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Gunn, Daniel P. "Beware of Imitations: Advertisement as Reflexive Commentary in Ulysses." Twentieth Century Literature 42, no. 4 (December 1, 1996): 481–93.

Related topics:

Creation and Making
Doubles
Language and Linguistics
Narration
Reproduction
Translation

Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/beware-of-imitations-advertisement-as-reflexive-commentary-in-ulysses/oclc/197080762&referer=brief_results

Link to full text: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441878

Gunn begins by discussing the mobility of advertising language in Ulysses, pointing out the various appearances of the Kino's ad throughout the novel (U 8.88-92,15.1658, 17.581-82). He then notes that such qualities of advertising language—"artificiality, buoyancy, detachment, mobility"—are characteristics of the language of Ulysses as a whole (482). The characteristics of advertising thus provide a reflexive commentary on the language within the novel. Gunn clarifies that Joyce does not desire to eliminate the boundary between high and low culture by implementing advertising language, but rather exploits the lowness of advertising culture to create a comic effect, through its similarity and contrast to the (supposedly higher) language of Ulysses as a whole. Much like the Hely's sandwich men, who are displaced from written word into embodied textual components (U 8.123-28), advertising language enacts both parallax and metempsychosis, broken apart and reformed in various places and various shapes across the novel. Joyce repeatedly calls attention to such phrases and images throughout Ulysses to emphasize the mobility of his narrative technique. Focusing on this phenomenon as it relates to Bloom's key advertisement (U 7.142-45), Gunn argues that advertisements represent not only the plasticity of language, but also the multiplicity of interpretations it fosters. The language of the key advertisement includes several layers of political, biblical, and self-referential meanings; Joyce recognizes the novel as its own sort of commodity, layered in precisely the same manner. Gunn writes that Joyce offers an "acute and sustained kind of self-referential criticism, generated by . . . a vision of advertisement as comic paradigm for his own work" (491). Like the language of advertising, the language of the text is also revealed to be displaced, portable, and plastic.

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