Listening to it, the first thing we notice is that it’s not a soundtrack by Leszek Jankowski, who has composed the music for many of the Quays’ best-known films (Street of Crocodiles [1986], Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies) [1987], The Comb [1990], among others). Rather, it is a sound collage apparently created by the Quays themselves, as the credits at the end of the film are fictitious. They read:

Music: Voz de Drohobycz
Performed by the Blata Gymnazjum Children’s Orchestra
Conducted by Izydor Hoffman
Assist: Nicolas

Aside from “Nicolas,” about whom more later, these are the same people and organizations credited with the music in Stille Nacht I (Dramolet) (where it is La Voz… and Blata Gimnazjum [with an “i“ and not a “y”], however), none of whom actually exist. A clue as to the true nature of the soundtrack is given in the following excerpt from an interview with the Quays conducted by André Habib in 2001:

QUAYS: […] We have all these cassettes of Radio Moscow that we taped off the radio, and we play them occasionally. They create their own spell, with all that static and interference coming over. We put them in Stille Nacht, and in Crocodiles also, there’s a passage. We found out much later, through a Russian friends of ours, that it was a Russian actress speaking. It was a Russian radio drama and the music was done by a Russian composer who lives in Uzbekistan, who wrote these exotic, kitsch pieces. The voice and the static opened up this world. We always thought it was the voice of Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz’s city. It’s actually Muzak. […]

AH: On Stille Nacht the grain of the record is also very powerful.

QUAYS: It’s actually the static from the radio.

Thus the muffled, barely audible female voice (are there more than one?) that we hear throughout Stille Nacht III is the Russian actress and the “exotic, kitsch” music would be by the Russian composer living in Uzbekistan. But what about the male voice we hear in the middle of the film (from 1:38 to 3:05)? Well, that’s where “Nicolas” comes in. Actually, it’s not Nicolas but Nikolai, as in Nikolai Gogol: in fact, the male voice we hear is an actor reading from the latter’s “Майская ночь, или утопленница” [“A May Night or The Drowned Maiden”]. The passage in question is the opening of the first paragraph of second section, “Golova” [“The Mayor”], which reads:

Знаете ли вы украинскую ночь? О, вы не знаете украинской ночи! Всмотритесь в нее. С середины неба глядит месяц. Необъятный небесный свод раздался, раздвинулся еще необъятнее. Горит и дышит он. Земля вся в серебряном свете; и чудный воздух и прохладно-душен, и полон неги, и движет океан благоуханий. Божественная ночь! Очаровательная ночь! Недвижно, вдохновенно стали леса, полные мрака, и кинули огромную тень от себя. […] Знаете ли вы украинскую ночь? О, вы не знаете украинской ночи!

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[Do you know the Ukrainian night? Aie, you do not know the Ukrainian night! Look at it: the moon looks out from the center of the sky; the immense dome of heaven stretches further, more inconceivably immense than ever; it glows and breathes; the earth is all bathed in a silvery light; and the exquisite air is refreshing and warm and full of languor, and an ocean of fragrance is stirring. Heavenly night! Enchanting night! The woods stand motionless, mysterious, full of gloom, and cast huge shadows. […] Do you know the Ukrainian night? Aie, you do not know the Ukrainian night! (Translation: Constance Garnett)]

Note that only the first half of the paragraph has been used, and the opening question and response have been repeated at the end, after a pause.

Why this writer, story, and section? Well, it’s entirely possible that this recording was one of the things the Quays had recorded from Radio Moscow, and that they felt that it fit the film they were making – the actor’s tone of voice is calm and dreamy, and he speaks in an East European (actually Slavic) language, both of which, given the filmmakers’ aesthetic and predilections, add a more than appropriate note to the film. Also, the textual content of the passage in question, like the story itself, does suggest the magical, menacing, fairy-tale world in which the action the film is exploring – a stag being shot in the testicle, thus causing its antlers to grow asymmetrically – could take place: an enchanting, moonlit night, a sky that “glows and breathes,” everything is bathed in “silvery light,” the languorous, scented air which seems to be alive, and of course the mysterious, shadowy, gloom-filled woods.…

It’s interesting also to consider the soundtrack’s circular structure: the opening chord sequence is repeated at the end, just like opening lines of text are repeated again at the end of the passage spoken. Only the music picks up again: the main melody comes back in as if the whole thing were starting over, the implication being that the action will repeat itself, ostensibly ad infinitum. In fact, this was the filmmakers’ intent – they imagined that the anamorphic deer table, a display in the “Archiv Gottinga,” would nightly dream of the accident that resulted in its antlers’ asymmetry and thus of its inclusion there, in an eternal, looping nightmare.

