Beware of imitations: advertisement as reflexive commentary in 'Ulysses.' - book written by Irish author James Joyce

Daniel P. Gunn

Standing on O'Connell Bridge in the "Lestrygonians" episode of Ulysses, pondering the mystery of "saltwater fish," which are "not salty," Leopold Bloom glances at the Liffey:

His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.

Kino's 11/- Trousers

(8.88-92)(1)

The most striking thing about the Kino's advertisement, as an "answer," is its opacity. This is not language spoken by one human voice in response to another; the words are just there, buoyant and energetic, a quotation from some mysterious and otherworldly source: Kino's 11/-Trousers. The rowboat serves as a simple metaphor for the peculiar linguistic condition of the phrase, suggesting its quoted, artificial status and its separation from the ordinary give and take of conversation. In the characteristic mode of advertisement, this piece of text is adrift in the natural world, impenetrable and stubbornly detached. Perhaps the boat is also meant to draw our attention to the mobility of the Kino's ad, since it does in fact wander on the treacly swells of Ulysses, reappearing twice in "Circe" as the gnomic sign "K. 11" (15.1658, 2633), which Bloom says is "the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran" (15.1656), and then again in "Ithaca," as an example of "the modern art of advertisement . . . condensed in trilateral monoideal symbols" (17.581-82).(2)

Artificiality, buoyancy, detachment, mobility - these are all general features of the language of Ulysses. And so, by forcing us to attend to its own unusual character, the Kino's advertisement also functions as a self-conscious critical aside about the condition of language in the novel which contains it. The image is a comic distortion of the Joycean text, which is improbably reduced to a few words and numbers on a plasterboard sign. My argument is that this, in fact, is Joyce's usual practice with the advertisements in Ulysses: In describing advertisements, or permitting Bloom to imagine or rearrange them, Joyce nearly always imitates or parodies some aspect of his own narrative technique. Everyone sees that Bloom's profession as an advertising canvasser gives him a compositional interest without burdening him with an artist's pretensions. What hasn't always been seen is that the advertisements themselves are self-conscious cartoons, in which Joyce formulates his own compositional aesthetic even as he parodies and distorts the form and substance of his work. Taken together, the advertisements provide a sustained reflexive commentary on Ulysses and its language - the comic equivalent of Lily Briscoe's painting in To the Lighthouse.

Most of the recent scholarship on Joyce and advertising - and there has been quite a lot - has attempted to define Joyce's relation to the burgeoning commodity culture of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Europe, arguing either that the ubiquity of commercial messages and consumption conditioned Joyce's artistic practice or that Ulysses itself articulates or exemplifies a highly sophisticated theory of consumption, with advertising at its center. In Advertising Fictions, the most significant and influential work on this topic, Jennifer Wicke has argued that advertising, as a form of literature, provided Ulysses and all of modernism with its distinctive forms and techniques and conditioned its representation of consciousness: "advertising language," she writes, "is responsible for the techniques of high modernism" (123; my italics).(3) More recently, in the introduction to a special issue of James Joyce Quarterly on Joyce and advertising, Garry Leonard has asserted that "advertising - and consumer discourse in general - constitutes a dynamic force every bit as influential on Joyce as, say, the works of Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, or Giordano Bruno" and that Joyce "presents the overall dynamic of advertising in order to demonstrate the extent to which social relations, nationalist aspirations, power structures, class distinctions, gender constructions, and subjectivity itself, all intersect with and even depend upon the simulated universe of advertisements" ("Joyce and Advertising" 574).(4) In this sort of account, advertisement looms large: Joyce is seen either as a product of consumer discourse or as its theorist, "presenting" its "overall dynamic" and "demonstrating" the role of advertising in the construction of political and individual consciousness.

The reading I propose is quite distinct from these. While I share Wicke's view that there are striking similarities between the language of the advertisements in Ulysses and Joyce's own writing, I treat this similarity as an aspect of Joyce's design rather than as a "material register of modern, mass culture's inroads in language and thought" (Advertising Fictions 124). In other words, I want to stress Joyce's control, as an artist, in giving advertisement such a prominent place in his text; I am not persuaded that he was a passive recipient of advertising techniques. And while it may be true that the advertisements in Ulysses demystify economic relations and represent ideological processes, I am convinced that their principal function is to refer to the technique of Joyce's own work in a systematic way.(5) In my account, Joyce recognizes advertisement's affinities with his narrative practice and consciously chooses to exploit them, shaping the advertisements in Ulysses into paradigms of his text and thereby creating sustained opportunities for self-conscious reference and comic play. I have concentrated, in short, on the literary effect of the advertisements in Ulysses - on the reflexive meanings they generate in Joyce's narrative - rather than on their relation to commodity culture or its ideological formations.

