Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 13

If hyperosmic sensitivity enables the work of detection, it also makes trans-corporeal material agency a source of anxiety in detective fiction—particularly as twentieth-century authors shifted the genre’s focus to increasingly stratified and polluted settings. As detectives become intoxicated, they register a model of environmental entanglement that questions the viability of approaches to deodorization that prioritize the removal of deviant bodies. Conflating detection with exposure, smell unsettles the ideas of ratiocination, bodily immunity, and interpretive control inherent in classic detective fiction. Instead of interpretively reconstructing past events from the traces they leave behind, smell introduces plots of environmental detection in which the threat, or crime, is materially present in the atmosphere—and thus already present in the detective’s body. As art historian Caroline Jones writes, olfaction calls forth new modes of thinking: “Tracing the path of smells requires thinking by sniffing, tracking the logic of stench in trajectories of the self.”18

The concept of environmental detection indicates a tendency found (frequently in suppressed or marginalized moments) throughout detective fiction that anticipates the contemporary subgenre of eco-detective fiction represented by novels such as Percival Everett’s Watershed (1996), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), and Donna Leon’s Earthly Remains (2017)—as well as investigative documentaries that bring olfactory detection (alongside other senses) to bear on risk perception, such as Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold’s Blue Vinyl (2002), Josh Fox’s Gasland (2010), and Jon Whelan’s Stink! (2015). Because of its trans-corporeal, chemical qualities, olfaction’s connection with the environment opens onto an “interactionist” ontology wherein the detective’s body is co-constituted by the environments she is investigating.19 The object of the hyperosmic’s environmental detection is not simply a transgression that has already occurred but harmful toxins circulating between atmospheres and bodies: not an absent event traced by clues left behind but the atmospherically dispersed agents of slow violence. The fantasy of environmental immunity that underpins the detective conceived as a “private eye” gives way to a model of the detective as “public nose”—an investigator whose sensory and cognitive capacities cannot be extricated from olfactory exchanges with differentially deodorized public spaces.

“John Archer’s Nose” (1935), the last story published by the Harlem Renaissance author Rudolph Fisher, stages the tension between two interpretations of smell: on the one hand, as a sign of individual morality and behaviors; on the other hand, as a material constituent of risk-laden atmospheres. Fisher’s text features a multilayered olfactory plot: if olfaction enables the story’s detective figures to solve a murder, noxious air remains as a dispersed material agent of slow violence that exceeds the detective plot’s denouement. In the story, detective Perry Dart is assisted by the hypersensitive nose of his friend Dr. Archer, who eventually connects a peculiar smell in the bedroom of a murdered boy with the “evil-smelling packet” of medicinal roots he saw around a dead baby’s neck earlier that day.20 Dr. Archer traces both deaths to the supposed ineffectiveness of root medicine: he believes that the baby died (of suffocation due to untreated status lymphaticus—“literally choking to death in a fit”) because its parents relied on folk “superstition” rather than modern medicine and X-ray treatments; and he deduces that the baby’s grieving father murdered the son of his root medicine provider as an act of retribution (“JA,” 186).

As Dart and Dr. Archer discuss the smells encountered at the crime scene, their banter presents a remarkable metacommentary on the complex connections between odors, language, literary genres, and Black urban geographies:

“M-m. Peculiar—very. Curious thing, odors. Discernible in higher dilution than any other material stimulus. Ridiculous that we don’t make greater use of them.”

“I never noticed any particular restriction of ’em in Harlem.”

. . . “Odors, should be restricted,” [Dr. Archer] pursued. “They should be captured, classified, and numbered like the lines of the spectrum. We let them run wild—”

“Check.”

“And sacrifice a wealth of information. In a language of a quarter of a million words, we haven’t a single specific direct denotation of a smell.”

“Oh, no?”

“No. Whatever you’re thinking of, if [sic] it is an indirect and non-specific denotation, linking the odor in mind to anything else. We are content with ‘fragrant’ and ‘foul’ or general terms of that character, or at best ‘alcoholic’ or ‘moldy,’ which are obviously indirect. We haven’t even such general direct terms as apply to colors—red, green, and blue. We name what we see but don’t name what we smell.”

“Which is just as well.”

“On the contrary. If we could designate each smell by number—”

“We’d know right off who killed Sonny.”

