In an indeterminate place » W.H. Mallock

Reading “A Humument” – the characters

Nipperkin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:15:07 +0000

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two characters were in fact the main characters of Mallock’s A Human Document, the source of A Humument, but they have withdrawn slightly to leave the center stage to toge, whose story will unfold over the pages of Phillips’ book.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

Note

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.

Reading “A Humument” – framing devices

Nipperkin — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:51:07 +0000

“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.

Note

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.

Framing Devices gallery

Nipperkin — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:50:07 +0000

This gallery contains contains selected pages from A Humument by Tom Phillips. Click on a thumbnail to enlarge it.

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

Reading “A Humument,” page 1

Nipperkin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:00:31 +0000

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.

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.”

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