Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the Stairworld stairhead, bearing a bowl of Camay lather on which a Myra Glass mirror and a Wilkinson Sword razor lay uncrossed. A yellow Giorgio Armani dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the early morning air, which was scented by Glade Freshener (apple-blossom). Glancing at his gleaming Rolex wristwatch, Buck realised he would need to hurry if he hoped to enjoy a luxurious Radox bath after he had completed his first pampering of the day with kitten-soft Andrex.
Or something like that.
It is, of course, presumptuous and no doubt, to some, even downright insolent to rewrite Ulysses. But, clearly, sad sod James Joyce, unlike Fay Weldon, didn't understand product placement. The news that Weldon, a feminist, who used to work in advertising (where she coined the slogan: "Go to work on an egg") has written a new novel, The Bulgari Connection, commissioned by the Italian jewellery outfit Bulgari, could lead to rewritings of many sad old Irish classics to update them for the contemporary world.
After all, it's not only saddo Joyce who didn't appreciate advertising as an asset to art. The sponsorship opportunities missed by such na∩ve Irish Nobel Literature Prize winners as W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney are obvious to the properly attuned 21st-century mind. Surely Sailing to Byzantium, for instance, could have interested Sutton Marine Limited or any of the other yachting suppliers. Krapp's Last Tape sounds ideal for EMI, and wouldn't an edition of Bog Poems sponsored by Bord na M≤na be an advertising natural, darling?
How about Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy? Securicor might be persuaded on the possibilities. John McGahern's The Dark? Obvious opportunities there for Guinness, given its huge advertising budget. Bram Stoker's Dracula? Wonderful scope for joint sponsorship here: Colgate, Massey Funeral Homes, perhaps even Pelican House. Paul Durcan's Going Home to Russia? Clearly, it's tailor-made for Aeroflot. And so forth . . . Indeed, you could probably market a family-fun board game suggesting "suitable" sponsors for Irish literary works.
Yet Fay Weldon's taking of the Bulgari shilling is not very funny. Apologists may argue that it accurately reflects the contemporary world in which everything - including literature - is, with Marxist irony, never anything more than a by-product of commerce. But it represents a capitulation which was not inevitable. Sure, literary authors need loot, too, but if they have to prostitute their words to get it, they've destroyed all their high-minded claims to truth, art and integrity.
It's true that publishing houses are also ruthless commercial enterprises but if say, Faber & Faber becomes indistinguishable from Coca-Cola, surely something will have been lost.
Even allowing that "literary" novelists' claims to integrity are routinely sustained by the literature industry, turning fiction into advertising represents cultural capitulation. Defenders of The Bulgari Connection, such as novelist Marina Warner, have suggested that the novel-ad (ad-novel?) primarily shows Fay Weldon's sense of mischief rather than financial opportunism. But vandalism is not mere mischief and Weldon has vandalised a form of writing which, if nothing else, ought to offer sanctuary from the totalitarian advertising monster which daily assaults us all.
Anyway, the capitulation of Weldon's "literature" to advertising points up an immensely ugly irony. A recurring theme - perhaps the recurring theme - of 20th-century literary fiction was the struggle and fate of individuals against society and prevailing beliefs. Now that statism, at least in the wealthy world, is less potent than before, we might have expected fiction to consider the struggle of individuals against being corporatised. Instead, we now have - albeit only one instance so far - the bought and corporatised author. Well done, Fay!
'The door is open and now the sky is the limit," says Weldon's agent, Giles Gordon. "I've suggested that in her next book she includes a whole string of top (don't you love that "top"?) companies: Disney, Levis, McDonald's, the lot. We should write to them and say: 'Ms Weldon is including a mention of your fine company in her next book. What do you reckon?' " Well Giles, I reckon you must be delighted with the publicity, but that doesn't mean that your delight is not in poor taste.
Literature, regardless of the snobbery which attaches to the word, was one of the last frontiers resisting product placement. If it too often shamelessly celebrated itself, that was elitist and irritating. But even when, as with, say, the Booker prize bash (all that status-signifying, self-aggrandising, sickeningly smug wood panelling of London's Guildhall) it verged on cultural masturbation, its self-regard was meagre compared with the gross self-regard of the head honchos of corporations.
