Thinking about and articulating what Nicholas Mosley is doing is like trying to occupy a mental no-man's-land, an area of experience over which conceptual battles are fought but which is known to theory only by what it is not.  If we first enlist the armies of theory - social, psychological, hermeneutic - in the study of his writings we will succeed only in pushing the ineffable back to known frontiers.  We will have made of his work a territory of the sort for which we already have maps. This is part of the process of understanding and analysis, but I think that if we do this alone then we will not invade or even isolate that mental no-man's-land.  Instead I suggest that we begin by accepting his campaign as revisionary.  We do know about the function and normative force of theory and methodology, that they order the ontology according to what they are able to denote and, interacting and layered in a cognitive network, constitute our conceptual scheme.  Thus it would seem advisable to approach Mosley's writings by first trying to grasp the nature of his beliefs about the ineffable - both what it is that theory has not yet captured and, possibly, what there might be which is both knowable, part of public experience, and yet is by its nature beyond the frontier of theorizing.  We might be guided by his figurative language, but this is not to allow at the beginning that we are concerned with mental territory and experience which is only penetrable with metaphor.  At one extreme there is metaphor frozen into virtual literalness; at the other extreme there are expressions so idiosyncratic as to be virtually private. Thus it would not be a victory to say in conclusion that metaphor is the language of thinking, or of course to characterize Mosley's thinking in the terms of his characteristic metaphor. Still, his figurative language might helpfully be pressed into service on this meta-theoretic level:  If our conduct is a strategy aimed at self-preservation, our language part of the weaponry used for defence or attack, then our words, like bullets, only rarely hit their targets bang-on; rather, they glance off objects, as off the smooth surface of Bert's pond in Imago Bird, ricocheting to an effect somewhere else.  In the effort to understand such trajectories we do not look back toward the marksman's intentions but outward along the path of public effects - this is how language impinges on experience, what we are trying to understand.  What follows is a brief reconnaissance of the no-man's-land.

       It seems that almost all of Mosley's public writings contain passages which raise questions about language use. I am not referring to theses so complex that they would be identified with the themes of particular books, as, for example, The Rainbearers and Religion and Experience would be taken to imply and illustrate a thesis about religious language. I am also disregarding passages which would be of interest to the literary critic just because of their "stylistic" features - e.g., that a passage is Faulknerian, or elliptical, and so on.  Obviously his literary language is partly a function of his views of language in general; the problem of that mental no-man's-land is just that there seem to be important things which are occasionally being exhibited in the fiction but which have not been captured in his discursive writing,  Here, then, is a sampling of passages and themes which seem to call for explanation.

1. Although the main story of Spaces of the Dark (1951) has so much to do with postwar England, it does foreshadow many of the themes of the most recent work.  One central implication is that the world is mad, mesmerized by empty words and causes. Truth is a matter of what is felt, what is shown in committed action.  Here Paul, who understands little German, is leaning over a dying German soldier who is speaking unintelligibly  "....but with such deliberation that I began to believe that I could understand him myself, believing with him and memorizing his statement although there was nothing to memorize; and I felt with him suddenly the precise importance of him holding me in the darkness and trying to convey something that perhaps could only be conveyed because it was unintelligible, believing something that he felt it necessary for me to believe in because it was otherwise incommunicable."  Thus the speech achieves its point - a testament of faith, imparting it to Paul - precisely because it was unintelligible.  (If we can infer that the soldier had this intention then we might suspect that he has been resurrected in Catastrophe Practice!)

2. A recurrent theme in the fiction is stated clearly in Experience and Religion: A central paradox of the human condition is that language is both the "stuff of life" and a confusion, seldom adequate to our higher purposes.²  These would at least include self-knowledge, self-expression, and moral action, but in each case language - for the most part literal, as it comes to us in discursive writing and speech - appears to work against us.  It most effectively represents persons as consistent, indistinguishable from the public facade.  Thus in the fiction there are all those examples of discontinuity between what is happening (public and private) and the language. This is part of another pervasive theme, that experience itself is paradoxical, good sometimes coming from evil, and the passion of love being mixed with doubt.  Language aggravates this by continually presenting us with a formulation of the contrary; if we do not master this, making of it a dialectic at least, then we are its victims.  In ethics the ordinary injunctions do not connect with the moral sense, what is needed in circumstances where injunctions conflict or fail to fit.  Moral consciousness is evoked by the parable, which is a careful not-saying of what ought to be done.  Moreover, true feeling is but rarely expressed in statements, which are part of a strategy; "I love you" is too likely to be reassurance or coercion, whereas the proper language of love is more like "Awa awa goo goo."

