{"id":70,"date":"2016-09-06T02:57:15","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T02:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/?p=70"},"modified":"2016-09-06T02:57:15","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T02:57:15","slug":"the-snotgreen-sea-the-grim-state-of-irish-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/uncategorized\/the-snotgreen-sea-the-grim-state-of-irish-art\/","title":{"rendered":"The Snotgreen Sea: The Grim State of Irish Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the opening episode of Ulysses<\/em>, the state of Irish artmaking is clearly dire. After borrowing Stephen’s handkerchief, Buck Mulligan examines it and derisively says, “The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.” (p4) He then coins the phrase, “The snotgreen sea,” after Homer’s wine dark sea, an allusion that becomes barbed when Mulligan later suggests that he and Stephen should “Hellenize” Ireland. Even more interestingly, Joyce quickly begins to play with the neologism, self-consciously hinting at it while Stephen, possibly influenced by Mulligan’s comment, imagines the sea as a bowl of his mother’s bile: “The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile…” (p5) Stephen himself later makes a more piercing joke, referring to Mulligan’s mirror as, “a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.” (p6) These brief remarks do a great deal to frame the state of Irish art. Irish writers are laboring in shadow of the English and coming up short. Joyce implicates himself as working the shadow of the Greeks as well. The outlook for art as a national project, as something truly Irish, is quite bleak.<\/p>\n

It is also worth briefly noting that while Stephen is a writer and Mulligan a medical student, the only verses in the opening episode are from Mulligan’s “ballad of joking Jesus,” another aspect of usurpation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the opening episode of Ulysses, the state of Irish artmaking is clearly dire. After borrowing Stephen’s handkerchief, Buck Mulligan examines it and derisively says, “The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.” (p4) He then coins the phrase, “The snotgreen sea,” after Homer’s wine dark sea, an allusion that becomes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}