Literary cubism: an unstructured structure for the 21st century storytelling

The world moves faster these days. From political sound bites to the latest teen idol (who is it this week?) to non-stop music video scenes, things go, things go, other things take their place and then they go too.

But literature, good literature, is made to savor. endures. Keys. whispers. Long after the written words have disappeared from sight, they play music in our minds. Herein lies the riddle. How to fit the literature of the 21st century in a world that moves faster, in a public that wants and expects a thunderous avalanche of continuous attractions?

One answer: literary cubism.

The Eleventh Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary offers a definition of Cubism that describes an abstractly structured artistic style that simultaneously displays multiple aspects of the same object in fragmented form.

OK.

Hmm…

The “same object” in that working definition is my story. The “multiple aspects” and fragmented forms I show include poems, email messages, personal notes, and legal documents, to name a few. And yes, there is room and need for blocks of traditional prose in literary cubism.

Cubist writing is liberating. It adds to a writer’s toolbox to tell his story. We’ve always had descriptions and dialogue to set up scenes, create moods, and create consistent and compelling characters. It feels good to now have the text of an email to do any or all of those things. We can also take advantage of poems, personal notes, shopping lists, and any other form of written media. All of these can be used to great effect to show a lifestyle, to define a character’s motives and psyche, or to paint the tensions and emotional contours of a relationship.

Like I said before, liberating.

Enough of theories of liberated lingual expression; How does literary cubism develop in its application? Very good. In a nutshell, “Resolution 786” tells the story of a philosophically and emotionally wounded American engineer who finds himself on combat operations in the Iraq War while simultaneously trying the Lord for crimes against humanity in court. Literary cubism made it possible to create the tapestry of a unified experience across these wildly disparate settings, an experience of spiritual self-realization in the context of a physical realization of human mortality. Cubism gave me license to develop this multi-pronged story and build my central themes using a variety of literary mediums presented from the perspectives of many different characters. In fact, a cartoon consists mainly of a collection of emails written by the mothers, wives, daughters, lovers and girlfriends of soldiers fighting in Iraq. Writing that part of the novel, I was struck by how candidly an author can develop characters and define relationships through email messages.

But despite the license granted by literary cubism, there are still a few “No Driving” lanes on this literary highway. Do not use incorrect grammar, spelling, or punctuation (unless you are “drawing” a Cummings poem on the page). Don’t use flat, uninteresting prose. And whatever you do, don’t let your focus drift away from telling a good story. The greatest literary art is in vain if a good story is not told.

Yes, with literary cubism, you run the risk of your argument becoming unintegrated bits and pieces of plot and story, but you run the same risk with traditional prose. Rewriting, revision, and reimaging enhance the integration of your multiple media. And as one of the characters in Resolution 786 explains while defending himself against criticism of realism in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis:

“I don’t think The Metamorphosis really happened. Samsa didn’t turn into a bug. If he had turned into a bug, he would have stopped considering his own consciousness. No, Samsa turned into a human who got trapped inside a bug. . , which is fundamentally different from turning into an insect. And as for being realistic, if a work of artistic expression does not have a traditional structure, that does not mean that, as a whole, it does not still have some valuable or useful form or substance. otherwise instructive”.

So go ahead and wake up a bug. Go ahead and test the Lord. And feel free to use a cubist structure throughout.

I consider literary cubism to be a sharp, fresh, and consistently interesting method of constructing novels. Considering how fast our world moves today, how dazzling and multivariate our media and entertainment tastes are, I’m surprised more writers don’t use cubism. It is an ideal structure for storytelling in the 21st century.