3. These effects of language are best combatted by our learning to manipulate them. Apparently Mosley shifted his attention to this sometime between Corruption (1957) and Accident (1965), though not exactly in Meeting Place (1962}.  There is some hope for Robert at the end of Corruption: evidently he is still boggled by the potentials of language but he at least sees behind its illusions.³  In Accident Stephen-Charlie is almost too good at getting what he wants through language, having the skills to keep up the public face - and thus some freedom - but perhaps at first not the knowledge and feeling to direct him to right ends, the power of the tongue being a kind of seduction.  But after Accident, all of the protagonists come to a more complete appreciation of their complexity.  Having dissolved the conventional notion of character they are now like pure consciousness, "particles with velocity but no location,"⁴ in Impossible Object exploring the usefulness of illusion, trying to generate contexts in which there will once again be meaning and passion.  Anthony Greville, in Natalie Natalia, creates with speech a facade behind which he is able to maneuver toward the truth, "what is really happening" necessarily being somewhere between and behind words on some different level.⁵

       Here I would like to attend not to the uses of language within the stories - the protagonists' language - but rather to Mosley's literary language, for the central themes of these books have as much to do with what is not said in the text as with what is said.  There is a remarkable phenomenon here, a kind of parallelism or interfusion of three things: what the protagonist is thinking and saying; what the reader is thinking and saying; and the theme. I think this is achieved to an almost magical intensity in some passages of Impossible Object and Natalie Natalia.  The most common term for this sort of effect would be "immediacy," suggesting that the protagonist's consciousness comes to replace the reader's, or vice versa.⁶  It is dependent upon contingent matters - who the reader is, the attitude, the number of words read - but I suspect that it is essentially an all-or-nothing affair, like grasping those illustrations of impossible objects or of figure-ground relationships.  This is not something which you can be told about; it has to be done for you, like sleight of hand.  At first it seems that the mechanics of it might be straightforward.Mosley establishes a rhythm of shifts between the protagonist's public voice, his private voice, and his interlocutor's voice.  Sentences tend to be short, impressionistic, to facilitate uptake and to eliminate the expectation of literalness.  Descriptions are dropped in favour of the idiom of direct acquaintance, pronouns and lexicals.  Then links between the protagonist's public voice and his interlocutor's public voice are stretched farther and farther, making the reader more avid for hints in the protagonist's private voice.  Here, possibly, the protagonist himself stumbles, expressing uncertainty, perhaps wonder, which gives the reader some hope and a feeling of camaraderie, or, at the very least, some liveliness of mind.  But the protagonist's next utterance does continue the dialogue, not in a way that the reader could have foreseen, but in a way that he immediately grasps, for, after all, the protagonist and his motives are not unknown to him. This process continues, the thread of the dialogue stretched farther and farther, the reader having to participate more and more in order to make of the various voices some coherence, until . . . well . .   some resonance: perhaps an utterance which perfectly captures some distant conjecture which the reader has made about the course of the dialogue, even perhaps a conjecture which the reader would not have been sure he had had until he read it in the text.

       Unfortunately, this is like saying that it is done with mirrors.  We pack what is mysterious into metaphor, or sidle up to it with expressions which in this context become almost equally opaque ("private voice,  "grasp").  This is an area in which we have to try to bring to bear what is known about the expressing of thought - in modes direct and indirect, in contexts of varying degrees of epistemological complexity, and in layers of varying reflexivity.  Obviously we will not find out much about the mechanics of immediacy without having a care for this.  At the same time it is important to add that in such an investigation we would not be looking only for the means by which the content of the protagonist's consciousness is given.  It seems that Mosley intends to generate a sense of the tension in that consciousness, this being a means of demonstrating that there is an area in which we have some freedom. In short, the literary device is intimately connected with a complex psychological-epistemological view of thinking and interaction.

