Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce by Garry Leonard (review)

HUMANITIES 275 signed articles and has actually gone through newspapers and journalsand located 345 of them. The longest section lists the speeches that were published as pamphlets, with each entry giving the location in the King papers and also in the major academic and public libraries inCanada where a copy has been found. Another section lists more than 100 recordings of King's speeches and statements. The author's introduction to each section is clear and succinct; the introduction to the section on King's diaries should be compulsory reading for any student who uses them. This half of the bibliography is, without question, a definitive listing of King's writings. . The second part covers other material relating to Mackenzie King. The author has included books and articles about the era as well as about the man. It makes the bibliography more useful to students and scholars but does have the disadvantage that the listings can never be complete. Every reviewer will be obliged to point out some omission. For example, why include the volumes by D.G. Creighton and rH. Thompson from the Centermial series on the history of Canada and not the earlier volume by G.R. Cook and R.C. Brown? More questionable was the decision to include some of the newspaper reviews of the major biographical studies but not the reviews in scholarly journals. On the whole, however, the author has selected judiciously and any omissions are more than compensated for by sections on newsreels and on radio and television programs, and, even more unusual, on novels, poems, and plays relating to King. As appendixes the author has also included a brief section on the writing of the official biography and has listed the memoranda prepared for the use of the official biographers. In short, this bibliography is a mo~el for what it contains, for how it is organized, and for the way it is published. There is no equivalent for any other public figure in Canada. (H. BLAIR NEATBY) Garry Leonard. Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce University of Florida Press. xii, 252 . $49.95 One way of teaching poetry to reluctant students is through the rhetoric of advertising, identifying the tropes by which the commodity promotes its presence and achieves its effect; then applying that technique to 'chosen poems.Of course, there is always some smart-ass who wants to know why, if the means are identicat the end is so different. Garry Leonard implies that the end is not so different, for ~culture' is equally the response to psychological, sociological, politic, economic, and (perhaps) aesthetic pressures. I cite the throwaway promoting his intriguing book, and would interrogate the interpolated 'perhaps.' For I am almostpersuaded by Leonard's study, by its imaginative insight, irreverent wit, subtle paradigms, and curious particularity. Almost persuaded ... Forty 276 LEITERS IN CANADA 1998 years ago Richard EHmann noted that Joyce's great discovery was that the ordinary is extraordinary, the commonplace uncommon. Leonard's study exemplifies this insight, for not least of its virtues is that it compels the consumer of Joyce to scrutinize the minutiae of life and see the everyday object in a new light. Leonard asserts that Stephen's theory of the epiphany underlies advertising , whereby the I commonest object' is made to seem radiant. In the literary tradition, phases of apprehension are defined as integras, consonantia and claritas, the object achieving its quidditas; in the language of the marketplace, commodities maybe apprehended in terms ofwholeness, harmony , and radiance, becoming (like Coca-Cola) the real thing. This audacious paradigm is tempered by appropriate insights from Lacan et aI, promoting a fascinating commodification of religion and desire. From the tempting wares, I would choose Leonard's 'packaging' of Gerty's femininity and the 'semerotics' of desire in the 'Distant Music' tableau of 'The Dead' as remarkable instances ofthe object redefined in terms ofimmediate response; chapter 4, 'Praying, Buying, and the Packaging of Desire,' makes compelling reading. This defines a wider thesis: the challenge made by advertising and commodity culture to accepted history. In Lacanian terms, the ephemeral and trivial, ignored by hegemonic discourse, assert an 'unrepresented reality excluded by language' to make theword appear 'the exact...