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KLMNO Book World
SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010
ADAM SIMPSON
SOCIETY REVIEW BY JAMES P. OTHMER One message, many mediums O
nce upon a time may never be the same. For more than a century, storytelling and ad- vertising have shared the same multimedia bed, pro- voking, manipulating, offend-
ing and occasionally entertaining the mass- es. But never has the combination of narra- tive and branding been as pronounced, exciting or dangerous as it is now. For every clever and entertaining viral sensation such as Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” there are countless other mes- sages, from corporate-sponsored bloggers, YouTube activists and every medium or channel in the social media universe where it is nearly impossible to separate creative expression from insidious corporate pitch. Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant’s “The
Age of Persuasion” is a lively, anecdotal primer that chronicles how advertising became, depending on whom you ask, a culture-shaping or culture-destroying $450 billion-a-year industry. O’Reilly and Tennant are advertising veterans who col- laborate on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program “O’Reilly on Adver- tising,” and their book is filled with smart and breezy tales told from an insider’s perspective. They begin in 1904 in Chicago, when a former Canadian Mountie named John E. Kennedy talked his way into a job by tell- ing his future employer at the Lord & Thomas agency that he had distilled the definition of advertising to three magical words: “salesmanship on paper.” As the authors smartly note, “Today Kennedy might rework the phrase, first to neutral- ize gender and then to include all manner of advertising media, beginning with
broadcast and Internet, but his core idea remains.” Kennedy eschewed the industry norm of simply using print space to share information or announce a product’s availability, and instead he used stories and provocative headlines to sell prod- ucts and services. The book then exam- ines advertising’s transition from a print- dominated industry to one that encom- passes radio, television and the Internet. Students of branding, or readers look- ing for a general overview of advertising, will appreciate the book’s playful factoid- illuminating design and anecdotes de- scribing the industry’s breakthroughs, such as Burma-Shave’s brilliant 1920s highway billboard campaigns. With a new product and little money to spend on media, the heads of the family-owned business purchased a load of wooden planks and paint and spaced hundreds of sequential messages such as this along America’s highways: “Said Juliet” “To Romeo” “If you” “Won’t shave” “Go homeo” “Burma-Shave.” The book’s cover illustration is a silhou-
ette of an ad executive that looks as if it has been lifted from the opening credits of “Mad Men.” This choice proves as clev- er as it is telling because “The Age of Per- suasion” is most entertaining when dis- cussing previous eras of advertising and less so when examining the industry’s more recent past or speculating on its fu- ture. The authors don’t consider, for example, how the convergence and inter- action among media — TV, print and so-
THE AGE OF PERSUASION How Marketing Ate Our Culture By Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant Counterpoint. 324 pp. $26
STORYTELLING Bewitching the Modern Mind By Christian Salmon Translated from the French by David Macey Verso. 173 pp. $24.95
cial networks — have altered advertising’s ability to persuade. In Don Draper’s 1960s, for instance, a company such as Lucky Strike could buy a certain amount of time on a show and play its message until it was burned into our conscious- ness. But today, because we have so many more choices and can zap, fast-forward or TiVo a commercial into oblivion, ad- vertisers must engage consumers or pro- vide — heaven forbid — a message that has some utility. Persuasion, while not dead, has been vastly marginalized. Staying timely and relevant while cov- ering today’s media landscape is nearly impossible given the slow pace of main- stream book publishing. Nonetheless, chapters on topics such as YouTube and guerrilla advertising read more like famil- iar summaries of trends than the fresh, insight-driven take one would expect from writers with the expertise that O’Reilly and Tennant bring to the subject. Christian Salmon takes a more analyti- cal and intellectually satisfying approach in “Storytelling.” Originally published in France in 2007, the book can also feel be-
hind the times, especially when it dis- cusses the latest trends in gaming and branding. But Salmon’s insights are thought-provoking and have ramifica- tions beyond the world of advertising. A writer and researcher at the Center for Research in the Arts and Language in Paris, Salmon contends that the storytell- ing methods that originated around Cro- Magnon campfires have been co-opted by politicians, corporate gurus, Hollywood, the military and of course, everyone’s fa- vorite villain, advertisers. Salmon tends to write with an overly conspiratorial flair, and his examples are almost exclu- sively used to prove a negative point about the dangers of storytelling gone wild, but his argument is nonetheless fas- cinating. As an example of how corporate titans use narrative to craft their own media- friendly creation myths, he points to Steve Jobs’s “Three Stories” address to students at Stanford University in 2005. Jobs’s ver- sion has a narrative arc that would make Joseph Campbell and Robert McKee proud: the call to greatness, banishment from the kingdom and a triumphant re- turn to the throne. Salmon also demon- strates how corporations from Disney to Enron have embraced storytelling as a way to foster better communication. Showcasing the evils of branding is al- most too easy, and while Salmon’s dis- cussions of Enron, Nike and McDonald’s are interesting, they pale in comparison with the sections that deal with the role of storytelling in politics. Though a case can be made that the art of storytelling spin or argumentation in this country goes back as far as “Common Sense,” Salmon claims
that the term “spin” was coined during the 1984 presidential election and that spin and storytelling have increasingly been the deciding factors of every election since. The line that best illustrates this, he writes, is this post-2004 election quote from James Carville on “Meet the Press”: “They produce a narrative, we produce a litany. They say, ‘I’m going to protect you from the terrorists in Tehran and the ho- mos in Hollywood.’ We say, ‘We’re for clean air, better schools, more health care.’ ” Of course, political spin existed long before the term was coined, but its vast delivery system over a 24/7 news cy- cle gives it unprecedented influence on our lives. What Salmon fails to recognize is the
huge difference between story and spin, fic- tion and lie. Using stories to illustrate a truth is one thing. Using them to perpetu- ate a lie is quite another. Salmon gives us too little credit for being able to tell the dif- ference. We’re constantly bombarded by stories good and evil, forced to distinguish spin from fact, branding from entertain- ment, the manufactured from the authen- tic. Some people think that the transparen- cy of the Internet will out the truth. But cor- porate malarkey served up as haiku or a one-act play is still corporate malarkey. And “Mission Accomplished” or “Change We Can Believe In” may make great lines, but if they’re not true, they can launch a thou- sand litanies.
bookworld@washpost.com
James P. Othmer is the author of the novel “Holy Water” and the memoir “Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet.”
BIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY WENDY SMITH Lord of the flies, but not of himself
WILLIAM GOLDING The Man Who Wrote ‘Lord of the Flies’ By John Carey Free Press. 573 pp. $32.50
W
illiam Golding’s literary career culminated in the early 1980s with a Booker Prize for his sea-
faring drama “Rites of Passage” and a Nobel Prize for a body of work that ranged from “The Inheritors,” a tragic account of peaceful Neanderthals done in by weapon-wielding Homo sapiens, to his visionary tour de force, “Darkness Visible.” None of those works, however, entered popular culture with the primal force of Golding’s tale of schoolboys stranded on an island who quickly give way to their most savage instincts. Some- one younger might have been unmoored by being the author of the book that “re- placed Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ as the bible of the American adolescent,” but Golding was nearly 43 when “Lord of the Flies” was published in his native England in 1954, and 50 when the run- away success of the American paperback edition enabled him to give up his un- congenial post at a Salisbury grammar school. His preoccupations as a writer and a man, John Carey demonstrates in this thoughtful biography, had already been fixed. The conflict between reason and faith, neither of which can wholly ameliorate
human cruelty, was waged in Golding’s breast long before it became the subject of his fiction. His father, a popular schoolteacher in Wiltshire, was an athe- ist, socialist and rationalist; his mother shared her husband’s “advanced” views. Both endeavored to disabuse their sensi- tive, fearful son of what they saw as his superstitious tendencies. Yet his most powerful childhood memory was a vi- sion of a benign spectral presence in his bedroom: “a glimpse of ‘the spiritual, the miraculous,’ ” Carey writes, quoting from an unpublished autobiographical frag- ment, “that [Golding] hoarded in his memory as a refuge from ‘the bloody cold daylight I’ve spent my life in, except when drunk.’ ” Drunkenness became a problem early
on; Golding was sacked from his first teaching job in 1939 at least partly for drinking too much. Alcohol may have blunted the humiliation of being judged “not quite a gent” at class-conscious Ox- ford. And it may have helped with the guilt he felt over jilting a hometown fian- cée to marry Ann Brookfield, whose mother also worried about his alcohol consumption. Carey gently presents Gol- ding’s lifelong weakness as the self- medication of “a deeply self-examining and self-blaming man who, as he said more than once, saw the seeds of all evil in his own heart.” Service in the navy during World War II confirmed Golding’s jaundiced view of
human nature, especially his own: “I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort,” he later wrote. Nothing in his outwardly ordinary postwar exis- tence as a husband, father and lackadaisi- cal schoolmaster justified such a com- ment, but Carey makes excellent use of Golding’s personal papers to delineate the turbulent inner life that fueled both his creativity and his harsh evaluation of unexceptional failings. In this context, “Lord of the Flies” — shamelessly written in the classroom while his students labored at make-work tasks — can be better understood as a salvo in the author’s battle between dark impulses and the longing to transcend them. Charles Monteith, the Faber and Faber editor who plucked the manu- script from the reject pile, encouraged Golding to eliminate religious echoes that suggested Simon’s death was a will- ing martyrdom. Golding reluctantly complied, and perhaps his more mystical original would not have been as popular as the published version. With sub- sequent novels, he would not so readily accede to demands that the action be “explicable in purely rational terms,” and his critical reputation occasionally suf- fered as a consequence. By the time “Lord of the Flies” became
a cultural phenomenon, Golding had published three more novels, all well re- ceived despite some carping from the up- per-crust intellectual establishment.
Once he gained the financial freedom to write and live as he pleased, his pace slowed, and his out- put lessened; he trav- eled extensively, gar- dened obsessively and went through more drafts of shorter texts. In the early ’70s, he endured a writer’s block that lasted 41
⁄2 years. Success had not
changed his bleak view that rational- ism was insufficient to nourish the hu- man soul, but “belief did not mean you were a better person.” His son’s 1969 ner- vous breakdown, the beginning of a long struggle with mental illness, confirmed his sense that “the name of our God is Random.” Writing “Darkness Visible” restored his equilibrium and productivity. Gol- ding published four subsequent novels and had completed a draft of a fifthwhen he was found dead on the bedroom floor of his home in Cornwall in 1993. Carey’s depiction of his final two decades, during which he was honored by a knighthood as well as the Booker and Nobel prizes, suggests that they contained as much happiness as was possible for a man who considered himself “a monster in deed, word and thought.” Golding’s constant self-castigation seems hardly justified by the sporadic incidents of drunken abu-
siveness Carey records, or a few seamy sexual affairs in his youth, but this intelligent, elegantly writ- ten and deeply empathetic biography re- minds us that the factual basis of a writ- er’s neuroses is less important than the imaginative use he makes of them. Gol- ding took the darkness he found in his own heart and rendered it visible in nov- els that examine with pity and horror “the long nightmare which is the bedrock of being human.”
bookworld@washpost.com
Wendy Smith is a contributing editor of the American Scholar.
1957 PHOTO BY JOHN MILNE
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