The Great War in Disguise: Faulkner, Cubism, and Camouflage

During the summer months of 1914, two events occurred that would dramatically affect the young William Faulkner’s military and creative imaginations. The first incident, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, led to the chaotic pact-making and fevered military alliances that would launch the guns of August and the First World War. The second incident concerned the breakup of the cubist pioneers Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, artists who had started their own war against the art world with their “bizarre cubes,” as France prepared for war. “The War to End All Wars” and the Cubists’ assault on the art world’s long durée of pictorial illusionism share more than a causal link. They each violently shifted paradigms, and they did so nearly contemporaneously. For Faulkner, cubism offered immense formal and thematic power—avant-garde radicalism, aesthetic experimentalism, cerebralism, violence, interiority—aspects developed to global acclaim in the mature fiction. And yet, as Ben Wasson recalls in Count ’No Count, Faulkner’s obsession with “missing out” on modern war left him psychologically wounded, emasculated enough in the mind of the day for him to return home in disguise as a wounded aviator, complete with fake uniform and rank, manufactured limp, and swagger stick. For Faulkner, “The War to End All Wars” was as much a psychological battlefield as a social performance, where personal concerns regarding absence, trauma, failure, and death converge through tropes of imaginative creation and martial disguise.

Faulkner’s letters from New Haven during his visits to Phil Stone, some of which included small drawings of his immediate environments, describe talk of art and literature as well as of cadets in training and munitions factories in a wartime context.¹ Considering the uproar surrounding America’s first exhibition of modern art at “The Armory Show” (housed in Manhattan’s 69^th Regiment building in 1913) and given the media’s Europhobic tagging of the event as “the invasion of modern art,” the two would have been linked in the young Faulkner’s mind. We also know from letters to his mother Maud that Faulkner frequented the Louvre and the Luxembourg museum as well as seeing modern exhibitions of “futurist and vorticist” paintings during his 1925 sojourn in Paris (Selected 13). He marveled at seeing Cezanne’s watercolors and viewed two “private collections of Matisse and Picasso” (24), where he would have seen cubist works as well. Although Faulkner’s interest in the visual arts extends beyond modern art, however broadly defined, his attraction to cubism was particularly intense and often associated with World War I, its aftermath, and psychological and emotional traumas. We see this especially in the early work and prose of the 1920s and early 1930s, where cubist passages appear in stories of aviation and post-war trauma, as design and fashion in Faulkner’s Jazz Age illustrations for university publications at Ole Miss, and as thematic passages and structural devices in his first five novels.²

Scholarly interest in Faulkner and cubism has come in waves with varying depths. Panthea Reid Broughton’s foundational essay “Faulkner’s Cubist Novels” set the stage for successive acts of analysis regarding the influence of cubist structural innovation on Faulkner’s narrative technique. Not surprisingly, given traditional art historical interpretations of the movement, nearly every critical commentary on cubism in Faulkner’s work focuses exclusively on form. Examining similar visual and structural devices such as multiple viewpoints, time-space ruptures, fragmentation, and repetitions, John Tucker pronounced As I Lay Dying “the quintessential cubist novel” (390), thus shaping the focus for similar essays that followed. Watson Branch, for example, cites Darl’s painterly descriptions, including the novel’s oddest metaphor of Addie’s coffin propped on a sawhorse “like a cubistic bug” (As I Lay Dying 219). He argues that Darl has a “cubistic vision” that frames scenes, flattens perspectives, and revels in narrative gaps but succeeds in telling the story as “composite,” as does the unnamed narrator in “All the Dead Pilots.” Reid discusses how Faulkner’s composition process mimics cubist strategies through spatial disfigurations...