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HOW WE LOST OUR SENSE OF SMELL – A S Byatt
Imagine a modern room. Its magic window is open on another world where once the hearth used to be, with its wood smoke, or its smell of hot coal with a ghost of tar. The artificial paradises succeed each other. Sunny glades in dappled woodland, inviting tunnels of greenery like the shadowed rides in Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, where
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs
But in embalmed darkness guess each sweet…
Keats lists the guessed-at flowers and grasses:
White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine
The murmurs haunt of flies on summer eves.
The television screen shows branches and violets. It shows pine forests and sheets of falling white water ending in curls of clean, shining spray. It shows meadows full of buttercups and pine forests full of mystery and crisp needles. It is telling you - enticing you – to recreate these atmospheres in your own home with air fresheners, with aerosol sprays of scented furniture polish, with jigging and extravagant canisters of flowery and fruity powder which will "freshen" your stale carpets, with droplets or waxy cones which drink up the odours of tobacco smoke and shaggy dogs and damp wool and replace them with tangy fruit and flower bouquets. Think how many such smells contend for supremacy in the room with the television. The lavender polish (with its sharp aerosol undertow), the rich, peachy freshener hanging in the window, the orris and attar of roses and orange peel in the carpet, the Glade, the Lavender Antiquax, the appley Pledge.
Move out into the kitchen, where the floors have been washed with sugary hyacinth disinfectant, where the dishwasher is scented with lemon and honey, where there is a kind of mixed artificial flower scent in the washing machine, and perfumed paper strips making the contents of the dryer smell of essence of concentrated plums and overwhelming extract of cloves, or vanilla, or potpourri, or all at once. You have seen ecstatic dancing women on your TV screen pressing their noses into heaps of enhanced white towels, which do not smell of damp cotton but of lightness and freshness, you are told. Does pressing your nose into your own towels induce ecstasy?
You have a deodorising block in your refrigerator which does not smell of nothing, but of ersatz orange or lemon or lime. Your steam iron emits aromatherapeutic steam, valerian for headaches and stomach cramps, nutmeg for digestion, neroli oil as an antidepressant and aphrodisiac.
Go out into the lavatory and your floor will smell of spring forest, your lavatory cleaner of "pine forest" or "aqua", which is not a smell of mussel shells and seaweed, or of froggy ponds and marsh marigolds, but another swoon-sweet mixed floral bouquet. The water-softening block in your loo tank will have its own strong, sweet odour, as will the little block you hang from the rim to odorise the water in the bowl, to make it smell "clean".
There will be air fresheners in canisters to spray high into the air, from where they drop and drip in wisps of rosy or spicy or peardroppy vapour. In France
Even your sanitary towels will have a florid fragrance. And the aspirins in your medicine cupboard will breathe artificial fruit at you when you dissolve them in water. Your toothpaste will smell of bananas or spearmint or raspberries. I imagine the liquid you put your false teeth in, these days, will taste of one or the other of those too.
And the people in the house will have sweet, sanitised smells. Their perfume, their talc, their underarm deodorant, their shower gels and shampoos and conditioners and hairsprays will all be strong and probably intensify as they mingle on skin and hair. You will deodorise your shoes, socks and feet with things scented with strawberries and blackcurrants and mangoes. You will sit at dinner and eat your roast, or your delicate pea soup, or your rosewater sorbet and vanilla cream to the accompaniment of a candle which penetrates every fissure and fold of tablecloth and napkin and nostril with strong incense, myrrh, patchouli.
If these were sounds they would be a cacophony. As with sounds, you are inured to it and turn up the volume. Women don't wear ghosts of fragrance any more – Floris bluebells, lavender water. They assert themselves with Opium and Poison, the swooning, insistent scents of the artificial paradises of the decadents. They have to and, even so, it doesn't work.
The one thing all these fresheners and perfumed atmospheres have in common is a sickly over sweetness: not honey, not the pale vanishing sweet scent of wild primroses, not the energy of burning sugar, but a thick, bland, saccharine fug, like putting your head into ajar of lollipops. Or like the taste of old stomach medicines, masking the nastiness that was good for you with floury emulsions. Or like the banana or strawberry gels that you gag on at the dentist's, when he takes an impression of your teeth with something slimy green or sticky pink.
What do we think of as good smells? We like roasting coffee, we like baking bread. We like the smells of cleanness - freshly starched and ironed linen, freshly shaved wood, with the sap still in it. Supermarkets now tempt in customers with the smells of baking and coffee roasting wafted from grilles near the door, as clothes shops tempt in young customers with amplified drums and guitars. We like delicate plant smells - moss and lavender and witch hazel. The perfume name White Linen trades on our liking for clear smells, as the increasing number of shampoos and lotions that are transparent in transparent bottles advertise themselves as pure and crystalline. But inside they smell of heavy things - frangipani, lilies, attar of roses, overripe fruit.