In most cases, I think, these meanings have a decidedly comic or mock-epic character - and this seems a point worth emphasizing, especially since the tendency of recent Joyce scholarship has been to collapse the distinction between high and low culture and to treat advertising seriously, in this spirit, as a respectable presence in the novel's system of ideas and a formative influence on Joyce.(6) Certainly, Joyce did not disdain advertisement as aesthetically beneath him, as Stephen might have, and he had a persistent, lifelong interest in its forms and techniques (Advertising Fictions 124-25; Berger 25-33). Thus it is not surprising that he was able to see images of his own artfulness in Dublin signboards and coffee ads and use them to create a network of self-conscious references. But Ulysses makes it clear enough, in the delusive cliches of "Nausicaa," or the speech of the nymph in "Circe," that Joyce recognized the debased and exploitative character of advertisement as well; he would no more have identified himself uncritically with its language or its social vision than he would have identified himself with the pulp journalism of the "Cyclops" parodies or the tired cliches of "Eumaeus." In fact, the comic play in Ulysses often requires precisely that the lowness of mass cultural references be retained. Why else do we laugh at the parodied styles or the deflated correspondences? In using advertisements to represent Ulysses, then, Joyce is intentionally degrading the novel, drawing it into the muck of popular culture for comic effect. A trouser advertisement in a rowboat: This is the language of Ulysses! But in making this sort of reference, Joyce only reproduces the original mock-epic movement Of Ulysses, which has dragged the Odyssey into the Dublin streets in the first place. It is difficult to retain a sense of the absurdity of the comparison, its essential lack of dignity, while at the same time recognizing it as an implicit commentary on Joyce's narrative technique. But this kind of dual thinking is exactly what Joyce requires of us throughout Ulysses.

Let me begin with a crucial feature of Joyce's language, announced unmistakably in several prominent advertisements. Advertising images are by their nature portable, rather than fixed; they move from place to place, either in the same form or with slight variations, now there, now someplace else, repeating themselves again and again. Joyce slyly calls our attention to this trait of mobility in the design of several advertisements in Ulysses. We have already seen the rowboat into which the Kino's sign is displaced, as if in preparation for a journey. Then there are the sandwichmen who spell out "HELY'S," a huge word in motion through the streets. There is a crumpled "Elijah is coming" throwaway, floating like a skiff down the river. Finally, the "potted" in "Plumtree's Potted Meat" reminds us that both the product and its jingle are easily moved from one home to another. If the advertisements create a system of self-conscious meanings, as I contend, this motif is a good place to begin, since it refers us to a distinctive aspect of Joyce's narrative practice in Ulysses: the detachment of words and phrases from their customary narrative homes and their more or less open transportation from place to place. As reflexive comments, the images of mobility embedded in advertisements are designed to alert us to the presence of displaced language in the novel; they are small metaphorical asides about Joyce's technique, the textual equivalent of the Linati schema. Moreover, because the language of advertisement is so artificial and so easily detached from context - Kino's 11/- Trousers - it frequently exemplifies the phenomenon of displacement as well. In this way, advertisement in Ulysses serves both as a metaphor for Joyce's habitual displacement of language and an enactment of it.

This dual status of advertising can be seen most clearly in the case of the Hely's sandwichmen:

A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. (8.123-28)

This is, first of all, an example of displacement. The word "HELY'S" stands out in the represented world of Ulysses because it has been moved from sentence to street; it seems alien in its new context, ludicrous and out of place, like the Kino's sign, and so it resists naturalization and remains an unrepentant fragment of language. Here is a word, discordant and oversized, parading around the streets of Dublin next to fictional characters, who have themselves been created out of words. It is foregrounded as language precisely because, as a displaced fragment, it will not blend into the context. As if to further emphasize the point, the letter Y has undergone an additional displacement, "lagging behind" the rest of the word and reasserting his human identity by eating a chunk of bread.

But this kind of displacement and foregrounding is a typical feature of narration in Ulysses, and so, as a metaphor, the plodding sandwichmen refer not only to their own rootless condition but also to the general condition of language in Ulysses. In their new contexts, repeated elements in Ulysses often achieve a special textual status: We encounter them as if they were quotations, interpolated into the narration but somehow not at home there. When Ben Dollard enters the Ormond, to choose an example almost at random, fragments of dialogue about his trousers from "Wandering Rocks" are inserted in parentheses: "He ambled Dollard, bulky slops, before them (hold that fellow with the: hold him now) into the saloon" (11.450-51). A key part of my reading experience in a sentence like this one is the recognition that the echoing phrases "hold that fellow with the" and "hold him now" have migrated from another episode into "Sirens." They have been displaced, in the meaning I am trying to give to the term, and they exist, in their new context, in the same condition as the word "HELY'S" in the passage we have just been considering. In fact, this effect of displacement is what Joyce means to advertise by setting the sandwichmen walking in the first place.

The intersection of advertisement and displacement in this image is not merely an accident. To be seen as displaced, language must stand out from its context. Joyce is capable of raising any language to this status - think of what happens with "parallax" or "met him pike hoses" - but advertising language is already in the required condition: It seems quoted, reproduced, even the first time it appears, like a song fragment or a line from a familiar poem, and thus it is readily subject to further displacement and narrative manipulation. When Bloom looks at Bantam Lyons and thinks "Good morning, have you used Pears' soap?" (5.524-25), the question immediately calls attention to itself as a previously written motif, displaced from a popular advertising campaign into the narration. Joyce recognizes this unusual resonance in advertising language and exploits it for his own purposes. And so Bloom's consciousness registers the "sweated legend in the crown of his hat" in "Calypso" - "Plasto's high grade ha" (4.69-70) - and then the truncated phrase turns up as a piece of narrative self-quotation at the beginning of Lotus Eaters": "Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather headband inside his high grade ha" (5.24-5). As he glances at some hoardings, Bloom sees an advertisement for "Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale (Aromatic)" (5.193). A few pages later, during the Mass, the phrase returns: "Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank what they are used to Guinness's porter or some temperance beverage Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale (aromatic)" (5.387-90). The unusual position of "aromatic," after the noun it modifies and in parentheses, marks the phrase as something written, a piece of text, and ensures that the second reference registers more clearly as a narrative displacement of language than as a "natural" memory. In its new home, alongside wine and ceremony, the deadpan and slightly inflated advertising phrase has a comic ring; it retains its character as advertisement even in a new, inappropriate context, like the poster of Marie Kendall, smiling daubily at the Viceregal Cavalcade.

My point here is that the advertisements themselves offer us a hint about the way they (and language in general) are manipulated for comic purposes in Ulysses. Bloom's particular interest in the Plumtree's rhyme, we may remember, is caused by its displacement to an inappropriate context, beneath the obituary notices in the Freeman's Journal. Here, as in the case of the Hely's advertisement, the image of mobility (in "potted") suggests the migrations of the advertisement through the text, during which it becomes a reference first to Paddy Dignam, then to cannibalism, then, after sidetrips into Stephen's parable and other plum and plumstone jokes, to Blazes Boylan and his potted meat. But, as I have been trying to suggest, the wanderings of any one image are symptomatic of the general tendency of language to wander in Ulysses, and thus the motif of pottedness, like the rowboat or the sandwichmen, is also a larger reflexive hint about Joyce's narrative technique, which treats all language as if it were ready to be carried away.

The language of advertisement is not only portable; it is also unusually plastic. Even as it exploits and parodies other texts and cultural phenomena in its quest for attention and novelty, advertisement encourages further exploitation and transformation of its own forms. In this spirit, Joyce once urged Italo Svevo's publisher to try a modern approach to marketing Confessions of Zeno:

Ethel: Does Cyril spend too much on cigarettes!

Doris: Far too much.

Ethel: So did Percy (points) - till I gave him Z E NO.

