In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” the trick is
that the incriminating letter is not hidden but has been sitting
in plain sight all along. The moral is that what is most obvious
is sometimes easiest to overlook, as the vain and frantic efforts
of the Prefect of the Parisian Police to recover the missing
document attest. Anyone who has had the misfortune to peek into
the library of deconstructivist literature knows that Poe’s story
is a favorite object of lucubration. The two Jacques, Derrida and
Lacan, both devoted many impenetrable pages to the story, as
have many of their epigoni.

We thought of Poe’s classic story recently when alerted by a
friend to The New York Times’s account of a
conference about literary theory sponsored by Critical Inquiry,
a hermetic quarterly that has long been home to
deconstructionists, post-structuralists, Lacanian-psychoanalysts,
and other acolytes of academic tergiversation. It was,
apparently, a somber convocation. The title of the Times’s
story—“The Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn’t
Matter”—captured the tone. More than five hundred academic
aspirants crowded into a lecture hall at the University of
Chicago on April 11 to witness an exchange among a quire of such
faded luminaries as Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, and Homi
Bhabha. The war in Iraq apparently received much anguished
attention. But theory—the ostensible
subject of the
conference—garnered only
afterthoughts. Professor Bhabha, a

“post-colonialist” and one of the most preposterous figures on
the current academic scene, wearily objected that theory still
mattered, that there are “poems that actually draw together
people in acts of resistance.” But according to the Times, the
dominant note was sounded by Sander L. Gilman, a professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago:

I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have
some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of
intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been
wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in
corrosive and destructive ways.

What’s next? The discovery that the earth is round? That water is
wet? We won’t say “We told you so,” but, well, we did. The
friend who told us about the Times’s story said “It is
practically a concession speech to The New Criterion.” We won’t
go that far. Doubtless Professor Gilman and his colleagues would
be horrified at the thought. But there is something to the idea:
for more than twenty years now, The New Criterion has
been dilating on the nullity of literary so-called theory and the
destructive commitment to adolescent leftism that it involves.
Naturally, we have been routinely abominated for our pains. It is
pleasant, therefore, to find, if not a concession, then at least
a tacit acknowledgment that the humanities have taken a wrong
turn. So many trendy academics have weighed in on “The Purloined
Letter” that it is a pity that they didn’t take the story’s
epigraph more to heart: Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio:

“Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.”