Читать книгу The Smell of Risk - Hsuan L. Hsu - Страница 14

Although it has been the subject of groundbreaking memoirs, ethnographies, clinical studies, and academic research, MCS—a frequently debilitating condition characterized by hypersensitivity to a range of toxic chemicals—continues to be both culturally and medically derecognized and often dismissed as a psychosomatic condition.45 Because it is a “relational illness” whose symptoms are connected with the behaviors of others, Steve Kroll-Smith and H. Hugh Floyd argue that “important, perhaps critical, to a person’s management of MCS is her ability to persuade other people that they are partly responsible for her misery and must change if she is to successfully manage her symptoms. People with MCS must narrate their illness stories in order to survive.”46 Denied the recognition of medical experts, people with MCS produce narratives to validate their experience and to enlist others to assume responsibility for maintaining a safe environment. As Alaimo writes in her definitive study of MCS memoirs, “The peculiar (auto)biographies of those with MCS have become a recognizable genre, featuring descriptions of toxins followed by descriptions of their effects.”47 Alaimo goes on to reflect on these authors’ tendency to focus on trans-corporeal materialities: “Social relations fade in these eerie accounts, as the most influential forces in the authors’ medical environmental/life histories are objects and substances, commonplace matters that would escape notice were it not for a conception of MCS.”48

Among the most ubiquitous of these “commonplace matters,” ambient odors evoke considerable attention and anxiety in MCS narratives. This is in part because—unlike other potentially intoxicating senses such as touch and taste—smells are invisible, mobile, spatially dispersed, and often difficult to avoid. The risks posed by unanticipated smells demand constant atmospheric vigilance and respiratory choreography for those with environmental sensitivity: for example, Mel Chen notes that walking in the city requires constantly scanning for the possibility of passing cars, cigarettes, perfume, and sunscreen and adjusting their breath accordingly: “Before [other pedestrians] near, I quickly assess whether they are likely (or might be the ‘kind of people’) to wear perfumes or colognes or to be wearing sunscreen. I scan their heads for smoke puffs or pursed lips pre-release; I scan their hands for long white objects, even a stub.”49 Even apparently stable objects present potential threats: “Substances made of volatile organic compounds such as foam, adhesives and plastics off-gas when the instability of the molecules cause them to escape the form of the object they were fused to, often releasing an odor.”50 Because such airborne chemical risks have been neglected, obfuscated, misrepresented, and medically derecognized, narratives of chemical sensitivity frequently take on the conventions of detective fiction, mobilizing smell to sense—and make sense of—airborne toxins and their embodied effects. The vulnerability of olfaction in these accounts stages the broader, universal human condition of the “defencelessness of breathing.”51

MCS narratives also dwell on olfaction because hyperosmia is one of the condition’s characteristic symptoms. Whether through physiological changes or the constant practice of olfactory vigilance, many people with MCS report a dramatically heightened sense of smell. Bonnye Matthews notes that hyperosmia is a common experience for those with MCS: “For example, a chemical sensitive who is experiencing acute sense of smell will be able to identify the level of personal hygiene of each person with whom he shares an elevator; recognize that a person waiting for a light to cross a street is sick (when it is not visually apparent); trail the path taken through a building by someone wearing perfume; and correctly list the contents of a metal lunch pail.”52 For the chemically sensitive, such enhanced powers of olfactory detection are accompanied by an acute vulnerability to the debilitating force of ambient smells. As “Jennifer” observes in her MCS narrative, “Now I can’t go near a store without feeling sick from the smells—which I couldn’t even smell when I was feeling well.”53 Underscoring the social and relational repercussions of olfactory hypersensitivity, Gail McCormick writes, “Work performance, relationships and community ties collapse when your olfactory system is so heightened that you become ill from the smell of laundry products on the clothes of someone sitting all the way across the room.”54 For Hermitra Elan*tra Vedenetra, the onset of MCS not only makes everyday smells more noticeable but transforms them into agents that disgust and sicken her, displace her from a series of familiar spaces (she ends up relocating to the high mountain desert of Arizona), and constantly threaten physical assault: “I was constantly fighting against a barrage of smells and odors coming at me from all sides, overpowering me, knocking me down again and again.”55 Like MCS, hyperosmia is stigmatized by the medical profession as a psychosomatic condition: “The Merck Manual used by physicians has only one thing to say about the acute sense of smell: ‘Hyperosmia’ (increased sensitivity to odors) usually reflects a neurotic or histrionic personality’ (15th edition, page 1357).”56 Whereas those with MCS experience their hyperosmic sensitivity as corroborating evidence that their symptoms are triggered by odors, the Merck Manual encourages physicians to view hyperosmia as further evidence of the MCS patient’s psychological deviance.