4. In the sixties thinkers like R. D. Laing and Erving Goffman gave up the last of the "coherent self" in exchange for something describable only as the function of certain linguistic and behavioral interactions.  It seems that for Mosley this opened new horizons, both making it possible for people to distance themselves from the models and patterns which were destructive, and providing the means - a more sophisticated conception of the relationship between language and conduct - for creating something more hopeful.  Interactions approaching this are exhibited in several parts of Imago Bird, just noted quickly here--

a) Bert witnesses scenes between his parents and between his Uncle Bill and Mrs.Washbourne which we might describe, with Gregory Bateson,⁷ as being conducive to the developing of schizophrenia.  In some sense Bert is a victim of these scenes, however Mosley has reframed the experience as something far more promising, the scenes becoming both demonstrations of a kind of survival skill and at the same time, because they force Bert into detachment, causes of the kind of mental stance which will incline Bert to develop the skill.  Whether we allow that this is a benefit -a virtue - depends in part upon how we construe questions of truth and value.  Of that scene where Bert's father is caught with the girl under the apple tree, we may say not that his parents are dodging "the truth," lying, in order to maintain a front, a deception, but rather that they are constituting the event in such a way that it generates intimacy and understanding instead of alienation and destruction.  Instead of saying that they are hiding behind their words in a charade to hide the truth, as a simplistic dramaturgical model suggests, we would say that they are standing behind their words - choosing them, giving them authority - in a conspiracy to create of the event something true.

b) A similar reorientation is suggested in other scenes where someone is liberated from a trap, a tactic that will not work: Bert and Sylvia in their bathrooms; Bert and Sally Rogers with Tammy Burns; Bert with Dr. Anders, and during the final recognition scene.  This is like grabbing the Zen Master's stick, using words to maneuver what is happening into some other category, or, in one sanguine view of psychoanalysis, facilitating a non-pathological reframing of experience.

5. The image of speech like bullets recurs in that scene of the Young Trotskyites' Meeting where Brian Alick (who might be an agent of the Aesthetic Revolution!) is using language as a weapon.   The theme of evolution and natural selection is here too, and Bert's apparently disconnected thoughts are reminiscent of Catastrophe Practice.  He demonstrates a kind of liveliness of mind which makes of the immediate events a seed-bed of possibilities, enabling him to discover - in a manner which is, as we would say, partly fortuitous - a different kind of connectedness.  Turning from Brian Alick's speech, which would paralyze the mind, Bert sees Judith, who it seems has been wanting him to turn.  Thus, to suggest one unraveling of the relationships here, Brian Alick's speech and Bert's response are both obstacles to Bert and Judith meeting as well as the cause of that meeting and the circumstances which make it particularly auspicious.  The whole can be taken as an elegant illustration of the complexities of relationship which are glossed over with terms such as "cause," "coincidence," "intention," and "understanding."  The effect of this is to draw attention to the variety of ways in which "what is happening" might be constituted and, as regards language, perhaps to undermine the notion that linguistic exchange is the fulcrum of communication and understanding, for it may be that ultimately the forces at work in interaction cannot be plotted and described.

6. Mosley's discursive writing about language is extremely stimulating but, as he has remarked himself, we do not have suitable means for talking about what he is after.  One of his best attempts is in that essay for Landfall [in Catastrophe Practice] where he refers to the "sleight-of-mind" involved in dealing with statements which are in a metalanguage and somehow reflexive, crossing between levels of language and levels of consciousness.⁹ However, I think the model of language which is employed here - essentially spatial, hierarchical, referential - is helpful only to a limited extent, largely because this idiom belongs to the study of artificial languages and is invoked there precisely to avoid the complexities of self-reference which Mosley seems to be trying to characterize. There are similar problems with the "levels" idiom invoked in the study of language-in-use and learning.  These idioms seem to structure experience, making it tractable to theory, but I believe that very often they instead make chaos of it, in the end blinding us to what we are trying to see.  It is easy to disregard the fact that language is only one factor in a communicational network which is also non-linguistic and meta-communicational and reflexive. Language-in-use and consciousness are not themselves stratified but are a kind of given which can be organized according to various models.  The grammar of models involves not only a richer notion of "aboutness" than simple reference but also the notions of "fit" and appropriateness, which are more suited to capturing the analogical processes in thinking and interaction.  (The "code" simile suits Mosley's themes beautifully, both because it initiates the search for a key and leads to those superb jokes and metaphors, and also because it is a way of characterizing language in general, something which, being patterned, contains the key to its own decipherment.)

