Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcript 10

   This excerpt begins with the question why Nicholas Mosley began to write, then turns to the subject of unfashionable novels. However most of the discussion concerns the character Jason in Serpent, who has written a filmscript about the siege of Masada which links the moral dilemma confronting those who wished to survive with two much larger and seemingly unrelated topics, the role of deception in natural selection and an interpretation of the Fall as a decisive stage in the evolution of the mind.

 --------------------------------

May 12, 1991 "Can Ravé" Majorca 

Nicholas Mosley - I began to write novels, I think, because I wanted to try to get my experience into some sort of shape so that I could handle it, try to understand it, and then having done that perhaps I could learn something about what was going on with myself, and then write something else, and so on, the to and fro. I saw writing novels as learning about myself, learning about the world, putting things into shape, thereby learning, and thereby influencing what I was. That's what I thought when I started off. Looking back on it, I think that was a grandiose idea of what I was up to. I think it was true to a certain extent, finding a pattern in one's experience, yes, but it might also have been putting up some smokescreen over experience, to cover up the real difficulties of experience. It might also have been some desperate and heartfelt effort to break through the smokescreens that were put up by life. I think all those things, but on the whole, what I've stuck with... I've been trying to make patterns out of my experience so that I could understand what my experience was, so that my experience might become something a bit different and I would write something a bit different, and that's gone.

   That's me, but why other people write fiction I really don't know, I've wondered. I think some do it for much the same sort of reason as I do, making patterns of experience, their experience or some experience that they feel in sympathy with, thereby to make it intelligible, [to bring it] somehow within compass. On the other hand, some people seem to write novels by just starting at the beginning and rambling on. They can start at the beginning and sort of ramble on with huge skill, with great skill and great artistry. But at the end of some modern novels one does get the feeling that even though there's been great skill and artistry, one can't think why they've actually written it - other than to, of course, to make money, to get prestige, to get in the bookshops, why not? That's a nice thing to do! [smiles]

   I think the trouble here is that novel writing often gets into fashion, and when people pick up a novel they have expectations [about] the sort of thing they're going to read, so novelists write that sort of novel - naturally, because novelists want to be read by a large number of people and it's a large number of people that will read them in that way. I think the trouble as I felt it with that is that then you get into a cycle of what's expected, which has very little to do with what is actually happening in life. It becomes a false way of looking at the world and looking at what human beings are really up to, just because it's got stuck in a groove. Perhaps it was relevant once - the first people who wrote like this were relevant - but then people who go on in a groove go on in a groove, whereas life is not something that goes on in a groove, life's always changing, people's experience is changing. And so to keep up with changing experience, or different ways of looking at experience, you then have to write slightly different forms of novels, and of course that is difficult because that is breaking out of the groove and it's difficult for people to read you, at first. But one hopes that if one goes on enough, and if you are really writing about something that is there, people in the end will recognize this and will read you. But it can be a risky process and, of course, probably nine times out of ten, if you jump out of the groove you're wrong. This is like evolution, the patterns of life that go on are patterns of life that have become accustomed to the environment, so the environment suits them and they suit the environment. Every now and then the environment changes a little and the old style of life goes trundling along but it becomes more and more out of kilter, and then... No, let's put it this way: there are always strange mutations cropping up, just by chance, and every now and then a random mutation will fit in with a change in the environment, and then eventually that mutation will take over. The strain, the offspring, of that mutation will gradually take over the species - or whatever one's talking about - because that is more fitted to the environment than the old strain, which will gradually die out. And I think that's like art, you know. There's a traditional form of art, which was exciting once and new and creative and fitted in with what people wanted; then it becomes a habit, everyone turns out this form of pop art or op art, or whatever the latest thing is, and then it becomes dead. And people try to break out of this, and no one is interested, no one is interested...and then something comes along and everyone says Aha! Yes, ok, that's interesting. And then everyone is interested in that kind of thing for a time.

John Banks - Do you think there is some coincidence between the success of Hopeful Monsters and a certain environment, given that you've been writing for so many years?

