Parthian Words

by Storm Jameson

This short book offers the dispassionate but sharp-tongued comments on the novel today by an old fiction hand, a personal exercise of taste and judgement, backed by a life interest in the history and methods of literary criticism. It reviews the evergreen question of the death of the novel, so often and confidently announced; the difficulties, peculiar to our nihilistic and often brutal age, that press on the contemporary novelist; the effect on him and his work of the technological revolution; his increasing diffidence in face of the overwhelming prestige of science in our day; the changing language of fiction; the novel as an art form; the nouveau roman, and its most sophisticated and more esoteric cousin, the nouvelle critique; the eruption into common daylight of pornographic fiction; the use and misuse of censorship. It attempts to decide whether the traditional or classic novel has a future and what sort of future. Though it may offend a great many solemn persons it has not been written to give offence, but in a serious effort to reach some positive conclusions about the health, the moral and aesthetic worth, of the novel in a day when our minds are, as never before, at the mercy of their worst dreams.

155 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Margaret Storm Jameson was an English writer, known for her 45 novels, and criticism.

Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.

From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.

A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.

Reviews

[L Timmel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this work-- "Parthian Words"-- both rueful and defiant-- indicates the author's wish for an ironic distance that she consciously struggles to achieve, for the most part without success. The bulk of this long essay is rant on the state of the arts in general and fiction in particular, the remainder a prayer for something new that she acknowledges lies beyond her grasp. In 1970, when "Parthian Words" was first published, Jameson's viewpoint would have been unintelligible to me, and her rant intolerable. In 2013, I find it interesting and sad. It would probably seem quaintly unintelligible to most twenty-first century readers.

Jameson writes this essay, as she says, as a survivor, being someone who came to consciousness before 1914, when the world first convulsed. (She was born in 1891.) She faces, she writes, "a gap I cannot cross." "Civilization" (a twentieth-century concept if ever there was one) has always been under threat, she observes, so this aspect of "reality" is nothing new. But the evils of our reality aren't the same as those of the middle-class world of the traditional novel. And our reality (even in 1970) is changing because of the importance and implications of computer technology. For her, the date August 6, 1945, marks a cataclysm. The contemporary novelist, as she says, lives in a world that has seen "Hiroshima, the death camps, wars in which children die of hunger or seared with napalm." "Something like a rupture of the past of human life on earth has occurred." "Society has changed more, and ore radically, in the last two decades than in the two previous centuries." And: "We can no more turn back to George Eliot's or Tolstoy's image of man at the center of a now inexistent order than we can return to Homer's." The novelist can no longer pretend to stand on stable ground. And since the novelist's task is to confront our formidable reality, in all its uncertainty and instability, a rebirth of the novel is needed. None of the novels of the 1950s and 1960s has been able to achieve the task.

I like her appreciation of how the language and social reality in which writers live inform the character of their work as well as set the challenges they face. I like her sense of history and the intelligence that frequently shines through her prose. And most of all, I admire her attempt to grapple with (rather than give up on, in silence) what lies on the other side of that gap in consciousness she acknowledges-- which is for me painfully similar to the gap many older people are facing today, people who "became conscious" before 1989, another watershed date. There are a couple of chapters, though, where the rant descends into diatribe. Should I give this four stars for the honesty and intelligence of some of the book? Or three stars because of the diatribe (which some people would probably think deserved one or two stars)?