(Letters 3:246)

Here Joyce has drawn on a distinctive and highly conventional form of advertisement, the dramatized testimonial, which invites parody and playful rewriting. There is some implied criticism of the absurdity of the fiction, but the emphasis is primarily on the earnest generative energy of the language - "So did Percy (points) - till I gave him ZENO" - and on its possibilities as a comic resource, a transformational mode. One of Bloom's imaginary advertisements for Hely's sounds something like the Zeno exchange: "Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser Kansell, sold by Hely's Ltd, 85 Dame street" (8.140-42). And there are similarly rewritten and parodied advertisements throughout Ulysses, ranging from small examples like "Dignam's potted meat" (8.744-45) to longer flights like Bloom's imagined pitch for the sale of a corpse - "Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable for fruit garden" (6.772-73) - and the lost-and-found poster in "Ithaca": "[pounds]5 reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles street, missing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold (Poldy)" (17.2001-02). As these examples demonstrate, the stylized character of advertising language and its openness to adaptation and transformation make it a natural site for Joyce's comic rewriting.

In this area, too, Joyce seems to have recognized his affinity with advertisement and to have built images of his own transformational practice into the text. In "Lotus Eaters," for example, Bloom sees an advertisement for a college sporting event, a "horseshoe poster" depicting a "cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot." "Damn bad ad," he thinks, and he begins to redesign it: "Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big: college" (5.550-53). What is striking about both versions of the poster is the plasticity of the material. The original, bad as it is, bends the cyclist into conformity with the horseshoe shape of the poster. And Bloom's imagined version takes what is presumably the original text - "college sports" - and redisposes it in space so that it forms a cycle wheel, with the word sports detached from college, multiplied, and splayed around the center. Like the Hely's sandwichmen or the sign in the rowboat, Bloom's new design emphasizes the physical presence of words, using their extension to mimic the shape of an object. And the act of revising itself, when combined with the playfulness of the new version, suggests Joyce's own creative energy, his ability to shape and arrange and transform his medium, language, to suit his ends.

There are at least two other prominent images of Joycean transformation embedded in the advertisements Bloom sees or thinks of during the day. Just after he sees the Kino's sign, Bloom thinks of Dr. Hy Franks, who, among other methods, seems to have advertised pills for venereal disease by altering two letters in "POST NO BILLS" to create "POST 110 PILLS" (8.101). And then there is Eugene Stratton, the vaudeville performer, whose advertising poster "grimace[s] with thick niggerlips at Father Conmee" (10.141-42) and greets the Viceregal cavalcade with "blub lips agrin" (10.1273-74). But the emphasis on blackness is a Joycean feint: Stratton was a blackface performer, a white man disguised as black. In a novel that transforms an ancient Greek into a Dublin Jew and Sweets of Sin into the Torah, and which then elevates transformation into a narrative principle in "Circe" and "Ithaca," these references to transformation in the advertisements are miniature emblems of Joyce's own work. Like everything else in Ulysses, the advertisements are subject to the process that they illuminate. In "Circe," Eugene Stratton metamorphoses into the Bohee Brothers, who "whisk black masks from raw babby faces" (15.424); in "Ithaca," we are advised that a "plumtree in a meatpot" is a "registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo" (17.604-05).

The phrase "Beware of imitations" in this last example suggests how pervasively the rhetoric of advertisement alludes to Joyce's own design. Stephen first thinks of these words in "Proteus," after imagining the transformed corpse of the man drowned in Dublin harbor:

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father Ocean. Prix de Paris:. beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. (3.482-84)

The advertising phrases here - "Prix de Paris," "beware of imitations," and the rest - are used by Stephen in mock publicity for "Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man." But part of the joke is in the allusions to the judgment of Paris and to Tiresias's prophecy of a mild death by sea for Odysseus.7 "Beware of imitations," Stephen warns - but Ulysses is everywhere an imitation of material evoked by the very words he uses, and this episode is an imitation of "Old Father Ocean" himself. The whole atmosphere of transformation and "seachange" has a reflexive quality, too, here as in The Tempest, since, as I have been saying, Joyce's kind of imitation inevitably entails transformation and comic distortion. When applied to Ulysses, the phrase "beware of imitations" has a double-edged tone, part bold self-advertisement, part ironic self-deprecation. In this respect it epitomizes the complex relation between the advertisements in Ulysses and Ulysses itself - and, for that matter, the mock-epic relation between Ulysses and its own sources.