NM - Well, I certainly hope so! This is the thing about hopeful monsters: there I was writing about these things called hopeful monsters, these slight changes of style which do not catch on easily because they're not in the groove, in the [familiar] style of novel writing, but of course I hoped that one day people would think, Wow, actually, what's being written here has a little more relevance to life, or some relevance to life in some way that other novels haven't got. Of course that's what I was hoping. But that's in the lap of the gods. I felt that what I was trying to write had more relevance to life than the novels in the traditional groove. Novels seemed in the last ten years to be so much random stories of events happening one thing after another, [characters were] leaves blown in the wind in a strange and incomprehensible world, so they staggered along through stories - this happened then that happened, the whole thing made nonsense, the whole thing was a sort of glorious farce. What was fun about these novels was that there was a lot of farce and oddity and interest, and enormous talent went into this writing, so it all came alive and it was fun. But somehow it wasn't much to do with what people's experience of life really was, and I thought in the end people would get a bit tired of this, like one gets tired of those things. So I thought in Hopeful Monsters -  the idea of the search for a pattern, and by searching for a pattern you're in some way creating a pattern, you're putting yourself in the way of a pattern being created - I thought sooner or later people might say, Wow, ok, that's actually... I see what you're on about, that's what I feel although I haven't easily formulated it, because there is not much customary way of formulating it at the moment.

[The discussion then turned to one of Mosley’s stalking horses, Jason, a protagonist in the novel Serpent who has written a film script which is “out of the groove.”]

NM - Okay, I’m off... [laughs]  The character in this series of Catastrophe Practice novels that was relevant to this question of how you break out of the mould of writing was my character Jason in the novel Serpent, who is a filmscript writer and is employed to write the script of a film on the subject of Josephus's story of the massacre at Masada at Palestine in Israel about A.D. 7O, in which, rather than be taken prisoner by the Roman forces that were surrounding them, a thousand Jewish men, women, and children killed themselves. Jason has been asked to write a script about the background of this story and the story itself. And he consciously writes a story which he knows will be totally unacceptable to the film people, because he no longer wants to write just about people feeling they have to choose between death and dishonour - either they give into the Romans and feel they've betrayed themselves, or they're all dead - either way there's a sort of death, and Jason just doesn't want to write one more film script about heroic doom, damnation, helplessness, hopelessness and death. So he writes the draft of a script in which the people he's dealing with are the few survivors of this scene and this war between the Jews and Romans in A.D. 7O, one of whom is the historian of this period, Josephus, himself. So Jason writes a script not about the people who had to choose between death and dishonour and chose death - but either way they felt themselves trapped in hopelessness and helplessness. - he wrote a script about the known survivors. When I say known survivors, it was known that there were seven survivors at this siege of Masada who apparently hid in a disused water system and survived. So Jason writes a film script about them, but no one wants to make this film; no one wants to make the film in the style of these people who somehow got out of this glorious suicide pact. Were they heroes or were they traitors? So Jason writes a script in a style of trying to deal with this question, and the film people can't make head or tail of what he is on about. Is he saying they're goodies or baddies, cowards or heroes...what the hell's he up to?. And he writes in this strange ironic style in which the people concerned realize this would be the consequence of their action, that people won't be able to make up their minds whether they’re traitors or not traitors. 

    And so Jason's script gets thrown out the window. But in writing this script Jason has learnt something about himself, how to handle his own life. And his way of trying to learn how to handle his own life spreads to his wife and to his child, his small four year-old child, and to his relationships with his family: he's learnt something about how to survive. It is not clear whether this way of learning how to survive is in the old traditional sense a bit off-key or treacherous or not. Because if you want to be a survivor in a society which is caught up with self-destruction, honourable self-destruction, if you want to be a survivor the other members of that society will see one as a bit of a traitor.

