Judith

Catastrophe Practice #4

by Nicholas Mosley

Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. We learn of her involvement with drugs and increasing self-delusion. After a crack-up, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and possibly mad guru. But what is at the back of appearances; how calculated is the self-destructiveness from which a new order might emerge?

Genres: Fiction, British Literature

298 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 1986

About the author

Nicholas Mosley was educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in Italy during World War II, and published his first novel, Spaces of the Dark, in 1951. His book Hopeful Monsters won the 1990 Whitbread Award.

Mosley was the author of several works of nonfiction, most notably the autobiography Efforts at Truth and a biography of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, entitled Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judith is a psychedelically baroque novel full of unexpected quirks.
There is a road between sanity and madness and Judith walks it from start to finish.
The tale begins as an epistolary novel – Judith is writing a letter or maybe it is a diary or probably all this is just in her head…

I suppose this is one of the things it should be difficult to write about, women in stories having got used to seeing themselves as victims – I mean, in stories written by women. Of course, there are those phantoms with snakes in their hair in stories written by men. Perhaps everyone gets a kick out of seeing themselves as a victim.

The path is meandering and narrow and it goes deeper and deeper into the thicket of one’s consciousness…

This had to be accepted: it was impossible to observe objectivity without objectivity being affected by that by which it was observed.

And Judith sequentially finds herself as a heroine of histrionic dramas; as a mistress in the embraces of a mysterious lover; as a delirious drugs addict; as a figure in the paintings of antique scenes; as a visitor in an ashram which she sees as a garden in Eden…

I don’t know how much you know (you, who bump into these letters, these messages, on your way through the maze) about this commune thing, this ashram thing, this Garden thing: you who presumably (or why are you here?) have some interest in ways within the maze. What was known as the Garden was an ashram, or commune, set up on the shore of this hot sea: a thousand or so people lived and worked here; they tried to find, to build, to heal themselves; having come half-way round the world and in as it were at the back way. The maze was in their minds; they had become lost; what distinguished them from others was that they had known they were lost: if you do not know this, how can you know that you are in a maze? People who came to the Garden were like dogs or cats who had had tin cans tied to their tails; they had gone round and round; the tin cans were echoes from their past such as, perhaps, the sounds of bodies falling from windows.

Then she becomes a character amongst villains, wolves and witches in the frightening modern fairytale…

I was going further into the forest. I thought – I am like Red Riding Hood going to visit her grandmother: of course Red Riding Hood knew her grandmother was a wolf! why else would she have gone to visit her?

The insane dwell in the very solipsistic world – everything that happens in their heads is their reality.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Encompasses all the worst aspects of Mosley’s writing. Judith is a female character with the voice of an upper-class Cambridge philosophy professor who speaks (and thinks) in quasi-profound and lyrical phrases—representing reality is not Mosley’s agenda, however this narrative voice is beyond ludicrous with its relentless intruding thought-bubbles, insanely awful dialogue, and failure to create a small semblance of realism on which to graft the surreal philosophical digressive narrative in which he indulges. Excessive and awkward repetition of the central metaphors and maxims pop up like unwanted gophers needing to be twatted into submission by Chevy Chase, and despite an amusing first part (satirising coteries of foul actors), the turn into waffling ashram mysticism and biblical philophastering and a baffling dreamlike section in a bomb-testing site near a pub (with a trapped child?), makes the novel unbearable, as all the characters tend to blur into the same voice (the default Mosley narrator). Nick’s mind is a fertile play area for wannabe thinkers and plenty of his musings are interesting and fascinating—shame these absorb and eat into the novel we were promised on the title page. This was followed up by Hopeful Monsters—a superior work that has the same stylistic tics but to less flesh-tearing annoyance.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

After having read 'Hopeful Monsters', I shied away from Nicholas Mosley for many years. The book was a work of genius. I was afraid that I would be disappointed by whatever else from his pen and then his stature would be diminished and my appreciation for the 'Monsters' would be tainted. So I reread that book, once, twice. But recently I decided to give it a go. I jumped headlong into 'Judith', another volume from the Catastrophe Practice series (of which 'Monsters' forms the grand finale).

I am happy to report that Mosley didn't let me down. 'Judith' is a weirder, more kaleidoscopic story than 'Hopeful Monsters' but it retraces a similar pattern. What Mosley, it seems, is trying to do is to capture a particular feeling, a 'Lebensgefühl', that is almost impossible to express in words.

"What one has to get used to, I suppose, is living and not just striving like this: chipping at the stone: being at home with what is there; watching with reverence in this strange territory. Not asking what it is - or how can you find it? Of course the language is difficult. It has to circle itself; at the centre there is silence."

It is a state of grace in which one balances on the cusp of detachment and involvement, in which one is both helpless and in control. It is the temper of the child at play, of the actor who hovers between acting and being truly and deeply himself on stage, of the artist who is able to forfeit expectations and puts everything on the line when tackling a new work.

