Last week, I explored the benefits of mastery when approaching a text — namely the meanings that are made possible to those who know what to look for. While I mentioned that those who didn’t know what to look for are likely to “miss out,” this week I am interested in the ways in which mastery itself can cause us to neglect. I invite you to consider Edgar Allan Poe’s famous detective story, “The Purloined Letter,” as a study in the dangers of trained knowledge.
The wonderful epigraph of the text gives voice to this issue:
Nil Sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio [nothing is more odious to wisdom than excessive cleverness]
Before we begin, we must note that the word “cleverness” here carries two very specific connotations. First, the word invokes a myopic perspective: a narrow attention to detail, and a lack of ability to connect small details to some sort of greater significance. This is, more or less, the sense of cleverness as we would use it in normal conversation. The second sense, draws attention to proficiency in a particular domain of knowledge, sometimes referred to as “acumen.” The subject is not so much general cleverness as it is a trained mastery of a specific field. If we shift our attention to the details of the story itself, they help to make the clear distinction between a shortsighted lack of insight and acumen.
In the story, Poe’s amateur detective Auguste Dupin, a precursor to Sherlock Holmes, takes on a case in which he must find an incriminating letter hidden somewhere in a hotel room. The text begins with the Prefect D of the Parisian Police soliciting Dupin’s help and describing his own failed attempt to locate the letter. The Prefect knows exactly what he is looking for, possessing a “minute account” of the letter’s physical appearance and its contents. He conducts a thoroughly “microscopic” search of the premises, drawing upon a battery of investigative techniques developed over his “long experience” with such matters. Much of this search involves focusing on minor details that he hopes will lead him to the letter. He probes furniture upholstery and book bindings with thin needles, dismantles furniture, and uses a microscope to look for displaced dust and wood-shavings. Unfortunately, this detailed search yields no results, and the Prefect turns to Dupin. After a brief survey, Dupin finds it exactly where nobody would expect to find it: in a card-rack full of letters, slightly torn and marked to change its external appearance.
This story is often used to emphasize a “too-close attention to detail” which illustrates a “hidden in plain sight” dynamic; sometimes the things that most deserve our attention “escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious.” In this first use, the story highlights the pitfalls of myopic perspectives. However, the story also comments on the second component of cleverness, “acumen,” or the specificity of a field of knowledge. The problem is not so much that the Prefect is incompetent or that his methods are poorly executed. On the contrary, Dupin calls the search techniques “highly ingenious.” Rather, the problem is the assumption that a particular framework can be universally applied to any situation, that the way the Prefect follows clues will always yield the thing for which he searches. The prefect “forcibly adapts his designs” to his skillset, and cannot imagine another way of looking for a hidden item. It is his training and experience that set limits on what he is looking for, how he can conduct the search, and ultimately what he is able to find.
In my first post in this series, I spoke about the work of mastery in precisely these terms. I described mastery as knowing what to look for, and noted that this knowledge is cultivated through consistent practice and training. I hope that the Prefect illustrates why I expressed reservations about mastery in that same post. In certain ways, mastery is little more than mere “cleverness.” On the one hand, these skills can make engagement with a text a gateway to entirely new perspectives, which last week’s reading of Hospital Sketches demonstrates. On the other hand, ill-applied mastery can easily become a limiting factor, narrowing the focus of what the reader is looking for in the text, and consequently what she finds in it.
Unlike the case of the purloined letter, such directed searches do not always result in complete failure. A reader could easily, having seen the importance of biographical information to Alcott’s text, turn to authorial biography as the key to unlocking meaning in any text. I’m sure that I could read Poe’s life into “The Purloined Letter” and develop a coherent reading. The question, however, is whether or not I should focus on that detail. Doing so certainly wouldn’t have developed the reading outlined above. And it’s this that causes me pause. If my students have learned to apply a framework of author biography, or symbolic objects, or metaphors to the works they read, I worry that this is the only way that they will approach texts once they leave my classroom. Mastery and cleverness, while valuable, may also result in uniform interpretations. It is possible to be clever and to decide what to look for in a text before even reading the first word. It takes an investment in the joy of studying literature, in the joy of discovery, to let the text offer up which details are important on its own terms.
Wil Marple is a PhD student in the English Department at Syracuse University. He studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in the Transcendentalists and other authors of the mid-century “American Renaissance.” He hopes that his current fascination with the notion that expectations shape perception will lead him to produce a project titled Great Expectations that has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens.