CONVOLUTED REPRESENTATIONS: ADVERTISING AS REVELATION IN H. G. WELLS’S TONO-BUNGAY AND JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Abstract

This article looks at advertising as a means through which we can better understand the literary efforts of both H. G. Wells and James Joyce. In Tono-Bungay, Wells turns to the advertisement and its culture of misrepresentation to express his critique of England’s social ills and the reification of the self into a marketable commodity. Wells uses advertising to reveal the maleficent dishonesty inherent in the practice of turn-of-the-century medicine makers and finance capitalism, and the crises of self and representation in a population. In Ulysses, Joyce uses advertising copy to navigate polyvalent planes of high and low culture, common vernacular, and elaborate oratory. Because the language of advertising lends itself to seemingly endless narrative (re)constructions, Joyce employs it to transform textual space and time at will as he deconstructs a panoply of variegated social formations and ideologically institutionalised markers of distinction.