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two characters were in fact the main characters of Mallock’s A Human Document, the source of A Humument, but they have withdrawn slightly to leave the center stage to toge, whose story will unfold over the pages of Phillips’ book.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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“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.

·

Continue “Reading ‘A Humument’ ”

• The Official Website of Tom Phillips
• Tom Phillips Info

·

Title Screen

The Brothers Quay are writerly filmmakers, and in saying that I’m not just referring to their penchant for working from literary sources. Though they have drawn inspiration from works as varied as The Epic of Gilgamesh on the one hand and the writings of Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser on the other, aside from the relative obscurity of the latter two and the former’s apparent resistance to filmic adaptation (only two Gilgamesh movies in 4,000 years, and one of them by the Quays), there’s certainly nothing unusual in that. No, the Quays’ interest in writing has nothing to do with the shepherding of short stories and novels from the page to the screen; rather, it’s all about the obsessive visual exploration of writing as both an activity and an artifact that permeates their films.

Working through their filmography one cannot help but be struck by how often and how cleverly writing is incorporated into their work, the 1988 black and white short Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies being exemplary in this regard. The spartan calligraphic title screen, with its spindly fraktur letters and graceful decorative initials, sets the tone for the entire film, whose aesthetic might be described as baroque minimalism. The title screen plays a functional role as well, serving as a window into the filmic world: above the triangular “A” of “Anatomies” is a peep-hole which the camera approaches, then peers through. On the other side we see a tiny, disembodied hand writing furiously. Two other intertitles follow, both bearing captions written in a flowery script dedicating the décor of the film (not the film itself, just the décor, a testament to the importance they attribute to it) to both the London Underground and to an “anonymous anatomical specimen,” presumably the puppet protagonist.

We then move into the inner world of the film, whose action alternates between two distinct but communicating spaces – a light room with impossible, Escher-like staircases and white walls decorated with a proliferation of bar code-like lines and phrases written in flowery script, and a dark room with a gloomy, black and white striped fabric covering the walls, the bed, and which is also piled up here and there. In the light room several fantastic, robot-like beings exist, among them two pterodactyl-like compasses which come to life and glide across the white floor like ice-skaters, tracing calligraphic curlicues as they twirl. In the dark room, two shadowy figures languish, looking sickly and forlorn. One rubs its forehead with a circular motion of its hand, echoing the gesture of the robot-like protagonist in the white room, and the rubbing motion strongly recalls the agitation of the writing hand, which returns repeatedly throughout the film. At times several writing hands appear, all scribbling away simultaneously.

As the film moves to its conclusion we have another intertitle bearing a hand-written dedication, this one to “the other Fragonard” (Honoré, the anatomist) and to the Musée Orphila (the anatomy museum of the University Paris V), then come the credits. Both are written in the idiosyncritic script of the preceding title cards, thus giving Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies a palendromic structure that emphasizes its inner coherence – the writing specimens at the beginning and end frame the activity of writing which runs like a leitmotif through the film.

Other works like In Absentia, their 2000 collaboration with Stockhausen, and The Calligrapher, a sequence of three “idents” commissioned (and rejected) by BBC2 in 1991, also foreground writing as an intransitive activity interesting in and of itself. Like the Quays’ fanciful hand-written title screens, intertitles, and credits, all of these films betray a fascination with the mechanics of verbal expression, with manual techniques and processes, and with the graphic arts in general, characteristics that are readily apparent in other aspects of their filmmaking, particularly in their use of stop-frame animation, hand-made puppets, and elaborate décors which often feature etchings, advertising bills, bar codes, and other printed ephemera. As they themselves put it in an interview: “We’re not writers but we respect writing.”

You can see a selection of the stills in the Brothers Quay gallery.

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• Zeitgeist Film’s Brothers Quay page
• André Habib, “Through a Glass Darkly: Interview with the Quay Brothers”

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Return to “Picturing Writing.”

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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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