“Perhaps. I daresay every crime has its peculiar odor.”

“Old stuff. They used bloodhounds in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“We could use one here.” (“JA,” 193–94)

While Dr. Archer’s desire for a comprehensive taxonomy of odors in the service of surveillance takes center stage in this passage, Dart’s incongruous responses shift our attention to the racial implications of olfactory surveillance. Dart’s comment about the lack of odor “restriction” in Harlem invokes the neighborhood’s disproportionate exposure to problems with sanitation, ventilation, crowding, and industrial pollution. Rather than reducing Harlem’s exposure to odors, Dr. Archer’s wish to “restrict” odors would involve only classifying them with words or numbers—a dream of total olfactory rationalization and control. This would support the detection of individual crimes according to their “peculiar odor”—a process that Dr. Archer concedes is comparable to the use of bloodhounds to track fugitive slaves. The doctor’s nose traces crime to individual rather than social causes—to the “peculiar odor” rather than the intractable background atmospheres to which most Harlem residents have become desensitized by prolonged low-level exposures.

Ironically, the “peculiar odor” that exposes the killer in this case is the smell of African American folk medicine. Aligning what he perceives to be superstitious racial beliefs with smell, Dr. Archer’s analysis directly contrasts the deodorizing influence of modern medical technologies with the “evil-smelling” roots. Dr. Archer’s eagerness to use “X-ray treatments” to melt away the baby’s inflamed thymus reflects Fisher’s own career as a successful radiologist; ironically, however, the diagnosis and X-ray treatment of an “inflamed thymus” were controversial in the 1930s and eventually proven to be “as mythical as the therapeutic effects of fried-hair charms.”21 Meanwhile, the rootwork that is so vehemently rejected by Dr. Archer invokes the long tradition of conjure and hoodoo in African American culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, mail-order curio companies made these practices more readily available to growing Black urban communities. In her study of the African American spiritual products industry, Carolyn Morrow Long describes a range of scented products—from perfumes and powder sachets to the spicy scents of High John the Conqueror Root and Van-Van Oil (an oil scented with vervain or lemongrass)—that circulated through the mail-order catalogs and spiritual supply stores of the 1930s.22 Although the magical properties attributed to these products are frequently dismissed as superstition (as in Crafton’s comment about “fried-hair charms,” above), hoodoo and rootwork promised recent Black migrants to the city the possibility of taking an active role in air conditioning. The powers attributed to these materials—which included enhancing charisma, warding off enemies, cleansing household spaces, and inspiring love—may not have been entirely unfounded: smell’s capacities to evoke collective and individual memories, along with its influence on affects and behaviors, may exert considerable (though not easily measurable) effects on physical and mental health. Among the antebellum antecedents of these mail-order conjure materials were practical interventions such as “powders designed to aid runaways by throwing tracking dogs off their scent.”23

If Fisher’s hyperosmic detective stigmatizes rootwork as a harmful and retrograde superstition, the story also offers a critical counternarrative that complicates the figure of the deodorizing detective. Although Fisher never directly acknowledges it, the true agent of violence in “John Archer’s Nose” may be the health effects of atmospheric stratification. It turns out that the murdered boy had a terminal case of tuberculosis—a contagious respiratory disease that disproportionately affected African Americans (the tuberculosis rate in Harlem was five times greater than the rest of Manhattan’s),24 and that strongly correlated with poor conditions of housing and ventilation. It is thus doubly significant that the killer in this “locked room” mystery entered the boy’s room through the building’s air shaft, a common ventilation feature in Harlem that Fisher elsewhere depicted in graphic detail reminiscent of naturalist description: “An airshaft: cabbage and chitterlings cooking[;] waste noises, waste odors of a score of families, seeking issue through a common channel; pollution from bottom to top—a sewer of sounds and smells.”25 In order to single out an individual perpetrator, Dr. Archer has to navigate and suppress Harlem’s broader panoply of odors: in other stories, Fisher describes Harlem’s atmosphere as “vile—hot, full of breath and choking perfume”; “Waste clutters over it, odors fume up from it, sewer-mouths gape like wounds in its back.”26 If “Lenox Avenue is for the most part the boulevard of the unperfumed ‘rats,’”27 it is because Harlem’s atmosphere has already been compromised by urban planning, immiseration, and negligent landlords. Whereas Sherlock Holmes could deodorize his encounter with a Black man by resorting to his scent bottle, Fisher’s Black detective figures are confronted with the systemic problem posed by infrastructures that permeate Harlem’s air with risk. As Bruce Robbins writes, “Infrastructure smells . . . because attention is not paid, because it is neglected. And it is neglected because it belongs to the public domain, all other tokens of belonging effaced, owned in effect by no one. The smell of infrastructure is the smell of the public.”28 Fisher’s story ironically dramatizes the tension between Harlem’s panoply of olfactory burdens and the respiratory health of the hyperosmic detective: as Dr. Archer puts it, “I’m going to locate that odor if it asphyxiates me” (“JA,” 213).

