Conclusion

Abstract

My conclusion is an image. It is the image of a wedding party — the bride and groom and wedding guests all dressed in clothes made from advertisements and serial novels. Jean-Jacques Grandville is showing us the marriage of Puff and Réclame - two forms of advertising, one literary, the other commercial — united with a view to procreation. [Fig. 23] The cartoon is part of his critique of commercial writing, yet also offers a vision of the human condition in which subjectivity is shown to be bound up with imprinting which is also clothing. Writers such as Carlyle and Dickens always insisted upon the closeness of cloth and print; stories are clothes, says Balzac, when he describes the serial novel as the flounce at the bottom of the skirt of the newspaper. Advertising fictions — the language of the walls — are the material we weave and which clothes us: it forms the texture of our daily lives and imprints itself upon our selves. Grandville shows that it has usurped the power of the institutions surrounding marriage (Church and state) and that it has even taken the place of the persons it clothes. Indeed, the image gestures towards a posthuman world where the subject is a prosthesis or indeed mere effect of the ambient text and image.KeywordsHuman ConditionCultural HistoryLiterary HistoryMere EffectImage GestureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.