Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 12

In an incisive reflection on the sniffer dog as an instrument of state surveillance, political theorist Mark Neocleous asks, “Why, with a critical intellectual culture saturated with analyses of biopolitics, biosecurity, biosurveillance and biometrics, has so little been said about the smell of power? Why is the state’s ‘nosiness’ still understood almost solely through the ocular and the aural?”3 Like biosurveillance more broadly, the genre of detective fiction is commonly associated with visual surveillance and ratiocination. In Edgar Allan Poe’s formative detective tales “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), C. Auguste Dupin intersperses his detective work with improvised lectures on ratiocination and optics that draw analogies between his methods and the judicious employment of sidelong glances by astronomers as well as the perspectival shift required to discern a word stretched across the surface of a map in an “excessively obvious” fashion.4 But “Rue Morgue” juxtaposes vision and ratiocination with another influential motif: the figuration of the detective as a sniffer dog. When Dupin boasts that “the scent had never for an instant been lost,”5 he initiates a mode of olfactory detection that at once positions the detective as an agent of deodorization and undercuts the notion of the detective as a disembodied mind or “private eye.” This motif of the deodorizing detective extends across nearly two centuries of detective fiction, from the olfactory methods staged by Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudolph Fisher (both discussed below) to the olfactory hypersensitivity of contemporary characters like Rudolfo Anaya’s Sonny Baca, Thomas Pynchon’s Conkling Speedwell, and Artyom Litvinenko’s “Sniffer.” Although it has received little critical attention, the trope of the “nosy” detective is so well established within the genre as to have inspired devices such as Conkling Speedwell’s olfactory laser or “Naser,”6 and punishments such as the slitting of Jake’s nostrils in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974).7

The sense of smell—one of the most pervasive metaphors and methods for the detective’s virtuosity—is also a site where bodily, mental, and affective integrity gives way to chemical intoxication. Thus, the deodorizing detective is a deeply ambivalent figure that renders one of the most prominent cultural icons of rational deduction dependent upon olfaction—a sense that is inherently trans-corporeal, immersive, and (for post-Enlightenment Westerners) notoriously difficult to describe. While nineteenth-century detective fiction acknowledges the presence of intoxicating atmospheres (for example, the “curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of [Dupin’s] chamber,”8 the “opalescent London reek” described outside the windows of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,”9 or the psychoactive drugs that animate the thinking of both these detectives), its plots underscore the detective’s role as an agent of deodorization who sniffs out and expunges deviant odors. Legal scholar Sarah Marusek aptly characterizes smell’s normalizing function in detective plots: “Through smell, law normalizes bodies, place, and expectations through the exclusion of the deviant, the noncompliant, and the disempowered.”10

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories build on Poe’s metaphor of detection as “scenting.” In Holmes’s debut novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Watson describes the detective at work as “a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound, as it dashes backward and forward through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent” (OI, 22). Elsewhere in the story Doyle literalizes this metaphor when Holmes deduces the use of poison from the “slightly sour smell” of a dead man’s lips (OI, 61). The Sign of the Four (1890) introduces Toby the dog, whom Holmes employs to track the faint scent of creosote tar from the scene of the crime. Holmes refers to Toby as “a queer mongrel, with a most amazing power of scent. I would rather have Toby’s help than that of the whole detective force of London” (OI, 83). In “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” Holmes reports that “I have serious thoughts of writing a small monograph upon the uses of dogs in the work of the detective”—a monograph that would presumably dwell on the dog’s olfactory capacities (OI, 65). Holmes’s olfactory virtuosity in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) suggests a connection between the detective and the titular hound: “I held it within a few inches of my eyes, and was conscious of a faint smell of the scent known as white Jessamine. There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt recognition” (OI, 550). Olfaction plays a crucial role in a later story, “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman” (1926), where the killer attempts to cover up the smell of gas used to murder his wife and her lover by repainting his house (OI, 1095–1106). In Doyle’s work, scent is both a metaphor and a sensory method of detective work—a powerful tool for policing the boundaries of class, religion, race, and nation.

