Contrived Chaos: Essay on Catastrophe Practice
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   This essay on Nicholas Mosley's Catastrophe Practice first appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1982, Vol. II, No. 2.  I have made only minor changes. Catastrophe Practice is comprised of  four essays, three plays, and a short novel called Cypher.
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Contrived Chaos: Catastrophe Practice and Gödelian Incompleteness

       Gödel's proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic1 is not everyone's cup of tea, however the search for parallels between this and Catastrophe Practice does lead to the discovery of interesting connections between some of Mosley's dominant themes. There is certainly enough in his writings to bring Gödel to mind,  In the four marvelous essays of Catastrophe Practice he suggests that the Plays for Not Acting are a sort of demonstration through which consciousness might come to terms with itself. This is similar to what Gödel did in demonstrating a method of getting arithmetic to reveal something about itself. More specifically, while describing a strategy of thinking and living, Mosley speaks of "using a language which can refer both to its own form and the things it refers to . ."2  Well this is almost exactly what Gödel did.  He wanted to show that there were arithmetical statements which were true yet which could not be proved in arithmetic - so it would be incomplete. To achieve this he constructed an arithmetical sentence which, when interpreted in the metalanguage, as a statement, said of itself that it was unprovable. That is, the thing it referred to was its own form - itself; and it said of things having that form that they were unprovable. Then he showed that this sentence was indeed unprovable in arithmetic and thus, from the point of view of the metalanguage, true!  In this achievement he also demonstrated some unusual cunning, like Mosley's "sleight-of-mind," constructing a kind of subterfuge in order to ensnare arithmetic with its own devices. But it is also important to notice that he did not get away with the Cretan's trick of saying, "This statement is false." Provability, what Gödel's sentence denied to itself, is a kind of syntactic property, whereas truth and falsity are properties of statements. We might also view a text as a kind of formula of an artificial language, defining it in terms of its syntactic properties, but this would not be particularly interesting to us, especially here. In order to catch what Mosley is after we need somehow to go "up a level," to statements which are in some sense about their own form as well as about the things they refer to - maintaining at the same time that the "form" here is not merely syntactic form.

       At first the Plays for Not Acting appear to be complete chaos; then later, caught up in the search for meaning, we recognize that they are a chaos artfully contrived between Mosley and his characters as a means of acquiring, exercising, and demonstrating the skill of making an order of chaos. This might be a style of writing which, when successful, through its form forces us to an appreciation of its message, not in the sense that through the reading we come to recognize that Mosley and the others are practicing and demonstrating something concerning a style of thinking, etc.- though of course there is this too - but rather in the sense that through the reading we are brought to an experience, hopefully an appreciation, of the style of thinking itself. This would be achieved partly through frustration, our ordinary tendency as readers to make what seems to be happening into familiar patterns and stories is continually denied. The sentences, granted to be representations of utterances, appear to be systematically ambiguous, not related as acts of speech to any one context of meaning. Instead there is a tangle of meanings, continually framed and reframed from one vantage point or another as threads of action and theme, but ultimately not coherent as a whole except as the tangle, the chaos, contrived by Mosley. And even this is illusory, or partly so, for "contrived" here either brings coherence by fiat or begs the question. The plays may be seen as illustrations of how what we might call contrivance, the writer's intentional patterning, is intermingled with free-association, accident; in fact there is no sharp difference here which is reflected in a writer's mental state. Mosley describes the process of writing plays or novels...

