A TALK ON ADVERTISING - HERMAN WOUK (TEXT)

Text for III Semester B.A./ B. Com./ B. Sc. Additional English 

A TALK ON ADVERTISING

HERMAN WOUK

An after-Dinner Oration by the Artist

Marquis, while you were talking I looked around this table and saw that (nearly) everyone here earns a living through the activity called advertising. Now, I realize that you invited me in the absence, enforced by your sedentary ways, of stuffed tiger heads or other trophies on your walls, a live artist being the equivalent of a dead beast as a social ornament. I will not question your motive because it has given me a chance to do a beautiful and good thing. I should like to entreat all these gentlemen to redeem the strange, bittersweet miracle of their lives, while there is yet time, by giving up the advertising business at once.

Has it ever occurred to any of you gentlemen to examine the peculiar fact that you find bread in your mouths daily? How does this happen? Who is it that you have persuaded to feed you? The obvious answer is that you buy your food, but this just states the question in another, less clear way, because money is nothing but a token of exchange. Drop the confusing element of money from the whole process, and the question I’ve posed must confront you bleakly. What is it that you do, that entitles you to eat?

A shoemaker gives shoes for his bread. Well. A singer sings for her supper, well. A capitalist leads a large enterprise. Well. A pilot flies, a coal-miner digs, a sailor moves things, a mister preaches, an author tells stories, a laundryman washes, an auto worker makes cars, a painter makes pictures, a street-car conductor moves people, a stenographer writes down words, a lumberjack saws, and a tailor sews. The people with the victuals appreciate these services and cheerfully feed the performers. But what does an advertising man do?

He induces human beings to want things they don’t want.

Now, I will be deeply obliged if you will tell me by what links of logic anybody can be convinced that your activity – the creation of want where want does not exist – is a useful one and should be rewarded with food. Doesn’t it seem, rather, the worst sort of mischief, deserving to be starved into extinction?

None of you, however, is anything but well-fed; yet I am sure that until this moment it has never occurred to you on what a dubious basis your feeding is accomplished. I shall tell you exactly how you eat. You induce people to use more things than they naturally desire – the more useless and undesirable the article, the greater the advertising effort needed to dispose of it – and in all the profit from that unnatural purchasing, you share. You are fed by the makers of undesired things, who exchange these things for food by means of your arts and give you your share of the haul.  

Lest you think I oversimplify, I gave you an obvious illustration. People naturally crave meat; so the advertising of meat is on a negligible scale. However, nobody is born craving tobacco, and even its slaves instinctively loathe it. So the advertising of tobacco is the largest item of expense in its distribution. It follows, of course, that advertising men thrive most richly in the service of utterly useless most richly in the service of utterly useless commodities like tobacco or underarm pastes, or in a field where there is a hopeless plethora of goods, such as soap or whisky.  

But the great evil of advertising is not that it is unproductive and wasteful; were it so, it would be no worse than idleness. No. Advertising blasts everything that is good and beautiful in this land with a horrid spreading mildew. It has tarnished Creation. What is sweet to any of you in this world? Love? Nature? Art? Language? Youth? Behold them all, yoked by advertising in the harness of commerce.

Aurora Dawn! Has any of you enough of a ear for English to realize what a crime against the language is that (trade) name? Aurora is the dawn! The redundancy should assail your ears like the shriek of a bad hinge. But you are so numbed by habit that it conveys no offence. So it is with all your barbarities. Shakespeare used the rhyming of ‘double’ and ‘bubble’ to create two immortal lines in Macbeth. You use it to help sell your Dubl-Bubl Shampoo, and you have not the slightest sense of doing anything wrong. Should lifts man above the animals and that you are smothering the flame in mud, you would stare. You are staring. Let me tell you without images, then, that you are cheapening speech until it is ceasing to be an honest method of exchange, and commercial is meant to be a lie and the English in the President’s speech which follows, a truth, will in the end fall into a paralyzing scepticism in which all utterance will be disbelieved.

God made a great green wonderland when he spread out the span of the United States. Where is the square mile inhabited by men wherein advertising has not drowned out the land’s meek hymn with the blare of billboards? By what right do you turn Nature into a painted hag crying ‘Com buy’?

A few heavenly talents brighten the world in each generation. Artistic inspiration is entrusted to weak human beings who can be tempted with gold. Has advertising scrupled to buy up the holiest of these gifts and set them to work peddling?

And the traffic in lovely youth! By the Lord, gentlemen, I would close every advertising agency in the country tomorrow, if only to head off the droves of silly girls, sufficiently cursed with beauty, who troop into the cities each month, most of them to be stained and scarred, a few to find ashy success in the hardening life of a model! When will a strong voice call a halt to this dismal pilgrimage, this Children’s Crusade to the Unholy Land? When will someone denounce the snaring allurements of the picture magazines? When will someone tell these babies that for each girl who grins on a magazine cover a hundred weep in back rooms, and that even the grin is a bought and forced thing that fades with the flash of the photographer’s bulb, leaving a face grim with scheming or heartbreak?

To what ends is all this lying, vandalism and misuse? You are trying to sell; never mind what, never mind how, never mind to whom – just sell, sell, sell! Small wonder that in good old American slang ‘sell’ means ‘fraud’! Come now! Do you hesitate to promise requited love to miserable girls, triumph to failures virility to weaklings, even prowess to little children, for the price of a mouth wash or a breakfast food? Does it ever occur to you to be ashamed to live by preying on the myriad little tragedies of unfulfilment which make your methods pay so well?

I trust that I am offending everybody very deeply. An artist has the privileges of the court fool, you know. I paint because I see with a seeing eye, an eye that familiarity never glazes. Advertising strikes me as it would a man from Mars and as it undoubtedly appears to the angels: an occupation the aim of which is subtle prevarication for gain, and the effect of which is the blighting of everything fair and pleasant in our time with the garish fungus of greed. If I have made all of you, or just one of you, repent of this career and determine to seek decent work, I will not have breathed in vain today.

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Glossary

oration:            a formal speech

sedentary ways: spending much of the time seated

lumberhjack:   a person who cuts down trees for a living

extinction:       ruin or destruction

dubious:           doubtful or questionable

plethora:          plenty or excess

mildew:             destructive growth of tiny fungi forming on plants, leather, food, etc. in warm and damp conditions

behold:             look, notice

yoked:              bound, linked or tied to

Prometheus:      a mythical character who stole fire from heaven

smothering:       suffocating, suppressing

paralyzing:        rendering helpless

scepticism:        doubt

hymn:               sacred song or music

bill boards:        advertisements displayed on boards

traffic:               immoral and illegal trade

crusades:          religious battles in the Middle Ages led by Christian rulers to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims

prevarication:    evading the truth

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