Researchers who have studied MCS as a neurological (rather than merely psychosomatic) condition have noted the importance of olfaction as a potentially debilitating interface between sensitive subjects and environmental substances. In “MCS: Trial by Science,” neurological researcher Donald L. Dudley suggests that the medical community’s failure to identify “possible initiators of [MCS]” may stem from its “general lack of interest in the olfactory system, which has never represented a popular or fashionable area of research.”57 According to Dudley, this avoidance of olfactory research can be attributed to “authoritative medical textbooks since at least 1875; the use of technology better suited to other systems (e.g., the immune system) to study the olfactory system; the lack of adverse effect occurring from ablation of olfactory tracts in the brain (which has been misinterpreted as evidence that the system must have little value); the supposed failure to identify neurotransmitters in the olfactory system; and the supposed failure to identify any essential role this system could have in disease production.”58 Drawing on experimental data gleaned from twenty subjects with MCS (each exposed to substances to which they claimed sensitivity), Dudley hypothesizes that “olfactory signals release excitatory amino acids, which lead to cell injury,” “diffuse, similar, and disturbingly severe changes” in responses to sensory stimuli, and increases in “the psychophysical measurements of disability.”59 Another influential study led by alternative medicine expert Iris Bell adapts the concept of “kindling” to explain how low-level chemical exposures in the olfactory system can trigger reactions in individuals with MCS.60 The olfactory system—which “permits direct access . . . to the olfactory bulb for a wide range of environmental chemicals”—enables substances to directly affect the limbic system, a key part of the brain involved in mediating emotions, memories, and learning.61 Kindling, the authors explain, “is a special type of time-dependent sensitization of olfactory-limbic neurons [that] involves the ability of a repeated, intermittent stimulus . . . that is initially incapable of eliciting a response eventually to induce a motor seizure from later applications of the same stimulus.”62 According to their research, the chemical kindling of olfactory-limbic neurons could be “the neurobiological mechanism” that amplifies responses to low-level exposures in people with MCS.63

One common scenario of environmental detection in MCS memoirs is their tendency to reconstruct the initial onset of symptoms by detailing suspicious odors followed by physiological changes. For example, Jacob Berkson’s A Canary’s Tale (1996)—an experimental epistemological memoir that Alaimo characterizes as “the Moby-Dick of MCS”64—opens with a “foul odor” emanating from the author’s recently fumigated home. After noticing the odor (which turns out to be Dursban, a toxic Dow Chemical product), Berkson reports, “I began to feel bad. My eyes were tearing. My nose was irritated. My head hurt. I became nauseated.”65 The following ten pages trace the extermination company’s various efforts to mitigate the odor through vents, plugs, and fans as Berkson’s health declines. Framing the kindling of MCS as the emergence of a new epoch, Berkson titles his memoir’s chapters after the number of years that have passed since his initial exposure: for example, “Year One: 1988 A.D.”66 In “My Experience with Chemical Sensitivity” (1998), Bonnye Matthews notes that her capacity to smell became both acute and unbearable at the onset of MCS: “I recall that out in the halls I could identify where every person had been. They left trails of scent—perfume, hairspray, lack of personal hygiene, and other odors. Each was distinct, and all were equally discernible simultaneously. I could have followed any one of them blindfolded.”67 However, she notes that “I did not want that knowledge” because each of these airborne odorants triggered debilitating reactions.68 In another account recorded by Kroll-Smith and Floyd, an environmental resources inspector first falls ill when responding to neighbors’ complaints about “caustic odors” in an abandoned used car lot:

We started smelling strange things coming from the ground. At that point, the state police should have pulled us back. No one was wearing a respirator. But everyone was so excited that we finally found something out there, that we proceeded on our merry way. The bigger the smells were, you know, that was pay dirt. We had this guy digging. I was just following my nose, smelling, stopping, pointing, and someone would dig. I was like a hunting dog.

Once we collected the samples, and the excitement of the big discovery was not so exciting, I noticed the smells burning my nose, eyes, my throat, my skin, and such. And it was a strange feeling. The guy with the shovel had to call me a couple of times, because apparently I was in a rapture of the deep, kind of like I had crawled into a big shell and couldn’t hear the world.69

At first acting like a “hunting dog” or olfactory detective, the environmental inspector falls ill from the very smells he is attempting to expunge. Doing the work of deodorization that supports fantasies of the hermetically sealed individual body, he is drawn into an entirely different way of inhabiting the world. When the newly reactive subject emerges from his cocoon-like “shell,” he finds himself enmeshed in previously unnoticed environmental intimacies.

These scenes of MCS inception are characterized not only by noxious odors but by a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty about what is happening to the subject’s body, mind, and moods. As Kroll-Smith and Floyd explain, chemically reactive people must rely on their own senses and embodied experiences to understand and articulate the “new body” they inhabit—not biomedicine’s conception of the immune individual as a “body worth defending,” but a body trans-corporeally co-constituted by its environment (including the bodies of others).70 People with MCS improvise a “practical epistemology” that affirms the importance of embodied experiences derecognized by the medical community.71 As Alaimo observes, everyday uncertainties about possible chemical exposures give rise to experimental practices of citizen science: “The person with MCS may be understood as a sort of scientist, actively seeking knowledge about material agencies, and, simultaneously, as the instrument that registers those agencies. In MCS (auto)biographies, the body often appears as something akin to a scientific instrument, in that daily life becomes a sort of experiment: what happens when I go there, breathe that, touch this?”72 In her “Notes from a Human Canary,” Lynn Lawson characterizes this process of self-experimentation as “detective work”:

One night about a month after I was diagnosed, I smelled formaldehyde on my pillowcase. Formaldehyde, a suspected carcinogen, is in many, many products, including synthetic fabrics such as cotton/polyester sheets. I immediately put some old cotton sheets and pillowcases on my bed. A few days later, I detected the same smell in soap from a filling-station dispenser. Now I avoid using public soap dispensers and try to carry my own soap. And once again I hang my all-cotton sheets on lines in our basement after they have been washed in our washing machine with a plant-based liquid soap without fabric softeners. Fabric softeners from neighbors’ dryers and others’ clothes now smell nauseating to me.

One’s sense of smell is invaluable in detecting possible chemical injury from modern synthetic products.73

Lawson uses her sense of smell to identify and evade potential toxins, while her olfactory vigilance in turn sharpens her olfactory capacities: once she has noticed the smell of formaldehyde, she becomes capable of “detect[ing]” its presence elsewhere.74 Like many other writers with MCS, Lawson comes to understand her sense of smell not only as a source of vulnerability but as an improvable tool of risk detection—perhaps the most widely accessible (though commonly disparaged and dangerously underutilized) resource of citizen science.