The two most elaborately meaningful advertisements in Ulysses, for Bransome's coffee and the House of Keyes, are also, as it happens, imitations of the novel in which they appear. The first of these, which is used as a model to describe the route of the Invincibles after the Phoenix Park murders, occurs in another unusually reflexive context. Myles Crawford is encouraging Stephen to write something important, and he has just said, "Give them something with a bite in it. Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes McCarthy" (7.621-22). Crawford goes on to hold up Ignatius Gallaher, the journalist, as a model for Stephen of what "a pen" (7.630) might do. Significantly, his example of Gallaher's work is an advertisement that Gallaher has used in a symbolic way, mapping the route of the Invincibles onto the letters of the text, superimposing one meaning on another: "T is viceregal lodge, C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon gate . . . . F to P is the route Skin-the-Goat drove the car for an alibi, Inchicore, Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh" (7.661-62, 667-68). All of this takes place only a few lines after Professor McHugh has added "the gentle art of advertisement" to a list of arts including "Literature" and "the press" (7.607-08). Everything conspires, in other words, to encourage us to read the rewritten advertisement as an image for Stephen's future literary work - that is, as a small version of Ulysses.(8)

There are enough echoes of Ulysses in the substance of Gallaher's construction to underscore the connection. Like Odysseus, the Invincibles travel home from the scene of violence via a circuitous route, which includes places with evocative names like "Inchicore" and "Windy Arbour." Skin-the-Goat is the decoy in the Phoenix Park murder, apparently fooling even Myles Crawford, who assigns to him the route taken by Kavanagh and Brady; in Joyce's text, he (or a counterfeit version of himself) provides a shelter for the false Ulysses Pseudangelos, another decoy. More to the point, though, is the similarity in technique. Like Joyce, Gallaher invokes legendary material - the stuff of myth - by imposing a pattern of correspondences on ordinary cultural ephemera. His reconfigured advertisement is a paradigm of Ulysses in that it has to be read simultaneously on two levels, with one set of meanings mapped onto another. In the years following the publication of Ulysses, Joyce was concerned that readers might not recognize his correspondences and the complicated reading strategies they require - hence the schema, the lists of correspondences and symbols, the hints to critics. When he buried an image of Ulysses in the Telegraph editorial offices, he emphasized precisely this "two-plane" aspect of his work, offering readers both a model of his narrative strategy and a built-in hint about reading.

The Keyes advertisement, some of whose design and production we witness, also has an overtly symbolic dimension. Like Joyce, Bloom begins with raw materials from another source - the advertisement cut out for him by Red Murray - and then rearranges it, according to instructions from his client, to create a second level of meaning:

- Like that, see. Two crossed keys here. A circle. Then here the name. Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant. . . . Then round the top in leaded: the house of keys . . . You know, councillor, the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the isle of Man . . . (7.142-43, 144-45)

Here, as in many of the other examples, the emphasis is on the plasticity of the advertisement and its capacity for communicating more than one meaning. As Wicke has explained in detail, the new version of the ad is a multiple pun, with Keyes's name alluding first to the pictured keys and then, by way of them, to the Manx parliament and the politics of Irish home rule (Advertising Fictions 146-47).(9) Bloom seems willing to have the design interpreted either as a mild political provocation or as a homey touch for Manx tourists: It's all the same to him. For readers of Ulysses - it has frequently been pointed out - there are additional references, to the key to the tower, now in Mulligan's hands, to Bloom's house key, at home in the wrong trousers, and to the keys of the fisherman given to Peter and his successors by Christ. What I want to emphasize is that, by laying bare the appropriation of raw material and the construction of symbolic levels, Joyce encourages us to imagine the Keyes advertisement as a work of art, composed by a Joycean artist, with a rich allusive texture - and, in so doing, he creates another version of Ulysses. In this role, the Keyes ad underscores the surfeit of meanings in Joyce's novel, their uncontrollable proliferation. The presence of so many keys mocks the idea of symbolic correspondence even as it reminds readers of the presence of symbols, since, despite all of the schemes, Ulysses is a work without a key - that is, without a predominating code, which, once cracked, will yield all of its secrets. And there is perhaps another teasing, rueful allusion: Like Joyce, Bloom has trouble with the printers, and his efforts to produce this advertisement come to nothing by the end of the day.

