Lemuel, Lego and Laundry Powder: The Visual Afterlife of "Gulliver’s Travels" in Advertising
Résumé
Images of Lemuel Gulliver have been used in a wide range of contexts that both bear witness to the longevity of Jonathan Swift’s character and raise questions regarding his current status and the degree to which he remains connected in viewers’ minds to his original literary and satiric context. Focussing on just some of the many adverts from around the world that, over a period of some 150 years, have comprised and reprised imagery of Gulliver – and one specific presentation of Swift’s imaginary traveller in particular – to promote an extremely eclectic assortment of products, this paper will examine the extent to which they can be seen as reflecting the evolution of the visual afterlives of Gulliver’s Travels. While the denotative value of these images, to borrow Barthes’s terminology, remains relatively stable, the connotative value they apparently convey is far more fluctuating. Admittedly, Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, a satiric puppet whose attitudes shift to suit the author’s diverse ironic purposes and critical targets, lacks the psychological coherence one might expect to find in the narrator or main character of a novel, but the sheer range of meanings and symbols that are represented and conveyed by the Gulliver figure in these adverts is nonetheless striking. This, I would argue, is due not only to the images’ possible susceptibility to individual interpretation, but also, and more notably, to the adverts’ inscription within a mutable and mutating visual and literary culture landscape. One indication of this is the inclusion of Gulliver adverts in series linking the character to other texts, thus providing indications as to how successive advertising creatives and copywriters have perceived the Travels in terms of different literary genres. Another is the imagery used, and its implicit or explicit connections to Swift’s text or to different literary, cultural or visual frameworks. The sample of adverts presented and analysed in this paper will try to assess not only what these images suggest about how those creating them perceive Gulliver, but also how they seem to presume their target audiences might perceive him.
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