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• André Habib, “Through a Glass Darkly: Interview with the Quay Brothers”
• Николай Гоголь, “Майская ночь, или утопленница”
• Nikolai Gogol, “A May Night or The Drowned Maiden”

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• Zeitgeist Film’s Brothers Quay page

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A Humument, p. 11

As I’ve written (here and here), the opening pages of A Humument serve primarily to establish its status as a conceptual work of art/literature. Over the course of those pages the nature of the coming narrative is also hinted at: we are given a brief glimpse of the story-line (a love story with strong erotic overtones) and are introduced to the following characters, who are listed on page 11 (TE, TPE, FRE, SRE): “the history viola,” “eve,” “edople,” “stan quent,” “sid,” “the human nature general,” and “operation toge.”

One of the interesting things about this list is its sketchiness: a couple of the characters named here (eve and edople) appear only in passing on the coming pages while others (the history viola, stan quent, sid, and the human nature general) do not appear at all. The protagonist of A Humument comes at the end of the list: “operation toge,” though to my knowledge this is the only time he is so named. His “real” name is “bill toge,” though he is often simply called by his surname “toge.” As Phillips has noted in his introduction to A Humunent, that particular combination of letters only appears in English in the words “together” and “altogether,” hence he can only be named on pages on which those words appear. Otherwise, different monikers are used to indicate him (such as “myster t,” or simply “T,” as he is called on p. 6 [AE]), when he is not simply referred to by the pronouns “he” and “him.”

Also interesting is the fact that the other two main characters – Irma and Grenville – do not appear on the list, though Irma may be the woman referred to on p. 2 (AE) as she who is perhaps “over her ankles in the storm and fire and desire of art; and the art of art, and would have given us a humument or two.” (And if we consider her role in both the present book and in Phillips’ opera Irma [on which more later], she has given us a humument or two.) The latter two characters were in fact the main characters of Mallock’s A Human Document, the source of A Humument, but they have withdrawn slightly to leave the center stage to toge, whose story will unfold over the pages of Phillips’ book.

It is tempting, given the nature of A Humument, to read the textual elements of the work as so many unrelated oracular or aphoristic statements. To do so, however, is to deny the narrative qualities of the work and ignore the fact that a story is being told. On the surface, it is the story of toge, Irma, and Grenville. Beneath the surface, it is the story – in the form of a demonstration or in places an anatomy – of literary and artistic creation. The dual narrative reflects the dual nature of the book, a work of both the visual and language arts.

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As A Humument varies from edition to edition, it is necessary to indicate the edition to which I’m referring at any given point. To do so I have adopted the following key:

TPE = Tetrad Press Edition
TE = Trade Edition
FRE = First Revised Edition
SRE/TE = Second Revised Edition / Third Edition
FE = Fourth Edition
AE = All editions

As I hope these pages will demonstrate, A Humument could and should be read both synchronically and diachronically.

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• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

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This paradoxical statement has always puzzled me, especially coming from Borges, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. If ever there was a writer whose work could be considered an “intellectual exercise” it would be him. And of his writings, “Pierre Menard” perhaps more than any other deserves that label – how better to describe a story that, in the midst of an otherwise straightforward parody on literary culture, poses probing questions about the nature of language and meaning, about the respective roles of writers and readers and the ways in which socio-cultural contexts inflect their activities, and finally, about the status of authorship and the necessity, in fact, the very possibility of being “original”? In this heady context, what are we to make of this statement that, on the surface at least, seems to deride the utility of intellectual enquiry?

