The missing piece

In Citizen Kane (USA 1941) there is a key sequence in which newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Welles) and his would-be opera singer wife Susan (played by Dorothy Comingore) are alone in a vast room in Xanadu, Kane’s mock castle home. Susan sits at a table, tackling a large wooden jigsaw puzzle while she complains to Kane of how dull things are for her. A montage follows of her hands working on a series of unfinished puzzles. We then see Kane, on another day, stumping down a grand set of steps to find Susan seated in the floor, a large unfinished jigsaw in front of her. “What are you doing?” He asks, then sees. “Oh, one thing I never can understand, Susan. How do you know you haven’t done ’em before?”. Susan makes a withering reply to the husband who has filled their home with treasures from around the world but left her life empty: “It makes a whole lot more sense than collecting statues.”

The jigsaw scene is familiar to film studies courses of old. The broken-up narrative of Citizen Kane is like a jigsaw puzzle, something confirmed by the comment made at the end of the film, when journalists make their way through the deceased Kane’s huge pile of worldly goods. The reporter Thompson, who has been trying to get to the heart of Kane’s story by pursuing what his dying word ‘Rosebud’ meant, puts down one of Susan’s jigsaws and sums up his investigation:

Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost. But anyway it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word can explains a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle – a missing piece.

The camera tracks over crates and crates of Kane’s meaningless collection, until it comes to Kane’s childhood sled, which bears the word ‘Rosebud’. To the right is a photograph of the young Kane with his mother; to the left is a jigsaw. Workers pick up the sled and throw it into a furnace. And so the missing piece is forever lost.

I have been tackling a lot of jigsaw puzzles lately. I have no great enthusiasm for jigsaws, but finding myself spending many hours with an elderly parent who finds comfort in completing them, I have been thinking more and more about them. And they turn out to be more and more interesting. Susan Kane was on to something.

A jigsaw is an image which has been broken up into pieces, leaving the puzzler to recreate the image from the disaggregation that they find in the box. It atomises a picture, and the stories within that picture, rendering meaningless that which was created, compelling the puzzler to rebuild that which is lost. In doing so, however, they may lose themselves.

Jigsaws were first invented in the eighteenth century, with British cartographer John Spilsbury usually being given the credit for commercialising the idea around 1760. However, the fragmented image has a longer history than that. The mosaics of the ancient world feel like antecedents, likewise the stained glass on churches and cathedrals. The image is as much in its parts as in its wholeness.

Jigsaws as we now understand them developed from educational toys (Spilsbury’s jigsaws were maps with the individual pieces the shapes of countries or regions) to amusements for adults from the early twentieth-century onwards. Pieces started out wooden and non-interlocking (such are the pieces for Susan Kane’s jigsaws), then became designed for mass production with interlocking pieces made of cardboard or paperboard.

Jigsaws grew in popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns and have developed cults and championships. There are some extraordinary puzzle types, often developed as niche gifts in the fancier sort of bookshops: literary-themed jigsaws (The World of James Joyce is a favourite), puzzles with murder mysteries to solve, 3D puzzles, double-sided puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles have become something to be seen.

But our interest, the parent and I, is in the traditional – in form and image. These are the jigsaws you find in libraries, charity shops, old age visitor centres and so on. They present comforting views of English villages and countryside, where flowers bloom, faces beam, blue skies dominate and there are no television aerials. The typical scene features the secure family unit – grandparents, parents, children contentedly playing. Cats and dogs take up their talismanic positions, birds swoop through the cloud-flecked skies, and the squirrels are always red. Frequently a church (C of E, naturally) nestles in the background, unstressed but present, as in many a Samuel Palmer painting.

It is profoundly ideological, of course. In these days of turmoil in British politics, it is hard not see the traditional and omnipresent jigsaw as representing the vision of the Reform party, with its yearning for change that is in reverse. It is an unsullied, uncorrected England, the reassuring fantasy. It is no surprise to learn that a major market for such jigsaws is audiences in Australia and New Zealand, looking back to a 1950s land of lost content.

However, though the view may be conservative, the artists are skilled. The images are carefully composed to attract and absorb the attention. They are distinguished by bright colours (with subtle repetitions), clear characters, intriguing details to delight the observant, and sly authorial touches (certain puzzlers try always to introduce recurrent features). The images mix the clear with the indistinct (beds of flowers being a favourite), creating layers of challenges for the puzzler. Above all the images tell a story – not directly so, but there is always something in the interplay of people, places and incident to suggest that we have stumbled upon a moment in time with its ramifications. The finest jigsaw artists – among them Janice Daughters, Trevor Mitchell and Tony Ryan – are masters of storytelling without incident.

