It’s almost 15 years since I registered the domain name nouspique.com. At the time, I thought it was a clever name. You can read an explanation here of what I was thinking when I bought it. But it wasn’t long before I had the stuffing yanked out of my clever idea. I had to call tech support about a hosting issue and when the tech guy answered my call, the first thing he asked for was my domain name. I spelled it for him. “Ah, nose pick,” he said. “Uh, no, it’s noooo speeeeeek.” “Ah, so you’ve got a kind of French thing going there.” “Yeah, whatever.”
I note that “nose picking” has an entry in Wikipedia. Don’t ask me how I discovered that. I don’t remember. And even if I did remember, I wouldn’t tell you. It appears that more than 91% of all people pick their nose. I’m not sure about the research methodology used to arrive at that statistic, but I’m willing to accept the figure with verifying it independently. The statistic means that if you’ve got working digits, then you’re sticking them up your nose on pretty much a daily basis. Presumably the 9% who don’t pick their nose are people with disabilities – people who have lost their fingers or suffer from severe rheumatoid arthritis. The newly elected Pope Francis picks his nose. Her Majesty the Queen picks her nose. Barack Obama picks his nose. So does Michele.
To misquote the tagline of my web site: I pick. You pick. We all pick nose pick.
In what is perhaps not a coincidence, the prevalence of nose-picking is roughly the same as the prevalence of male masturbation. Basically, if you’re an able-bodied male with a penis and something to work it with, then, baby, you’re working it. Even Francis chokes the bishop from time to time. I say this is perhaps not a coincidence because it would seem that, metonymically speaking, the nose is often deployed in literature as a stand-in for the male member. Like the old joke about the size of the man’s feet, so, too, the nose. However, the size of the nose takes things one further by indicating potency as well as physical presence.
At one extreme, we have the nose of Saleem Sinai from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which he introduces by way of his grandfather’s nose:
There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face… Aadam Aziz, waiting for Tai, watches his rippling nose. It would have dominated less dramatic faces than his easily; even on him, it is what one sees first and remembers longest. ”A cyranose,” Ilse Lubin said, and Oskar added, ”A proboscissimus.”
Ingrid announced, ”You could cross a river on that nose.” (Its bridge was wide.)
My grandfather’s nose: nostrils flaring, curvaceous as dancers. Between them swells the nose’s triumphal arch, first up and out, then down and under, sweeping in to his upper lip with a superb and at present red-tipped flick. An easy nose to hit a tussock with. I wish to place on record my gratitude to this mighty organ – if not for it, who would ever have believed me to be truly my mother’s son, my grandfather’s grandson? – this colossal apparatus which was to be my birthright, too. Doctor Aziz’s nose – comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh – established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch. It was Tai who taught him that, too. When young Aadam was barely past puberty the dilapidated boatman said, That’s a nose to start a family on, my princeling. There’d be no mistaking whose brood they were. Mughal Emperors would have given their right hands for noses like that one. There are dynasties waiting inside it,” – and here Tai lapsed into coarseness – ”like snot.”
On Aadam Aziz, the nose assumed a patriarchal aspect. On my mother, it looked noble and a little long-suffering; on my aunt Emerald, snobbish; on my aunt Alia, intellectual; on my uncle Hanif it was the organ of an unsuccessful genius; my uncle Mustapha made it a second-rater’s sniffer; the Brass Monkey escaped it completely; but on me – on me, it was something else again.
In case there is any doubt that Rushdie draws a connection between the nose and the penis, consider the occurrence of the word cucumber as a descriptor of the nose. Here: “…that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little one in your pajamas!” And here: “And now Shaheed ran FULL TILT! – into the latrine, to find the buddha urinating away with an expression of foggy pleasure, emptying a bladder which must have been filling up for a fortnight, while the current passed up into him through his nether cucumber, apparently unnoticed, so that he was filling up with electricity and there was a blue crackle playing around the end of his gargantuan nose…”
Not until I read Laurence Sterne”s The Life And Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman did I appreciate Rushdie’s indebtedness to the 18th century master of digression, not only for his use of a narrator who tells his story by yammering on and on about seeming irrelevancies, but also for his nasal fetishism. However, Sterne’s concern is in the opposite direction. Poor Tristram’s nose is all mashed in, thanks to a difficult birth in which the doctor misapplied his forceps.
Tristram takes it upon himself first to define the word Nose:
I define a nose as follows—intreating only beforehand, and beseeching my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and condition soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against the temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition—For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs—I declare, by that word I mean a nose, and nothing more, or less.
As with Saleem Sinai, Tristram’s nose has a genealogy:
—”Because,” quoth my great grandmother, repeating the words again—”you have little or no nose, Sir.”
—S’death! cried my great-grandfather, clapping his hand upon his nose,—’tis not so small as that comes to;—’tis a full inch longer than my father’s.—Now, my great-grandfather’s nose was for all the world like unto the noses of all the men, women, and children, whom Pantagruel found dwelling upon the island of Ennasin.—By the way, if you would know the strange way of getting a-kin amongst so flat-nosed a people—you must read the book;—find it out yourself, you never can.—
—’Twas shaped, Sir, like an ace of clubs.
—’Tis a full inch, continued my grandfather, pressing up the ridge of his nose with his finger and thumb; and repeating his assertion—’tis a full inch longer, madam, than my father’s—You must mean your uncle’s, replied my great-grandmother.
—My great-grandfather was convinced.—He untwisted the paper, and signed the article.
And as with Saleem Sinai, Tristram’s preoccupation with one member is mysteriously translated into a preoccupation with another. Most famously, we have the account of how Tristram came to be circumcised. His uncle Toby had a habit of pilfering scrap metal to fashion the cannons of his model battlements and had stolen the lead weights from Tristram’s window sash. One morning when Tristram was five, he awoke to the call of nature, but because his chamber pot was missing, his nurse, Susannah, raised the window and told the boy to answer his call that way. Without counterweights, the window came crashing down and … it’s all right if you cross your legs here.
There are other notable noses in world of letters. Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac comes to mind. This 1897 play is based on the life of a 17th century dramatist renowned for the size of his proboscis. Rostand’s character falls somewhere between Tristram and Saleem on the nose/potency axis. Cyrano has a large nose, but his is a tale of unrequited love. Alas!
Then, of course, there’s Gogol’s nasal rhapsody which you can read here. Along the way, we have this conversation between Kovaloff and his nose:
“Pardon me; if one regards the matter from the point of view of duty and honour—you will yourself understand——”
“I understand nothing,” answered the nose. “I repeat, please explain yourself more distinctly.”
“Honourable sir,” said Kovaloff with dignity, “I do not know how I am to understand your words. It seems to me the matter is as clear as possible. Or do you wish—but you are after all my own nose!”
The nose looked at the Major and wrinkled its forehead. “There you are wrong, respected sir; I am myself. Besides, there can be no close relations between us. To judge by the buttons of your uniform, you must be in quite a different department to mine.” So saying, the nose turned away.
It seems natural that a web site called nouspique should feature Nose Stories of its own. And, indeed, it has. Recently, I wrote a story called The Virgin’s Nose. At the time, I hadn’t considered that I might be drawing on a broader literary history. Nor that I might be using the nose to talk about other concerns. But revisiting the story, I wonder if maybe something from my unconscious life was working its way out through the tip of my … well, whatever.
Photo Credit: Carlos Paes, Wikimedia Commons