R. Brandon Kershner

The World’s Strongest Man: Joyce or Sandow?

With my chapter title here I mean to play a bit with the comparison of two apparently incommensurable figures: James Joyce, the modernist author, and Eugen Sandow, the now-forgotten strongman-performer who flourished in Britain in the early twentieth century. Here begins a gradual shift in my focus from texts to institutions, in that Sandow, who displayed a modernist mastery of advertising dispersed over the cultural spectrum, presented himself not only through language but preeminently through images—everything from postcards to staged spectacles. The present chapter deals both with Sandow as a broadly disseminated image that effectively interpellated consumers of the British Isles (and to a lesser extent those of Europe and American as well) and with the discourse of advertising upon which he depended and which effectively shaped him into a significant cultural nexus as well. As Vike Plock observes, Physical culture, which had its heyday in the years between 1850 and 1918, became, at the turn of the century, practically synonymous with the name Eugen Sandow, whose publication Strength and How to Obtain It marked the zenith of a fitness craze relying on new media such as advertising and photography; growing degeneration paranoia, and resurfacing concepts of Hellenistic body aesthetics as a means for aesthetic dissemination. (Plock, 115)