Ulysses shows the human body performing a vast range of quotidian tasks. Of all these activities, one of the most minute and seemingly inconsequential is the human habit of "picking" away the excrescences of noses, fingernails, and toenails. These three actions appear in three chapters. Small mysteries attend each one.

What Joyce called his "epic of the body" offers an astonishingly comprehensive picture of the body's actions: breathing, pumping blood, gazing, averting its gaze, sniffing, touching, tasting, listening, drinking, licking, chewing, swallowing, vomiting, urinating, defecating, menstruating, lactating, copulating, masturbating, dressing, undressing, washing, hair-combing, nose-blowing, nose-wiping, tooth-cleaning, knuckle-cracking, laughing, sighing, weeping, sweating, shivering, coughing, choking, belching, farting, spitting, sneezing, rubbing, scratching, blushing, dozing, hallucinating, walking, running, trotting, climbing, jumping, sitting, reclining, swimming, kicking, grabbing, hitting, lifting, wrestling, singing, dancing, gesturing, writing, speaking, panting, growling, shouting, screaming, shrieking, whispering, whistling, clapping. This is a hastily assembled list, no doubt incomplete.

Picking one's nose is distasteful to others and hence taboo, but it is one of the small satisfactions of life. At the end of Proteus Stephen looks around to make sure he is alone after laying "the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will." The narrative does not describe him picking his nose, but the cringe-inducing description of Bloom's defecation in the next chapter suggests that this is not because of any squeamishness on the author's part. It may instead reflect Stephen's habitually abstracted attitude toward his own body, or his desire for privacy. Not everyone is so concerned about appearances. In Penelope Molly remembers her father's repulsive friend "captain Groves"––"drunken old devil with his grog on the windowsill catch him leaving any of it picking his nose trying to think of some other dirty story to tell up in a corner."

A picked toenail memorably figures in Ithaca. Taking off the shoes that have tortured his feet for some sixteen hours, Bloom finds that the nail of one big toe has poked through his sock. Some minor surgery ensues: he "picked at and gently lacerated the protruding part of the great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and inhaled the odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the lacerated unguical fragment." The smell gives him a most un-Stephen-like "satisfaction," reminding him of the smells he got from "other unguical fragments" which he peeled off his toenails at night as a boy. Bloom's olfactory savoring of the toenail––an excrescence to be discarded, but also a comfortably redolent product of his body––represents a common human, and especially male, experience.

"Unguical" is not to be found in English dictionaries, but "ungual" is. It comes from the Latin unguis = claw, nail. Given his excellent Latin and his inventive deployment of Latinate constructions throughout Ithaca, it seems possible that Joyce may have coined his adjective without consulting any English dictionaries, and no one should object to his spelling an unusual word in an unusual way. Gabler, however, enforces lexicographical compliance, apparently assuming that the author made a mistake which he would have been grateful to see corrected, or that readers will need help making sense of the text. His presumptuous alteration of "unguical" to "ungual" has no precedent in earlier printed texts––or manuscripts, as far as I am aware.

The trimming of fingernails has figured famously in A Portrait of the Artist when Stephen imagines the dramatic artist lurking behind his creation "invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." In Sirens this action returns somewhat obscurely when the third line of the overture sounds the theme "Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips." The reference becomes clear when Simon Dedalus strolls into the Ormond bar: "Chips, picking chips off one of his rocky thumbnails. Chips. He strolled." A little later this image blends with others as Simon stands at the bar filling his pipe: "He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into the bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute." It seems unlikely that bits of fingernail are going into the pipe bowl, any more than Miss Douce's hairs are. Both of them float through Simon's musing cogitations as things he has handled, things he would like to handle, things that the shreds of tobacco resemble.

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John Hunt 2023