Fisher’s attention to infrastructural racism resonates with the “air of fatality” that Sean McCann discerns in hard-boiled crime fiction—a genre that reinvigorated the detective story from the 1930s to the 1960s.29 Whereas classic detective fiction purged deviant odors in order to restore a transparent social order, hard-boiled stories—influenced by literary naturalism’s portrayals of humanity amid a swirl of environmental forces30—remained cynical about the prospect of “clear[ing] the atmosphere.”31 To be sure, hard-boiled authors sometimes indulge in moments of olfactory racialization, as when Dashiell Hammett notes the “unmistakable . . . smell of unwashed Chinese” or when Raymond Chandler writes, “He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.”32 But they are distinguished by their interest in depicting an atmosphere of generalized corruption: as Chandler puts it, “It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in.”33 In the amoral world of hard-boiled crime fiction, smell does not just provide the detective with clues—it manifests as a trans-corporeal index for social corruption and atmospheric stratification. In The Big Sleep (1939), for example, Chandler juxtaposes the cloying scent of General Sternwood’s orchid hothouse with the pungent smell of the oil sump holes that made the Sternwoods rich. In addition to indicating divisions of space and class, odors have potential consequences for health and cognition: in an auto garage, “the smell of the pyroxilin paint was as sickening as ether”; down by the Sternwoods’ oil wells, “the smell of that sump would poison a herd of goats.”34 Rather than enabling the detective to sniff out criminals, smell threatens Marlowe with physical and mental debilitation. Far from serving as a clue, the ether-like smell of paint, which “drugged the close air of the garage,”35 dulls Marlowe’s attention enough for him to be caught off guard and captured. Chandler’s detective is not a dispassionate cartographer of the city’s ambient smells but a porous subject co-constituted by the atmospheres he traverses.

In his hard-boiled Harlem detective series, Chester Himes dramatizes the contradictions between the policing of individual crimes and the subtler workings of structural violence. The Heat’s On (1961) stages a temporary and collective climate of hyperosmia, as a heat wave amplifies Harlem’s “atmospheric pressures”36 and ambient odors:

Heat was coming out of the pavement, bubbling from the asphalt; and the atmospheric pressure was pushing it back to earth like the lid on a pan.

. . . An effluvium of hot stinks arose from the frying pan and hung in the hot motionless air, no higher than the rooftops—the smell of sizzling barbecue, fried hair, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, cheap perfumes, unwashed bodies, decayed buildings, dog-rat-and-cat offal, whiskey and vomit, and all the old dried-up odors of poverty.37

Himes frames insomnia, gambling, knife fights, and “evil” itself as consequences of the neighborhood’s lack of air conditioning: “It was too hot to sleep. Everyone was too evil to love” (HO, 30). Sustained by a convergence of structural inequities, these everyday “odors of poverty” are coterminous with the “smell of [inadequate] infrastructure.”38

Himes later revisited this passage in his unfinished, final Harlem novel, Plan B (1993), expanding its olfactory prose into two pages of baroque excess. Early in that novel, a long paragraph catalogues Harlem’s indoor stinks, culminating in “yearly accumulations of thousands of unlisted odors embedded in the crumbling walls, the rotting linoleum, the decayed wall paper, the sweaty garments, the incredible perfumes, the rancid face creams and cooking fats, the toe jam, the bad breath from rotting or dirty teeth, the pustules of pus.”39 The following paragraph explains that, despite people’s beliefs in the “fresh air” of the outdoors, Harlem’s outside air was no better: “Outside there were all the impurities generated by their worn-out automobiles, their brimming garbage cans, the dog shit and cat shit, the putrefying carcasses of rats and cats and dogs and sometimes of meat too rotten even for the residents to eat” (PB, 51–52). Himes’s catalogues of stenches insistently connect atmospheric “impurities” with the economic and political issues embodied by poorly maintained homes, rotten food, inadequate dental care, substandard automobiles, and failures of municipal waste removal. Even cancer—a possible long-term consequence of all these stenches—becomes another source of stench: “It stank from . . . body tissue rotten from cancer” (PB, 51).