   This book that I've been talking about in which Jason was the hero, was called Serpent. In the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the serpent has been taken as the "baddy," he was the person who tempted Eve to take the apple, who got Adam to take the apple, and so they acquire knowl-edge of good and evil. But what's always been at the back of that story is the idea: What's wrong with the knowledge of good and evil? If you've got any respect for human beings, then knowledge is not bad, knowledge is good, knowledge of good and evil is a progression from non-knowledge of good and evil. So according to this way of looking at the story, which is a very real way, the serpent is a “goody” who got Adam and Eve out of their infantile innocence. And if you just stick at that stage then God becomes a baddy who wanted his children to remain infants, but this is a very simplistic way of looking at God, because of course God is everything. And then in the next book I wrote, in Judith, there is a wise old guru figure, a wise old Indian joker-guru figure, who tells the myth of the Garden of Eden in quite a different way: Of course God knew that the serpent would try to get Adam and Eve out of the Garden and on, and He was waiting for them, but He wanted them to do it under their own steam. And in this myth that the old Indian guru tells, God is grumbling to himself - or to his wife, who is the same thing, because God is everything - God is grumbling because he can't get these kids out of the garden, rather like a mother now grumbling that kids are hanging around at home and they're eighteen or nineteen and they won't leave home. And so the more the serpent can get on with the job, and get them to learn about good and evil, the sooner they'll get out of the garden and get on with it. God says, of course I can't tell them this because they have to do it under their own steam; if I tell them it won't be them doing, it it will be me. I think that is quite a good new way of looking at the myth.

   An image that also comes into Judith, and into some of the other books of the series, is one which was first started, as far as I know, by the German writer Kleist way back in the early 19th Century. Once Adam and Eve are out of the garden - being out of the garden means that you're self-conscious, you're conscious of your own predicament - there is no way of getting back into the Garden, there's no way of getting back to have the unconsciousness of a thing or an animal. Kleist had the idea that Adam and Eve, [now out of the Garden, human beings], had to go right round the world and then perhaps they'd get in the Garden again by the back way. And this seemed to me to be a very potent image. In the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, the story is that God told Adam and Eve that they must not eat of the Tree of Good and Evil, so they eat it, and He must have known this, He must have wanted them to eat it, the way I see it. There was also in the Garden of Eden this very important thing called the Tree of Life, which God did not tell them they should not eat, and so they didn't bother to eat it. This is a common experience of all parents: they will understand what God was up to at this moment! So in the imagery of the story as this old guru in India - or me - was telling it, there's the idea that you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil because God told you not to, because he wanted you to; you go right round the world and in at the back way, and then you may be able to eat of the Tree of Life. And in the biblical story God turns them out of the Garden of Eden because otherwise they will eat of the Tree of Life and will thereby become like gods, like us, like gods. And so, in the story I'm telling, they're turned out of the Garden - thank God, about time too! - they go right round the world, in at the back way, and, okay, then perhaps they might be able to eat of the Tree of Life and become like "gods," in inverted commas, whatever that means. [smiles]

   I think this phrase, "and become like gods," means with these powers of being able to see oneself, being oneself and seeing oneself. And, as is said, this idea of seeing oneself can go back into infinite regress, a self seeing a self seeing a self... and so on. Okay, one uses the phrase infinite regress, and the word infinite is the sort of word one uses in relation to what one calls God. Alright, one can't pin this down, but there's a sense of this, there's a sense of the self observing the self, and that is what one might become at home with when one gets back and eats of the Tree of Life. It's a good story, a good a metaphor, a good myth. And myths are stories that are trying to tell us things that can't otherwise be said. If you try to put all this stuff into didactic terms anyone can make a nonsense of it; if you tell a story, you can't exactly make a nonsense of it, you can either listen to it or not, you can either hear it or not. This comes into the Bible the whole time: Christ told parables, and he doesn't argue them - there's nothing to argue - he just says, Those who have ears to hear, they'll hear, and those who don't, won't. 

JB - And it has something to do with getting into relationship with yourself. 

NM - Well, and by getting into relationship to oneself, getting into relationship with everything, with a sense of the cosmos, of the infinite, of the infinite dimensions, reflections... these are just words, you know. Yes, sure, infinite. 

JB - So there is no getting back into a literal Garden, but there might be an environment in the mind.