For an understanding of the mystery of jigsaws there is nothing better than Georges Perec‘s post-modernist novel Life: A User’s Manual. Perec’s extraordinary work relates the parallel stories of the inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, stories which are governed by a system of writing constraints and linked by the idea of puzzles. The central narrative concerns an English millionaire, Bartlebooth, who devotes fifty years of his life to a seemingly pointless project involving jigsaws. Ten years are spent by him learning to paint in watercolours. Twenty years are spent touring the world, painting watercolours of every port he visits, 500 in total. Each watercolour is sent back to Paris, where a craftsman glues the painting to a board and makes a jigsaw puzzle out of it. Bartlebooth, on his return, solves each puzzle. The paper on each puzzle is then rebound, removed from its wooden support, and the picture returned to the port where it was painted. There – twenty years after it was first created – the image is destroyed by means of a chemical solution, and the blank paper returned to Bartlebooth.

Bartlebooth’s actions are a puzzle in themselves, constructed out of puzzle thinking. The centrality of the jigsaw to Perec’s ideas is made clear by the book’s introduction, a short, brilliant disquisition on the nature of jigsaw puzzles. For Perec, a wooden jigsaw puzzle is

…not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it.

The puzzle piece, he says, means nothing of itself – as soon as the puzzler succeeds, after long moments of searching, trial and error, in finding where it fits, the “piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece … it seems never to have had a reason, so obvious does the solution appear”.

The function of the puzzle-maker – by which Perec also means himself as the novelist – is difficult to define in an age of machine-made jigsaws. He much prefers the artistry of wooden, hand-crafted puzzles. This kind of craftsman

… undertakes to ask himself all the questions the player will have to solve, and, instead of allowing chance to cover his tracks, aims to replace it with cunning, trickery and subterfuge … The organised, coherent, structured signifying space of the picture is cut up not only into inert, formless elements containing little information of signifying power, but also into falsfied elements, carrying false information …

Hence the the two fragments of a cornice that surely belong together but turn out to be from different parts of the ceiling, the belt buckle that seems to fit but turns out to be a metal clasp holding a chandelier, the tree and its reflection in a mirror. The jigsaw puzzle is a riot of disinformation.

The “ultimate truth” of jigsaw puzzles, he concludes, is that – contrary to all appearances – it is not a solitary game. “Every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before”. And, despite Perec’s scepticism when it comes to machine-made puzzles, the artist behind the puzzle (meaning those specially commissioned for the work and not a Van Gogh, Degas or landscape photographer) has constructed their work with a profound understanding of, and hence collaboration with, the solver of the puzzle.

We need to remind ourselves of the book’s title. This is a guide to life. It is not the trite observation that life is a puzzle, but rather that nothing connects until it does connect, at which point we are compelled to seek out another connection, bedevilled by falsity at every turn.

Bartlebooth’s life mission seems like a cynical statement on the futility of human endeavours. It also seems as though Bartlebooth, as both puzzler and the solver of puzzles, is an alter ego for Perec the novelist. But things are not so simple. Perec is the manipulator of Bartlebooth, and the character’s ambition to achieve extravagant, perfect pointlessness, in the end fails. He never makes it to 500 puzzles. Death halts him in the middle of puzzle 439. At the point of death he has the puzzle before him, with just the one space left, awaiting the final piece. But the space is in the shape of an X, and the piece Bartlebooth is holding as he dies is in the shape of a W (W is the title of an earlier, partially-autobiographical novel by Perec featuring two characters, both called Gaspard Winckler, which is also the name of the jigsaw craftsman in Life: A User’s Manual).

Perec has not mentioned missing pieces up to this point, yet they are not only the bane of the puzzler but maybe the key to the mystery of the jigsaw. The missing piece is the one that fell to the floor and was swept up by accident, or which lurks unfound beneath the sofa, or which was always missing from that charity shop set you bought on the assumption that it must be complete. It is the piece you could never find among those laid out on the table as you worked your way through the puzzle, because it was never there to be found. It is profoundly annoying, yet it may also be the jigsaw puzzle’s salvation – as a metaphor, at least. Once the final piece is put in place, the jigsaw ceases to exist, just as Perec says that the piece once placed in its correct position ceases to exist. The jigsaw exists only in a state of incompletion. Unfinished, it has life. Finished, and its spirit vanishes. It becomes just a picture, to be decanted back into its box and disposed of.

The jigsaw puzzle is a playing out of life. The puzzler is compelled to complete it, but in doing so kills what it is and thereby kills something in themself. The missing piece is what keeps the puzzle a puzzle. It is a necessary failure. That is why Rosebud had to be burned. Without the missing piece there would be no life worthy of the telling.

Links

• Everything Jigsaw is an informative, enthusiastic guide to the hobby by Geoff Lee, a former director of development for a jigsaw company
• The website of jigsaw artist Trevor Mitchell is handsomely illustrated and a useful introduction to the business and licensing side of the jigsaw puzzle industry
• Life: A User’s Manual was originally published in French in 1979 as La Vie mode d’emploi. The English translation, by David Bellos, was published in 1987. Quotations above come from this translation. On the system of writing constraints used by Georges Perec to construct his novel (knight’s tour, bi-squares, lists, the layout of the apartment block) see Matthew Gidley, ‘Georges Perec: A User’s Maual‘ [sic], Frieze issue 53, June-August 2000 and the novel’s Wikipedia entry