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’ ”

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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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