Taken together, the advertisements in Ulysses function as a built-in critical apparatus, encouraging attention to Joyce's language and to his transformational and symbolic effects. But criticism is itself a kind of advertisement, as Joyce certainly knew. He sought to promote Ulysses by soliciting reviews and interpretations, and, when necessary, he did the work himself, leaking insights and patterns and key terms to sympathetic friends (Dettmar 798-802). The internal commentary in Ulysses is part of this same effort, in that it both suggests reading strategies and encourages attention to the monumental character of the work. Ulysses is always talking about itself - in Stephen's Shakespeare theory, for example, or in the nostalgic recapitulations of earlier material in "Circe" and "Ithaca." But the advertisements I have been discussing offer a particularly acute and sustained kind of self-referential criticism, generated by Joyce's vision of advertisement as comic paradigm for his own work. In this sense, they advertise not only Bransome's coffee or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale (aromatic) or Plumtree's potted meat but also Joyce's own mass product, the novel Ulysses - as, of course, anyone who writes about them does, too.

NOTES

1 References to Ulysses follow the one-volume Gabler edition, with episode and line number cited in parentheses.

2 Osteen also stresses the mobility of the Kino's advertisement, arguing that "its power to arrest attention depends, paradoxically, upon its wavelike movement" (724) and that it is "repeated, transmogrified, and recycled throughout Ulysses, thereby illustrating again how advertising symbols move in Joyce's novel: they rise and fall or circulate like water" (725).

3 Wicke gives her argument an additional political dimension in "Modernity Must Advertise," where she claims that advertising, as a "heiroglyph of modernity," allows Ulysses to participate in the "historical process of enforcing a partial independence of Ireland" (594, 610).

4 This special issue also includes the articles by Wicke and Osteen cited above. Among the other relevant contributions are articles on Eugen Sandow as a popular culture phenomenon (Kershner), deficit spending and consumer capitalism in Ulysses (Tratner), commodification in Bloom's dream of Flowerville (Jones), advertising narcissism in "Nausicaa" (Ochoa), and Joyce's depiction of "the material and ideological realities of modern Ireland" in "Eumaeus" (Watt). Since all of these essays approach the advertisements in Ulysses from historical or psychological perspectives, their readings tend to be very different from mine. Leonard has discussed the role of advertisement in the "Nausicaa" episode in two previous essays ("Women on the Market," "The Virgin Mary"). On this topic, see also Richards, 205-48.

5 In contrast, Osteen sees the advertisements as reflecting the novel's substance - in particular, the domestic situation of the Blooms, which is itself analogous, in Osteen's account, to the political situation of Ireland. "By foregrounding figures of circulation and cyclicity," he writes, "Bloom's ads illustrate both his anxiety about his stagnant and disordered domestic economy and his method of regenerating it" (718). By suggesting that the advertisements refer obsessively to Ulysses itself, Osteen's argument supports and complements mine; moreover, at the end of his essay, he echoes Wicke in claiming that 'Joyce's own artistic practice is conditioned by advertising" and that "the structural economy of Ulysses is itself created out of repetitions, returns, and cycles that mimic Bloom's advertising theories and practices" (734).

6 On the distinction between high and low culture in Joyce, see, for example, Leonard, "Joyce and Advertising," 578-79. In the special issue of James Joyce Quarterly, advertising in Ulysses is characterized variously as "the textual avenue of decolonization" (Wicke 610); as a force that "allows the individual to develop some degree of power, identity, and agency resulting in a positive self-image" (Ochoa 783); as a depiction of Bloom's "economic philosophy of making both ends meet" (Osteen 718); and as a sign of "the homologous dynamics of interpreting the form of dreams and the form of commodities" (Jones 740).

7 Gifford suggests that there may be a reference here to a minor version of the Helen of Troy story, in which "only a ghost, or 'imitation,' of Helen went to Troy with Paris" (65) - in which case the phrase "Beware of imitations" would refer directly (and self-consciously) to the Trojan War material as well.

8 Groden makes a similar point about this advertisement in a different context, arguing that Joyce included it "as if to acknowledge indirectly his use of Berard's geography" (85). My point, though, is that the advertisement alludes not just to Joyce's use of Victor Berard's epic geography but also to the whole idea of symbolic correspondence and the superimposition of one text on another.

9 Wicke revises her view of the political force of this ad in "Modernity Must Advertise," 609-10. Osteen also treats the ad at length (728-34), arguing that it makes the connection between personal and national renewal explicit: "like Bloom, Bloom's nation is keyless, lacking the home rule such keys and such a parliament represent" (731).

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