- that business that begins as the plaything of its creator and then takes off, disappears, comes back when it is ailing: takes off again (if it is any good) goes round and round dementedly and only when you are not looking, but have persevered, it is there. Ah, these plays! on the grid and riddle like happy children!3
       Let me tie these things together after I have explored the more familiar way of interpreting the Plays for Not Acting. It would take literally forever to unravel all of the threads connecting Catastrophe Practice with Mosley's other work. (This is a metaphor of both literary interpretation and of brain physiology!) Apart from the direct connections between the plays and the interlocking novels (Cypher, Imago Bird, and Serpent to date), there are similarities of character, circumstance, and theme which go back, though not on a uniform slope, toward Spaces of the Dark. There is also some degree of self-reference or reflexivity in every novel, increasing sharply in Accident and going off the scale after Natalie Natalia. A thematic element common to much of the work is the religious story linking a man and two women, innocence and knowledge, and two births, one physical and one spiritual. This is true of Catastrophe Practice as well, except that here the spiritual rebirth is tied with the baby and its coming to a new self-orientation or style of thinking. This is not to imply that the terms "religious" and "spiritual" are no longer appropriate, however. That is not something that can be taken up here. I want to focus on the baby because its viewpoint and the ways in which it is viewed provide guides for organizing much of the rest of Catastrophe Practice. First, taken as a whole the plays might be taken as a demonstration of the baby's passage, conceptual and physical, to that unusual self-consciousness. In Skylight there is the surface of the brain (it could also be Mosley's) and the characters flitting about like ideas. In Landfall there seems to be the present between past and future, like a waiting room, or perhaps between heaven and hell. There is also growing and learning. In Cell there is the body, its internal and external environment, and the figurative restructuring of the brain. Second, there is the baby as the agent and product of revolution and evolution (political, anthropological, genetic, conceptual, aesthetic). Third, the plays may be interpreted as representations of what the baby sees - what goes on inside his head, combining what he makes of his inheritance with what he makes of what is seen in Cypher. To him the other characters and their actions are like myth, the activities of gods. Fourth, there is the baby as consciousness itself, what goes between.
Lilia and Jason walked at the edge of a ploughed field beneath a cold sky and trees as if reflected in water. Jason was carrying the baby on his hip. Sometimes it looked out on the world as if it would tell it what to do; and sometimes it studied its parents as though they were legs, lungs, heartbeat.4
       I have been describing what might be called the thematic organization of the book, providing several related contexts within which much of the text becomes meaningful. Many utterances and narrated segments become accessible as speech-acts of various kinds, expressions of states, allusions, and so on, a pattern of activity from which we might infer motives. This is a process of interpretation working in two directions at once, like a feedback loop, from a guiding theory to the sentences and from the sentences to the larger context of the theory. Thus, except for the sharp differences in the number of non-linguistic clues that are available, this is essentially the same as the process of understanding speakers who are present to us. We expect now that a book be "true to life" and not self-interpreting, not telling us what particular utterances or events mean (what kinds of utterance or event they are). I think the fact that this generates an infinite number of interpretations does not disturb us much because convention, interest, and preference immediately steer us to a few closely related readings and issues.5  However in the Plays for Not Acting, Mosley appears to be intentionally leaving the possibilities open. His characters also very often seem to be pointedly shifting the context of the interaction and the context of speech. Are they all speaking in the same general context? Do they think they are? Do they have a goal? We are forced to attend to the meta-communicative and meta-linguistic dimensions of the utterances in the hope that this will reveal regularities, patterns, some enclosing context. There is an enclosing context - something which embraces all of the thematic elements in the text - but this is only the tangle and the chaos which is somehow intentional!

       By some means or other Mosley and the characters do achieve something on that stage: in Cell the partitions are pushed aside and, in the light of so many other clues, we take this as a sign of success, that something has worked. The outcome here is still partly accidental - the characters keep trying things, apparently not with definite expectations. What succeeds, then, is a complicated strategy involving both fortune and contrivance. This concept of strategy is evident in much of Mosley's work, particularly Natalie, Natalia, and clearly it has a lot to do with his views of writing and the manner in which fiction can render truth. You do not get what is genuinely worthwhile by defining precise goals and laying plans; rather, you hope to put yourself in the way of right ends. Plainly this is not how the plumbing gets fixed. It is more like going to a party with the hope and expectation of having a good time, not knowing what you will do - in fact not wanting to know - but relying on your sense of what makes such occasions successful. Concepts like this have a venerable history in philosophy and religion but are lost sight of in life. As far as theory is concerned, what is implied is that between mere accident, or perhaps free-association, and conscious contrivance, there is a very large domain of strategies suited to various kinds of tasks and ends. In a sense these are exactly equal in variety and complexity to the kinds of accounts we give -  in terms of intention, expectation, etc.- in the course of relating conduct to its consequences.

       Therefore, if we allow that it was one of Mosley's desires to indicate this strategy working, we come to something like the following: He could not have indicated how the characters' complicated and indirect strategy leads to a satisfactory outcome by detailing or even referring to the characters' motives, etc., and the eventual outcome: it is the nature of the case that this not be possible; it is supposed to be a demonstration and an experiment. In other words, in order to achieve their end, the plays have to have the character of a display. But in order to see that they are a kind of contrived chaos - to see, that is, what the plays are a display of - the reader has to both adopt the complicated strategy, trying things out, looking for connections without quite knowing what a connection will be until he finds it, and he has to achieve some success through this. Moreover, the extent to which the characters' demonstration is perceived to be a success - the reader making connections between the things that they are trying - would be proportionate to the success of Mosley's display. This does not entail that these plays are unlike other plays or fiction in having one extremely complex interpretation which readers might approach by degrees. On the contrary, it both allows for the endless interpreting and still maintains an interesting link between the products of the activity and Mosley's strategy.

