How do ad campaigns fundamentally affect the way we think – and how do ghosts help grease the wheels of corporate greed?
Julius Julius, the quirky, ethereal debut novel by playwright and essayist Aurora Stewart de Peña, seeks to answer those questions in its haunting portrait of an advertising agency built atop a maze of mysterious catacombs.
Julius Julius, by Aurora Stewart de PeñaSupplied
Presented as a mosaic of short vignettes, Julius Julius highlights advertising’s capacity to change the world, while critiquing the means by which it has historically done so. The book, a toothy, tender satire, betrays Stewart de Peña’s lived experience: She has spent years employed as a marketing strategist.
Two-parts Mad Men to one-part Doctor Who, this time-travelling paradox of a novel will change the way you see the ads on your morning commute – and will surely leave you with far more questions than answers by the time you turn the final page.
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The Globe and Mail sat down with Stewart de Peña to discuss Julius Julius – and the blonde sausage dogs that roam free within the novel’s eponymous, ancient advertising agency.
You chose to structure Julius Julius in a series of stream-of-consciousness vignettes from three employees at this otherworldly advertising agency. What was the impetus behind that decision?
It was intuitive – and it felt very cohesive with the way we write in advertising. Short vignettes, short sentences, short words, with a lot of space around those words to allow for people’s own aesthetic experience of the sentences. If you think about an ad on a page or writing on a billboard, it’s often not a lot of words.
What struck me while reading Julius Julius was the characters’ shifting attitudes toward the company they work for – and advertising as a whole. One page will be deeply cynical, the next surprisingly hopeful. Does that reflect your experience of the industry? And how did writing the book either affirm or reject your thoughts advertising as a medium?
It’s a line I tread all the time. I’m a naturally optimistic person and that has led me to place my optimism sometimes in bad actors – I think advertising is a neutral tool that can be used as part of some hideous workings.
As an adult, I’m cynical, but the book was written from the place of a person trying really hard to be optimistic, to ignore the situations unfolding around them. I’m still asking myself and figuring out how I feel about advertising, but this book was an attempt to begin answering that question.
Why do seemingly immortal, blonde sausage dogs roam the agency?
Every agency has dogs in them. Every agency wants to be the dog agency. Dogs embody the emotions of the people around them – an early reader, Lauren Bride, pointed out that the sausage dogs in the book express the emotions of the agency, and she was totally right. They do. They express the anxieties and hopes and ambitions and sorrows and grief of the people around them.
In Julius Julius, we meet three employees in different time periods – and none of them seem to be an ideal fit for the agency. What do you think a person needs to be in order to succeed in this industry?
Thirteen years into this work, I don’t think I’ve met that ideal person. The amount of work you’re expected to do at an agency is often really heavy, like 60- and 70-hour work weeks. I think it’s different for every agency. But I think at the very least it’s someone who’s creative and energetic.
Every advertiser I’ve ever met has had a complicated relationship with Mad Men and its portrayal of the advertising industry. What’s yours?
Mad Men exaggerates the world of advertising in terms of the social dynamics, and I think it’s pretty bang-on. The way the characters are sort of bound together for life feels really truthful to my experience in advertising – the amount of time they spend together, the intensity of the work. That said, I feel elements of my experience in the field in that show, but it also feels like I’m watching a sort of magical, exaggerated world.
Also, Don’s not a very good creative director.
How does Julius Julius reflect your experience of advertising? Did you find yourself needing to exaggerate much?
Well… sort of. It’s heightened. I was thinking about all the places I’ve worked, and the opportunities I’ve had to work for these big brands. It was interesting to think about those brands as monoliths, and sweeping historical stories – what if these brands we know and love stretched back to Pompeii or the Crimean War?
I love historical advertising because they didn’t have the same rules we have today. I think today’s advertising will result in similarly interesting artifacts for people in the future. In the book, I made up a hygiene campaign called “Wash up, lasses!” which didn’t exist, but it might as well have. Old advertising operated on shame – I think we’ve come a long way from that, but I think we still contain that history inside us in modern advertising.
This interview has been edited and condensed.