In James Joyce’s Ulysses, as Bloom attends Dignam’s funeral, an odd thought passes through his mind: “Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of.” The interloper’s presence seems significant: “Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I’m thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death’s number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.”

He turns up again later: “In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path.”

And still later: “A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor.”

Altogether the mysterious man is mentioned 11 times in the novel. In the Cyclops episode we’re told, “The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead,” and in Ithaca, a catechism of questions and answers, we’re asked, “What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend? Who was M’Intosh?”

The question has never been answered definitively. But in his Cornell University lectures on Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov suggested that the “chap in the macintosh” is none other than James Joyce himself. In the library episode, “Scylla and Charybdis,” Stephen Dedalus explains that Shakespeare “has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas.” This “is exactly what Joyce has done — setting his face in a dark corner of his canvas. The Man in the Brown Macintosh who passes through the dream of the book is no other than the author himself. Bloom glimpses his maker!”

To create his 1970 novel A Humument, British artist Tom Phillips began with W.H. Mallock’s forgotten 1892 novel A Human Document and drew, painted, and collaged over the pages, leaving a few words showing to tell a new, hitherto unrevealed story. For instance, the title arises from Phillips’ deletion of two central syllables in Mallock’s title, and the protagonist, Bill Toge, can appear only when the word “together” or “altogether” arises in Mallock’s original text.

Even this new text is evolving. Phillips has published five editions of the book, in each of which he replaces certain pages; eventually he hopes to replace every page, creating an entirely new work (or an entirely new version of the same work).

“Can we call what Phillips is doing ‘writing’, or would some other term be better?” asked Adam Smyth in the London Review of Books. “What version of authorship or creativity is at work here? A Humument is a reminder that books are inevitably intertextual — they grow out of older texts — and that all writing involves selecting words from a finite pool: what appears to be a constraint, having to work within the walls of an existing novel, in fact dramatises a condition of literature.”

The full text of the 1970 edition is here.