"The experience does seem to be aesthetic. Have you not often said - One should know what to do, or rather do without exactly knowing, in the same way that one knows, or at least does, about a painting or a piece of writing."

The image of the playing child reminds us of Nietzsche's Zarathustra and, indeed, one might say that Mosley is trying to grasp the essence of the 'Free Spirit', the freethinker, and ultimately the Übermensch who, joyfully, commits to an 'amor fati', an endless cycle of creation and destruction.

"Humans have this drive to commit themselves, to give themselves over, to a cause, to a god, a fatherland, a lover. They join groups, parties, armies, treadmills; their aim is to become identified, loyal, fixed, all-of-a-piece. It is scarcely bearable to be something blown about on your own. To be alone and be yourself is to know some great hollow at the centre; this can be the terror that there is the drive to fill; it can also be used, of course, to make music."

This way of being in the world comes with an emptiness and an openness for 'whatever might be around some corner' and it creates a space where a particular set of mutations might emerge. These 'hopeful monsters' bring new worlds into being, they set on us a new and unpredictable course. It is, by the way, with these sudden shifts in systems' behaviour that the mathematical 'catastrophe theory' is concerned.

"He said: 'What is a hopeful monster?' He pushed the bowl of milk toward the sheep. I said 'It's when something is born which things outside are not quite ready for. Or perhaps they might just about be ready; that is the hope."

This has ultimately to do with life, with adaptiveness and resilience in the face of potentially hostile conditions; it has to do with risk of total annihilation (the bomb, the climate), but even more it has to to with hope.

"Structures change through chance mutation - then through the business of whether a mutation lives or dies. What lives is suited to an environment. It is the conventional, by definition, who are usually suited to an environment. So most mutations die. But if an environment changes, then of course it is the conventional who may die."

"What is happening now is something of the kind that happened two thousand five hundred years ago: either humans will make a leap, a quantum leap, in their consciousness of the world and of themselves- or they will die. But this time, if they do not, they will be destroyed."

Both 'Judith' and 'Hopeful Monsters' are pervaded with a deep sense of reverence and gratitude.

"I thought - I have loved life so much! How indeed can I show am I grateful? It was as if we were dancing on this riddle; bits and old pieces of us fell through: we were supported, delicately, on bars of light ... "

Mosley is a mystic, and his language is the language of a mystic: incantatory, elliptical, occasionally cryptic, full of sudden shifts of perspective, peppered with rethorical questions that tear holes in the narrative. It's not a refined, musical prose; rather it comes across as deliberately stilted and askew. And yet it radiates with a deeply humane sense of fragility and courage. Few writers are able to take humanity's predicament at the dawn of the 21st century so clear-eyed by the root.

"The discipline is in the faith: you do not know what, but you know that: there has to be also, I suppose (how can you say this!), courage, skill; the skill being perhaps in knowing how to say - Ah, skill, how can you say that! So you let yourself go; with diligence, with pain, and then suddenly - by neither accident nor design; you have been blown round some corner - there is this extraordinary landscape."


Edvard Munch, Sunrise, 1911-1916

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to write about Nicholas Mosley’s fiction. Toward the end of this, the fourth in his Catastrophe Practice series, the narrator suggests that another character once said (nothing is straightforward in Mosleyland), “Ecstasy and despair are the only two emotions worth having.”

With Mosley, there is near despair about man’s destructiveness, with only a touch of hope. The ecstasy is in his style, his metaphors, his perspectives, and the way he gets you to think.

Mosley does repetition as well as anyone, but it’s more special. And yet it’s also too much. Mosley’s metaphors are incredible. His way of mixing thought and speech cannot be explained; it can only be experienced. His way of constantly questioning, of so many statements being at the same time questions, is thought-provoking in a way no one else’s writing is. And yet enough already with the questions.

The experience of reading Mosley is similar to what his characters are experiencing: wonder, uncertainty, ecstasy, despair. And lots of lots of thinking about life and what we hope to get out of it.

Everything that makes Mosley’s writing great also makes it somewhat annoying. Mosley walks a tightrope, and this reader sometimes put this novel down wondering if he could go on. Upon picking it up again later, he wondered how he could even have considered giving it up. One metaphor, one fresh thought extinguishes the feeling. Until it returns.

This is my fourth Mosley novel, and second from this series (I started at the end, with the amazing Hopeful Monsters). Between novels I forget how special the experience of reading him is. And yet I need some time off between them.

I don’t understand why Mosley isn't lionized all over the world. One review of this novel so far? What are literate people looking for? This is a reading experience like no other. This is what you should hope to get out of a reading life. Or is it?

[Rob Walter]

Beautifully written characters, who lead meandering lives and struggle to make sense of the world around them.