       Let me, then, venture a parallel between the plays and Gödel's proof. Two circumstances have to be brought together: first, the recognition that the end state of the plays is, in relationship with the activities which have been going on - including the reader's, of course - a kind of success; and, second, the recognition that it is impossible for the demonstration to be successful if there is describable a set of motives, intentions, beliefs, etc. which have that end state as their result. In short, a necessary condition of the success of the plays is that it is impossible to describe how that success is achieved. They are a use of language to demonstrate something - how the success is related to the activity - which language necessarily cannot be used to describe. Certainly we can explain the relationship - in terms of our response to utterances which are systematically ambiguous, or perhaps always ironic - but we cannot from this form a description of a relationship between, on the one hand, those multiple allusions, references, and so on, and, on the other hand, the end state, without arbitrarily positing the requisite set of motives and intentions, etc. I think what is indicated here also constitutes an important link between the structure of Catastrophe Practice and that wider theme relating brain structure to our conduct and to our conceptions of ourselves. One part of us knows what the other part cannot say, and saying what we know is a search and a discovery.

       Finally, let me speculate about what all of this has to do with what lies between acting and not-acting. We know that it is only rarely helpful to imagine actors inside their roles - or even people inside their bodies - as little stagemen pulling levers behind switches and dials. This both leaves an inexplicable gap between the person and his role and creates an inaccessible region of intentions, beliefs and motives. As Mosley has indicated, these are pitfalls of views which try to relate a fixed, coherent self to the world. It is ironical that it is mostly in relation to narrative (fiction or history) that we bother very much about the coherence of the personality, and there it is usually given (or used to be) as a determinate set of traits. Post-modern fiction reveals how much we have become accustomed to the partial personality. (And in real life when the search for the self is profound - as it is in, say, psychiatry - we describe this with the idioms of fiction and narration!) However - to make my way back to the plays - even that model of the self (as a kind of self-constructing protagonist who is narrating a story for itself) allows that amidst the happening of events - now rather than "then" or "when" - the self is something moving between patterns, between frames, or between scenes. It is made a part of these contexts at a different time and from some other vantage point, when it is no longer conceived of as an activity and process but as a personality, with particular motives and beliefs in a particular setting.7 Mosley seems to be saying that it is the working of this that we might get a feeling for, or catch a glimpse of.  In such movement we would be liberated from a host of other "selves" - the homunculus, the robot, the private "actor" and his public "performance."  These images and metaphors might still be useful, but there would be added a new space in which to maneuver. This would be a peculiar sort of addition to the ontology, something created through the reconceptualizing of conduct and human potential, but it is not really a mystery. I think there are already activities and strategies which call for a more subtle analysis than our ordinary vocabulary of motives, beliefs, and attitudes allows. And perhaps in wit, allusion, and pretense there is already ample evidence of the kind of mental stance with which Mosley is concerned. His characters are often cutting across communicative-interactional structures and making something quite different of events by, as it were, repunctuating or reconstituting them in a different communicational framework. In Imago Bird there is that amusing scene - also extraordinarily intricate - where Bert "unwittingly" succeeds in flagging down a taxi for Judith Ponsonby.8 It reminds us that from any arrangements of events it is possible to generate an infinite number of patterns. With an awareness of this we might, as Mosley hopes, come to realize some new freedom, recognizing and creating more strategies and resources for achieving what is worthwhile.

                                                                                                                                                               John Banks 1982

NOTES:

1. Despite the recent popularity of Godel, Escher, and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (New York: Basic Books, 1979), I think the most useful short discussion of the proof is still Godel's Proof by E. Nagel and J. R. Newman (New York: New York University Press, 1958). There is an interesting attempt to relate the proof to literature in"Waiting for Godel: Some Literary Examples of Hierarchical Thinking" by R. apRoberts in Language, Logic, and Genre, edited by Wallace Martin (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1974).
2. Nicholas Mosley, Catastrophe Practice (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979), p. 168.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 321.
5. My views on texts and the factors influencing their assessment have been based largely upon the position outlined in Languages of Art by Nelson Goodman (Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968).
6. Here is one of Greville's remarks to his girlfriend Natalie: "You're always saying you re going to kill yourself. You do this in order to get just what you want; which you do, but then you don't want it. If you want to go on wanting what you think you want, you have to try not to get it. Do you see this? Then you get it. Even if it kills you." (Natalie Natalia, Nicholas Mosley [Penguin Books, 1975], p. 63.)
7. The setting of the characters in the Plays for Not Acting is particularly unusual in that many of their remarks are intended to redefine, reframe, one aspect of their setting. Thus there is an important sense in which they are about themselves, about their own form.
8. Nicholas Mosley, Imago Bird (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp. 97-102.

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