Brand names

[Burgess, John]

Your comment:

>"parodies of branding and advertising"...absolutely.  Just as the song 
>lyrics suggest synaesthetic music in one's head, the obsession with 
>propaganda in all its forms throughout GR I think stimulates us to 
recreate 
>the consumer-bondage world we currently live in.  TRP may not mention 
many 
>specific brands, but the entire apparatus of marketing, advertising, 
>thought-control and secret messages is baroquely elaborated.  An example 
is 
>the stunningly paced episode of the hard candies...Slothrop is dosed 
(market 
>tested) again and again, we hear his stream of conciousness, this is 
market 
>research, focus group, new product intro (to a foreign market), and 
satire 
>of English modes of consumption among other things...and as Gore Vidal 
has 
>pointed out, for example, English films the late thirties and early 
forties 
>were nothing if not Allied advertising.

is an interesting one, but I think it goes too far.  GR abounds in brand 
names, but the names are so commonplace and so utterly "right" in context 
that I suspect many just pass most readers' attention.

Practically every brand and model of pre- and WWII UK car is named, as 
are a handful of branded German vehicles.  Cigarette brands, shoe polish 
brands (including Shinola), lightbulb marks, matches, sweets, even radio 
programs of 1944-45 (which, too, are brand names) are there in black and 
white.

While it's surely plausible that TRP is dropping all these names to 
parodize mass marketing, advertising and propaganda-in-general, I think 
it more likely that he's using familiar landmarks to paint his scenery.  
Take away these markers and the landscape becomes a simple gray, 
suitable, perhaps, for the Zone, but not a place for a reader who is 
already working a an historic remove from the action. 

I'm willing to concede an element of parody here, but as an aside, at 
most.