Impossible Object, Nicholas Mosley, 1968
What is Mosley’s Impossible Object, one may ask. What Impossible Object does one arrive at, at the finish of Mosley’s novel?
My excitement is palpable, as I sit down to answer this question an hour and a half before the in-class discussion of the assignment for my Experimental Fiction class with Jason Schwartz.
The Impossible Object is life itself, or personhood itself, or sanity itself, or love itself, or, wait, I think understanding itself, or knowledge itself, or all of these practical things intended to guide us through these illusory human-centered lives in which we are, really, no different than creatures. There are things we should abide by, being human and all, but there are also these wild, complex, ruminatory minds bent to the highest form of savagery. We kill each other in war, and then, in education, we are asked to understand why. We are structured for self-sabotage—I think that is Mosley’s point. His novel is structured in 8 connected short stories—or, rather, connected scenes—each beginning with a separate multiple pages of abstract and imaginative context surrounding the novel’s themes, which I identify as love, selfishness, duality, madness, and meaning.
If my answer didn’t do it for you, Mosley has one too. “The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one’s hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.” This is page 175 of 176. Mosley does a wild thing in which he has us locked in to his imaginative, experimental, slightly deranged prose world before we hit the end and understand that none of it was meant to make sense—that he wrote this because he is plagued, with the rest of us, trying to make sense of the impulses which make us human, which also make us bad.
I will have to get to campus soon, but I was so taken by Mosley’s first story that I must give my interpretation before I get my class’s scaffolding.
Family Game (Story 1)
There is a father with three sons—he is the novel’s main character. Early on, he says this about his children, which I think is a great precursor to what the novel explores:
“Children do not speak to each other much in front of adults. They wait with eyes cast down like people who have committed murder and are being interrogated. Their crime is deeper than love or happiness; something from their birth, and about what will become of them” (Mosley 13)
So humans are born with shame, an original sin; we are destined to become monstrous.
The father is conscious of his son’s girlfriend while at family dinner. He notes her prettiness, her demureness, her legs. Afterward, the father plays hide and seek in the dark with them, some neighbors, and his other two sons. Mosley introduces the game thusly; “The game in the cellar was a hide-and-seek in the dark in which there was one catcher and the rest were his victims” (Mosley 16). What a way to characterize a man’s inclination to violence.
In the dark, the girlfriend puts her head on his shoulder. The prose becomes wild; his mind is racing, and he even admits to the reader that he’s not certain of what is true or what is perceived. But he is surely lusting over her, this fourteen year old girl; he is thinking he could take her and disappear, he is thinking his son will be jealous. As this is happening, the basement lights are turned on and off, and then there is screaming about a body on the floor. The man is slow to acknowledge this, as he is stuck in his arousal about the young girl.
When he comes out of his reverie, the young girl is dead on the ground—has been electrocuted by the light.
The story is up to our interpretation. We do not know what happened, but I believe this: she put her head on his shoulder because she was falling, and in the movements of her dying, he imagined she was coming onto him.
The man tries to revive her with mouth-to-mouth, manhandling her and touching her with the violence he had dreamed of. “I was holding her with my fingers round her ribs and my thumbs squeezing her…I knew I should turn her over and kiss her” (Mosley 24). Except now, as his desire has been consummated, she is dead. That is the point here—man’s desire killed the woman (but, to be clear, she is literally fourteen). The sickest line is this: “I had wondered if she had touched the wires wanting darkness or light” (Mosley 25).
A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People (Story 2)
The third person POVs swap from Mr. and Mrs. Mostyn in equal conversation. They are guessing over the other person’s intentions, and have an ulterior motive for a power struggle. This is the theme of selfishness—or how love is filled with selfishness.
The two are reeling after an argument the night before, both wanting to have sex, but not wanting to make the first move. Their desires are not about each other, but they are about how most to hurt one another. It is as if how well they can hurt each other determines how well they can love each other.
The Sea (Story 8)
The last story brings us back around. It is in the voice of the man’s mistress, who he left his wife for when he and she became pregnant. The novel as a whole surrounds this affair.
They are connecting their families, he and his three sons, her and her young daughter, and their baby. At a hotel on a sea in Africa, she is becoming fond of his children, fascinated by the way he tries to impress them, and intends to be friends with them. We believe her because we have seen him be this character in “Family Game.”
They are out on the sea sailing, and she is closely holding her baby. His children convince him to sail into a dangerous area, and as he is a pushover, he does. Remember we are in the woman’s point of view; she is filled with fear, holding her baby. There are a long few pages of everybody’s movements, surviving victoriously when the danger hits, which the woman observes in terror. After the scene is over, when the adrenaline falls, the prose relaxes, and it becomes apparent that the baby is no longer there.
The man tells her not to blame herself for their infant’s death. “I knew that he always thought that life could be refashioned and go on, but I thought that it should not. There are some things for which one cannot be forgiven” (Mosley 174).
There is human nature, there are things out of our control. There are flukes of nature and, despite that, we are at fault, because that is the nature of being human.
Recorded live from Experimental Fiction course with Jason Schwartz at FAU (CRW 6024-001 21492) (things in quotations are things said by my Professor)
“Is it a novel? A work of fiction—is that a better way to put it? A collection of stories with an italicized interface of stories?” “A novel in stories; interconnected stories.”
“The drama of consciousness” — creating stakes
These stories are written as if by “doppelgangers,” some are written by himself as a writer, and some are written by the writer of the story that is written. So there are multiple layers to the story.
The chronology is not straightforward—the narrative in “A Morning in the LIfe of Intelligent People” comes after the events of “The Sea.”
Mosley relies heavily on similes—outlandish similes which make “the texture of the book.” They show the reader that “everything is something else.” Professor uses an example from “Family Game”; “her eyelashes were like bee-stings.”
My take on his reliance on similes are that they lend to his strangeness. His madness, his imagination, and his loss of reality are key to the novel’s themes. They show his weird mind connection, and his weird structures of seeing the world. He makes uncanny linguistic connections. It doesn’t feel like his similes are meant to make the meaning clearer for the reader, but to make the meaning clearer for himself. This lends to the form of a writer taking his stance as a writer. His own meaning matters to him; that is why he is writing.
More transcriptions from Professor Schwartz:
“Arrangement that we can have it both ways” — in the first story, for example, does the woman really die, or does she become a character in a later story? It can be interpreted differently—my interpretation, actually, is much different than other students who spoke. But I am still convinced of mine.
“The fracturing of character is obviously a central feature here” – the sexualization of women, the women being alluded to Cleopatra—are they all the same woman, or does he see them all as Cleopatra, in the same, sexual way?
“To see everything at once…to fracture your characters…how can you actually see someone whole? Well, you can’t.”
“We are all in different points of view…breaking a character up is part of what we do.” Think about alternate endings in films.
“She appeared to be seen from two directions at once—both full-face and in profile. The Egyptians had painted like this; with the legs and the head sideways and the body straight to the front. You can only get the whole of a person by this sort of art, deception” (Mosley 86).
“Why is Nietzsche referred to all the time? Because of this idea of “eternal recurrence.” This is Nietzsche’s “idea that your life, along with every event, joy, and sorrow in the universe, will repeat itself in the exact same sequence for an eternity” (this was a google search, by the way). Mosley gets at this too.
What happens in the italicized section?
“Little pockets where he can put his weirdest stuff, but that doesn’t mean it’s not related.”
Last one: “I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started…” — a letter to a lover; everything here was a performance.
“But even when the curtain comes down, that isn’t the end of it. What is the reaction of the audience?”
