Noserag
Noserag
In Brief
Joyce had a lifelong aversion to hyphens. When words needed to be combined, he made one compound word. Examples like "stairhead," "dressinggown," and "gunrest" do not call much attention to themselves, but the novel soon introduces more startling examples. When Mulligan uses the English idiom "nose rag" he gives it the same unbroken form as the more proper "handkerchief": "Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.” Other compounds follow: “snotgreen,” “oakpale,” “snotgreen," "harbourmouth," "cuffedge," "dogsbody," and, most strikingly, “scrotumtightening.” The sentences in this part of Telemachus also display another feature of Joycean language that shaped A Portrait and continues throughout Ulysses: repetition of words or phrases to induce meditation and accumulate resonance.
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The snotgreen sea soon becomes linked with the green bile that Stephen’s mother vomited into a bowl, and Stephen’s mother comes into the conversation because Mulligan calls the sea “our great sweet mother,” “Our mighty mother!” The green sea becomes “a bowl of bitter waters” like the one beside the bed. And the waters are bitter not only because they remind Stephen of his mother’s suffering but also because a Yeats song which he sang for her mentions “love’s bitter mystery.” Stephen's fear of drowning in the sea becomes linked with his fear of being swallowed up in guilt over the mother whom he loves and fears. Words generate more words in Ulysses, and the reader will soon discover that this can happen not only in adjoining paragraphs but also across vast distances.
In these several paragraphs, which are not at all unusual in
Ulysses, one encounters something like a prose poem
in which words clump together, separate, generate new words,
associate in new ways. The image at right identifies
interpenetrating clusters of sound and sense:
nose, snot, mouth, taste, eating, vomiting, bile
sea, water, liquid, bowl, bay
the color green
razor, blade, killing, death
mothers
This prose poem (constructed, admittedly, by the note-writer's decision to excerpt several paragraphs of Joyce's narrative) begins with attention to the word “noserag,” and ends in the same way. It could have started earlier, beginning perhaps with the bowl in which Mulligan has stirred his lather, or Stephen’s fear of drowning in the sea.
