The end of the line? (Notes & comments: May 2003).(The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe)

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 Time'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 ...