Well, one way to take the statement is literally, i.e. as a claim that intellectual activity is pointless, though admittedly such an interpretation seems to fly in the face of the story, written in praise of a particularly cerebral exercise: the creation of a work of conceptual literature. Another way to take the statement is, well, also literally, i.e. that intellectual activity is not necessarily useful. This would certainly be the case of Menard’s undertaking (that of Borges’ as well): literary writing serves no practical purpose. As Auden said of poetry, it makes nothing happen.

It’s interesting to consider this latter idea through the prism of a statement made by Darwish. “J’ai longtemps cru que la poésie était une arme,” he wrote. “Et puis j’ai compris qu’un poème ne changeait rien. Rien que la poésie.” [“For a long time I believed that poetry was a weapon. And then I understood that a poem didn’t change anything. Anything other than poetry.”] A literary text may “change nothing” in practical terms, though it can inspire and inform change in aesthetic, artistic, and/or conceptual domains that could ultimately have “real-world” consequences. Such, I believe, is the case of Borges’ “Pierre Menard” (and “The Garden of Forking Paths” and…): it anticipates some of the fundamental questions that underlie postmodern and post-structuralist theories about literature and art, and literary and artistic creation, and offers a re-imagining of the respective roles of authors and readers, that is, of makers and consumers, that is currently being played out in a variety of socio-cultural contexts, not least of all on the “Web 2.0” Internet with its wikis, blogs, mashups, et al.

Borges’ narrator could be right – there may be no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately useless. On the other hand, the conscious exploration of that uselessness may well lead to something useful.

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• “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”
• “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (trans. James E. Irby)

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ProLoop User Interface

(Letting the mind wander, sweep wide, loop back…)

The loop fascinates, whether as idea, object, or aesthetic device. It spurs the mind on, sends it spinning, causes it to wonder: will this ever end?

Technically, it shouldn’t, because the loop = infinity (whose symbol – ∞ – is itself a loop). Among the things that can stop it: the pause button, the fade out, a power failure, exhaustion, boredom, ellipses.…

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In music, the loop is an early motor of compositional dynamism. The round and canon, their technological grandchild the tape loop, and the latter’s relations: the proto- and pseudo-loops (the former orchestral and playerly, like Satie’s Furniture Music, Reich’s many phase pieces, Adams’ Shaker Loops, et al; the latter electronic and virtual, such as old-school “digital delay” effects, the looping feature of programs like Pro Tools and Garage Band, and stand-alone loop players like ProLoop), are all variations on a theme: the perpetual movement machine.

In fact, devices like ProLoop represent an apotheosis of the loop: whereas in most cases the loop is a means to an end, in that of loop players such as this, it is itself the end, the goal being more to work with loops for what they are than to use them for what they add. They go from ornament, as in the The Beatles’ 1966 “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for example, to main event, as in Brian Eno’s “1/2” from his 1978 Ambient 1: Music for Airports, recently reprised in Peter Chilvers and Sandra O’Neill’s iPhone app Air.

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In narrative the loop implies circularity, fatality, self-reflexivity. That Ionesco’s Bald Soprano (and its progeny, Pedro Pietri’s The Masses are Asses) ends as it began suggests that things never change, that everyone is the same or at least interchangeable, that life is a trap. That the end of Robbe-Grillet and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad features the beginning of the play whose ending we saw in the opening scenes implies that the outcome was decided from the beginning, that it was inescapable, that it may be beginning again. The same is true of the Quay Brothers’ Stille Nacht III (Tales from Vienna Woods), whose ending is a replay of the central event of the film – a bullet grazing the testicle of a deer effigy – and thus represents the eternalizing of that action. Not unlike night 602 of the 1,001 Nights as fictionalized by Borges in “The Garden of Forking Paths” and elsewhere (but referenced as fact by Foucault in his essay “Language to Infinity”), in which, due to a copyist’s error, Scheherazade begins telling the stories of the 1,001 nights all over again (and will do so of course each time she hits that 602nd night).

