Branding

When I was in high school, I was the world’s worst English student.  I actually flunked my senior English class (which was media studies) and was forced to do a final project to receive a passing grade.  However, I will say thank you to Mrs. Brennen while reading this novel because she taught me to be aware of advertisements and think critically about their use of language, text, and space on a page.  Although this message has taken quite a bit of time to sink in, I can say that while reading Ali Smith’s Hotel World I was constantly catching the advertisements that are placed throughout the novel.  The brand placement is amazing (even Apple would be jealous!).  Smith uses language and an impression of disconnect or disembodiment to point out rift between the consumer and the advertiser.  The theme of disembodiment is established immediately with Sara, as she is literally out of her body and split into two different aspects of herself.  Smith furthers this idea with Else, as she splits apart words and weaves them back together in a shortened speech, while Lise pulls the words together again to reassemble them into an advertisement that Penny is responsible for producing only to find that the connection to all of these women is Clare finding the contraption that ripped apart (disembodied) Sara. 

The connection between disembodiment, or detaching the soul from the body, is shown in the language of the novel almost immediately, allowing language to act as a guide between connecting the soul with the body.  Sara’s “soul” or the remnants of Sara that act as the narrator for past and when talking about a bird she says, “Their beady       ,“ the blank space serving as the intended word (which is eye) yet she cannot recall this word saying “The word’s gone” (8).  Four pages prior the narrator uses the word eye, and yet for the remainder of this section she cannot recall this word, implying that the narrator is slowly moving to a space that is no longer connected with language. 

This breakdown in communication is spotted again when Else is recalling three stories that come to mind when hearing the phrase no strings attached.  The narrator notes of Else, “it is when she could still say whole words,” implying that there is a collapse of language that is shown throughout Else’s section as she is constantly shifting communicable, common language into shorthand (59).  Most interesting, Else associates this feeling of disconnect to the hotel which is a place that should connect most people.  This miscommunication that Else is picking up on and that Sara cannot name is associated with the hotel’s point which is a statue of “a flying head” which is a body-less human form (67).  It is Else that connects the language to the advertisement which allows Lise to pick up and run with full advertisement jingles.  Else’s section points out subtle advertisements, such as Global Hotel on the jacket.  Although this is expected as a marker of identification, the jacket also adds, “all over the world;” “we think the world of you” (73). This is an advertisement and although it is highlighted potentially for irony, it makes its way into a section in which Else points out the World of Carpet advertisements and the fast food advertisement (saladspies).  These advertisements don’t go unnoticed, but Lise heightens the awareness on advertisements and consumer culture.

Penny’s authoring of an advertisement can come as no coincidence.  Penny’s misconstructions of the other characters highlight the divide between fantasy and reality (something I believe Smith is playing with quite a bit).  This can further be associated with the divide between the advertiser and consumer.   As an author, Penny is supposed to be able to take a product and package it linguistically to appeal to a large audience.  As we read, she is unable to make essential connections about these characters allowing for her interpretation of the world to be off, if not completely wrong, suggesting that the corporate advertiser again misses their mark (as seen with sidespies and “we think the world of you” even though there are lasers in the refrigerators that prevent you from using this machine in any other capacity besides a consumer of their products). 

These women make up various aspects of an advertisement.  Advertisements are disembodied segments of a fantasy that hope to one day make their way into a reality by becoming a tangible product to be consumed.  When Lise recalls “Bring me apples, bring me (something), bring me hazelnuts, bring me wheat, bring me good things, to eat, Kellogg’s Country Store,” she not only indulges in an advertising fantasy that implies that the amount of food is endless and the consumer will have a bountiful table in Kellogg’s County Store, but there is a disconnect linguistically because something is clearly missing in Lise’s recollection of this text (85).  These women are all segments of a greater engine; they are pieces of an advertisement: text, color scheme, jingle, emotion; they are segments of a whole; the rooms that make up a greater hotel that combine to make a global hotel.  I think that at the end of this novel, Smith attempts a moment of realization in which the reader is able to connect all the characters in a great a-ha moment while the subtle globalized economic engine of corporate advertisement is able to continue on, regardless of the tragedy or realization, so that while Clare wipes her nose with a Kleenex, she is able to borrow some Nike’s and someone can clean the mess up with a Dustbuster.