FABLES OF ABUNDANCE A Cultural History of Modern Advertising

FABLES OF ABUNDANCE: A Cultural History of Modern Advertising. By T.J. Jackson Lears. Basic. 492 pp. $30

Jackson Lears's fascinating history of advertis- ing is really two books in one. The first tells the story of how, around the turn of the last century, advertisers put their Barnumesque past behind them and remade themselves as professionals. Distancing themselves from patent-medicine salesmen and itinerant ped- dlers, the new breed of advertisers traded old- fashioned images of plenty and a carnival rhetoric for a technocratic language of effi- ciency and control. Contrary to popular opin- ion, the consumer culture they created did not promote hedonism; instead, it subordinated longings for a bountiful agricultural paradise to the demands of modern industry. This 1909 counsel from the J. Walter Thompson adver- tising agency handbook might have served as a kind of manifesto: "The chief work of civili- zation is to eliminate chance, and that can be

done by foreseeing and planning."

As Roland Marchand did in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity,

1920-1940 (1985), Lears emphasizes the role of advertising in promoting a scientifically man- aged world. In this brave new world, expert authorities and mass-produced commodities combined to dispel the uncertainties not only of a market economy but of the human condi- tion. Advertisements repeatedly stressed the victory of a scientific civilization over the lim- its of nature, including human nature. Early- 20th-century ads were obsessed with bodily odors, slimness, and intestinal "regularity," and suggested that a "unified, controlled, sin- cere selfhood was necessary to successful competition in the modern marketplace. In 1926, Guardian Memorials carried this strain of advertising to its logical conclusion: "The thought of its clean, dry, airy above ground crypt is a constant consolation to those still living."

Lears has done more, however, than re-

make the case against advertising's vision of

a sanitized world of happy, robotic consum-

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ers. His other story is that of late-19th- and early-20th-century writers and artists who for- mulated similar critiques of modern consum- erism. Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, and artists such as Kurt Schwitters, the abstract ex- pressionists, and-above all-Joseph Cornell objected to the advertising culture of consum- erism not for its materialism but for its care- less betrayal of the material world. "The ma- terialism promoted by advertisers was antimaterial," Lears writes; "the success of the corporate economy depended less on the es- teem accorded material things than on the constant restimulation of the desire for more of them." Lears describes artists such as Cornell (1902-72), a semirecluse in Flushing, New York. who made surreal boxes filled with the para- phernalia of every- day life-stuffed birds, buttons, toys, fragments of old the-

atrical posters-jux- taposed and treated

with the moral au-

thority of religious

icons. To counter

modern advertis-

ing's drive for mas-

tery over nature, Cornell revived an irrational,

"magical" outlook that valued apparently use-

less objects and attempted to reconnect dreams

and reality, "matter and spirit, thoughts and

things."

Lears's two stories-of advertising as an agent of bureaucratic order and of the artis- tic counterappeal to a holistic worldview- coexist uneasily in this volume. Indeed, Lears seems less interested in reconstructing the rise of the advertising profession than in probing the spiritual resources of artistic modernism. What inspire Lears at his best are not the conceptual boxes of social his- tory but the actual boxes in which Cornell assembled a more sensuous and fantastic private world. By reconstructing this subter- ranean celebration of animism and hedo- nism in modern American culture, Lears brilliantly redefines the debate about con- sumer culture and, in the process, estab- lishes himself as a profound and original cultural critic in his own right. Fables of Abundance is a rare picture of an intellectual searching for fresh, new ground on which to stand as an interpreter of modern life.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF CHAIRMAN MAO: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician. By Li Zhisui. With the editorial assistance of Anne F. Thurston. Trans. by Tai Hung-chao. Random House. 682 pp. $30 BURYING MAO: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping. By Richard Baum. Princeton. 489 pp. $35

Ever since Mao Zedong officially founded the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the inner workings of its political system have remained clouded in mystery. Two new books plumb that mystery and uncover, at bottom, a large irony: a country supposedly governed by ironclad ideology was buffeted this way and that by a few men's personal whims.

Li Zhisui was Mao's personal physician (his great-grandfather had also been physi- cian to a Chinese emperor), but his story of Mao's private life belongs less to medical annals than to the National Enquirer. Mao's insatiable appetite for young women (he passed on venereal disease to hundreds of them), his slovenly personal habits (he nei- ther bathed nor brushed his teeth), his drug addiction, and his extravagant "imperial" processions from city to city hardly fit his once-popular image as an ascetic, ideologi- cally inspired patriot. Convinced that Chair- man knows best, Mao trusted few and worked closely with no one. When thwart- ed, he would contemplate returning to the mountains to launch a new guerrilla cam- paign. He seems to have enjoyed few things as much as the terror and chaos caused by his Cultural Revolution (1965-68).

But can this tale, with its lurid sex and the relentless pettiness of Mao and his vicious, self- indulgent wife, Jiang Qing, be entirely believed? Anne Thurston, a noted China authority, has shaped and written much of the book, and her contribution gives a creditable historical back- ground to Li's anecdotes. Li's source materials, his diaries, were burned in 1966, yet he asks the reader to accept verbatim dialogues as well as minutely observed details of events he could not have personally witnessed. Nor can Li qualify as an unbiased observer when it is obvious that he allowed few standards, political or ethical, to interfere with his role as Mao's physician, con- fidante, and servant.

Baum, a political scientist at UCLA, readily admits that he is using limited and questionable documents, but he neverthe- less manages to construct a richly textured and convincing portrait of the political transformation that ensued after Mao's death in 1976 at the age of 82. Deng Xiao- ping, the master manipulator, demonstrated again the centrality of personal control in China, and during his reign the scheming of factions and rivals customarily took the place of policy debates. It was, after all, his ambivalence about market reforms and po- litical liberalization that led to the Tian- anmen Square massacre in June 1989. Deng is now 90 years old and sick, and the People's Republic stands on a precipice once more, with few institutions in place that can guarantee stability, economic reform, politi- cal change, or even the shunning of nation- alistic militarism. Baum makes clear that Deng's one-man show has been better for China than was Mao's. But Deng, too, has cast the Chinese people adrift in complex and dangerous circumstances, being no more willing than Mao to trust China's fate to independent political processes he cannot dominate.

THE SOUTHERN TRADITION: The Achievement and Limitations of an Ameri- can Conservatism. By Eugene D. Genovese. Harvard. 138 pp. $22.50

If any more evidence is needed that the end of the Cold War turned the world upside down, this book should do it. It is not so much the author's argument that "southern conserva-

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