GROUP EXHIBITION

POSSIBL Y
but not certainly
FRANCES STARK & MARK LECKEY
a commentary
and a Torment of Follies
by Frances Stark
(with text by Witold Gombrowicz, circa 1937)*
What will you say, finally,
when you have seen the whole of all the parts
as well as the parts of all the parts?
Do you not agree that the reader
is able to assimilate
only one part at a time?
Sometimes he reads two or three passages
and never returns
and not, mark you,
because he is not interested,
but because of some totally extraneous circumstance
and, even if he reads the whole thing,
do you suppose for one moment
that he has a view of it as a whole,
appreciates the constructive harmony of the parts,
if no specialist gives him the hint?
Is it for this that authors spend years
cutting, revising, and rearranging,
sweating, straining and suffering?
Let us carry the matter further.
May not a telephone call, or a fly,
distract the readerʼs attention
just at the moment
when all the parts, themes, threads,
are on the point of converging
into a supreme unity?
Consider, moreover, that
that unique and exceptional work of yours
on which you have expended
so much effort and sweat
is just one of the thirty thousand
equally unique and exceptional works
which will appear during the year.
Oh! Terrible and accursed parts!
So it is for this that we laboriously construct;
so that part of a part of a reader