In the 1970s the makers of Johnson's baby powder appear to have discovered that many women were using the baby powder on themselves and, instead of drawing the conclusion that we liked a faint scent of witch hazel and a plain bottle, they changed the packaging to a lurid pink and made the scent heavily floral. It is interesting that this decision was later reversed. We like outdoor smells - pine forests, lavender, herbs - but not with an element of decay: bracken, mushrooms.
Bad smells are human smells, our own smells. Excrement first, but we don't like sweat, or cheesy feet, or stale or sickly breath, or other people's after-sex fish smell, or old clothes, and we don't like things that smell like our own smells, things like the rich, rank fungus, Amanita phalloides.
Freud was very interested in the human nose. He believed that children crawling in the nursery did not find excreta repulsive, whereas adults find the strong smell of other people's excrement disgusting. He put this down to the "atrophy of a sense of smell (which was an inevitable result of man's assumption of an erect posture)" and he wondered whether "the consequent organic repression of man's pleasure in smell may not have had a considerable share in his susceptibility to nervous disease".
He thought that human sexual problems and the coming of repression came with bipedalism and distance from the earth. My husband remarked sagely, when told this, that he wondered if Freud had any views about the nervous state of giraffes. Freud observed also that other animals used their sense of smell in the pursuit of their sexual lives without inhibition. Humans had invented sexual pleasures that came from overcoming distaste or disgust about the proximity of the sexual and the excretory organs. He noted that most people are happy with their own smells. We think of Leopold Bloom asquat on the cuckstool, reading his newspaper, "seated calm above his own rising smell". It is other people whose failure to be clean - according to Freud, "to hide their own excreta" - is offensive, and "shows no consideration".
The smells that have invaded our modern lives are neither the good smells nor the bad smells, but the guilty, masking smells. Smells that we use to cover human smells. I remember as a girl reading Smollett's Roderick Random, in which an old maiden lady tries to pass herself off as a marriageable girl and is detected by the "violet cachous" she uses to perfume her breath, and to cover the odour from her decaying teeth. I was horrified by this image, which is of course a dance-of-death parody of the spring-flower breath of pastoral maidens. I still shudder when I see small violet sweets.
There is a different kind of horror in the idea of the intimate feminine sprays or delicately perfumed moistened wipes, with which my generation was urged to get rid of any female smell from its crotch and vagina. Were we pretending to perpetual maidenhood? Or were we, as Freud supposed, uneasy about responding to bodily functions at all?
Richard Hoggart, in the first book of his autobiography, A Local Habitation, gives an account of both the squeamish niceties and the wicked humour of working-class background in 1920s Yorkshire . It is too good not to quote as it stands. He is writing about his aunts, Ethel and Ida:
"The lavatory in each of their homes reeked of one of the more heavily perfumed 'toilet deodorants'. The blend of that with the smell of an evacuation was more unpleasant than the smell of shit itself, like a rank and fetid growth concocted in a shifty laboratory, a poisonous but ersatz jungle plant. But it too, like the words for the things, and no matter how much they stepped up the deodorants, eventually said to them: 'Someone's just had a shit here.’ So they took to leaving a pack of cigarettes in the lavatory and suggesting that their guests might feel like a smoke to reduce the unbecoming smell.
"There were then three smells: shit, heavy deodorants and cigs. Aunt Annie, who had a slightly scatological side, told me she would sit there puffing away like mad, and the smell was something awful."
John Donne, in Elegie IV, "The perfume", describes how his clandestine visits to his mistress were betrayed to her father by
A loud perfume, which at my entrance cryed
Even at thy father’s nose, so were wee spied.
The plain use of synaesthesia is very effective, dramatically, as smell replaces sound as a clue, and Donne suggests that his perfume was perhaps extravagant. He immediately contrasts his adorning smell with her father's basic human ones:
Had it beene some bad smell, he would have thought
That his owne feet or breath that smell had wrought.
He goes onto inveigh against perfume in general:
Base excrement of earth, which dost confound
Sense, from distinguishing the sicke from sound
- cunningly characterising the perfume as the substance it is masking. He describes incense as loathsome:
Gods, when yee fum 'd' on altars, were pleas'd well
Because you were burnt, not that they lik'd your smell. . .
This reveals an ambivalence about incense that is very common. Does the perfumed incense in churches replace the fatty smoke from burned offerings? Is it designed to confuse the senses into swooning? Or does it again conceal the smell of mortality?
Perfumes were once rich, rare and exotic. When Scheherazade and Dunyazade married the two princely brothers, the hammam [public bath] was scented, according to Burton Arabia " is used by the desperate Lady Macbeth, whose dreams are haunted by the stink of blood that she has resolutely kept from her waking self.
All the perfumes of Arabia
Will not sweeten this little hand.