Films have long been sites of product placement. Consider Breakfast at Tiffany's (jewellery outfits seem to be big into the gig); James Bond and his Savile Row suits and Aston Martin; The Love Bug and its Volkswagen Beetle. Art, too, has sometimes been colonised by commerce - most infamously perhaps when, back in the 1880s, Pears Soap bought Millais's painting, Bubbles, to help flog its product. As for classical, pop and rock music . . . just listen to any ad-break on television.
But until Fay Weldon, literature was different. Its practitioners and groupies regularly distinguished their efforts from those of mere "journalism" on, among other rationalisations, the grounds that journalism was hopelessly controlled by commercial concerns. And yes, of course, there is spillage from advertising into editorial in journalism. Seldom however, is it as crass or hypocritical as Fay Weldon's "mischief". How now can any company or product be mentioned in fiction in future without readers suspecting the literary equivalent of a crooked politician's brown envelope?
Or maybe that's too sniffy. If it's all right (is it?) for films, art and music to take an advertiser's shilling, what's the problem when literature does likewise? Maybe it's even democratising, propelling literature from its cloistered self-regard closer to popular culture. But that's not the point. What Weldon's capitulation means is that, throughout culture generally, ad-free space (as the BBC still offers in television, excepting its ads for itself and its own programmes and products) has been further lessened.
So, in a society in which we are psychically assaulted by advertising and even encouraged to walk around with ads on our clothes, another ad-free space has been colonised. Surely, if you colonise culture, you colonise minds. It's not as if all readers of The Bulgari Connection will slavishly want an item of Bulgari jewellery, though some might. The problem is that including paid-for ads in a novel forces an internalisation of values: that's the way the world is - corporate power is total - rather than recognising that that's the way the world has been distorted in the interests of corporations with the clout of capital.
The danger is that we are further subjected to a kind of attitudinal training, prime among which is that we should come to accept that there is no alternative to corporate power having sovereignty over all human affairs . . . not just the production of jewellery, cars and other goods but over culture too. Already, we have a culture industry sponsored by outfits whose overriding product - albeit legitimate in commerce - is profit. What we face is a world in which economics encloses culture rather than remaining a vital aspect of it.
At a time when millions of people - from Third World workers to First World anarchists - are engaged in social and political struggles against corporations and branding, Weldon's ad-novel represents not some slick postmodern joke but a rather callous betrayal. Advertising already results in a broad manipulation of consciousness - consider why your kids must have a particular brand of trainers. In that, it's arguably a form of censorship rather than a patron of the creativity advertisers claim for their "art".
The truth is that advertising, which Marshall McLuhan considered the greatest art form of the 20th century, can never be art at all. Certainly, it can sometimes be clever, engaging, sharp, memorable, even brilliant, but it cannot be art. It cannot be so because art, if it has any purpose at all, must have the capacity to bestow an unconditional gift - to create the space where a free lunch is possible or at least held to be possible. Advertising, which by definition seeks a response for its own ends, cannot bestow such a gift.
In some respects, the problem is not new. The patronage of literature by the aristocracy in previous centuries facilitated much excellence but also gave rise to an elitist canon, nowadays hotly and rightly disputed. Patronage by corporate commerce can ultimately result only in a culture in its own, vacuous image. Some people may argue that being paid to pepper a brand name throughout a novel is just an example of free speech. But surely, it can be no more than the freedom of corporate speech, which is a requirement of contemporary capitalism to make the world secure for global advertising.
For its part, you can hardly blame Bulgari. If it can place its expensive products in such a "high culture" form as a literary novel, it may not be doing culture any favours, but the resultant publicity attracts business attention. Likewise, perhaps, a struggling writer might understandably be tempted to write a sponsored novel. But when a best-selling author such as Fay Weldon takes the shilling (or the lira, or whatever) from a firm pretentious enough to use a Latinate "v" instead of a "u" in its trademark name - Bvlgari - something very vgly is happening. Very vgly indeed.