In Poisoned: How a Crime-Busting Prosecutor Turned His Medical Mystery into a Crusade for Environmental Victims (2017), Alan Bell expands this trope of detective work into a fully fledged “medical mystery.” Bell approaches familiar elements of MCS memoir—the onset of symptoms in a “sick” office building, his frustrated search for an accurate medical diagnosis, his search for a safer living space, his epistemological quest to learn about the disease—with the legal training of a former criminal prosecutor. Poisoned charts a trajectory from Bell’s early legal career prosecuting individual defendants (allegedly involved with organized crime and drug trafficking) in Florida to his legal advocacy for victims of environmental injury resulting from sick buildings, occupational illnesses, pesticide exposure, and incinerators sited in African American communities. After provisionally resolving his own “medical mystery” by consulting (and convening, as founder of the Environmental Health Foundation) an emerging network of researchers focusing on MCS and environmental health, Bell learns that the drug Neurontin (gabapentin) can help manage his reactions. At this point, he begins offering other chemically injured people support as a sort of ad hoc environmental investigator. He reports, “I could now determine with some accuracy when toxic chemicals were around me. I was like a drug-sniffing dog able to detect low levels of toxins that other people couldn’t sense.”75 Because taking Neurontin enables Bell to minimize his chemical reactivity, he can use his olfactory sensitivity to locate toxins: “Unorthodox or not, my ability to sniff out or ‘feel’ the presence of toxins was actually pretty straightforward and simple. Some victims would call me to say they thought their workplace or home was making them sick, but they weren’t sure why. I’d go on site to help them figure out the likely source of their illness. If there was black mold or another toxic chemical in their environment, I could sense it. My lungs would immediately seize up, or I’d feel an intense sinus pain” (P, 170–71). Detecting toxins like a “drug-sniffing dog,” Bell puts his body on the line to produce evidence of environmental toxicity. Although he puts himself at risk of tightened lungs and sinus pain, Bell’s hyperosmic detective work also serves to shore up his masculinity and, to some extent, his sense of bodily integrity: Neurontin enables him to use his vulnerable, porous body to rescue others. The arc of Bell’s career is oriented by a focus on “organized crime” and the traffic in intoxicants—only the intoxicants are no longer criminalized narcotics, but everyday chemicals propagated by corporations benefiting from weak legal regulations and putatively strict medical standards of “evidence.” Bell comes to conceive of his role as helping to “expose this ultimate crime—a crime so vicious that it leaves millions of victims in its wake; a crime so insidious that the villain is often invisible” (P, 238). As an embodied tool that helps give direction to technologically supported “expert” methods of measuring toxicity, Bell’s sense of smell plays a crucial role in this project of detecting insidious, corporate “crimes” of slow violence.

As Kroll-Smith and Floyd argue, the burden of MCS narratives is to persuade others to join in the recognition of this “new somatic text”: “From changing something as personal as avoiding the use of a scented hair spray to rewriting a federal public housing code to accommodate the habitat needs of the environmentally ill, society is representing the existence of a new body” (P, 145). Hyperosmia communicates this mode of porous and interactive embodiment by reordering the modern hierarchy of the senses, at once appealing to the commonly available but undervalued sense of smell and dramatizing the potential toxicity of synthetic scents. Through this vigilant attention to odors—often juxtaposed with their presumed embodied effects—MCS narratives also recode smells in material terms. This olfactory rhetoric validates both smell and suffering as embodied experiences that challenge the privileging of the visual inherent in the etymology of “evidence.” Instead of functioning as free-floating signifiers of freshness, sex, and a range of “natural” associations, synthetic scents come to signify what they materially entail for chemically reactive authors: nausea, migraines, fatigue, gastrointestinal discomfort, respiratory problems, muscle pain seizures, and cognitive difficulties. This recoding brings the semiotics of scents back to their material basis in highly reactive volatile organic compounds—substances, commonly found in scents, that have been associated with a range of short- and long-term health conditions.76 Because, in many cases, MCS is first kindled through an olfactory pathway and subsequently triggered by a vast range of everyday smells, these narratives attune both reactive and nonreactive readers to the potential toxicity of the everyday atmospheres they inhabit and inhale.

