Beware of imitations: advertisement as reflexive commentary in 'Ulysses.' - book written by Irish author James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1996 by Daniel P. Gunn

In most cases, I think, these meanings have a decidedly comic or mock-epic character - and this seems a point worth emphasizing, especially since the tendency of recent Joyce scholarship has been to collapse the distinction between high and low culture and to treat advertising seriously, in this spirit, as a respectable presence in the novel's system of ideas and a formative influence on Joyce.(6) Certainly, Joyce did not disdain advertisement as aesthetically beneath him, as Stephen might have, and he had a persistent, lifelong interest in its forms and techniques (Advertising Fictions 124-25; Berger 25-33). Thus it is not surprising that he was able to see images of his own artfulness in Dublin signboards and coffee ads and use them to create a network of self-conscious references. But Ulysses makes it clear enough, in the delusive cliches of "Nausicaa," or the speech of the nymph in "Circe," that Joyce recognized the debased and exploitative character of advertisement as well; he would no more have identified himself uncritically with its language or its social vision than he would have identified himself with the pulp journalism of the "Cyclops" parodies or the tired cliches of "Eumaeus." In fact, the comic play in Ulysses often requires precisely that the lowness of mass cultural references be retained. Why else do we laugh at the parodied styles or the deflated correspondences? In using advertisements to represent Ulysses, then, Joyce is intentionally degrading the novel, drawing it into the muck of popular culture for comic effect. A trouser advertisement in a rowboat: This is the language of Ulysses! But in making this sort of reference, Joyce only reproduces the original mock-epic movement Of Ulysses, which has dragged the Odyssey into the Dublin streets in the first place. It is difficult to retain a sense of the absurdity of the comparison, its essential lack of dignity, while at the same time recognizing it as an implicit commentary on Joyce's narrative technique. But this kind of dual thinking is exactly what Joyce requires of us throughout Ulysses.

Let me begin with a crucial feature of Joyce's language, announced unmistakably in several prominent advertisements. Advertising images are by their nature portable, rather than fixed; they move from place to place, either in the same form or with slight variations, now there, now someplace else, repeating themselves again and again. Joyce slyly calls our attention to this trait of mobility in the design of several advertisements in Ulysses. We have already seen the rowboat into which the Kino's sign is displaced, as if in preparation for a journey. Then there are the sandwichmen who spell out "HELY'S," a huge word in motion through the streets. There is a crumpled "Elijah is coming" throwaway, floating like a skiff down the river. Finally, the "potted" in "Plumtree's Potted Meat" reminds us that both the product and its jingle are easily moved from one home to another. If the advertisements create a system of self-conscious meanings, as I contend, this motif is a good place to begin, since it refers us to a distinctive aspect of Joyce's narrative practice in Ulysses: the detachment of words and phrases from their customary narrative homes and their more or less open transportation from place to place. As reflexive comments, the images of mobility embedded in advertisements are designed to alert us to the presence of displaced language in the novel; they are small metaphorical asides about Joyce's technique, the textual equivalent of the Linati schema. Moreover, because the language of advertisement is so artificial and so easily detached from context - Kino's 11/- Trousers - it frequently exemplifies the phenomenon of displacement as well. In this way, advertisement in Ulysses serves both as a metaphor for Joyce's habitual displacement of language and an enactment of it.