The language of ‘la publicité’ with its reflection and creation of the tastes of the times, its verbal economy, its striking images, its word-play, and its incessant search for novelty of expression, has of late become a subject of study. Whilst some ‘pub’ language is memorable, and is devised to be so in the short term, it is patently not literature. Yet its linguistic features seem to overlap curiously with those of poetry. Just as they are features of verse, so alliteration, assonance, repetition, rhyme, simile, metaphor, textual compactness, telling imagery, and many other more specialized rhetorical devices are part too of the armoury of what Joyce called the ‘gentle art of advertisement’. But for all their common denominators and despite poets' occasional turning to slogan-writing— Cocteau coined ‘Sans Kayser vos jambes ne seraient plus qu'un moyen de transport’—the advert, ephemeral as it may be, is not a lyrical construct and ‘Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet’ no poem.
There has, none the less, been mutually fruitful interplay between advertising and literature. Indeed, the modern advert may have roots in the emblematic tradition of the Renaissance. Novelists have toyed with advertising material. Balzac has Birotteau invent his ‘Eau Carminative’ and his ‘Double Pâte des Sultanes’ in his search for commercial success: ‘il déploya le premier entre les par fumeurs ce luxe d'affiches, d'annonces et de moyens de publication que l'on nomme peut-être injustement charlatanisme.’ Zola wrote of the new fascination of affiches and vitrines in Au Bonheur des Dames, as did, more subtly, Proust of the haunting ‘cris de Paris’ in La Prisonnière. Poets turned to the advert as textual model at the same time as, with the coming of colour lithography, painters like Toulouse-Lautrec began to design posters. The bizarrerie of at least one of Lautréamont's disjointed similes purportedly stems from a contemporary newspaper ‘réclame’. According to Valéry, the typographical layout of adverts played a part in Mallarmé's conception of the formal structure of Un coup de dés (1897). Thus it was that the musical model of Symbolist poetry began to slip towards an iconographical one where, as in the advert, image and text worked together in close semantic support, a trend that reached its apogee in Apollinaire's ideogrammatic Calligrammes (1918). Like Apollinaire, the Dadaists were fascinated by street art, posters, and letterpress adverts in particular. Arcades and their vitrine displays were an important vector in the Surrealists' understanding of mental transparency and the collapsing of perceptual barriers between reality and dream. Breton's early concept of the image owed as much to ‘réclame’ as to Reverdy. Indeed, a cynic might see the twin super-egos of Surrealism as Freud, the father of automatic associationism, and Bébé Cadum, the son of soap, respectively the private and public exponents of the expulsion of the Unclean and the satisfaction of Desire. It was not the Surrealists, however, but Cendrars who promulgated a poetic genre he styled ‘Publicité = Poésie’.
The 1920s, when unregulated advertising ran riot in the streets of Paris, and when literature itself first began to be ‘marketed’, by Grasset, as a commodity, were undoubtedly the heyday of ad-lit intercourse, though novels such as Perec's, and Beauvoir's Les Belles Images, indicate that the affair is far from over.
[David Steel]
