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

My point here is that the advertisements themselves offer us a hint about the way they (and language in general) are manipulated for comic purposes in Ulysses. Bloom's particular interest in the Plumtree's rhyme, we may remember, is caused by its displacement to an inappropriate context, beneath the obituary notices in the Freeman's Journal. Here, as in the case of the Hely's advertisement, the image of mobility (in "potted") suggests the migrations of the advertisement through the text, during which it becomes a reference first to Paddy Dignam, then to cannibalism, then, after sidetrips into Stephen's parable and other plum and plumstone jokes, to Blazes Boylan and his potted meat. But, as I have been trying to suggest, the wanderings of any one image are symptomatic of the general tendency of language to wander in Ulysses, and thus the motif of pottedness, like the rowboat or the sandwichmen, is also a larger reflexive hint about Joyce's narrative technique, which treats all language as if it were ready to be carried away.

The language of advertisement is not only portable; it is also unusually plastic. Even as it exploits and parodies other texts and cultural phenomena in its quest for attention and novelty, advertisement encourages further exploitation and transformation of its own forms. In this spirit, Joyce once urged Italo Svevo's publisher to try a modern approach to marketing Confessions of Zeno:

Ethel: Does Cyril spend too much on cigarettes!

Doris: Far too much.

Ethel: So did Percy (points) - till I gave him Z E NO.

(Letters 3:246)

Here Joyce has drawn on a distinctive and highly conventional form of advertisement, the dramatized testimonial, which invites parody and playful rewriting. There is some implied criticism of the absurdity of the fiction, but the emphasis is primarily on the earnest generative energy of the language - "So did Percy (points) - till I gave him ZENO" - and on its possibilities as a comic resource, a transformational mode. One of Bloom's imaginary advertisements for Hely's sounds something like the Zeno exchange: "Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser Kansell, sold by Hely's Ltd, 85 Dame street" (8.140-42). And there are similarly rewritten and parodied advertisements throughout Ulysses, ranging from small examples like "Dignam's potted meat" (8.744-45) to longer flights like Bloom's imagined pitch for the sale of a corpse - "Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable for fruit garden" (6.772-73) - and the lost-and-found poster in "Ithaca": "[pounds]5 reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles street, missing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold (Poldy)" (17.2001-02). As these examples demonstrate, the stylized character of advertising language and its openness to adaptation and transformation make it a natural site for Joyce's comic rewriting.

In this area, too, Joyce seems to have recognized his affinity with advertisement and to have built images of his own transformational practice into the text. In "Lotus Eaters," for example, Bloom sees an advertisement for a college sporting event, a "horseshoe poster" depicting a "cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot." "Damn bad ad," he thinks, and he begins to redesign it: "Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big: college" (5.550-53). What is striking about both versions of the poster is the plasticity of the material. The original, bad as it is, bends the cyclist into conformity with the horseshoe shape of the poster. And Bloom's imagined version takes what is presumably the original text - "college sports" - and redisposes it in space so that it forms a cycle wheel, with the word sports detached from college, multiplied, and splayed around the center. Like the Hely's sandwichmen or the sign in the rowboat, Bloom's new design emphasizes the physical presence of words, using their extension to mimic the shape of an object. And the act of revising itself, when combined with the playfulness of the new version, suggests Joyce's own creative energy, his ability to shape and arrange and transform his medium, language, to suit his ends.