Elizabeth Eisenstein, investigating this historic relationship of the book and the ad, writes: "In the course of exploiting new publicity techniques, few authors failed to give high priority to publicizing themselves. The art of puffery, the writing of blurbs and other familiar promotional devices were also exploited by early printers who worked aggressively to obtain public recognition for the authors and artists whose products they hoped to sell." Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 228-29; quoted in Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: literature, advertisement, and social reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 5.
This promotion of printed works by printers also led to the significant identification of texts with authors. The crediting of the author had not always occurred previously when oral stories were written down. These new techniques established books as intellectual property and made many authors into celebrities.
These early advertisements eventually became separated from the texts themselves. "By the late seventeenth century... [these] publicity techniques called 'advertising' had slipped out from the covers of literary works and helped to create the newspaper--The Advertiser became a generic name for journalistic offerings." At this point, advertisements as we know them today began to develop separately from books, appearing not only in newspapers but in public spaces as signs and posters as well.
In the 19th century, the novel emerged as the most important literary genre and remained so until film, radio, and television challenged its popularity it in the 20th century. After advertisements became separate and independent texts in their own right, the relationship between literature and advertising did not cease. Rather, it assumed complex new forms, as Wicke shows in her masterful analysis of three classic novelists--Charles Dickens, Henry James, and James Joyce.
In several of the novels by Charles Dickens (Sketches by Boz, Pickwick, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend), advertising figures prominently. In Sketches by Boz he wrote: "...all London is a circus of poster and trade bill, a receptacle for the writings of Pears and Warren's until we can barely see ourselves underneath. Read this! Read that!"
Dickens knew intimately of what he wrote. Before establishing himself as a novelist, he worked in Warren's blacking factory where shoe polish was manufactured. It seems that he sometimes helped write the copy for advertisements and that for a while he was placed in a window polishing shoes as a form of advertising. Later, when he wrote his novels, the power and presence of factory work and the promotion of goods played significant roles.
In addition, Dickens engaged with advertising yet another way by taking great interest in the advertising of his own novels--choosing or writing ads for them. The great popularity of his stories led to the incorporation of many of his characters into a broad range of advertisements in ways that are familiar today. Player's cigarettes issued in 1912 a set of trade cards (one inserted in each pack of cigarettes) for Dickens's characters. Various commercial products mimicked the style or used the name of one or more of his characters--from Dolly Vardon aprons to chintz fabrics emboldened with Dickensiana. This trend continues even today as various brands make reference to "A Christmas Carol" or ask "Oliver Twist."
The American author Henry James similarly engaged advertising in his novels. The American stage for spectacle, exaggeration, and outrageous claims was set earlier in the 19th century by P.T. Barnum and his extravagant and outlandish publicity for his traveling shows, circus, and museum. An America that succumbed to Barnum and unchecked advertising claims of every sort fascinated James. This fascination is reflected in his novels. According to Wicke, James's own style of fiction "bears a confessed kinship to the melodramatics of advertising." His late work The American Scene (1907) takes up the subject of the consumer society.
His book commemorates the trip he took in 1904, after returning from twenty years in Europe, a "pilgrim" come to see his own native land. The patchwork of places and sights--St. Augustine, Newport, the Waldorf-Astoria, Hoboken--may seem impressionistic renderings of his journey, but above all the text explores the phenomenon of a capitalist culture that has come into its own since his departure. Henry James, The American Scene; quoted in Wicke, 113.
Irish author James Joyce, like Dickens before him, wrote advertisements at an early stage of his career. (He ran a film theatre and often wrote the ads for it.) It is his masterful Ulysses (1922) that directly conjoins literature and advertising. Leopold Bloom, the central character in the novel, works as an advertising canvasser thus occasioning many references to advertisements in the novel. More profoundly, "the constantly unfurling 'stream of consciousness' that is Bloom's narrative style is largely made up of his 'mind' wending its way through the eddies, currents, and shorelines of advertising or advertised goods."
