A catalogue of lost things

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The absence that exists prior to a thing’s existence is quite different to the absence after it has gone, and the book makes us consider this conundrum, says Howard Hollands

The Missing Pieces by Henri Lefebvre, translated by David L. Sweet

The wonderful children’s classic by Lev Silverstein, The Missing Piece, written/drawn in 1976, gets to straight to the heart of what a missing piece might or might not be. The same could be said of Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing. But Henri Lefebvre’s little book, literally a catalogue of anything from history that was either lost or never actually produced, has a problem. Firstly, the fixed form of a hard copy book means that any changes of status cannot be accommodated within the form itself. In addition, the list, while extensive, is flaky in all sorts of ways. Some of the entries are questionable, or a little forced in terms of the book’s title and it is irritating that Lefebvre includes himself as an entry, why?

The project, however, does have a resonance, and is reminiscent of French writer and filmmaker George Perec’s categorization projects from his days in the Oulipo group (the ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’, which included Marcel Duchamp and Italo Calvino). The difference is that Perec does not strain the categories he creates – they all have a little poetic system going on and the reader runs with this. In Lefebvre’s book the categorization of missing or lost things come across with a lack of confidence in what he listing – good list though it is.

As a reader, I simply filtered out those entries that did not really make the missing/lost criteria as far as my eyes were concerned. This does spoil the power of listing as a structural form for the literary and visual images the text is attempting build.

The potential of the ‘missing’ as a category, as with ‘nothing’, is very great – take for example the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, and the resulting increase in visitor numbers to view the empty space left by the stolen painting. We project into those spaces to generate even more meaning about what has been replaced by nothing. This is what we should be doing with Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces – but it could have been so much better executed. It needed to be a tightly controlled project that did not allow the reader to start questioning what should be there or not there – interesting though this might be.

The project really lends itself to a blog format to which anyone can contribute and erase, as circumstances and context change.

The absence that exists prior to a thing’s existence is quite different to the absence after it has gone, and the book does indeed make us consider this conundrum. A great idea, a little flawed on paper, but a good read on the tube!

The Missing Pieces  by Henri Lefebvre, translated by David L. Sweet is published by MIT/ Semiotext(e). 85pp. Unillustrated, £9.95. ISBN 978-1-58435-159-