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The loop is present in nature in ocean currents, the asteroid and Kuiper belts, as well as in the orbits of planets, comets, and other heavenly bodies, as Luke Twyman’s SolarBeat beautifully (and musically) illustrates. The cyclical nature of time with its repeating units (days, seasons, years), all products of the Earth’s revolution and orbit, can also be seen as a loop, its most emblematic representation being the circular clock face (but also: the functioning of clockworks, the movement of the hands).

The loop is a fundamental trope of repetition, giving otherwise abstract cyclical occurrences a simple shape by which to visualize, understand, and remember them.

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“A Humument,” p. 5

A Humument features a number of framing devices that, in addition to whatever narrative role they may play, further emphasize the self-reflexive character of the book. Unsurprisingly perhaps given the nature of this work, among the most common are the (book) page, the painting, and the window. These items are represented both verbally and visually, and have both literal and metaphorical functions.

On the most basic level, these framing devices are merely incidental to the scenes in which they appear, such as the windows in the many interiors where the protagonist Toge (more on him later) sits writing or thinking, pages (AE) 142, 150, and 155, for example. In such cases they are essentially ornamental objects; they have no particular narrative function (other than perhaps contributing to a Barthesian “effet de réel,” if such an effect can be said to exist in this book), and thus generally go unmentioned. In other cases they serve as socio-cultural markers, as do the many paintings hanging on the walls of what appear to be salons or galleries, the “bourgeois pictures” on pages (AE) 70 and 71 being two such examples. They contextualize the milieu in which the narrative, such as it is, evolves, while underscoring several of the meta-level themes of the work, namely art, its creation, and contemplation. Interestingly, it is rare that the content of the framing device, i.e. whatever the page, picture, or window actually frames or reveals, be of any consequence. Often it is not even identifiable, which is also telling – it is the device itself that counts.

This leads us to the case of those framing devices that have no other purpose than to be a focal point in and of themselves. To emphasize this fact they are often the only thing appearing on the page in question. This essentially intransitive usage is highly unusual since the whole point of a frame is to set off some thing, whatever it might be, in order to draw our attention to it and encourage us to consider its possible significance to the work in which it appears. Here, the thing being set off is the framing device itself, which often functions as a mise en abyme, i.e. a detail reflecting the work as a whole. Such is the case of the shattered page on (AE) 5, which I referred to in an earlier post. The image is emblematic of A Humument. It highlights the specificity of Phillips’ work by graphically depicting its relationship to its source text, Mallock’s A Human Document, showing that A Humument came into being by breaking apart the latter book and fragmenting its otherwise continuous fabric. (One is reminded another line from Barthes, namely that “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”) The text on the page reinforces this interpretation, beginning with the lines: “attempt to / cripple sentences, // reality, / broken by / quivering / peculiarities / … / artificial / fiction // broken in / the imaginary / journal,” and ending on: “fragments / fragments.”

Finally, it is interesting to note that all of these objects – pages, paintings, and windows – are things which give to see, whether literally in the case of the latter two, or via the imagination in the case of the former, and are entirely fitting for such a (apologies in advance for the weak pun) visionary work. And what the framing devices in A Humument give to see is not so much that which is framed, but rather the fact of a containing frame itself, which is also a reflection of the work’s nature, A Humument being both contained within and containing A Human Document.

You can view a selection of pages from A Humument in the Framing Devices gallery.

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As A Humument varies from edition to edition, it is necessary to indicate the edition to which I’m referring at any given point. To do so I have adopted the following key:

TPE = Tetrad Press Edition
TE = Trade Edition
FRE = First Revised Edition
SRE/TE = Second Revised Edition / Third Edition
FE = Fourth Edition
AE = All editions

As I hope these pages will demonstrate, A Humument could and should be read both synchronically and diachronically.

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• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

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Return to “Reading “A Humument” – framing devices”

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A Humument, page 7

I’ll treat these pages from the introduction as a block, since they collectively develop the main ideas presented on page 1 (which was discussed here). Overtly self-referential, they reveal more about the nature of the book and the procedures used to create it.