In The Heat’s On, the Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed have a conflicted relationship with the detective’s deodorizing profession. Early on, Himes alludes to an earlier novel in the series in which Coffin Ed shot a kid who threw perfume at him, mistaking it for acid.40 On two occasions, the detectives unsuccessfully try employing a dog to “sniff around” (HO, 99, 147). A later scene literally deconstructs the figure of the sniffer dog: believing that a key has been hidden in the dog, the drug dealer Sister Heavenly chloroforms it and systematically dissects it, releasing new odors into an already putrid hotel room: “The hot poisonous air inside of the room, stinking of blood, chloroform and dog-gut, was enough to suffer the average person. But Sister Heavenly stood it” (HO, 171). Like the sniffer dog, Himes’s detectives fail to locate the missing shipment of heroin that drives the novel’s plot: they identify and stop (often by killing) individual culprits, but eventually discover that the five kilograms of heroin were unwittingly thrown into an incinerator. As the novel concludes, this incinerated heroin disperses into Harlem’s atmosphere, blending with both the catalogue of stenches and the intoxicating atmospheres of opium, incense, and marijuana described earlier in the novel. Not only do the detectives (who frequently rely on extralegal violence) become morally associated with the criminals in Harlem’s generalized atmosphere of corruption, but their interventions actually increase the atmosphere’s toxicity by contributing the suffocating smells of cordite (from gunshots), the pheromonal “smell of terror . . . like a sickening miasma” evoked by Coffin Ed’s menacing presence, and the fumes of burning heroin (HO, 174).

Blood Shot (1988), Sara Paretsky’s fifth hard-boiled novel featuring the female detective V. I. Warshawski, leverages the genre’s dual modes of olfactory representation—smell as both clue and airborne risk factor—to stage the economic and political machinery of environmental “slow violence.” Although the novel’s central characters are white working-class women, its account of environmental violence is set in South Chicago—an area whose population is 93 percent Black. As environmental sociologist David Pellow notes, South Chicago has been described as “one of the greatest ecological disasters in the history of North America,” where residents “breathe in an estimated 126,000 pounds of toxic pollutants emitted into the air each day and are surrounded by the most landfills per square mile in the United States.”41 Environmental justice activist Hazel Johnson “has often charged that environmental racism in [South Chicago] is ‘another form of genocide.’”42 Although Paretsky disingenuously downplays these racial disparities in order to underscore the class dynamics of environmental injustice, her novel offers a vivid sensory account of everyday atmospheric violence in South Chicago. Blood Shot begins with detective Warshawski reencountering the long forgotten smell of the neighborhood in which she was raised: “I had forgotten the smell. Even with the South Works on strike and Wisconsin Steel padlocked and rusting away, a pungent mix of chemicals streamed in through the engine vents. I turned off the car heater, but the stench—you couldn’t call it air—slid through minute cracks in the Chevy’s windows, burning my eyes and sinuses.”43 Whereas writers frequently deploy smell to evoke powerful place-based memories, the smell described here draws attention only to itself. The detective is no sooner introduced than her perceptual faculties are debilitated by an indecipherable and inescapable “pungent mix of chemicals.”

