literary cubism
Mattis Fishman (mattis@argos.argoscomp.com)
Thu, 05 Mar 1998 14:29:12 -0500 (EST)
Hello,
Scottie asks about Buddy's statement that "all his instincts were for
a lower-middle-class resistance to Cubism in writing ?" I cannot
comment on the lower-middle-class resistance but I recently came
across this reference to literary cubism which may clarify the term.
This, I would imagine, may be familiar to those of you who have read
Stein and Hemingway, and so it may not shed any more light on the
question of why resistance to cubism would be particularly related
to the lower middle-class, or why Buddy would eschew this type of style.
However I found it interesting and hope you do too. It comes from
U. Penn's "English88, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry" web
site and the URL is:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/moveable-feast-ideas.html
I have snipped out some parts that are relevant (I hope in keeping with
fair use).
All the best,
Mattis
--- begin excerpt ---
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/moveable-feast-ideas.html
Ideas for teaching Hemingway's A Moveable Feast
Alan Filreis
... snip ...
Even Hemingway's detractors acknowledge the power and sharpness of his early
fictional prose - which can best be described as cubist.
Hemingway's stories in In Our Time - the work he was composing at the time of
the events in AMF - don't "describe" in traditional ways. Many passages enact
the rejection of the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening,
modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the
imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture,
color, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that
depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen
simultaneously. Cubism in language is difficult to pull off, and many literary
critics agree that Gertrude Stein managed it well, especially, for instance, in
her Tender Buttons and her verbal "portraits" of figures like Picasso.
In Our Time uses repetition - and a prose rhythm that sometimes give the
reader the feeling that he or she is moving three steps forward while two steps
backward. Scenes and figures are presented, and then presented again in a
slightly repetitious, slightly different way. In one In Our Time vignette we
have this "description" of a wartime harbor:
The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I
do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were
all on the peer and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the
searchlight on them to quiet them.
Here is the origin of the prose style Hemingway made famous (and infamous).
Short sentences, seemingly simple and straightforward - actually unrevealing
and difficult. It could be said that Hemingway atomized description in a
way that Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and others, in their cubist phases, broke
visual perceptions into perspectival shards. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in
its Walter Arensberg collection, has many great examples of this.)
Gertrude Stein can be said to have conducted this experiment both at the level
of the individual sentence *and* at the level of the "descriptive" passage.
Hemingway conducted the experiment at the level of the passage but not at the
level of the sentence: the individual sentences are traditional in structure
(disarmingly so).
AMF not only remembers the social and emotional scene in which this new style of
describing was created, but it also, on occasion, reproduces that style. Because
it is remembering and imitating or replicating, it is highly self-conscious
writing in a way that the best work of In Our Time (such as the Nick Adams
stories) was not. Some would argue that this self-consciousness makes for bad
writing, self-parodic and flat. Other readers might argue that the
style succeeds.
...snip...
A marvelous anti-descriptive yet compelling example of cubism in language is
Gertrude Stein's passage about a car accident, self-reflectively titled "Let Us
Describe":
Let us describe how they went. It was a very windy night and the road although
in excellent condition and extremely well graded has many turnings and although
the curves are not sharp the rise is considerable. It was a very windy night and
some of the larger vehicles found it more prudent not to venture. In consequence
some of those who had planned to go were unable to do so. Many others did go and
there was a sacrifice, of what shall we, a sheep, a hen, a cock, a village,
a ruin, and all that and then that having been blessed let us bless it.
... snip ...
A possibly helpful summary of Stein's prose is provided by poet W. G. Rogers:
As always when at her best, she uses double talk to arrive at plain meanings:
she adds nothing and nothing and gets something; her sum is an emotional impact;
an excitment, an undeniable deep stirring. This is the marvel and the mystery of
her language; it can be an incantation, and like the lingo of the medicine man,
it can say little while accomplishing a lot. You don't blame it for what it is,
you credit it for what it does.
... snip ...