World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Catastrophe Practice

Name: Catastrophe Practice
Author: Nicholas Mosley
ISBN: 9781448211197

by Nicholas Mosley

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Overview

Catastrophe Practice, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive –conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations – and try to find a way to realise genuine experience.

About the Author, Nicholas Mosley

Born in London, Mosley was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford and served in Italy during the Second World War, winning the Military Cross for bravery. He succeeded as 3rd Baron Ravensdale in 1966 and, on the death of his father on 3 December 1980, he also succeeded to the Baronetcy.
His father, Sir Oswald Mosley, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and was a supporter of Benito Mussolini. Sir Oswald was arrested in 1940 for his antiwar campaigning, and spent the majority of World War II in prison. As an adult, Nicholas was a harsh critic of his father in Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933-1980 (1983), calling into question his father's motives and understanding of politics. Nicholas' work contributed to the 1998 Channel 4 television programme titled 'Mosley' based on his father's life. At the end of the mini-series, Nicholas is portrayed meeting his father in prison to ask him about his national allegiance.
Mosley began to stammer as a young boy, and attended weekly sessions with speech therapist Lionel Logue in order to help him overcome the speech disorder. Mosley says his father claimed never really to have noticed his stammer, but feels Sir Oswald may have been less aggressive when speaking to him than he was towards other people as a result.

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Editorials

Library Journal

The three plays and one short novel that make up Catastrophe Practice show humans still fumbling about between two worlds--one dead, the other powerless to be born--that Arnold wrote about. Like Arnold, too, Mosley has great hopes for literature's role in bringing that new world to birth. His characters are all in a hopeful quest for an understanding of themselves and others. This understanding may not alter human nature but is surely a first, necessary step toward changing old behaviors that have brought us near destruction. The philosophy lesson is heavy here; each play has a preface, and the whole ends with a postscript, so the reader who might worry about not getting some absurdist non sequitur or Mosley's efforts to go beyond the limitations of language by using the obscurities of myth need not fear. Four books arose directly from Catastrophe Practice . One of them, Imago Bird , is now being presented in a slightly revised version of the one published in England in 1980. It is an attempt to show who the characters in the plays might be in real life. Thus, Bert, the highly intelligent 18-year-old narrator, is nephew to the prime minister of England. With the help of his psychoanalyst, he tries to make some sense out of the chaotic adult world of politicians, radicals, pop stars, and eccentric relatives that surrounds him. Mosley aims to show that beneath the seemingly real world of appearance is a world of interior experience that language fails adequately to express. Genuinely experimental but wittier and more readable than the plays.-- Laurence Hull, Cannon Memorial Lib., Concord, N.C.