       I have tried to intimate how Mosley's views of language might be revisionary. This is difficult because the shifts in the view of language, seemingly minor in themselves, radiate outward like waves, forcing almost everything else that there is - everything that is now in the ontology of theory - into some new equilibrium. The fear and the boast of metaphysicians is that their revisions have been known to us all along - making life possible!- only not articulated.  In the revision some things go under, other things come to the surface,  There are pleasing ironies here. The thrust of much of Mosley's writing seems to be that the locus of truth is not in sentences and statements but in a different category altogether, approachable in language only along some odd tangent.  This is not to make truth "relative" but to acknowledge that sentences or statements are not true in isolation from their context.  A more distant implication is that the most interesting notion of truth - the one which is relevant in those areas of life which matter most to us - can only be comprehended if we try to come to terms with that area of consciousness in which the relationship between our language, our context, and ourselves is apprehended. Clearly this is one of the major themes of the fiction.  But another way of approaching Mosley's concerns would be to begin by saying that statements are the carriers of truth and then to ask how this is possible.  This is where we would mobilize what is known about the processes through which language successfully both captures and reveals our beliefs, feelings, and motives.

       Let me at least try to indicate the direction of the inquiry.  I think that when we allow that a person has understood a piece of language, or used a piece of language successfully, we are recognizing a relationship which is more complex than that between a person and a string of words, or a particular proposition, or, say, a speech-act.  The piece of language, in and by its being understood, both constitutes and reflects the context of its appropriateness.  This is a difficult formulation because I have tried to refer to so many factors all at once, however such a formulation might also be helpful if it manages to impart a sense of so much happening all at once as we understand.  Such a view also entails that there is a sense in which events are created by being "framed" in language.  The term is Goffman's, borrowed here because it suggests the extent to which language is implicated in our structuring of the world.  To appreciate this we need only examine that process of exchanging and honoring (producing and accepting) reports on one another's cognitive and perceptual states,  It is apparent that it is only through this process that our separate states, our separate understandings of what there is, become accessible and verifiable - in short, it is only through this that we acknowledge (both constituting and reflecting!) a common world.

       This path does lead back to Mosley's fiction,  First to the pond and the apple tree and those words like bullets:  we might at least learn the shape of no-man's-land - what is ineffable behind the eyes or, possibly, between us - by inferring from where our bullets have gone what they must have bounced off in order to get there!  In speaking we listen for the echo which comes back true.¹⁰  Now there is even a visual model - the holographic image which is both there and here, reconstituted each time by our knowing the trajectories and ricochets of light rays.  These are the processes of understanding which Mosley is inviting us to test (and in the testing, to note) in the later fiction, particularly in the Plays for Not Acting. Amidst the continual framing and reframing, and the hunting for what is recognizable, we might become infected with Mosley's style and sense the true power of the word, which is to create - is it magic if the metaphor can bear us? - worlds for one another. Conspiring with such freedom we may just be able to fashion something in our own best image.

                                                                                                                                                     John Banks 1982
-------------------
NOTES

1. Nicholas Mosley, Spaces of the Dark (London:  Hart Davis, 1951), p. 119.
2. Nicholas Mosley, Experience and Religion (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1965).
3. Nicholas Mosley, Corruption (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1957).
4. Nicholas Mosley, Impossible Object (London:  Hodder & Stoughton, 1968), p. 147.
5. Nicholas Mosley, Natalie Natalia (New York:  Coward McCann, 1971).  Greville's letters from Africa (pp. 200-228) are especially helpful.
6. There is an aspect of this which is experiential and could never, therefore, be "explained."  An account of the mechanics should include an examination of the conventions of indirect mode reportage and the manner in which these are related to understanding.  I do not know of any other author who has explored this to the same extent.
7. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York:  Ballantine Books,  1972), pp. 206-27.
8. Nicholas Mosley, Imago Bird (London:  Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp. 152-58. Note the parallels between Bert (language) and Tammy (music) and the way in which these lead to Judith, symbolizing a connectedness among things on a different level.
9 Nicholas Mosley, Catastrophe Practice (London:  Secker & Warburg, 1979), p. 91.
10 Nicholas Mosley, The Rainbearers (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1955).  Here it is an echo which comes back wrong that brings about an important redirection of Richard's conduct (pp. 280-82).  I am not using the metaphor in quite the same way.  I wanted to indicate a connection between a practical notion of truth and the process through which projections and expectations are confirmed.