SOURCE: Fell, Jill. “Alfred Jarry's Alternative Cubists.” French Cultural Studies 6, Part 2, no. 17 (June 1995): 249-69.

In the following essay, Fell suggests that Jarry was one of the first to use the word “cubisme” and that Jarry practiced a linguistic cubism in essays such as “Commentaire pour servir à la construction practique de la machine à explorer le temps” and plays such as César-Antechrist, as well as through his neologisms and textual acrobatics that emphasized multiple points of view.

The emergence of the artistic movement of Cubism is officially put at about 1907-8.¹ Given that its origins have been the subject of fierce debate, however,² and that neither Apollinaire, who set himself up as the Cubists' theoretician, nor Picasso, ever accepted that Cubism was only a matter of translating the visual image into cubic form, it may be worth investigating an alternative usage of the word cubiste, coined in 1894 and in...