The poetry of brand names

National Review, Nov 16, 1992 by Peter Lubin

THERE CAN be a poetry to proper nouns. Once, poets gave us names of exotic kings and distant lands. Think of Marlowe:

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

Techelles, Usumcasane, and

Theridamas?

Is it not passing brave to be a king

And ride in triumph through

Persepolis ?

Or Milton:

Araxes, and the Caspian lake; thence

on

As far as Indus east, Euphrates west.

Later, another kind of proper noun--the brand name--was exploited for purposes of art. In Eugene Onegin, Pushkin describes how time is told in the household of the Larins: "Zheludok--verniy nash Breget." Literally, this means: "The stomach is our accurate Breguet." Breguet was a celebrated French watchmaker (a firm by that name is still going strong); like Faberge, his productions found favor with the Tsars, so that Pushkin could use the word as a synonym for timepiece. Unlike the reactionaries who opposed the introduction of foreign words into Russian, the great poet was in the import-export business.

By specifying Breguet (instead of writing generically that "The stomach is our truest timepiece") Pushkin plays on two lexical keyboards, and the French name evokes the small army of foreign artisans (Rastrelli, Falconet) who helped to build premeditated Petersburg, as well as all those language tutors and dancing masters sent Russia-wards by the French Revolution.

Or consider Pushkin's champagne. He enjoys specifying the grandes marques from Ay and Epernay and Reims, his favorites being Veuve Clicquot and Moet. It is easy to see why the latter, especially, should have attracted him, as it provided a ready rhyme for the Russian disyllable "po-et."

Later in the century, Baudelaire writes in "Sed Non Satiata":

Je prefere a la constance, a

l'opium, aux nuits,

L'elixir de ta bouche ou l'amour se

pavane.

The "nuits" to which Baudelaire prefers the elixir of his mistress's lips are not nights of passion, but a famous burgundy, Nuits St Georges. If the poet had written: "Je prefere a la constance, a l'opium, au vin," the simultaneous ambiguity (a wine, or nights of passion) and rich specificity (not any wine, but this particular wine) would have been lost.

Sometimes the distinction between brand and generic names is blurred. In his poem "January 1, 1923" Osip Mandelshtam writes: "Gde-to shchelknyl Underwood." ("Somewhere there clattered an Underwood.") So many typewriters in Russia early in this century were Underwoods that the brand became a generic name, and a good thing too for Mandelshtam, considering the awkwardness of the actual Russian for "typewriter"--"pishushchaya mashina."

Mayakovsky, in "Leviy Marsh" ("Left March"), one of his exercises in declamation, writes:

Tishe, oratory!

Vashe slovo, tovarishch mauzer.

(Be quiet, speakers!

Your turn, Comrade Mauzer.)

Here "Mauzer" is not used generically like Mandelshtam's "Underwood." Mayakovsky anthropomorphizes the violence he celebrates ("Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun") in the persona of Comrade Mauzer.

Randall Jarrell in "Next Day" describes how a woman, feeling "commonplace and solitary," pushes her shopping cart along the supermarket aisle: "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All." By enrolling these names of detergents in his poem (names that cascade over us, pledging and promising so much), Jarrell helps the victims of advertising to overcome their lexical oppression. For the woman narrator the names are used ironically, but they put a bounce in our step as we march down the same aisles.

Grace Paley's story "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" begins: "Up early or late, the day gets away from me. I never get into my Rice Krispies till noon." The beauty of the beginning hinges on those Rice Krispies. Imagine if she had written: "I never get into my cereal till noon." "Cereal" could be virtuous Muesli or satanic Frosted Flakes. "Rice Krispies" sets the lonely, homely scene: the scruffy table, the room with no view, the narrator no doubt reading, at breakfast, the back of the cereal box on which the treacly trio of Snap, Crackle, and Pop are depicted.

NOWADAYS, some of our writers are one-trick ponies. "Price is wearing a six-button wool and silk suit by Ermenegildo Zegna, a cotton shirt with French cuffs by Ike Behar, a Ralph Lauren silk tie and leather wing tips by Fratelli Rossetti."

Bret Easton Ellis exploits the proper noun, not to stimulate the imagination ("Techelles, Usumcasane, and Theridamas") or to briskly single word ("Breguet") the contrast between the French artisanry of St. Petersburg and the Russian backwater of that provincial miss, Tatiana Larina, but to show mere knowingness. We are not taken lands away, but simply to 57th and Madison, or Rodeo Drive. The poetry of brand names, from Pushkin's Breguet to Paley's Rice Krispies, is missing.