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humumental humility
Jan. 10th, 2009 03:28 pmIn spite of owning at least one and possibly two of the successive versions of Tom Phillips' A Humument, I have never been able to bring myself to do more than admire it as a visual document, or as a book sculpture, actually. The idea of actually reading Phillips' inspired redaction of W. H. Mallock's A Human Document has never appealed to me.
However, I am surprised today to discover that Mallock's original Victorian novel, described as depressingly conventional (I'll take that on faith, as well), is at the same time composed of, according to Daniel Traister, the narrator's reconstruction of what the narrator calls a "single thread of narrative" from what he describes as "pages after pages of letters, ... scraps of poetry, and various other documents."
In other words, Mallock was claiming that his narrator was imposing a provisional order on a collection of puzzling fragments that had been handed to him to make sense of. This fitted in with what Traister describes as Mallock's attempt to construct a "politically conservative and religiously orthodox sanctuary from a world increasingly defined by modern science."
This wouldn't be unusual if Mallock hadn't insisted upon the necessity of constructing it, not finding it as conventional conservatives would have done. But of course to construct that sort of reconciliation is already to undermine the premises on which it would rest, and Traister concludes that "neither Mallock nor his contemporaries, however clearly they saw these threats and recognised their significance, could contain or control them. Their very efforts contained the seed of their failure. The undertone of radical instability often characteristic of their works reflects their awareness of this failure. Man-made constructs remain vulnerable to the alternative constructs of other people. Mallock, like many of his contemporaries, sought a kind of certainty which, finally, no man-made construct could provide. His disappearance from modern consciousness is a not completely unfair measure of the success with which his efforts at reconciliation met."
So Phillips' ongoing work of contemporary art has in fact rescued an interesting moment in intellectual history, even though it is almost certainly a boring moment in literary history.
However, I am surprised today to discover that Mallock's original Victorian novel, described as depressingly conventional (I'll take that on faith, as well), is at the same time composed of, according to Daniel Traister, the narrator's reconstruction of what the narrator calls a "single thread of narrative" from what he describes as "pages after pages of letters, ... scraps of poetry, and various other documents."
In other words, Mallock was claiming that his narrator was imposing a provisional order on a collection of puzzling fragments that had been handed to him to make sense of. This fitted in with what Traister describes as Mallock's attempt to construct a "politically conservative and religiously orthodox sanctuary from a world increasingly defined by modern science."
This wouldn't be unusual if Mallock hadn't insisted upon the necessity of constructing it, not finding it as conventional conservatives would have done. But of course to construct that sort of reconciliation is already to undermine the premises on which it would rest, and Traister concludes that "neither Mallock nor his contemporaries, however clearly they saw these threats and recognised their significance, could contain or control them. Their very efforts contained the seed of their failure. The undertone of radical instability often characteristic of their works reflects their awareness of this failure. Man-made constructs remain vulnerable to the alternative constructs of other people. Mallock, like many of his contemporaries, sought a kind of certainty which, finally, no man-made construct could provide. His disappearance from modern consciousness is a not completely unfair measure of the success with which his efforts at reconciliation met."
So Phillips' ongoing work of contemporary art has in fact rescued an interesting moment in intellectual history, even though it is almost certainly a boring moment in literary history.
