the stereotypes already attested in the sociolect. Since this
seems to be working, I suppose there must be a level of natural awareness where the
natural reader can make a guess at the matrix, however hazily, or at least at its sociolectic,
pretransformation state. I lay stress upon pretransformationstate: for you must remember
that the generating matrix motor always seems to be a reversal or cancellation of one or
more of the structural relationships investing the matrix.
DIACRITICS:Another resistance with which you are doubtless familiar that can also
emanate from sympathetic readers would typically be translated into a charge of "reduc-
tionism." Your analysis relies on the reduction of the literary dimension to the text-reader
relation, on the reduction of a poem's structure to the matrix, hypogram, and their rela-
tion, on the rigid control of reading experience by a strictly constructed and applied princi-
ple of textual unity, and so forth. The point would be, not that your approach does not
leave the text open to many possibilities for interpretation once the basic form of its unity
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is perceived, but that for some poems- for example, those which allow for ready compre-
hension in referential terms, or those to which you attribute a relatively vague or obvious
matrix- the determination of matrix and hypogram just yields a structural account that
impoverishes the reading experience. Recognizing in general that literary semiotics has to
defend the analytic reductions inherent to its work, we would like to know how you
respond, in particular, to the charge of reductionism when it is addressed to your explica-
tions of poems.
M. RIFFATERRE: I confess to being puzzled by your mention of a "reduction of the
literary dimension to the text-reader relation." Is there anything else? Reader-response
criticism here, and the esthetics of reception in Germany, attest the paramount impor-
tance of this relationship. It may be that I was the first to shift the focus of modern
criticism from the text to the text-reader dialectic. In a first book, back in 1957 and in a
1959 paper (now included in my Essais de stylistique structurale), I defined compulsory
perceptibility and the control the text imposes upon the reader's deciphering of it as
necessary conditions of the literary act of communication. Needless to say, no matter
what standpoint the critic adopts when he looks at literature-sociological, psychoana-

lytical, historical, you name it--he is obliged to submit to the restrictions on the reader's
perception. These alone determine relevance. Without these limitings the text may remain
a legitimate object of inquiryfor a linguist, say, or a historian of ideas, but it ceases to be a
literary artifact. It is a literary artifact only so long as it is looked at from the perspective
the text commands the reader to adopt.
As for the charge that determining the matrix of a text is a reductionist strategy, I
must insist once again that it is only one of two analytic phases: the description of the
given that generates the text. No matter that this given is sometimes simple and obvious:
as the text expands, the derivation becomes enormously complex. The other phase of my
analysis gives the reasons for this explosive development. It is based upon my concept of a
double reading that only literary texts require- a primary reading, which deciphers the
text at the level of mimesis; and a retroactive reading, which effects the semiotic transfor-
mation. The matrix structure sets everything going, triggering as it does the back-and-forth
scanning of the textual space. But this double reading is the actual literary experience: my
analysis explains and preserves its complexity and its richness. For I ascribe two facets to
each component, mimetic and semiotic; I place the literary phenomenon at the moment
of transformation. Third, I have pointed out that every reader's effort to make sure of the
semiosis makes him go through a new reading at the mimetic level. This accounts for the
continuous re-reading, the inexhaustibility of the experience that is peculiarly literary.
DIACRITICS:Your work is relatively sparse in references to the work of other practi-
tioners of literary semiotics, and conveys a distinct impression of independence. Have you
actively sought to avoid connections to this or that school, or to spelling out your
agreements or disagreements with other major figures in the field? Would you, in any case,
indicate what you consider to be the key issues in poetics and literary semiotics at this
time, and point toward the directions in which you believe this field of inquiry should be
headed.

diacritics Iwinter 1981 15

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 M. RIFFATERRE:I have, I dare say, always maintained an independent line of inquiry,
if only because my principle has always been to take the real reader's performance as a lit-
mus test, to start from the difficulties of an actual text. I often put to use another critic's
approach, or this or that theorist's system, without regard to its intrinsic merit or special
attraction: it serves me as an indicator or buoy marking the spots where problems keep
recurring. I do not hesitate to spell out my objections if a given approach is so general and
doctrinaire it threatens to cloud over the entire landscape of literarystudies. Years ago, for
instance, there was Jakobson's failure to distinguish its literarinessfrom the other features
of a text when he assumed that a "linguistic" analysis alone was capable of yielding data
pertinent to poetics. In semiotics proper, I find Charles S. Peirce's relentless rigoran inspir-
ing model.
The key issues, it seems to me, are the related questions of textuality and intertex-
tuality. The latter especially, as the idea has evolved from Bakhtin and Kristeva onwards,
should take care of quite a few difficulties unsolved by comparative literature or literary
history, or solved in a manner irrelevant to literariness. Other problems cry out for fresh
approaches: the nature of ambiguity (the very concept looks dubious to me), and the
fallacies, in particular the intentional and the referential.
DIACRITICS:Your emphasis on the reader is all the more interesting when one con-
siders the accent on production or generation that is conveyed by your model of the text.
In the conclusion to Semiotics of Poetry, perhaps your most striking statements are those
which reiterate the highly constrained nature of reading and proclaim the text's control
over the reader. Moreover, it is clear that, over against the strain of semiotics that is con-
cerned principally, if not exclusively, with what readers do in reading (what competence is,
what conventions govern the reception of the text, etc.), your concern is just as much with
deriving the structure of texts and understanding their construction or generation as that
of a monument rigorously unified by the determining force of that structure. The title of
your latest book, La Production du texte, conveys that concern with production, as
opposed to reception or competence, unmistakably; and you would presumably agree
that a structural account of textual production, carried over into a conception of the
reading process as reproduction, has clear-cut advantages for the critic who wishes to
move from analysis into interpretation. Perhaps you could specify the advantages as you
see them. In any case, we would like to know, first, how you situate semiotic inquiry into
competence and conventions in relation to your own work, to what extent and in what
ways it may be useful to you; and second, what sort of contribution may emerge from your
work to the more orthodox semiology concerned with the enabling and regulating condi-
tions that preside over reading and the determination of meaning. Do you imagine that the
cumulative effect of pursuing your readings of texts so as to constitute a substantial cor-
pus of readings will be a modification or extension of our notions of reading competence?
M. RIFFATERRE: The first advantage, I submit, is that my model of mimetic cancella-
tion accounts for the difficulty, or strangeness, inherent in the literarytext; it accounts for
literature as an alienating, disturbing experience, and for the elusiveness of significance. In
this connection the concept of syllepsis may be the answer to the questions raised by the
so-called ambiguity of literary discourse; it also links text with intertext. Second, the idea
that descriptive systems become codes for something else, and that they play the same
role within the intertext as do the references or allusions to actual works of art: this idea
should solve the problem troubling you, that literature seems to be accessible only to the
"knowledgeable" reader. I believe I have demonstrated that textual ungrammaticalities
are but the other face of intertextual grammaticalities, and that the core of significance
always remains implicit (or is to be found elsewhere - my image of the text as doughnut,
or should it be bagel?). This may eventually make it possible for us to show that literary
competence, as a special variety of linguistic competence, rests upon presupposition.
Reading in accordance with the rules of literariness, literary reading, may be found not
strictly to require a knowledge of the intertext, a familiarity with a corpus: the only requi-
site may be a presupposition of intertext.

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