Literary mustard...

Fysh

Odd I know, but what are your favourite literary incidents involving mustard? With Denny's cashing in on the mention of their sausages in Ulysses, which writers have best done credit to that most classy of condiments, mustard?

I'll start this off with two relatively recent books:

"Fight Club" - I can't give an exact page reference, but when the narrator's apartment gets blown up, he finds his fridge in the street and thinks "how embarassing, a fridge full of condiments and no food", and goes on to describe his several types of mustard.

"And The Ass Saw The Angel" - At one point Euchrid talks about waking up with stinging eyes and wonders if the Sandman has been replaced by the Mustardman - perhaps we can get Neil Gaiman to chronicle this little-known hero's adventures?

simu

Here are examples of Joyce using mustard for descriptions:

BLOOM: (A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth) I tried her things on only once, a small prank, in Holles Street. When we were hardup I washed them to save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.

(from Ch. 15 of Ulysses)

Then she stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, and, listlessly lolling, scribbled on the jotter sixteens and capital esses. Mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She’s not nicelooking, is she? The way she’s holding up her bit of a skirt. Wonder will that fellow be at the band tonight. If I could get that dressmaker to make a concertina skirt like Susy Nagle’s. They kick out grand. Shannon and all the boatclub swells never took his eyes off her. Hope to goodness he won’t keep me here till seven.

(from ch. 10 of Ulysses)


For some reason, mustard reminds me of T.S. Eliot's
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, although it does not contain any explicit reference to mustard.

I took a look at the poem and it wasn't all that hard to figure out why if you look at this section:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

My brain probably reasoned like this: fog is like gas, this is yellow gas, mustard is yellow, there's such a thing as mustard gas, the idea of mustard gas goes with the suffocated, indecisive feelings of the poem's narrator, plus mustard gas reminds me of war, war reminds me of destruction and this reminds me of The Wasteland (another Eliot poem). And this was all going on subconciously until I read this thread and started to think about this!