A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel

It is a thing uncommonly strange to see a book appear at the physical expense of another book, but here we have it. British artist Tom Philips published his “treated” novel, A Humument, in 1970 to much art-world fanfare and delighted chin-scratching. Philips had begun the project some years earlier, when he sauntered into a bookstore and selected “by chance” a book that he would then alter (read: enhance? mutilate? transform? plagiarize? appropriate?) to make his own work. The book Philips selected was A Human Document, a supposedly “forgotten” 1892 novel by the wonderful and multi-talented Oxford man, William Hurrell Mallock. It remains rather a mystery to me why Mallock has come in for so much rough treatment this past half-century. Perhaps it’s because his economic writings are anti-socialist in a way that, these days, has become quite more than gauche. Whatever the man’s political leanings, A Human Document seems rather a delightful novel for a rainy Sunday afternoon, well worth the read in chortles and ah-has.

Mallock’s novel is not, in and of itself, a particularly strange book. Well, that all changed when Philips got his hands on it. As you can already see in the “treated” version of the opening page, Philips’s strategy is to make all sorts of strategic colorful doodles over Mallock’s carefully wrought verbiage, in order to construct a “new” work, the title of which emerges through partial erasure and conflation: A Human Document.

The transformed work purportedly tells the story of one Bill Toge—a character not evident in Mallock’s writing. But the true pleasure of the book, if you take it at all, lies in the stunning visual textures Philips deploys throughout. After all, we can safely suppose that had Philips wished simply to tell a story about a character he’d invented, this Bill Toge, he might have turned to blank paper and the not insignificant resources of his own imagination. But no, Philips is a visual artist, and his project for A Humument has always been primarily visual.

     

As someone interested in strange books—and only secondarily in, say, strange doodles—I can hardly help but wonder what it would mean to produce a “treated” version of A Humument itself. I find myself tempted to transcribe with loving care each of Mallock’s words that Philips left visible, peeking through his designs, and to typeset them in the most visually plain, regular fashion of prose that our technology can muster.

In the meantime, A Humument is available for purchase in book form, and Philips also has created a Web site for A Humument, where you can “read” the full text online and even download the iPad app.