Puff Marries Advertising: Mechanization and Absurd Consumerism in J.-J. Grandville’s Un Autre Monde

Abstract

In J.-J. Grandville’s masterpiece Un Autre Monde (1844) Puff fashions himself as a “neo-god.” He creates two other “neo-gods,” Crack (Krackq) and Chatterbox (Hahblle), and the three depart for separate adventures in the realms of the sky, earth, and sea, parodying contemporary Parisian society.¹ Un Autre Monde was a revolutionary book, in which images were illustrated by texts. It was an extremely ambitious book: in the epilogue Grandville proclaimed that he created a whole world, no small task. And what a world of complex, strange and fantastic imagination! It is little wonder that when Un Autre Monde was rediscovered in the 1930s by the Surrealists, they foremost admired the singular and uncanny character of its images. Others, inspired by Walter Benjamin, have used Grandville’s images from the book to explore and illustrate theories of modernity and varied aspects of modernization.² Yet Un Autre Monde as a whole, both image and text, has received little sustained analysis, and the interpretations of Grandville’s work have largely focused on art.³ Grandville was, along with Daumier, the most popular and prolific artist working with La Maison Aubert, and was in the thick of the world of the publishing of illustrated books, lithograph prints, and caricature papers. This chapter situates Grandville’s work in rapidly changing contemporary conditions and methods of book production and marketing, by exploring the phenomenon of advertising and the commercialization of publishing and culture as significant themes in the book, and also by discussing the book’s narrative structure.