LITERARY CUBISM: CHARACTERISTICS, REPRESENTATIVES AND WORKS - LITERATURE - 2024

The literary cubism is a movement of the early twentieth century the aesthetic characterized by a fracture shape, breaks with the traditional linear narrative perspectives and challenges the very idea of representation.

In this sense, the style was inspired by the Cubist visual arts movement led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (1907-25), who also influenced architecture and cinematography.

Guillaume Apollinaire, representative of literary cubism

In the case of literary cubism, it meant a change in the narrator's points of view. Events and people were described from a certain character, then through the eyes of another, and then from another.

It is also common to use different narrators for different chapters or even different paragraphs, to describe how each character sees the others. This discontinuity can also be seen in the syntax.

In general, the writers of literary cubism were a motley group with diverse origins, united in their love for innovation and the search for a language that brought poetry and the arts closer together.

Origin

As early as 1905, Apollinaire and Picasso - along with other poets and painters such as Max Jacob, André Salmon, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, and Jean Cocteau - had begun to form a united front of the avant-garde.

In 1908, Georges Braque exhibited some photographs in the Autumn Salon (an art exhibition held in Paris) in which the ceilings merged with the trees, giving the impression of being cubes.

At the time, the painter Henri Matisse, who was on the jury, described them as "cubic quirks." It is believed that this is where the term cubism derives, initially applied to painting and, later, to literature.

Others attribute this name to the observations made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles to the work of Braque Casas in L'Estaque (1908). He would have derisively described them as houses made of cubes.

Then, in 1911, the Salon des Indépendants (Paris, 1911) became the stage where the Cubists made their first collective appearance. In the following year, Gleizes and Metzinger present the theoretical book on the subject.

Between 1917 and 1920, literary cubism had already been consolidated. Magazines as important as Norte-Sur and Literatura, among others, played a significant role in this consolidation.

Characteristics of literary cubism

Subjective and multidimensional

Innovative advances in the social sciences, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud, had a great impact on literary cubism.

In this way, the Cubists showed more interest in the internal panorama of the individual than in the events that occurred in the external panorama of the objective world.

Likewise, as a reaction to the more objective and one-dimensional portraiture of the Victorian period, cubism in literature directs its attention to the psyche, the subconscious, the conscious intellect, and creative abstraction.

Stream of consciousness

In an effort to emulate the Cubist exploration of the mind through the visual arts, many writers of literary Cubism used words and sentence structure to capture thought.

To achieve this, they moved away from the traditional writing style based on logic and clarity. Instead, through a technique called stream of consciousness, they tried to portray the thought as it happened, randomly and illogically.

Multiple perspectives

In the visual arts, cubist works present various planes and angles of perception. Similarly, literary cubism employs this technique to great effect.

Its objective is to show how narrative realities change through the subjective perspectives of different characters. The different voices of the characters reveal the subjectivity and relativity of the human experience.

Fragmentation and dispersion

Cubist techniques presented the individual as a set of broken images. This fragmentation was translated, within literary cubism, in the use of a new syntax characterized by its discontinuity.

Furthermore, the texts show an anti-narrative tendency, observing the elimination of the anecdote and the description.

On the other hand, the so-called analytical cubism used techniques such as the destruction of grammar, strange or absent punctuation, free verse, among others.

In the case of Guillaume Apollinaire, who was closer to synthetic cubism, the fusion of poetry and drawing in calligrams was very common. Other poets created collages with postcards, letters, and the like.

It is important to note that Cubist poetry often overlaps with Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, and other avant-garde movements.

Representatives and works

Guillaume Apollinaire

Apollinaire is considered one of the most important literary figures of the early 20th century. His use of direct language and unconventional poetic structure had a great influence on modern poetic theory.

Of his extensive work, Alcools: poemas, 1898-1913 (1964) and Caligramas: poemas de paz y guerra, 1913-1916 (1980), are considered his best works.

Blaise cendrars

This French-speaking poet and essayist was born in Switzerland as Frédéric Sauser in 1887. He created a powerful new poetic style to express a life of action and danger.

Some of his poems, such as Easter in New York (1912) and The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Joan of France (1913), are travel posters and laments combined.

Among the bold mechanisms of Cendrars are: simultaneous impressions in a jumble of images, feelings, associations, surprise effects - all transmitted in a syncopated and faltering rhythm.

Max jacob

Jacob became the leader of the avant-garde art scene after moving to Paris (he was born in Quimper, France). Jacob was known for his word games and his skill with prose poetry.

His work includes the famous collection The dice cup. In addition, other of his notable poetic collections are The Central Laboratory and Poems of Morvan le Gaëlique, and in the prose-poetry hybrid The Defense of Tartuffe.

Gertrude stein

Stein was an American writer, poet, and art collector. Her well-known books, The Making of Americans (1925) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) earned her many merits and prominence.

Gertrude Stein was one of the main representatives of literary cubism. She was also one of the first collectors of cubist paintings and other works by various contemporary experimental artists of the time.

References

1. Vaught Brogan, J. (2005). Cubism. In SR Serafin and A. Bendixen (editors), The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, pp. 240-242. New York: Continuum.
2. Neuffer, S. (s / f). Cubism In Writing. Taken from penandthepad.com.
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2018, April 13). Cubism. Taken from britannica.com.
4. Breunig, LC (Editor). (nineteen ninety five). The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
5. New World Encyclopedia. (2013, July 20). Cubism. Taken from newworldencyclopedia.org.
6. Hacht, AM and Milne, IM (Editors). (2016). Poetry for students, Vol. 24. Farmington Hills: Gale.
7. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2015, April 24). Blaise Cendrars. Taken from britannica.com.
8. The Biography. (2018, February 12). Max Jacob Biography. Taken from biography.com.
9. Famous Authors. (2012). Gertrude Stein. Taken from famousauthors.org.