The
International Writers Magazine: Review
Review
of A Jacques Barzun Reader
Dan Schnieder
Jacques
Barzun is sort of the social sciences equivalent of Harold
Bloom, albeit less personally and intellectually noxious. He is,
however, the quintessential living Dead White Male
scholar whose knowledge about his subject matter is very broad-
he can write seemingly convincingly on opera, politics, baseball,
Paris in the 1830s, and Raymond Chandler, but whose depth of wisdom
about any one thing is paper-thin.
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His 2000 opus called
From Dawn To Decadence was an ill wrought stereotypical old
mans lament, which unwittingly did more to show how wholly
out of touch the man- born in 1907, was with modern life than bolster
his argument that society was, of course, in decline. Of
course, all of the arts nowadays- literature (poetry and prose), criticism,
painting, music, film, television, theater, are in a collective slump.
Call it the bane of PC. But, history shows it is just a matter of time
before a rebound occurs. Culture is cyclical by nature, not an arrow
in ascent nor a boulder in declension.
In 2002 HarperCollins released an omnibus of a few dozen of what
they considered the best of Barzuns decades of essays, called
A Jacques Barzun Reader, to cash in on the unexpected bestseller status
the earlier book achieved. This was also done because, despite initially
favorable reviews, many mainstream critics started rightfully taking
Barzun to task for the reasons mentioned above. The over 600 page book
has a few good moments of insight and prescience, but the truth is,
the book only further strengthens the case that Barzun may know alot
of historical facts, but has not a clue of how to put them in coherent
and logical orders. In short, he doesnt know much, and doesnt
know how to express it well. His whole academic and literary career
is a testament to the power of connections and networking- the very
ills he ironically, yet cluelessly, laments as aiding cultures
descent.
In essay after essay he proves this point, and shows he knows
little of much, especially art. In Toward A Fateful Serenity he argues:
Faulkner
.said that one of Keats odes was worth
any number of old women. Such literary conceit is also bad logic.
Life is good because it is the source and container of everything we
value. It is old women, not Grecian urns, that have in their time borne
Keatses and Faulkners. Its amazing that a scholar could
literally be so dense as to a) not see Faulkner was speaking metaphorically
and b) not see Faulkner was speaking as an artist. No one disputes women
give birth, not urns- Duh! But it is urns and other things of beauty
that make life more than just autonomic acts like breathing and defecation.
In Science And Scientism he writes:
.the aim of a critic,
beyond that of saying what he thinks, is to make two thoughts grow where
only one grew before. At least this time Barzun is partly right.
But a critics task is that of an unbiased evaluator, not a translator
of the art. Translation may play a small part, in special circumstances,
but it is the how of an arts success that is the critics
focus, not the why. To see art as an active verb not a static noun has
bedeviled far greater critics than the too often lazy Barzun. Of course,
Barzun has never really understood the very nature of criticism, for
in Criticism: An Art Or Craft, he argues that it was only with Oscar
Wilde that critics claimed themselves as artists. Yet, every bit of
writing manifestly contains some art- for the act of putting words together
is intrinsically artistic, for it is meant to persuade, not be a mere
bill of lading nor a dry business letter. One may argue that criticism,
as a didactic tool, may, more often than not, not be a creative art,
per se, and Barzun does correctly argue that criticism is nothing without
art to criticize, but that is again utterly missing the point, for derivation
is not the opposite of the thing it is derived from, and its also
viewing art again merely as a noun, rather than a verb, for great criticism-
think Twain or Mencken, is necessarily artistic, lest it could not persuade.
That Barzuns own dry and formulaic writing is bereft of such art
speaks volumes for this flaying of his ideas, and the position he takes
when he writes: If the critic finds in his own work the compression
and suggestiveness of the poet, then he is blind to both sense and style.
One can counter that Barzun is correct when comparing like quantities-
a bad poet and bad critic, or even a great poet and great critic. But,
does one get far more delight and music from the ideas of a Twain at
his critical best than can be had from the so-called poetry that is
published today? Of course. To not see this manifest fact is to wantonly
appropriate fallacies and wield them as a club for whatever reasons
one illogically holds such fallacies to the breast.
Yet despite such obtuseness. Barzun can stumble upon some insight, such
as when he writes in
Rhetoric- What It Is, Why Needed:
The mind tends to run along the groove of ones intention and overlooks
the actual expression.Right on, but this is manifestly the one dart
tossed in the dark that scores a bulls-eye for, as shown, Barzun
expressions far too often fail his intentions, which are usually not
too well thought out in the first place. Plus the average essay is about
two or three times as long as needed, and weighted down with many trite
observations and dull prose. Such ills afflict the many overly long
and trite pieces on writers such as Samuel Butler, Lionel Trilling,
Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron, and George Bernard Shaw.
The best essay in the book is from 2000, called The Word Man,
where Barzun starts off brilliantly and logically defending the specific
(as in species) use of the word against PC revisionists who prefer desexualized
terms like councilperson to councilman. Barzun argues the point as well
as anyone could. Then the essay implodes midway, as the old man tries
to be a hepster, and parody the argument with an ill-advised
bolster that claims teenagers are far more oppressed than women, and
thus should be considered in such ontological and cultural revisionism.
It does not work, and trashes the earlier brilliance of the piece, which
is, in microcosm, all that is wrong with Barzun as a thinker and a writer-
he simply does not have a clue when he is on nor off.
Similarly, the essay How The Romantics Invented Shakespeare while historically
correct, and skewering many of the points asserted by Shakespeare apologists
like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, still goes on far too long, and
gives no real insight into the push to canonize the Bard, only how it
occurred. A similar problem of vacuity and over-length plagues The Permanence
Of Oscar Wilde, which also bogs down in length and obscurantism. The
opposite problem plagues his essay Lincoln The Literary Artist, which
proffers the 16th President as a writer of stature, and fails. Yes,
the Gettysburg Address and a handful of other speeches are well written,
and contain art, but are not in and of themselves art. There
is any irony in that Barzun fails in his understanding of arts
nature from both perspectives.
Yet, in a sense, these rhetorical and intellectual lapses are all that
can be expected from books like this, where old men look back at their
lives and inevitably see the good old days through the golden
haze of senescence. Thus, even such ills as Nazism, Jim Crow, Vietnam,
and religious intolerance, do not seem quite as nasty as they really
were, and thus render most of his writings pointless, as he is lacking
in insight, and out of touch, no matter how earnest in his preachments.
His rigid bloviations make one want to bitchslap some sense into the
man, but then, most old men are predictable in their opinions, and such
books are only read for the wisdom that falls through the crannies of
their egos, not for any grand wordplay. Unfortunately, Barzun lacks
both- critical wisdom and the beauty of artistic craft. And, since art
is far more grounded on beauty than truth, because beauty is more objective,
enduring, and always pleasures, whereas truth is often subjective, facile,
and more often pains, his often generic writing too often matches his
failure as an objective historian, and that fact no amount of rhetoric
can deny.
© Dan
Schnieder Sept 2006
Cosmoetica
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