Over the course of the opening pages A Humument is given many descriptive monikers. It is alternatively labeled a “pillow book,” a “pocket volume bound in reality” (FRE, SRE, FE, 3),* a “besides journal,” an “impression journal,” “the first discrepancy journal,” an “imaginary journal” (AE, 5), and, most tellingly, “a journal of secret scribing and hiding” (AE, 6). Each of these labels sheds a bit of light on the sundry qualities the book possesses: “pillow book” and “journal” suggest that A Humument is a personal, intimate work; “besides” and “discrepancy” hint at its relationship to its source text and the differences between them; “impression” and “imaginary” highlight its subjective, imaginative side; and finally, “secret scribing and writing” reminds us of the method with which A Humument was created.

Other descriptive phrases – “the once or twice story” and “scribe art of the other hand” – emphasize the book’s dual nature as both a intertextual and intermedia work. In fact, “scribe art” may be the most appropriate of the labels offered, with its references to writing and art. The conjoining of the arts comes up again further down the page (AE, 7), when the narrator exclaims: “you have written a volume inside out, a thrown journal, the changes made the book continue, now the arts connect.”

“the changes made the book continue” – we have arrived at the heart of the matter (the “heart of A Humument”?): changes are indeed the matrix of the work, whose specificity lies in the discrepancy between it (the “discrepancy journal”) and its source text (Mallock’s A Human Document). A few pages later we encounter the premonition: “I foresee a book which which, might disguise name. admit explain perfectly indicate mention convince might, most completely, change” (TE, TPE, FRE, 10). And on the following page: “That book accordingly is now offered to the reader. As to what the changes are which I have been obliged to make, I cannot say more, but it is a humument” (TE, TPE, FRE, SRE, 11), which puts it plainly: it is the changes which constitute “a humument.” Interestingly, in the most recent edition of A Humument, page 11 is one of the pages that have been changed, and the new version emphasizes significance of the changes in the creation of the work. “the changes are the method,” Phillips writes, and “it is a rule that a rule rules the fiction.”

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As A Humument varies from edition to edition, it is necessary to indicate the edition to which I’m referring at any given point. To do so I have adopted the following key:

TPE = Tetrad Press Edition
TE = Trade Edition
FRE = First Revised Edition
SRE/TE = Second Revised Edition / Third Edition
FE = Fourth Edition
AE = All editions

As I hope these pages will demonstrate, A Humument could and should be read both synchronically and diachronically.

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Continue “Reading ‘A Humument’ ”

• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

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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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• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

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Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally, it can be calculated in advance, and becomes part of the ceremony.

– Franz Kafka

(Translation: Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)

Kafka’s parable of leopards in the temple has always struck me as a perfect allegory of the avant-garde in that it points out the truism that in art the transgressive is ultimately absorbed into the canon. The fact that we can speak of a “tradition of the avant-garde” or of “avant-garde art” at all says as much. One is reminded of Susan Sontag’s observation that “The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions,” as well as of the following lines by Quentin Crisp:

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

One wonders in fact whether the transgressive is actually anything more than a doppelgänger of the canonical which, by its very nature, it needs and implies. As there can be no anti-novel without a novel, no meta-cinema without a cinema, no dodecaphony without diatonic harmony, etc., that would seem to be the case. But does not the canonical, by virtue of the qualities and characteristics that constitute its specificity, likewise imply its opposite, i.e. a parallel system that would further define and validate it by the very challenge of its existence? That many anti-traditions are nearly as old as the traditions they seek to subvert seems to confirm that supposition.

Whatever the case may be the two are clearly bound into a dialectic so tightly constructed that they appear to be two distinct yet interdependent modalities of a single activity, as Henri Béhar plainly stated in a comment on Tristan Tzara’s early poems (and on Dada art generally speaking): “There is no such thing as anti-art,” he wrote, “only artistic manifestations against art.”

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• The Kafka Project
• Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”

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Addendum [2.6.10]:
I just stumbled across a review of the show “Leopards in the Temple, Sculpture Center, New York” by Ariella Budick. Referring to Kafka’s leopards, she writes: “As a metaphor for the art world, this little tale feels especially apt. The avant-garde systematically infiltrates the canon; yesterday’s outrage devolves into tomorrow’s platitude.” Indeed. If you wish you may read the review here.

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