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

There are at least two other prominent images of Joycean transformation embedded in the advertisements Bloom sees or thinks of during the day. Just after he sees the Kino's sign, Bloom thinks of Dr. Hy Franks, who, among other methods, seems to have advertised pills for venereal disease by altering two letters in "POST NO BILLS" to create "POST 110 PILLS" (8.101). And then there is Eugene Stratton, the vaudeville performer, whose advertising poster "grimace[s] with thick niggerlips at Father Conmee" (10.141-42) and greets the Viceregal cavalcade with "blub lips agrin" (10.1273-74). But the emphasis on blackness is a Joycean feint: Stratton was a blackface performer, a white man disguised as black. In a novel that transforms an ancient Greek into a Dublin Jew and Sweets of Sin into the Torah, and which then elevates transformation into a narrative principle in "Circe" and "Ithaca," these references to transformation in the advertisements are miniature emblems of Joyce's own work. Like everything else in Ulysses, the advertisements are subject to the process that they illuminate. In "Circe," Eugene Stratton metamorphoses into the Bohee Brothers, who "whisk black masks from raw babby faces" (15.424); in "Ithaca," we are advised that a "plumtree in a meatpot" is a "registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo" (17.604-05).

The phrase "Beware of imitations" in this last example suggests how pervasively the rhetoric of advertisement alludes to Joyce's own design. Stephen first thinks of these words in "Proteus," after imagining the transformed corpse of the man drowned in Dublin harbor:

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris:. beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. (3.482-84)

The advertising phrases here - "Prix de Paris," "beware of imitations," and the rest - are used by Stephen in mock publicity for "Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man." But part of the joke is in the allusions to the judgment of Paris and to Tiresias's prophecy of a mild death by sea for Odysseus.7 "Beware of imitations," Stephen warns - but Ulysses is everywhere an imitation of material evoked by the very words he uses, and this episode is an imitation of "Old Father Ocean" himself. The whole atmosphere of transformation and "seachange" has a reflexive quality, too, here as in The Tempest, since, as I have been saying, Joyce's kind of imitation inevitably entails transformation and comic distortion. When applied to Ulysses, the phrase "beware of imitations" has a double-edged tone, part bold self-advertisement, part ironic self-deprecation. In this respect it epitomizes the complex relation between the advertisements in Ulysses and Ulysses itself - and, for that matter, the mock-epic relation between Ulysses and its own sources.

The two most elaborately meaningful advertisements in Ulysses, for Bransome's coffee and the House of Keyes, are also, as it happens, imitations of the novel in which they appear. The first of these, which is used as a model to describe the route of the Invincibles after the Phoenix Park murders, occurs in another unusually reflexive context. Myles Crawford is encouraging Stephen to write something important, and he has just said, "Give them something with a bite in it. Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes McCarthy" (7.621-22). Crawford goes on to hold up Ignatius Gallaher, the journalist, as a model for Stephen of what "a pen" (7.630) might do. Significantly, his example of Gallaher's work is an advertisement that Gallaher has used in a symbolic way, mapping the route of the Invincibles onto the letters of the text, superimposing one meaning on another: "T is viceregal lodge, C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon gate . . . . F to P is the route Skin-the-Goat drove the car for an alibi, Inchicore, Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh" (7.661-62, 667-68). All of this takes place only a few lines after Professor McHugh has added "the gentle art of advertisement" to a list of arts including "Literature" and "the press" (7.607-08). Everything conspires, in other words, to encourage us to read the rewritten advertisement as an image for Stephen's future literary work - that is, as a small version of Ulysses.(8)