I won’t be updating regularly until September. A bit of holiday, and the need for uninterrupted writing time, will break my blog rhythm. Before I go: a brief reflection on another visit to the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual conference, again at the invitation of my colleague Neil Hunt.
      I wrote about last year’s meeting here, and followed up here. This year there was a debate about Othello: is he a) suffering from morbid jealousy or some other identifiable condition, or is he b) the victim of manipulation? The audience wasn’t encouraged towards the answer ‘both’, or the more interesting answer ‘neither’, and opted for b).
      As before, psychiatric scrutiny of literary characters was attentive, energetic, and observant. They asked different questions of literary characters, and applied different criteria, from the ones literary critics prefer. I haven’t organised my thinking yet, about what productive affinities there may be between these two kinds of close reading, but I hope to at some point.

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The audience was shown some video clips of the 1995 film directed by Oliver Parker, starring Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Fishburne. One of them was very thought-provoking. Shakespeare’s hero undergoes some kind of fit after a magnificently disturbed speech:

Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when they belie her. Lie with her! that’s fulsome. — Handkerchief — confessions — handkerchief! — To confess, and be hanged for his labour; — first, to be hanged, and then to confess. — I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. — Is’t possible? — Confess — handkerchief!– O devil!

In the film, most of the speech is replaced with clips of Desdemona in flagrante. The reasons for this are clear enough: this is an efficient and effective way of realising what’s on Othello’s mind. However, presenting us the contents of the mind in visual form, as pictures or cinematic action, isn’t simply a more authentic representation of inner life than Shakespeare’s theatre could manage.
      The spiky distortion in Othello’s words gives us something harder to grasp, less smooth than the easy assumption that our imaginations are filmic, an alternative version of how the mind might be working before it’s translated into more convenient form by a director or by our own attempts to explain it.

A third post on the topic, after this one and this one. In the most recent one, I found Virginia Woolf saying that not even Shakespeare could describe smell. So I have quickly corralled some data on Shakespeare’s olfactory vocabulary. Specifically, I have word-searched all instances of the word ‘smell’ and its cognates (smelled, smelling etc.), and seen what qualitative, descriptive vocabulary he uses there. I think I’ll just leave it as a list, and not embellish it more than to offer a hasty conclusion, i.e. (i) Shakespeare does not have an unusually full vocabulary of smell, (ii) Plato was right that pleasantness / unpleasantness dominate the repertoire — see the quotation from Timaeus cited in the previous post, and ‘sweet’ in the lists below.

SMELL

‘all horse-piss’
‘bad’ (like a fox; metaphorically)
‘fish-like’
‘like a fish’
‘like in simple time’
‘most rank’
None (‘a man of middle earth’)
None (blood of an Englishman)
None (but aversive; ‘of hot meat’)
None (civet)
None (dead bodies)
None (Emilia in Othello; women have senses too)
None (scent of a hare)
None (Launce, of Crab – a distinctively bad smell)
None (‘the first time that we smell the air, / We wawl and cry’)
None (leek; makes Pistol ‘qualmish’)
None (‘let him smell / His way to Dover’)
None (re. blood; ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical, suspicion)
None (metaphorical; means ‘detect’)
None (metaphorical; detect)
None (metaphorical; detect)
None (metaphorical; detect)
None (metaphorical; means ‘judge’)
None (‘of sin’)
None (of a flower; ‘comparing it to Adonis’ breath’)
None (onions)
None (Othello can’t smell a plucked rose)
None (pork)
None (pun on ‘rank’)
None (pun, dunghill / unguem Latin)
None (re. a ‘foul deed’)
None (refers to perfume in abstract)
None (refers to perfume in general, of herbs)
None (refers to the sense)
None (sense in abstract)
None (sense in abstract)
None (‘the very smell’)
None (verb; blocked up nose)
None (verb; metaphorical for detect)
‘of sweat’ (no more specific)
‘rank’ (‘of weeds’; Sonnet 69)
‘rank’ / ‘villainous’ (re. Falstaff in the laundry, ‘rammed me in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins; that, Master Brook, there was the rankest compound of villanous smell that ever offended nostril’
‘stinking’ (but somewhat metaphorical)
‘strong’ (metaphorical)
‘strongly’ (metaphorical)
‘sulphurous’ (Jupiter)
‘sweet’ (general savours)
‘sweet’ (‘of different flowers’, Sonnet 98)
‘sweet’ (person)
‘sweet’ (‘What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet’)
‘sweet’ (rose)
‘worse than weeds’ (verb; festering lilies smell)

SMELLS

‘April and May’
‘loathsome’
‘most sweetly’ (Thaisa’s coffin)
None (‘the violet smells to him as it doth to me’)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical)
None (metaphorical)
‘of mortality’
‘rank’ (‘O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven’)
‘sweet’ (‘the forward violet / my love’s breath’
‘well’ (‘the feast smells well’)
‘wooingly’ (‘This guest of summer, / The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, / By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath / Smells wooingly here’)

SMELT / SMELLED / SMELL’D

‘brown bread and garlic’
‘like a fool’
‘musty’ (‘You are the musty chaff, and you are smelt / Above the moon’)
None (‘lifted up their noses / As they smelt music’)
None (metaphorical; means ‘detect’)
None (refers to smelling things in general)
None (but suggests skull smells horrible, ‘And smelt so, pah!’)

