In an earlier post I wrote about an article by Oloffson and Gottfried in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which explored reasons why we may not easily identify smells or find words for them. The scientific research is mostly on the former, quantitative aspect, but the article points to the latter, qualitative aspect early on: ‘The tenuous link between odors and names might have been noted already by , who wrote that “the varieties of these smells have no name, but are indicated by two distinctive terms only, pleasant and painful”‘.
Creative writers have of course encountered this problem, and I think they have done so advisedly and responsively. While they are unlikely to answer the questions asked by the scientists (their principal interest is in how an understanding of neural architecture can explain things), they may uncover other nuances. The encounter between the writer’s wish to articulate things that are not usually articulated, and the olfactory scenario’s limitations in that respect, may be instructive.
In this post I’ll take one example and I’ll include a lengthy quotation. Bits of the text will be highlighted, and hovering your mouse over those will reveal any comments I want to make. I’m aware that I am just broaching a large topic here, and I am sure there are excellent things I haven’t read on the topic. The point is just to sketch some possibilities that arise from literary attempts to express the olfactory.
Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933; Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) is a partly fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. Flush, as is the nature of his kind, has an acute sense of smell, and his experience of the world is dominated by it. Woolf writes some passages that attempt to unveil that experience, so my question is, how does the process of finding words seem to go? There are several passages of effortful, brilliant vividness. Here I include one which starts with the author’s voice disavowing the process.
*
Here, then, the biographer must perforce come to a pause. Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what we see – and Mrs. Browning had to admit herself beaten by the Apennines: ‘Of these things I cannot give you any idea,’ she admitted – there are and perhaps one-half for what we smell. The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell. To describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power. Not even Mr. Swinburne could have said what the smell of Wimpole Street meant to Flush on a hot afternoon in June. As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps , had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra – But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice – he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun – how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade – 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. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either. He knew it as only the dumb know. Not a single one of his myriad sensations ever submitted itself to the deformity of words. (pp. 86-7)
*
Virginia Woolf is making our minds work here; on the terms of the Gottfried / Oloffson article, she is drawing in different parts of our brain’s sensory and verbal systems, seeing how they might interact with one another. Flush’s olfactory experience is unreachable, but then so are many, many other things. Naming a smell is manifestly hard, but finding words for many, many other things is also a complex process, relying on more or less acknowledged metaphors, habitual approximations, and so on. The fiction-writer’s efforts are, as I have often said, a kind of experiment into how we think.
The reference is to Plato’s Timaeus, section 67a.
Woolf may well have read the Plato passage cited above…
I am planning a post to test this idea: does Shakespeare have much of a language of smell? It’s interesting that Woolf should cite Antony and Cleopatra. This is a very sensory-sensuous-sensual play, and it’s also as packed as any with exotic commodities. Woolf’s evocation of smell in this sentence is also packed with exotic commodities: things are description, when it comes to smell.
It seems like a good idea to be alert to the verbs of smelling: if we can’t get at the quality of the perception, we may be able to pick up something special about the action.
This sort of metaphorical synaesthesia – conceiving one sense in the terms of another – may be a route to olfactory experience too. The actions in the sentence are, I think, all experienced through smell. It’s easy for us to imagine that with bread and wine and bird-cages, but not with brass and hair.
This goes a bit further than the simpler synaesthesia of, say, ‘purple’, ‘raucous, ‘crimson’ in the next line, brilliant though they are. We have to take on the exclamation here – shade-on-stone does not produce an emphatic smell for us, but we have to think what that might be like. The word ‘acid’ transfers from shade to stone to smell, and evokes a range of different experiences and registers – a very complex triangulation of language and idea, aimed at the smell experience we can’t share.
Words fail me here, really. Virginia Woolf is so, so good at writing. See my earlier comments and see how this sentence just does it all. I love the simplicity of ‘sniffing’.
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk