The Appearance of Rudy: Children’s Clothing and the History of Photography

Abstract

The Orient is a discourse, broadly dispersed through the culture of turn-of-the-century Great Britain and Ireland, whose signifiers permeate the text of Ulysses as well. Sometimes, as with Lalla Rookh, the locus of signification is a suggestive intertextual event. But just as there is no single dominant source for Orientalist discourse, there is no single textual location for it in Ulysses (or, for that matter, in Joyce’s other books). If the preceding chapter can be said to take a “macroscopic” approach to its subject, pursuing Orientalism throughout the text, I now would like to take a “microscopic” perspective, examining a single textual moment in terms of several kinds of cultural discourse. Rather than analyze an intertext, here I am examining the appearance of a single image in the light of several unfamiliar cultural contexts. The moment is among the most significant in Ulysses, and is considered by some readers to be the book’s climax: the fantastic appearance of Rudy to Bloom after he and Stephen have left Bella Cohen’s house, while Stephen is lying semiconscious in the street. Rudy’s appearance is so rich in potential symbolism as almost to constitute a parody of literary symbols, and the meaning of his helmet, waistcoat, lambkin, cane, and so forth have been energetically debated by generations of critics.¹

Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions. (U 11.497)

Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you get is, well, a positively distorted macro-mass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. (FW 111)