The 16th Annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : HISTORY WINNER, JACKSON LEARS : Shopping for Our Souls : Excerpt from “Fables of Abundance”

While it has long been fashionable for academics to deride advertisements as merely tools of social control, Jackson Lears, a professor of history at Rutgers University, believes that advertising copywriters--iconoclasts at the center of capitalism--can help us find a place in the world for play, wonder and the imagination. True, he writes, yesterday’s peddlers and patent medicine salesmen have become powerful social engineers. But as he suggests in this adaptation of the introduction to “Fables of Abundance,” they are also guardians of democracy and creators of inspirational art.

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What do advertisements mean? Many things. They urge people to buy goods, but they also signify a certain vision of the good life; they validate a way of being in the world. They focus private fantasy; they sanction or subvert existing structures of economic and political power. Their significance depends on their cultural setting.

And they can show up almost anywhere. Consider the meaning of advertisements to the Abelam of New Guinea. The Abelam are well known among anthropologists for their tambarans: polychromatic sacred designs embodying the most powerful ancestral spirits of the tribe and covering the outside walls of the houses used for important ceremonies.

“Coloured magazines sometimes find their way into the villages, and occasionally pages torn from them are attached to the matting at the base of the ceremonial house facade,” the British anthropologist Anthony Forge observed in 1963. “In all such cases I have seen, the pages were brightly coloured, usually food advertisements of the Spam and sweet corn and honey-baked ham type. Inquiries revealed that the Abelam had no idea of what was represented but thought that with their bright colours and incomprehensibility the selected pages were likely to be European tambarans and therefore powerful.” In New Guinea, as in the industrialized West, advertisements could slip past the narrow, instrumental purpose of selling goods to acquire broader and more elusive cultural meaning.

Without falling into a facile definition of advertising as “the folklore of industrial society,” it is possible to admit that the Abelam were on to something. During the last 200 years, in the capitalist West and increasingly elsewhere as well, advertisements have acquired a powerful iconic significance.

Yet they have been more than static symbols: they have coupled words and pictures in commercial fables--stories that have been both fabulous and didactic, that have evoked fantasies and pointed morals, that have reconfigured ancient dreams of abundance to fit the modern world of goods. By the late 20th Century, these fables of abundance--especially the ones sponsored by major multinational corporations--had become perhaps the most dynamic and sensuous representations of cultural values in the world.

In “Fables of Abundance,” I tell the story of how advertising collaborated with other institutions in promoting what became the dominant aspirations, anxieties, even notions of personal identity, in the modern United States. The contradictory patterns I have found, I believe, embody some recurring tensions in commercial culture: between the deceptions of the confidence man and the plain speech of the self-made man, between the spontaneous force of consumer desire and the managerial drive for predictability and control.

Overall, the balance of tensions has gradually been restructured in accordance with the requirements of organizational rationality, especially during the past century with the rise of national and multinational corporations. But neither confidence men nor consumer longings could ever be entirely integrated into a managerial system. Indeed, it was precisely the variety and unpredictability of the marketplace that had attracted people to it in the first place.

For centuries since the great commercial fairs of early modern Europe, market exchange has been associated with a carnival atmosphere, with fantastic and sensuous experience, perhaps even with the possibility of an almost magical self-transformation through the purchase of exotic artifacts in a fluid, anonymous social setting. Consumer goods, in other words, could still sustain traces of an animistic sensibility, but they began to circulate widely in the West during the early modern period (1500-1800), when the cosmic explanatory power of a magical worldview was becoming problematic for some people. The magic of the marketplace was fragmentary and attenuated; it had less to do with a coherent cosmology than with a developing world of free-floating, shape-shifting selves. But under certain circumstances, it held out a vision of transcendence, however fleeting.

Advertisements preserved that fitful promise down to the 20th Century. Consider a vignette from Henry Roth’s autobiographical novel “Call It Sleep” (1934), which recreates the experience of a sensitive Jewish immigrant boy growing up in Brooklyn before the First World War.

Battered by street punks and living in fear of his father’s rages, the boy imagines that if he had a tricycle, “he’d ride away,” past the telegraph poles on the outskirts of the city, to “a place like a picture in the candy store. That lady who stood on a big box of cigarettes and wore a handkerchief under her eyes and funny fat pants without a dress and carried a round sword. A place where those houses were that she lives in, that all ended in sharp points.”

His erotically charged ruminations return quickly to his immediate situation; still, for a moment he has been lifted from his chronic anxiety and transported to a fantastic place by remembering a fragment of commercial exotica--perhaps a label from a box of Egyptian Deities cigarettes.

But as rhetorical constructions, advertisements did more than stir up desire; they also sought to manage it--to stabilize the sorcery of the marketplace by containing dreams of personal transformation within a broader rhetoric of control. The urgency of that project was rooted in circumstances peculiar to Anglo-American Protestant culture: extraordinary natural abundance, combined with a proliferation of charlatans and confidence men in a society committed to sincerity and self-command.

In the 19th Century the rhetoric of control often originated outside the advertising business, issuing from ministers and other moralists. Advertisements themselves became a carnival of exotic imagery. But as the marketplace in commercial images became more organized and more dominated by large corporations, the rhetoric of control came from within the advertising business, in the managerial idiom of efficient performance. At about the same time Roth’s young narrator was fantasizing about the lady in the fat pants, most national brand-name advertisers were sanitizing exoticism and standardizing ideals of beauty.