A Humument, page 1
The first page of Tom Phillips’ A Humument is emblematic of the entire work. Textually and graphically it touches on some of the book’s central concerns and provides clues to certain of its mysteries.
It begins with the epigraph, “volume And / side I shall lie / bones my bones,” which is significant in many regards. First of all it reveals the dualistic nature of the book, which is made up of both a “volume” and a “side,” and further suggests that the two share an underlying structure. This is of course the case as A Humument was “written through” W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document. The use of the first person implies that the work itself is speaking here and thus that the book is its own narrator, in other words that we are dealing with a metatext. The verb “to lie” is interesting for its ambiguity: it could be “lie” as in an epitaph (“Here Lies…”), and that is in fact the sense of this passage in Mallock’s text, p. 367); of course it could also be “to lie” as in to not tell the truth, that it is a question of a fiction. Finally, the fact that this textual fragment was taken from p. 9 and collaged in here (and will be reprised in slightly altered form on p. 367), also foregrounds the collage technique that is both a method and a theme of the work. Thus the epigraph explains and demonstrates an essential quality of the book.
Next comes the title, which appears just above that of its source text: A Human Document. The crossed out letters demonstrate Phillips’ m.o.: A Humument was made by highlighting certain words and letters of the source text and concealing others. The fact that the title of Phillips work appears above that of Mallock’s further suggests that the former was superimposed onto the latter in the manner of a palimpsest, which indeed A Humument is.
The text of the introduction gives additional details about the type of book we shall be reading: it is a work of conceptual art (“a book of art, of mind art”) created by appropriation via the process mentioned above (“that which he hid reveal I”). This is supported graphically by the two word-strings superimposed on the image of a box as if they have been extracted from it, which they have. The arrow pointing right metaphorically suggests that the present work is moving beyond or breaking out of the box (of the original work, of the traditional book, of traditional notions of originality and authorship), and pictographically tells the reader that he or she should now move on to the following page.
Thus from the start the reader is made aware of the book’s nature, its intertext, and the method used to create it.
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Addendum [3.19.10]
Tom Phillips has indicated to me that the bardic opening line – “The following sing I” – is an allusion to the first line of Virgil’s Æneid: “Arma virumque cano” [“Arms and the man I sing”], a humorously ironic beginning of classical epic proportion for, as he put it, a “little book.”
Continue “Reading ‘A Humument’ ”
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Tagged: A Humument, appropriation, intertextuality, Tom Phillips, W.H. Mallock
