Word: barzun
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Historian-Educator Jacques Barzun can be a mean critter when aroused, as he has been of late by contemporary prose (a "mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax"). Higher Learning (he could find only "an immense amount of Lower Learning" in the U.S.), and the Ph.D. racket (TIME, Nov. 25, 1957). In American Scholar Barzun castigates his latest victim: detective stories, which, he says, have fallen on evil days, turning increasingly into "novels of haze and daze...
...first crime of the detective stories is that they can no longer hold even such a willing victim as Jacques Barzun in any suspense. Writers nowadays try to create suspense by merely delaying the story with digressions, or by causing the characters to become confused: " 'He had stopped understanding things over an hour ago.' The idea is that the reader, also bewildered, will feel breathlessly eager to recover his wits and will call the anxiety suspense. Mind is explicitly excluded." Moreover, the new detective fiction is badly put together ("The prevailing impression is of writing by a gifted...
...recent tales pass Critic Barzun's muster...
...most part, Barzun insists, the mystery story is in trouble. His explanation: the detective story is a "parasite" of the novel, and when the serious novel itself "concentrates on the whacky," as it does today, and "starts from the conviction that society and all who dwell in it are disagreeable and worthless," the detective story is simply thrown off its feed. Good detective fiction needs "a world that we accept because it is conventional . . . Why pursue the criminal if the victim and society are not worth protecting...
Documentation of their charges suggests some clear-and clearly controversial-answers to a question put by Columbia Dean Jacques Barzun in the foreword: "Why has the American college and university so little connection with Intellect?" In language that is often witty and only occasionally typical of sociology's bread-pudding prose, Professors Caplow (University of Minnesota) and McGee (University of Texas) list academe's hurtful mores and petty machinations. Some of the worst...