Balzac’s Revolution of Signs: Advertisement as Textual Practice

Abstract

Our transition to the walls of Paris involves a shift in focus: the community of shoppers imagined by Dickens must give way to one which had its roots in another tradition entirely, in which display and consumption of the written word were a political rather than a commercial activity. Some of the irony in the Moses and Son adverts in the Dickens Advertiser is based on a disparity between meaningful announcement with political intent involving a desire to change existing social structures and the bathos or relative paltriness of buying consumer goods. The ‘Anti-Bleak House’ advert offers the purchase of a coat as an ersatz of emancipated action (the latter represented by a vocabulary of defiance, rebellion, rising, defying). Similarly, the humour of the political reference in ‘What a Stir’ mentions ‘Revolution at the Antipodes!’ to conjure up a world outside Britain of movement and social change only to telescope such a vision back down to clothes retailing. The humour functions on a juxtaposition of the sublime and the ridiculous, the desired perverse effect being the ridiculing of sublime action and the endorsement of retail and purchase as the only proper activity.