NM - Yes, exactly, it's an environment in the mind. I don't see anything about getting a perfect society, a sort of Marxian state, a brave new world. If it happens, it happens, but I don't know why it should. That's not the problem, the problem is holding it in your mind. All the New Testament imagery is about the Kingdom of Heaven being something within you, something you find within you, the pearl of great price, the mustard seed, all this stuff... it's something within you. It spreads in a sense in the outside world, in a sense it takes over the outside world, but it takes over the outside world as a way of looking at things, a way of looking at the outside world, yes. [smiles].

JB - To me, this is dying on one level - it's a Christ image - dying on one level as a person in society, with a persona, a character, the husk of character, and coming alive on a different level, to use that levels metaphor. 

NM - Sure, yes, I think that's right. All Christian imagery is struck through with this dying to come alive imagery. And if it is taken on a very simple level, talking of literal death and resurrection and heaven, possibly this is the point, but no one knows about that, no one can have experience about that. Who knows what happens after death? It's not worth going on about, because no one knows about it. But what one can know, and what one can experience, if one practices it, is the idea, yes, of dying on certain levels, husks of one's personality dropping off and something new happening, and then that in turn becoming a husk, so you're always changing. There's no "you" that you just find and you say, That's me. As soon as you say that, then that has to die.

JB - To shift the discussion to evolution, in the animal kingdom there's a feigning of death in or-der to survive. Is what happened at Masada something like that, the survivors were playing a kind of trick.

NM - Well, yes [smiles]. One gets into this tricky area, yes. Now my hero - or my one-level-back hero, Josephus, back in AD 70 - was himself involved in a suicide pact. He was trapped, surrounded by the elders who all wanted a suicide pact, and Josephus tried to get out of it. He said, I'll go and make honourable terms with the Romans; the elders said, No, you must join us; he said, Ok I'll join you. And then the story, as he tells it himself, is that they all drew lots for who should kill who, and he somehow fixed the lots, or he says - he leaves it open - he's writing about himself - he says either he fixed the lots or could it be by chance that it just turned out like this. But it so happened that he and another man held the last two lots - either he was supposed to stab him or...(gestures), but then these two came to some gentleman's agreement not to kill one another and handed themselves over to the Romans and made terms for themselves - which they thought honourable, but which the people who killed themselves would not have thought honourable.

   Now this again, in the old way of looking at it, the old romantic-tragic way of looking at things, is the action of a traitor. But in the evolutionary way, it is the action of a very sensible person. As you say, there are all these tricks that animals in nature do to stay alive - they camouflage themselves, pretend to be sticks of wood, or pretend to be other animals, they put on colouring of a poisonous animal to scare off things when they themselves are not poisonous. To stay alive in evolution living beings resort to endless tricks. Humans have got this consciousness, or conscience, according to which this is often supposed to be a bad thing - you're not supposed to do tricks, to “cheat” or something [smiles]. Well now, this is a serious question, because human beings have evolved this idea of honour and truth and it is a bad thing to cheat, and this is also a part of evolution; this is what has been evolved by all the trickery, this consciousness that it is a bad thing to cheat. So there's no one overall rational answer to this, that it is never proper to cheat, or that it is always under any circumstances proper to cheat. And the task that has been put upon human beings by consciousness is to judge these matters, what to do in the [particular] context. And you don't judge this rationally, you judge it by some informed instinct. You have to learn... I say “have to,” but this is a stupid phrase, isn't it... if you can, if this is how things work out, then one learns a sort of style in which, with luck and with hope, one will do some trick in circumstances when it seems right to do a trick and one won't in such circumstances as when it doesn't seem right to do a trick. But this is... this use of the word “right” depends on what you've learned, what you're trying out; it is an open question, you're always learning what the word “right” in this context means. And you learn it by practicing it and seeing what you've done wrong, or that other people have got it wrong. It's an instinct. But then, a lot of animal life in evolution is to do with the creation of instinct, the use of instinct, and this is what human beings have to learn, bearing in mind what they are, which is things which presumably want to stay alive and, secondly, that they have got this in-built sense of honour and right and wrong, and they can't escape it without grave injury to themselves. So they have got to find what is and what is not an injury to themselves, and what is lively to themselves. They've got to find it by trying it out here and there. [smiles]