Cubism and Nonlinear Storytelling
For centuries, Western painting was governed by a relatively simple principle: the world should be represented as it appears from a single point of view. The development of linear perspective during the Renaissance allowed painters to arrange objects in a convincing illusion of three-dimensional space. Much of traditional fiction operates according to this same principle. Events unfold chronologically, characters occupy identifiable positions in time and space, and the reader is invited to observe the story from one or several clearly defined perspectives.
The Cubist painters of the early twentieth century challenged this convention. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began dismantling recognizable objects into geometric planes, representing forms from several angles within a single composition. In Picasso's Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), the art dealer's face emerges from a complicated arrangement of overlapping fragments. The viewer must assemble these pieces into a recognizable whole, thus participating in the creative act rather than simply receiving a completed image.
What makes Cubism interesting for fiction writers is the possibility that a fragmented structure might offer a more complete understanding of a subject than conventional representation. After all, our experience of the world is seldom as orderly as a traditional narrative suggests. We remember events out of sequence, entertain contradictory interpretations of other people's behavior, and experience the past as something continually intruding upon the present. Why shouldn't the structure of a novel reflect this?
Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960) follows a French cavalryman attempting to make sense of his experiences during the Second World War. Rather than proceeding chronologically, Simon returns obsessively to particular events, especially the death of a cavalry officer, Captain de Reixach. Memories, conversations, and imagined possibilities interrupt and revise one another. The reader gradually assembles a picture of what happened, though a number of questions remain unresolved.
Like a Cubist portrait, Simon's novel presents its subject through a series of intersecting perspectives. Its fragmented structure is communicating something essential about memory, particularly the difficulty of reconstructing traumatic experiences into a coherent account. The reader's inability to establish a definitive sequence is part of the novel's underlying theme.
A similar technique appears in Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd (2011), which moves between the life of a contemporary Mexican woman, her earlier experiences working in New York, and the imagined life of the poet Gilberto Owen. These narratives gradually overlap, until the boundaries between their different times and identities become uncertain. The novel resembles Juan Gris's Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1912), in which interlocking geometric planes complicate the distinction between figure and surrounding space. In both works, the subject seems to emerge through the relationships among its fragments rather than existing independently of them.
Cubism also offers a useful model for stories containing contradictory accounts of the same events. Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) is organized into three interrelated dictionaries, presenting Christian, Islamic, and Jewish versions of an invented history surrounding the Khazar people. The accounts overlap and contradict one another, leaving readers to navigate competing versions of the truth.
Here the analogy extends beyond fragmented representation to the construction of meaning itself. Just as a Cubist painting refuses to privilege a single visual perspective, Pavić's novel resists the authority of any one historical narrative. The contradictions are essential to the work's conception of history.
Cubism's experiments with collage offer another possibility. In Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), Picasso incorporated printed oilcloth and a rope frame into his composition, challenging the boundary between representation and the materials of everyday life. Novelists can achieve comparable effects by incorporating letters, transcripts, newspaper articles, or other documentary fragments into their narratives. These materials may introduce voices or forms of knowledge that resist assimilation into a single narrative consciousness.
Writers developing unconventional manuscripts often need help distinguishing productive ambiguity from unintentional confusion. Author coaching might examine how different narrative perspectives interact, identify recurring images or events that connect seemingly disparate sections, or help an author determine whether a structural disruption reveals something new about the story. Rather than insisting upon chronological order or conventional transitions, effective author coaching can help a writer clarify the principles governing an experimental work while preserving its originality. The lesson of Cubism is not that fiction ought to abandon recognizable forms, but that there may be more than one way to represent a subject faithfully. Sometimes a character becomes clearer when viewed through contradictory accounts. And sometimes the most convincing representation of an experience is one that obliges readers to participate in the difficult work of putting its pieces together.