In his influential study of literary engagements with the London Fog, the ecocritic Jesse Oak Taylor reads Holmes as a sort of amateur meteorologist perfectly attuned to variations in London’s thick, anthropogenic atmosphere. Taylor explains that the “opalescent” fog that suffuses the Sherlock Holmes stories is not an obstruction to vision but the very medium of detection in the Anthropocene’s irrevocably transformed atmospheres: “Holmes sits ‘amidst the teeming millions, with his filaments stretching out and running through them’ (‘The Cardboard Box,’ 1113). Those filaments exist in a more ‘prosaic and material’ form in the patterns and curling wreaths of the fog outside the windows, infiltrating all of London, its alleys and byways, the crevices of its windows and the bodies of its inhabitants. Sherlock Holmes gains access to this pervasive climate of interconnection by manufacturing a malodorous and disordered atmosphere of his own.”11 Thus conceived as a hypersensitive atmospheric instrument, Holmes deploys his hyperosmic sensitivity as a tool for identifying and expunging deviant odors. In the course of doing so, he both navigates London’s dramatically differentiated atmospheres and obscures them by targeting deviant bodies rather than disparities. In “The Adventure of the Three Gables” (1926), Holmes claps his hand to his pocket upon seeing a “grim and menacing” negro prizefighter named Steve Dixie, who asks, “Lookin’ for your gun, Masser Holmes?” Holmes’s reply: “No, for my scent bottle, Steve” (OI, 1063). Instead of physical violence, Holmes protects himself by using his personal air freshener to ward off Dixie’s supposedly intolerable odor. In “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” (1910), Doyle stages a material confrontation between Holmes and a toxic West African root whose powder produces both “a thick musky odour, subtle and nauseous” and a fatal sense of terror in anyone who inhales it. As Watson and Holmes learn firsthand, the root’s odor is a direct threat to self-possession: “At the very first whiff of it my brain and my imagination were beyond all control. A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe” (OI, 793). After solving the murder through this experiment in “immersive toxicology,”12 Holmes sends the killer—along with his knowledge of the root—back to central Africa.

Classic detective fiction frequently deploys olfaction as a tool for detecting transgressive, racialized bodies and for controlling their atmospheric incursions on the spaces of white respectability.13 Anticipating Holmes’s encounters with Black atmospheres, the Bornean orangutan figuratively sniffed out by Poe’s Dupin indexes a common stereotype associated with Black and brown bodies by practitioners of scientific racism. The racial implications of the deodorizing detective echo the role of bloodhounds used to discipline fugitive slaves. Given Poe’s southern origins and the racially loaded orangutan at the heart of his formative detective story, we might consider whether the genre was influenced as much by the slaveholder’s bloodhounds as it was by James Fenimore Cooper’s narratives of wilderness tracking (as Walter Benjamin famously argued).14 Mark Twain gestures toward this line of influence in “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (1902)—a parody in which Sherlock Holmes’s rational method is eclipsed by the tracking skills of a detective born with a preternatural sense of smell. In Twain’s story, the detective’s hyperosmic condition is referred to as “the gift of the bloodhound” because it was supposedly acquired when bloodhounds were set upon his mother shortly before his birth.15 Smell’s narrative function as a means of detecting, avoiding, or removing Blackness reflects its powerful role in historical arguments for segregation: as sensory historian Mark Smith has documented, advocates of segregation claimed not only that they could make racial distinctions based on the smell of Black bodies but also that desegregation would be repugnant because “Negroes have a smell extremely disagreeable to white people.”16 The racial underpinnings of olfactory detection persist in the use of drug sniffing dogs by contemporary police: in 2011, the Chicago Tribune reported a vast discrepancy between the success rate of drug sniffing dogs used at traffic stops for “Hispanic” and other drivers.17 When influenced by the conscious or unconscious biases of their handlers, sniffer dogs may be just another mechanism for racial profiling.

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives of the deodorizing detective, Holmes and Watson’s intimate encounter with the Devil’s Root is the exception to the rule. Dupin and Holmes are seldom threatened by their recreational intoxicants, and, despite his regular and frequently deliberate exposures to London’s panoply of smells, Holmes never experiences their cumulative effects. As Taylor notes, London’s “abnatural” atmosphere enables Holmes’s detection; with the exception of the Devil’s Root, the atmosphere does not debilitate him. The nineteenth-century detective narrative’s tendency to reduce criminality to the actions of individual perpetrators assumes a teleological, procedural model of deodorization: the detective traces the scent to its deviant source in order to contain or banish it. For many in the nineteenth century, however, unpleasant odors were recognized as environmental health threats—miasmas resulting not from individual crimes but from structural (and, often, infrastructural) inequities. Although miasma theory gave way to the germ theory of disease transmission in the later part of the century, the perception of smells as potentially debilitating substances persisted in popular health discourses. Whereas early detective fiction frequently frames the detective as an agent of olfactory surveillance and control, twentieth-century narratives of hyperosmic detection channel the genre’s olfactory obsessions into critical accounts of differential deodorization in which the work of detection runs up against the uneven, inequitable distribution of smells across spaces and communities.