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The Persistence of Visual Fiction (1983)

Back in 1965, as he tells it, Tom Phillips, then a young Englishman who had already made both poetry and paintings, discovered William Burroughs’ experimental hypothesis of the literary “cut-up.” Inspired by the idea of taking apart and reassembling another author’s text, Phillips resolved to purchase the first fat book he could get for threepence (less than a dime). That book turned out to be the 1892 edition of a forgotten Victorian novel by W. H. Mallock, A Human Document. However, instead of cutting that book apart (a la Burroughs), Phillips decided to draw directly on its pages, so that most of its language was obliterated or, conversely, only certain words showed through. Continuing this process of reduction through addition, or extraction by superimposition, Phillips literally authored his own book on Mallock’s pages.

While Mallock’s text became raw material for Phillips’s spatial poetry, the title for his new project became, with the elimination of a few letters, A Humument. More important, what had been garbage fiction became a contemporary artist’s feast. “I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings,” Phillips wrote in the afterword to the first Humument. “Its vocabulary is rich and lush, and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover.”

The words on Phillips’s opening page look like this, incidentally becoming a preface to the entire project:

The following

sing

I

a

book.  a   book

of  art

of

mind

art

and

that

   which

 

he

 hid

reveal      I

In place of the deleted Mallock words is Phillips’s beige field punctuated by white space in the shape of an arrow; around the edge of the field is a gray border of cross-hatched lines that only partially mask the book’s type. On other pages of AHumument, visible words are surrounded by a variety of images, both representational and abstract, in many colors and shapes. What is obviously remarkable is the variety of tones and comments that Phillips obtains from such limiting constraints.

Black and white pages from Phillips’s Humument in progress began appearing in literary and art magazines, in both England and America, in the late 1960s, and a selection of these pages, also in black and white, titled Trailer (as in movie trailers), appeared in 1971 under the imprint of Hansjörg Mayer, a German printer-poet who teaches graphic design in London. I remember that around that time I recommended A Humument to American publishers here both large and small, but they all balked at the fact that the originals were not in the black and white of periodicals (and Trailer) but in color, whose reproduction would be prohibitively expensive. So selected color reproductions appeared not within the structure of spine-bound books but in suites of small separate square-shaped prints, more suitable for framing. Color reproductions of yet other pages also appeared in a book-length retrospective of Phillips’ Words/Texts to 1974 that was likewise published by Hansjörg Mayer. These color selections from A Humument were so superior to the black-and-white that I remember wondering if this work, by then a genuine underground classic, would ever be publicly available in its original form of a spine-bound book with sequential colored pages. It was no pleasure crediting Phillips with innocently producing something that book publishers piously insist cannot exist: the masterpiece that no one, utterly no one, is able to publish.

To the rescue again came Hansjörg Mayer, whose family happens to own a large Stuttgart printing company; and it produced in 1982 a color edition, in roughly the same size as Mallock’s original novel and thus in the same size as Phillips’ original pages. Copies of A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel were distributed not by Mayer’s firm, like earlier Phillips books, but by an Anglo-American art house at a price so incredibly low, given all the color work ($12.95 in paper), that it (like the book itself) would have been impossible, were someone not doing both the author and his public a great favor.

The beauty of A Humument lies not only in the designs for individual pages, but in the sequential rhythms that are established as the reader moves from page to page. This is the sort of esthetic experience indigenous to the book medium, especially when, as here, the means of enhancement are as often visual as verbal. Like William Blake before him, Phillips appears to be one of those rare artists who work best with word and image sequentially together. (Indeed, for all these similarities in this last respect, the two are quite different, Phillips, for instance, favoring a cuteness that would be unacceptable to Blake. That observation suggests, in turn, that this visual-verbal terrain is still quite open.) A Humument must be seen to be believed; not even reproductions in magazines and, especially, newspapers can do justice to its hues.

In short, this is visual fiction, which is to say narrative that depends upon the author’s pictures, much as Frans Masereel’s recently revived books (Penguin) are visual fiction or Alain Arias-Misson’s Confessions (1974) is visual fiction. [One forgotten American masterpiece in this vein is Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong (1931), whose subtitle is, no joke, “The Great American Novel.”] Visual fiction is not identical with visual poetry, which eschews narrative. As a result, it is scarcely surprising that Phillips gets only a few mentions in Kathleen McCullough’s new thousand-page bibliography, Concrete Poetry (Whitson, 1989).

Another sign of the book’s weight is that other artists have imitated its additive/extractive form—among them Doris Cross in the American magazine Kauldron not too long ago—but none have achieved the wit, the inventions or, most important, the scale of Phillips’s work. In recent years, Phillips himself has concentrated more on his painting, which is perhaps better known outside the U.S. Like other adventurous artists nowadays, he has explored areas far beyond his initial terrain. His musical version of pages from A Humument and a similar work, Irma, have been released on two scarce records. However, good as he may be at other arts, at book art (aka “artist’s books”) Tom Phillips is a master.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that the initial version of this review was commissioned in 1982, at my suggestion, by the New York Times Book Review that held onto it, unused, for well over a year. It was then placed with the Village Voice that likewise paid a pittance for it before taking a year to return the piece to me. This whole experience illustrates the principle, surely no surprise, that it hasn’t been easy to review visual fiction in America. (Among the other important casualties of such neglect are Paul Zelevansky’s masterful books The Case for the Burial of Ancestors [1986], Shadow Architecture [1988]—and Stephen Paul Miller’s The Flood [abridged, 1987].) The fortunes of acoustic fiction, which would be acoustically based narrative, comparably avant-garde, are even slighter in the U.S. (though, by comparison, prominent on German radio).

Phillips has since issued not only The Heart of the Humument (Talfourd Press, 1985), which contains treated extractions only 2” by 2 1/2”, and the “First Revised Edition” that differs from its predecessor initially in its opening pages, being dedicated no longer to his wife but to his principal patrons and then in many different designs. Not only are the new book’s colors consistently brighter but so are the reproductions. Simply compare the differences between the covers, essentially a frame for the same illustrations, to witness the improvement, which reflects either Phillips’s own personal situation or perhaps a technical improvement in color reproduction. The reasonable price of this new edition reflects continuing beneficence. If Phillips keeps his promise of yet more versions, we might be given the opportunity to chart a spiritual autobiography, in image as well as word, as reflected in successive reworkings of the same text. In that case, what is highly innovative fiction would constitute equally innovative autohistoriography.