SMELL can transport us through memory like no other sense: see a face, hear a sound, and you may enjoy a fleeting jolt of déjà vu; but smell a redolent odour, catch a whiff of some half-forgotten perfume, and you are transported back to the moment itself.
Writers, most famously Marcel Proust, have often celebrated the power of smell and taste to summon the remembrance of things past, for smell is the fixative of memory. I can see my father’s old study in my mind’s eye, but I cannot truly remember it until I open one of his books, and inhale leather, musty paper and the preserved scent of Player’s Navy Cut tobacco.
Smell is fleeting, by definition indefinable, leaving no trace in history, only reminiscence, but it brings a crucial, heightened sense of reality to fiction and experience. Nothing is more memorable than a smell. I will never forget the acrid, grey stench of the site at Ground Zero two weeks after 9/11, the very stink of Armageddon; I hope never to smell it again. The word scent comes from the French sentir: meaning to smell, but also to feel. Thus novelists deploy smells to describe ephemeral feeling, because neither can be bottled. Until now.
Beside me on the desk as I write is a small phial with an atomiser bearing the label: “Marcel Proust: Swann’s Way”. Spray it into the air and the room instantly fills with the odour of fresh pastry and vanilla, with an undercurrent tang of citrus and fresh tea. Here, indeed, is the translation into smell of Proust’s evocation: “And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings in Combray . . . when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my Aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea and lime blossom.”
The essence of Proust is one of five scents created by the Italian perfumer Laura Tonatto to evoke some of the most memorably smelly moments in literature. The stunt is part of a Waterstone’s promotion, but more profoundly it points up the long and rich literary partnership between the nose and the mind, smell and memory, scents and sensibility.
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Another of Signora Tonatto’s literary pongs is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “violets that woke the memory of dead romances”, a thick, cloying fragrance, heady, headachy and voluptuous. Then there is the scent dedicated to the moment in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary when Emma secretly smells the inside of the Viscount’s cigar case to “breathe the scent of its lining — a mixture of tobacco and verbena”. For Emma, the smell suggests a world of grandeur and glamour from which she is excluded; I thought it smelt like an ashtray soaked in aftershave.
But undoubtedly the most pungent of Signora Tonatto’s smells is that dedicated to Patrick Süskind’s best-selling novel Perfume, the story of a murderous quest for the ultimate scent set amid the reeks of 18th-century Paris. The quotation from the book accompanying the bottle cautions: “There reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men & women”, and the resulting concoction is, indeed, truly disgusting: part musketeer ‘s jockstrap, part fishpaste, all overlaid with odour of ancient abattoir; Charnel No 5.
The experiment opens up an entirely new sub-genre of olfactory literary criticism, in which readers and critics will enjoy the great works while being suffused with the appropriate smell: scratch‘n’ sniff classics. Many writers have thought in aromatic terms.Since smells can now be reproduced digitally, we may one day be able to enjoy Moby Dick, while suffused with the briny whiff of fish, tar and hemp; hot strawberry essence could accompany the reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles; anything by Tom Clancy requires an accompanying bouquet of cordite and male sweat; while Jane Austen should be read to the smell of roses, powder and port. We may, however, draw the line at trying to reproduce, in olfactory form, the passage from Ulysses where Leopold Bloom goes to the jakes and then remains “seated calm above his own rising smell”.
Whether book buyers can be led by the nose remains to be seen, but anything that increases our sense of smell, the most unfairly neglected of the senses, should be applauded. We have relatively few words to describe smell, and we are, as a species, atrocious at smelling. Instead of enjoying and celebrating the odours and malodours around us, we would rather smother them in air freshener, one vast fake piney-fruity stink.
It is no surprise that all the authors chosen for the smell makeover at Waterstone’s, with the exception of Süskind, should be from earlier centuries. Shakespeare revelled in the emotive power of smell; Lady Macbeth knows that “all the perfumes of Arabia/Will not sweeten this little hand”; Claudius knows that his “offence is rank, it smells to heaven”. Rudyard Kipling vividly evoked the thrilling stench of Lahore, “the heat and smell of oil and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat, and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty”. These earlier writers delighted in the fragrances and flavours that trigger emotion and are able, in Proust’s words, to “bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and most impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection”.
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By contrast, modern novelists seldom like to dwell on smell. This is not surprising, since natural smells are increasingly banished from the modern world, where mortality, dirt and decay must be cloaked in oversweet, cloying deodorant. Signora Tonatto’s Eau de Flaubert is unlikely to be available at Boots anytime soon, but in poking her nose into the literary classics she offers a pungent reminder of the evocative power of pongs. Later writers should wake up and smell the coffee.
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