Many literary theorists have recently noted connections like those above between literature and the culture of consumption for which advertising is the mouthpiece. The James Joyce Quarterly asserts that advertising influenced the writer at least as much as Thomas Aquinas, Dante, or Shakespeare did. Garry Leonard, "Joyce and Advertising: Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce's Fiction," James Joyce Quarterly 33.4/34.1 (1993): 573-92. Other writers like George Eliot and Sherwood Anderson have been studied for their connections to advertising discourse as well. Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2) contains passages reflective of Bloom's interior monologues about consumer goods in Ulysses. William Deresiewicz, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 723-740; taken from note 23, page 740. Anderson himself had a long career in advertising before writing his many observations about its practices.
Thus, what all these connections between literature and advertising show is the impossibility of maintaining any strict division between the "high" culture of literature and the mass culture of advertising. Some writers of great literature were also authors of many advertisements to which and from which they took their style of writing. More importantly, many influential writers have brought advertising into their stories in order to analyze the role of advertising in society. Finally, the study of literature has opened itself to the examination of many kinds of non-canonical texts such as advertisements in order to understand the culture that generates them.
Advertising and Art
The relationship between advertising and art is even more intimate than that with literature. Over the centuries, artists have been hired to paint signboards, shop walls, and other kinds of images in the service of commercial promotion. However, it was in the 19th century that a much closer relationship between advertising and art developed.
In London, the well-known illustrator Cruikshank was commissioned in 1820 by Warren's blacking company (the same company that Dickens worked for as a boy) to illustrate an ad. The drawing he produced--a cat frightened by its own reflected image in the sheen of a highly polished boot--clearly added spark to the long-copy advertisement it accompanied. Such relationships were typical 19th-century interactions between the art world and advertising.
In addition to the drawings and other images produced directly for commercial use, a second relation of advertising to art was the appropriation of high art for use in advertisements. For example, John Everett Millais's sentimental painting Bubbles (1886) became a poster for Pears soap, but not without considerable critical uproar from those who wanted to keep "art" on a high pedestal above the crassness of everyday commercial appeals.
Even more significant, however, was the close connection between advertising and modern art that developed in the later years of the 19th century. Both advertising and the artistic movement known as modernism emerged about the same time--around 1860 to 1870. The stage for their collaboration was set by at least two factors: the development of techniques supporting the mass production of images, and an abundance of consumer goods hitherto unknown. Modernism dismissed literal representations in favor of freer modes intended to evoke the sorts of fantasies and emotions that marketers were coming to realize would help move products. By the final years of the 19th century, modern art and modern advertising were freely borrowing from and influencing one another.
The French advertising poster of the late 1800s marks the beginning of this crossover between advertising and art. For example, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec produced advertising posters, as did many other artists who are usually thought of as belonging to the "high art" tradition. It was Jules Cheret, however, who invented and perfected the advertising poster as a new genre that had no real precedent in earlier artistic traditions. His poster for the Folies-Bergere in Paris privileges movement over literal representation. Its bright colors also depart from literalism to convey the excitement of the spectacle of the Folies-Bergere.
Despite widespread use, the advertising poster did not always meet with universal acclaim. There were those who felt that filling the streets of Paris with advertising was a sure sign of cultural decay rather than progress. A conservative writer, Maurice Talmeyr, published an article entitled "The Age of the Poster" in which he assessed its impact on society.
[The poster] does not say to us: "Pray, obey, sacrifice yourself, adore God, fear the master, respect the king..." It whispers to us: "Amuse yourself, preen yourself, feed yourself, go to the theater, to the ball, to the concert, read novels, drink good beer, buy good bouillon, smoke good cigars, eat good chocolate, go to your carnival, keep yourself fresh, handsome, strong, cheerful, please women, take care of yourself, comb yourself, purge yourself, look after your underwear, your clothes, your teeth, your hands, and take lozenges if you catch cold!" Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams, 1990), 236.
The artist Georges Seurat became a great fan of Cheret and the style of his posters. He drew inspiration for some of his later work from them. Cheret's high-stepping dancers in Les Girard: Folies-Bergere, a lithograph from 1879, reappear a decade later in Seurat's Le Chahut (1889-90). Many similar links between "high" artists and the popular cultural artists producing advertising are recognized by historians of art.
In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition entitled High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture that explored the relation in such areas as words, graffiti, caricature, comics, and advertising. The exhibition catalogue noted: "[T]he story of modern artists' responses to advertising, and vice versa, is the most complex and tendentious of the various histories [the exhibition] addresses." The exhibition traced the link between art and advertising from the French advertising poster to the present.
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