Perfume masks. Smell is direct. When Gloucester
Scent also comes from the French, sentir, a word which means both to smell and to feel, acknowledging the primitive nature of the scenting sense. Scent is to do with our sense of our own identity, with our recognition of other people's identities and their emotions, with sex, with infant-mother bonding. It is also to do with finding things and places, with tracking prey and locating food, from mushrooms to honey. It is not an easy thing to describe at this level. I know and can remember the scent, the smell, of all my four children's hair when they were babies. There are no words to describe these unique scents. When they are very small there is something extraordinarily painful about other women picking them up and making them smell briefly of L'Air du Temps or Chanel No 5. Other women's children at that stage always seem to me to have a Noli
me tangere [Touch me not] smell – unless they are perfumed with talc and Bounce in their babyjamas. Sheep only accept other ewes' lambs if they are rubbed with their own lambs' smells.
We are losing functions – we don't recognise, we don't detect; it is all ersatz. Ants, as EO Wilson discovered and described, communicate and organise their complex societies with odours and pheromones. We also recognise - or used to recognise - good and bad food with our noses. I know the smell of tainted meat or fish, or mouldy sprouts - but I believe our senses are being blunted by the chemical haze we choose to live in, like living in a constant buzz of high-level interference, snow on the television screen, just audible screeching on the radio to which we have had to become inured.
The French word sentier, meaning a footpath, or way, presumably comes from the
primacy of the sense of smell in discovering our surroundings. Smelling out a way can be sinister - one of the most blood-chilling moments in literature is when Regan tells the blinded Gloucester he can "smell/His way to Dover", and Tolkien's Black Riders are sinister in their snuffling shapelessness, smelling their human and Hobbit prey, like hellhounds. Terry Pratchett's Ankh Morpork werewolf guardswoman, Angua, who unravels all the foul smells of that richly rotting city, including fresh blood is both perturbing, comic and somehow indecent. She is related to Virginia Woolf's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, Flush, whose world is constructed of smells, good and bad. Woolf is concerned with the link and the difference between the human and the animal, as Kate Flint shows in her elegant introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition. If Donne plays with synaesthesia between smell and sound, Woolf plays with synaesthesia between sight and touch and smell:
"He slept in this hot patch of sun - how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade – how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony – goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the intricacies of dark cathedrals…"
It has to be said that the smells that concern Woolf's Flush are somewhat human-interested smells, however bravura the writing. Pratchett's werewolf-woman is arguably more impressively canine. My favourite anthropomorphic-smelling animal - possibly because he is woven into my earliest reading memories – is Kenneth Grahame's Mole, coming across the cold, dead scent of his abandoned home, breaking down into weeping, persuading the insouciant Rat to follow him. Grahame describes the "summons" reaching Mole like "an electric shock".
"We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal's intercommunications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word 'smell', for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling." The word "murmur" here is a metaphor from sound, but muted – Grahame goes on to describe Mole's home odour as a "fine filament, the telegraphic current" and finally, moving from sound to touch "those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way".
Woolf’s anthropomorphism is in a way using Flush to make strange her own extreme sensitivity to the sensual world. Grahame is more straightforward. He points out what the human animal has lost or has not had, and then takes his animal characters, via the pull of little hands (but note, both rats and moles do have little hands) to a very anthropomorphic "Dulce Domum" complete with that most human of ritual occasions, Christmas carol singing and punch. It works, because the primitive pleasure of humans in the smells and sounds of home and Christmas are truthfully related to the sense that animals follow their noses along remembered paths.
In gloomy moments, I think we are bringing up a generation deafened by constant loud music and desensitised by constant loud and garish smells. You can't try on a dress in silence now, or sit quietly in the lobby of Broadcasting House, or travel in a minicab, without an encapsulating environment of loud noise "because our staff would go mad without it".
Taxis increasingly have swooning smells, too, from sanitising tutti frutti to lingering pot. There is legislation against decibels, which seems to do little good, or else I am prejudiced by being too old and too accustomed to hearing myself think. I have friends who are allergic to perfumes. The effect of the delicately perfumed loo paper on sensitive tissue is better not described. I have a scientist friend whose lab door bears a notice forbidding students or visitors to enter wearing perfume as it gives her migraines. I met an elegant professor from Yale who said her husband felt that she shouldn't wear perfume because it was intrusive and impolite.
Articles in the New Scientist have suggested that the pervasive additives to everything -
washing and drying products, polishes, air itself – may be increasing our allergic
susceptibilities. There was also a more ambivalent piece suggesting that seasonal affective disorder (SAD) might be treatable with summery smells as well as with artificial light. The research of Teodor Postolache suggested that depressed people and people in winter had less sensitive senses of smell - there is the case of the winter-depressed woman who couldn't smell her husband as she could in the spring. Postolache's research - on rats, humans and lemurs - also suggested that the time of year affects our sense of smell as well as our mood. I suffer from SAD and find light boxes blissful. But the very idea of a perpetual summer of artificial floral bouquet casts me into an apprehensive depression.
There may be hope. Oversensitive California Halifax in Canada
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