CUBISM IN WRITING
Cubism was principally a movement in the visual arts in the early 20th century spearheaded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
These painters explored new forms of expression by emphasizing subjective mental experience over objective sensible experience, fragmentation over linear plotting, and multiple perspectives over singular perspective.
No matter that cubism became one of abstract art’s most important movements, its name actually began with an insult.
Art critic Louis Vauxcelles derided the new style as merely “little cubes”, believing the work vastly inferior to traditional paintings with more realistic perspectives.
It was another French art critic, Guillame Apollinaire, who came up with the exact term cubism (or cubisme, to use the French).
But instead of outrage, he used Vauxcelles’s term positively, being an early champion of the style.
Although Pablo Picasso was inspired by the work of Georges Seurat, the idea of multiple perspectives based on flat, geometric shapes was a new idea.
His painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, depicting a group of variously-dressed women, is considered the first cubist painting.
Picasso was not the only innovator of this style though.
He worked very closely with Georges Braque, and it’s widely understood that the two artists developed this new mode together.
The movement originated in France, as seen by Picasso’s artwork title, but soon expanded worldwide.
Some of the original cubists were not French, although they were residing and exhibiting in France at that time.
And, of course, Picasso was Spanish.
The movement influenced modernist novelists and poets of the same time period, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, who used cubist elements in their writing to push the boundaries of literary portraiture.
INTERNAL LANDSCAPE
psyche,
subconscious,
conscious intellect and creative abstraction
all became more important in modernist literature than the more objective, one-dimensional portraiture of the Victorian period that preceded it.
In “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1915), James Joyce plumbed the internal depths of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, discovering a vivid and varied inner life that would come to characterize his later, more experimental novels.
THE RISE OF LITERARY CUBISM
Cubism is one One single reading does not refer to a single perspective (which is ambiguous) but to an understanding of all possible perspectives.
MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES
Picasso's paintings contained various planes and angles of perception.
Modernist writers have used this technique to great effect to show how narrative realities change through the subjective perspectives of different characters.
A master of this technique was William Faulkner.
In his novel “As I Lay Dying,” the death and burial of rural matriarch Addie Bundren is portrayed through the interlinking perspectives of more than a dozen characters.
Each character has his own voice, tone and vocabulary, and relays the events of the narrative in a distinct way. Like Picasso, Faulkner created a stark collage of images revealing the subjectivity, and relativity, at the heart of human.
LITERARY CUBISM
It means shifting the literary perspective, that is, the points of view.
It involves:
writing about events and people as they appear to one character, then repeating through the eyes of another, and then moving to yet another.
using different narrators for different chapters or even different paragraphs, so as to describe how each character views the others, put in the words, thoughts and feelings of the characters themselves.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The Cubists' exploration of the mind through the visual arts led many writers to do the same through words and sentence structure.
Modernist writers have tried to portray thinking as it happened, randomly and illogically.
FRAGMENTATION POF THE INDIVIDUAL
Cubist techniques presented the individual as an assemblage of broken images.
Using the same techniques, modernist writers have explored the implications of movements such as Cubism.
Coming off groundbreaking advances in the social sciences, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud, cubists were more concerned with the internal landscape of the individual than the external landscape of the objective world.
CUBISM IN WRITING
CUBISM