Some of these airborne chemicals are at the center of the novel’s plot, as Warshawski investigates a series of cover-ups and a murder aimed to suppress the occupational and environmental health effects of Xerxine, an industrial cleaning solvent manufactured in the South Side. As a retired company doctor explains, “The way they used to make it, it left these toxic residues in the air. . . . If you breathe the vapors while they’re manufacturing it, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. Affects the liver and kidneys and central nervous system and all those good things. . . . You know, they didn’t run the plants to kill the employees, but they weren’t very careful about controlling how much of the chlorinated vapors got into the air” (BS, 132). After being left for dead in a pungent, chemical-filled marsh, navigating a “thick mist carrying the river’s miasmas” (BS, 318), and taking down a gangster and a corrupt politician in a chemical plant, Warshawski worries about the effects of her many exposures to airborne toxins over the course of the narrative: “I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t keep out the clamor, or the murky Xerxine smell. What would my creatine level be after tonight? I pictured my kidneys filled with lesions—blood-red with black holes in them, oozing Xerxine” (BS, 333). The novel’s title, Blood Shot, turns out to refer not to bloodshot eyes or to gunshots but to the slow violence that toxic chemicals introduce into the bloodstreams of workers, local communities, and the detective herself.

The most recent incarnation of the deodorizing detective is the eponymous protagonist of The Sniffer (2013–)—a popular Ukrainian television series directed by Artyom Litvinenko and internationally distributed by Amazon Prime and Netflix. Although its provenance is located at some distance from the US detective fiction (and the unavoidable influence of Doyle) that I have discussed so far, the show’s many references to Sherlock Holmes and the conventions of Hollywood police procedurals position it as one of the latest, international installments in the hyperosmic detective tradition. Working with the Special Bureau of Investigations, the show’s reclusive police consultant, Käro, relies on his hyperosmic talents to reconstruct crime scenes. Blending olfactory data with his extensive knowledge of chemistry and related fields, he is able to deduce the age, gender, recent contacts, smoking habits, food preferences, weapons, and countless other characteristics of those present at the crime scene. When he cannot solve cases in situ, the Sniffer continues his investigations in his home—a hermetically sealed apartment where he conducts olfactory experiments in a fully equipped laboratory. At the center of the show are the Sniffer’s virtuosic olfactory capacities, which are often dramatized through the formal innovation of staging his analysis of crime scenes with CGI-animated gaseous bodies and props. These aspects of The Sniffer underscore how hyperosmia empowers its protagonist to perceive invisible material traces and to leverage these traces in the service of surveilling and containing a motley collection of terrorists, kidnappers, murderers, thieves, art forgers, sex criminals, and traffickers.

The Sniffer’s hyperbolic rendering of the olfactory detective stages the immense architectural and social efforts necessary to prop up the hyperosmic detective as a figure of pure rationality. For, as the series slowly reveals, Käro suffers from acute environmental hypersensitivity: his surly personality is not (or not only) the product of machismo, but the result of the strain and unease with which he tolerates the barrage of city smells outside his home. In a rare moment of self-reflection, he offers this description of his condition: “Imagine a person who lives without a skin, like a snail without its shell.”44 When the show is not concerned with solving crimes, The Sniffer reflects on how its protagonist compensates for his condition of radical olfactory exposure. His hypersensitivity—reflected in his irritability, solitude, and inability to eat impure foods or to tolerate the presence of others without commenting on their odors—compromises his relationships with his ex-wife, son, and new love interest. His home—a pristine apartment that appears to be the only inhabited unit in a high-rise building—is accessible only by a private elevator in which visitors must undergo an ultraviolet decontamination protocol. In order to employ hyperosmia without succumbing to its intoxicating effects, the Sniffer must occupy the difficult position of a misanthrope socially distanced from the world in a deodorized bubble—ironically, a bubble with a laboratory chock full of synthetic chemicals that somehow do not affect him. As in most serial detective fiction, the Sniffer’s body bears no cumulative traces of its past exposures or chemical body burden: despite being “a snail without a shell” when it comes to atmospheric exposure, his body seems repositioned as a blank slate at the beginning of each new episode. The serial form’s tendency toward bodily renewal at the beginning of each new installment resolves the tension between hyperosmia’s everyday debilitations and its status as an extraordinary crime-solving ability. This enables The Sniffer to reframe masculinity itself—not as an invulnerable body distanced from its surroundings, but as a body that can both leverage and manage its environmental entanglements. While The Sniffer takes the hyperosmic detective’s environmental detection to its logical endpoint by dramatizing Käro’s sometimes debilitating environmental sensitivity, it simultaneously glosses over the chronic symptoms and pervasive exposures that distinguish illness narratives by people with MCS. The following section considers how these narratives of chemical injury mobilize environmental detection and the figure of the hyperosmic detective in their efforts to document and communicate embodied interactions with atmospheric risks.