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Definition
Although the history of advertising dates back to classical times, it did not emerge as a powerful force in society until the industrial age in the 19th century. Literature and advertising share a common purpose, to have its audiences engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. However, where literary work asks you merely to accept the temporary illusion that its characters are real and its events really happening, the advertisement asks you to carry its illusion into the real world by buying its product or electing its candidate. In Advertising Fictions (1988), Jennifer Wickes looks at the relationship of advertising and literature through the lenses of three writers, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and James Joyce, whose novels, she suggests, represent three stages in the interaction of advertising and literature: advertising's borrowing from literature, its emergence as a perceived threat, and its ultimate triumph. She begins with a seminal example, a jingle written on a bottle of shoe polish , made by the Warren factory in London, as "one of the first examples of an individually packaged product with a textual accompaniment." When Charles Dickens was forced to work as a child, he was employed at Warren's, pasting those labels on bottles. As a young man, Dickens later wrote advertising copy for Warren's. Thus, at an early age he became conscious of advertising's power, assigning it a significant role in his novels and employing it in their sales campaigns. In The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), for example, the shop, which deals with relics of a dead past, is itself a relic, symbolized by the fact that it has no sign advertising itself. Little Nell, the novel's heroine, moves from the shop to become a model, used to advertise Mrs. Jarley's waxworks museum. The author's attitude toward advertising is evident in the name he gives the advertising copywriter, Slum. But Dickens's own reliance on advertising is evident in his use of it in his financially successful reading tours in which the texts of his novels become the advertisements for his readings.To illustrate the second phase when advertising emerges as a formidable threat to literature, Wickes sees Henry James as an author sensitive to the impending "usurpation and displacement of literature that loomed on the horizon." A specific example of that threat is the figure in James's The Ambassadors (1903) of Chad Newsome, whose idyll in Europe must end. He is being called back to America to assume a critical role in the family business by becoming the head of the advertising department. Chad readily abandons his lover for the lure of advertising, which he describes as "an art. . . and infinite like all the arts. . . in the hands, naturally, of a master."The third stage of interaction, Wickes maintains, finds a reversal of the earlier relationship. Now literature borrows the language of advertising in the vocabulary and thought of one of the 20th century's most celebrated characters, Leopold Bloom, the central figure of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Bloom is an advertising canvasser, soliciting ads for local newspapers. In the process, he has absorbed the language and slogans of advertising, of which, as his interior monologue reveals, he is a walking repository. As a result, according to Wickes, the novel "performs a tango with advertising and is set to its music." Wickes's point is a striking one, but for many readers, the notion that the language of advertising dominates the rich linguistic tapestry that is Ulysses would seem to be overstating the case. Closer to the truth is her general proposition: Advertising's rise to power has been accompanied by a comparable decline in the influence of literature.
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