Exemplary Moments: Remembering Michael Riffaterre

Abstract

New to the job and eager to learn all the scholarly ropes and prove my mettle to the still intimidating professor who had taken me on as his research assistant, I was sent out one day to hunt for a hedgehog. Back in those pre-electronic days when the job of research assistant often called for equal parts of intellectual engagement and physical exertion, I was Professor Riffaterre's gofer. Scrambling from card catalogue to reference room, then up and down the narrow stairs in the Butler stacks and, as often as not, scurrying off to double check the Carpenter, Barnard, and Avery holdings, I would eventually cover miles and miles searching for the pounds and pounds of books Professor Riffaterre needed a.s.a.p. Meticulous reader that he was, it seemed he had never seen a footnote he didn't want to check, and he had an unerring eye for the quote that needed to be read in full. One day, to the usual list of books and articles he wanted me to track down, he had added a rather puzzling note that read something like this: herisson? porc-epic? Schlegel fragment hedgehog? German. Although rumor had it that Professor Riffaterre hadn't himself set foot in the Columbia library for well over a decade, he had an unequaled knowledge of what could be round there and held firmly to the belief that a graduate student armed only with the mimeographed research bibliographies from his stylistics course and proseminar could successfully search for and retrieve even his most arcane requests. This was not unlike his oft-repeated reading for literary significance could be compared to performing a musical score or running a computer program, that it was merely a question of carefully following the instructions spelled out in the text. No doubt he assumed that finding a Schlegelian hedgehog in the library stacks would be a simple matter of following its trail, from quote to concordance, language to language, translation to original Romantic text. To my utter amazement, he was right. I don't believe he ever commented on the quotation, at least not in print, but, how could the theorist of the self-sufficient text, the text as always one of a kind, unique, not have been pleased with what we round? Ein Fragment muss gleich einem kleinen Kunstwerke von der umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Igel. [A fragment, like a small work of art, must be completely separate from the surrounding world and itself be perfect, like a hedgehog. …