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

This dual status of advertising can be seen most clearly in the case of the Hely's sandwichmen:

A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. (8.123-28)

This is, first of all, an example of displacement. The word "HELY'S" stands out in the represented world of Ulysses because it has been moved from sentence to street; it seems alien in its new context, ludicrous and out of place, like the Kino's sign, and so it resists naturalization and remains an unrepentant fragment of language. Here is a word, discordant and oversized, parading around the streets of Dublin next to fictional characters, who have themselves been created out of words. It is foregrounded as language precisely because, as a displaced fragment, it will not blend into the context. As if to further emphasize the point, the letter Y has undergone an additional displacement, "lagging behind" the rest of the word and reasserting his human identity by eating a chunk of bread.

But this kind of displacement and foregrounding is a typical feature of narration in Ulysses, and so, as a metaphor, the plodding sandwichmen refer not only to their own rootless condition but also to the general condition of language in Ulysses. In their new contexts, repeated elements in Ulysses often achieve a special textual status: We encounter them as if they were quotations, interpolated into the narration but somehow not at home there. When Ben Dollard enters the Ormond, to choose an example almost at random, fragments of dialogue about his trousers from "Wandering Rocks" are inserted in parentheses: "He ambled Dollard, bulky slops, before them (hold that fellow with the: hold him now) into the saloon" (11.450-51). A key part of my reading experience in a sentence like this one is the recognition that the echoing phrases "hold that fellow with the" and "hold him now" have migrated from another episode into "Sirens." They have been displaced, in the meaning I am trying to give to the term, and they exist, in their new context, in the same condition as the word "HELY'S" in the passage we have just been considering. In fact, this effect of displacement is what Joyce means to advertise by setting the sandwichmen walking in the first place.

The intersection of advertisement and displacement in this image is not merely an accident. To be seen as displaced, language must stand out from its context. Joyce is capable of raising any language to this status - think of what happens with "parallax" or "met him pike hoses" - but advertising language is already in the required condition: It seems quoted, reproduced, even the first time it appears, like a song fragment or a line from a familiar poem, and thus it is readily subject to further displacement and narrative manipulation. When Bloom looks at Bantam Lyons and thinks "Good morning, have you used Pears' soap?" (5.524-25), the question immediately calls attention to itself as a previously written motif, displaced from a popular advertising campaign into the narration. Joyce recognizes this unusual resonance in advertising language and exploits it for his own purposes. And so Bloom's consciousness registers the "sweated legend in the crown of his hat" in "Calypso" - "Plasto's high grade ha" (4.69-70) - and then the truncated phrase turns up as a piece of narrative self-quotation at the beginning of Lotus Eaters": "Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather headband inside his high grade ha" (5.24-5). As he glances at some hoardings, Bloom sees an advertisement for "Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale (Aromatic)" (5.193). A few pages later, during the Mass, the phrase returns: "Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank what they are used to Guinness's porter or some temperance beverage Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale (aromatic)" (5.387-90). The unusual position of "aromatic," after the noun it modifies and in parentheses, marks the phrase as something written, a piece of text, and ensures that the second reference registers more clearly as a narrative displacement of language than as a "natural" memory. In its new home, alongside wine and ceremony, the deadpan and slightly inflated advertising phrase has a comic ring; it retains its character as advertisement even in a new, inappropriate context, like the poster of Marie Kendall, smiling daubily at the Viceregal Cavalcade.