Cubism in writing is often overshadowed by its counterpart in the visual arts. While Picasso defined the cubist movement in painting there was no singular literary figure who did the same for writing. Although, some major writers in the early 20th century had cubist elements in their works including Gertrude Stein, Pierre Reverdy, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
Cubism
Cubism is a style of art that stresses abstract structure at the expense of other pictorial elements, especially by displaying several aspects of the same object simultaneously and by fragmenting the form of depicted objects. It is often thought of as a style of painting and nothing more, but the cubist school of thought was also prevalent in both music and literature. An example of how this would look could be made by taking several pictures of an everyday object like a cellphone from different angles and then cutting the pictures into large pieces. These pieces would then be collaged to a large piece of poster board. The object would then be seen from several angles all at once. The key here is that no one picture can show the entire object but all of the pieces must be able to be identified individually.
Cubist Fiction
The elements of cubism can be seen in two seminal literary figures of the time period, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. In Faulkner's 1930 novel "As I Lay Dying" there are 15 short narratives interwoven to show a complete story. The narrative is told from the perspective of several different narrators as the funeral procession for Addie Bundren passes by. Each narrator tells a portion of the narrative and several of these narrations overlap giving the reader a different perspective on the events. This example of showing multiple angles of the same story over the same time period builds the story in a non-traditional fashion and circles around the main plot-line while adding to it. This type of fragmented narrative is the definition of the cubist style. Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" also employs this technique. Each of the characters is trying to deal with the horrors of the Great War. Each narrative adds a piece to the puzzle and once it completed there is one coherent line in the story. Hemingway also brought cubism to the level of the paragraph often purposely leaving out the connections between one sentence in the next.
Cubist Poetry
Poetry was a much more fitting form for cubist thought than prose. Gertrude Stein,
Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Pierre Reverdy, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams were major forces in this literary niche. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Stevens demonstrates how multiple perspectives works in poetry. William Carlos Williams "Spring and All" uses the intentional ambiguity of the speaker and multiple references to the same objects from different perspectives as a way to see every aspect of spring. These techniques are hallmarks of cubist poetry.
Historical Context
Cubism first came on the scene in 1906 with paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The visual arts led the way but were quickly followed by both literature and music. While this avant-garde movement was puzzling at first, the painting style quickly gained credence among up and coming artists and critics. The style was so popular that by 1911 painters were already being identified as being part of the "cubist school" of painting. The literary arts didn't fair so well. Many of the aspects of cubism that were readily visible in the world of painting - and even sculpture - did not translate as easily to the written word. The term literary cubism never became popular and the writers who used the cubist technique were often referred to as "stream of consciousness" writers or "language poets" although the definitions of these are easily interchangeable with that of cubism.