SMELLING

None (love)
None (metaphorical; means ‘detect’)
None (‘odouriferous flowers of fancy’)
None (sense in abstract)
None (sense in abstract)
‘sweet’ (‘sweet issue of a sweet-smelling sire’)
‘sweetly… all musk’
‘tender’ (but probably adverbial, suggesting a delicate sense of smell, ‘most tender-smelling knight’)

Virginia Woolf’s Flush played a starring role in my previous post about the language of smell. Its central character, a cocker spaniel, sniffs his way through the world, and Woolf’s prose pirouettes and somersaults through synaesthetic metaphors as it tries to capture that experience. Having written another earlier post touching on the problem of knowing other minds (heterophenomenology being the beguiling technical term), and alluding to Thomas Nagel’s famous essay ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’, I thought I might register the pertinence of Flush to that question too. Among the many passages trying to convey Flush’s sensory experiences, which could already be seen as aspiring to heterophenomenological content, there are some that turn towards the incompatible mental worlds of the dog and its mistress, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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And yet sometimes the tie would almost break; there were vast gaps in their understanding. Sometimes they would lie and stare at each other in blank bewilderment. Why, Miss Barrett wondered, did Flush tremble suddenly, and whimper and start and listen? She could hear nothing; she could see nothing; there was nobody in the room with them. She could not guess that Folly, her sister’s little King Charles, had passed the door; or that Catiline, the Cuba bloodhound, had been given a mutton-bone by a footman in the basement. But Flush knew; he heard; he was ravaged by the alternate rages of lust and greed. Then with all her poet’s imagination Miss Barrett could not divine what Wilson’s wet umbrella meant to Flush; what memories it recalled, of forests and parrots and wild trumpeting elephants; nor did she know, when Mr. Kenyon stumbled over the bell-pull, that Flush heard dark men cursing in the mountains; the cry, ‘Span! Span!’ rang in his ears, and it was in some muffled, ancestral rage that he bit him. (p. 26)

Woolf is interested in the origins of the spaniel as a breed, and tells a story of working dogs called ‘Span!’ by their ancient Iberian owners. This history is buried deep in the memory of the dog, and it stirs at unexpected times. The narrative voice knows something about this that Miss Barrett cannot. Much of this passage is concerned again with the senses of the dog, and what they afford. However, ‘understanding’ is brought in, what Flush ‘knew’ as well as what he ‘heard’, the reach of imagination: I think this is offering us the idea of building on sensory difference and getting further into what it might be like to have a spaniel’s way of thinking.

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Sleep became impossible while that man was there. Flush lay with his eyes wide open, listening. Though he could make no sense of the little words that hurtled over his head from two-thirty to four-thirty sometimes three times a week, he could detect with terrible accuracy that the tone of the words was changing. Miss Barrett’s voice had been forced and unnaturally lively at first. Now it had gained a warmth and an ease that he had never heard in it before. And every time the man came, some new sound came into their voices – now they made a grotesque chattering; now they skimmed over him like birds flying widely; now they cooed and clucked, as if they were two birds settled in a nest; and then Miss Barrett’s voice, rising again, went soaring and circling in the air; and then Mr. Browning’s voice barked out its sharp, harsh clapper of laughter; and then there was only a murmur, a quiet humming sound as the two voices joined together. But as the summer turned to autumn Flush noted, with horrid apprehension, another note. There was a new urgency, a new pressure and energy in the man’s voice, at which Miss Barrett, Flush felt, took fright. Her voice fluttered; hesitated; seemed to falter and fade and plead and gasp, as if she were begging for a rest, for a pause, as if she were afraid. Then, the man was silent. (pp. 40-1)

‘That man’ is the poet Robert Browning, and this passage (which I think is dazzlingly good; not all of Flush is dazzlingly good, but I think this bit is) conveys a pet dog’s experience of human conversation and its subtexts. I think I can more or less leave it to speak for itself. Its similes and metaphors, intimations and possible misconceptions, compose a picture of the inwardness of another species. However, what comes across just as vividly, perhaps more so, and seems to me like its main achievement, is the portrayal of human drama, of two people falling in love, asking questions, and fearing answers, seen more sharply as a result of an estranging perspective.