Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 11

In Spider Robinson’s Hugo Award–winning speculative narrative “By Any Other Name” (1976), an environmentalist who has become disillusioned with industrial modernity designs a virus that radically enhances humans’ olfactory sensitivity, leaving humanity with “a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf.”1 This “hyperosmic plague” (“BA,” 29) brings about the end of industrial civilization: a fifth of the world’s population is killed (or self-immolates) as a result of sensory overstimulation concentrated in cities and industrial sites; others survive by emigrating to rural settlements and developing advanced nose plugs. The novella’s hyperosmic humans experience olfaction as both capacity and debility: on the one hand, they can use it to track the scent trails of human and nonhuman creatures, including hitherto unperceived atmospheric entities called “muskies” (“BA,” 31); on the other hand, the sensory overstimulation can devastate their minds, and synthetic cleaning chemicals become deadly weapons.

Robinson’s novella draws together an eclectic range of influences: his own experiment with living in the woods as a young man, his job as a night watchman guarding New York City’s pungent sewers in 1971, the synergies between 1960s counterculture and environmentalism, and the 1970 Clean Air Act spearheaded by Maine senator Edmund Muskie.2 Hyperosmia connects all these threads, precipitating a massive worldwide decline in anthropogenic emissions that have suddenly become unbearable. Enhanced olfaction also attunes the novella’s characters to the differential distribution of noxious smells in dense urban communities like Harlem, where the African American narrator’s mother and brother die almost instantly. Robinson’s work exemplifies the critical potential of hyperosmic narratives: in addition to zeroing in on airborne particles that usually float near—if not below—the thresholds of sensation, attention, and cultural value, a heightened sense of smell amplifies patterns of premature death already present in differentiated atmospheric geographies. Hyperosmic narratives experiment with a radical redistribution of the sensible, simultaneously inverting the hierarchy of the senses and drawing attention to the visceral, trans-corporeal environmental exchanges inherent in olfactory perception. In the novella, this reorganization of the human sensorium has immediate and radically transformative effects on nearly every aspect of political, economic, social, and environmental activity.

“By Any Other Name” also exemplifies the material ambiguity of olfactory perception, which blends cultural associations with biochemical materiality. Robinson’s hyperosmic humans are not directly harmed by airborne toxins: they self-immolate when their olfactory bulbs are overwhelmed by urban and industrial smells. If this implies a vital distinction between industrial odors and putatively natural ones, it also suggests that the difference may have to do more with cultural perceptions of smell than with the chemicals that compose those smells. After all, why should the scent of bleach or asphalt be more overwhelming to a hyperosmic than the scent of the rose invoked by the novella’s title? In the course of imagining olfaction as a site of trans-corporeal vulnerability, Robinson paradoxically privileges smell’s semiotic dimensions. In his hyperosmic narrative, industrial odors are not unpleasant because they’re harmful: they’re harmful because they’re unpleasant. As one of the hyperosmic plague’s inventors puts it, “All the undesirable by-products of twentieth-century living . . . quite literally stink” (“BA,” 25, emphasis original). Paradoxically, Robinson’s engagement with olfaction functions both to dramatize geographies of atmospheric violence and to translate them into the moralizing, dematerialized language of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, fragrance and “stink.”

To the extent that they mobilize the sense of smell as a tool of risk perception, hyperosmic narratives must negotiate the tensions between olfaction’s cultural and biochemical components. To what extent can cultural and moral discourses about smell—frequently oriented by imperatives of deodorization—be disarticulated from chemical toxicity? This chapter explores how two genres in which hyperosmia has played an integral role—detective fiction and multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) narratives—engage with the cultural and chemical components of olfactory risk perception. Positioned as agents of deodorization, hyperosmic detectives endeavor to stigmatize and eradicate odors perceived to be culturally and morally deviant; yet their very dependence on smell renders detectives vulnerable to olfactory intoxication and the uneven dynamics of differential deodorization. I move from the figure of the deodorizing detective established in nineteenth-century narratives to later works that juxtapose the sniffing out of clues and culprits with what I call environmental detection, or the detection of unevenly distributed material presences. Finally, I consider how narratives of chemical injury leverage tropes of detection to chart the chemical pathways of olfactory risks from their environmental manifestations to their embodied effects. Both these genres are shaped by olfaction’s material ambiguity: detectives find themselves unwittingly intoxicated by smell, and people living with MCS struggle to recode scents associated with freshness and modernity in terms of chemical toxicity.