An incantatory catalog of cultural artifacts either lost to time or
never realized.
- A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is
removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart
when his pornographic novels are discovered - A photograph taken by
Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the
village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert
to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it - The
Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis
--from The Missing Pieces
The Missing Pieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been
lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy
chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of
what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays,
negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives
that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a
literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical
quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts--rather than reminding us
of the death that inhabits everything humans create.
Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's (accdidentally destroyed) film
of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's pubic
hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); Spinoza's
Treatise on the Rainbow (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of
Kerouac's original typescript for On the Road (eaten by a dog); the
chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the
one moment in André Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "I believe, for
a minute, I was thinking nothing." The Missing Pieces offers a
treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even
those readers not enamored of the void.