If hyperosmia enables MCS narratives to communicate sensory experience and associated perceptions of risk in embodied, everyday terms, it may also have the effect of circumscribing the scope of readers’ engagement with environmental health issues. As Matthews notes, “Our tendency is to ignore the existence of substances we cannot smell or delight in those with a pleasant scent. That tendency can prove harmful, if not deadly.”77 While the pleasant scent of perfumes and fabric softeners can be recoded through association with debilitating health effects, hyperosmia cannot directly engage with the considerable risks posed by odorless toxins. It also risks reinscribing—even exacerbating—cultural influences on olfactory perception: which cooking smells and personal care products are perceived to be noxious may not be entirely extricable from issues of ethnicity, class, and culture. Hyperosmic MCS narratives are further limited by a tendency to feature the struggles of individual breathers endangered by the presence of atmospheric substances. What this communicates to readers is the visceral urgency of moving to a place with more breathable air: Bell, for example, draws on his enormous family wealth to move from Florida to the Arizona desert, an MCS community in Texas, a stone castle in Cabo San Lucas, and finally to the California coast in search of less toxic atmospheres. Many MCS authors and/or chronic respiratory conditions resettle in the Southwest, compelled to reenact settler colonial patterns whereby health-seeking migrants with tuberculosis and asthma helped fuel settler population growth throughout the region.78 Finally, MCS narratives’ intense vigilance concerning the harmful effects of everyday consumer decisions regarding personal care products, perfumes, colognes, cigarette smoking, and pesticides may draw attention away from broad and geographically uneven patterns of atmospheric violence, even as it promotes social recognition of MCS and support for fragrance-free spaces. How can the direct sensory appeals (and aversions) of hyperosmia be redirected from individual breathers to the broader dynamics of slow violence?

Alison Johnson, a chemically sensitive author who has edited two collections of MCS narratives, identifies military veterans with Gulf War Syndrome, office workers in “sick buildings” (including the EPA headquarters), 9/11 responders and cleanup workers, oil spill cleanup workers, and residents of post-Katrina New Orleans as populations especially vulnerable to chemical poisoning; her books also include clusters of narratives by painters, beauticians, and domestic caretakers.79 The numerous MCS cases clustering around war, industrial accidents, catastrophic events, and chemically intensive occupations convey the extent to which chemical sensitivity disproportionately affects working-class populations. Whereas MCS networks and the condition’s most prominent spokespeople have been white and relatively privileged, Johnson presents several testimonies by chemically injured people of color. For example, the siblings Tomasita and Moises recount how they both fell sick after being exposed to an unknown scent while cleaning up a guest house: “Suddenly I had the feeling of being gassed, and I felt like something was encompassing me. . . . I felt like I had just taken a chug of perfume or something like that because my mouth tasted like perfume.”80 While they graphically recount the gruesome experience of being enveloped and violated by an unknown smell, the narratives of Tomasita and Moises also provoke questions about the many laborers in fields such as intensive agriculture, domestic work, construction, and cosmetology—frequently immigrants with limited access to health care, literacy, and MCS networks who lack opportunities to bear witness to their experiences of chemical sensitivity.

Although MCS often has the effect of (at least temporarily) isolating people from their communities and social relationships, Terri Crawford Hansen (Winnebago) writes that “in many ways my life has changed for the better” after formaldehyde exposure in her newspaper office triggered her symptoms.81 Hansen’s social losses (divorce, losing custody of her daughter, and leaving her job) were counterbalanced by stronger connections with her mother’s Winnebago ancestry: “It wasn’t until after I quit my job that I became Indian. After I had to quit my job, I started volunteering in the Indian community. That was good for me, to go back to my roots. My mother was all Indian. She was removed from the reservation at the age of three because her mother died. She was adopted by a family in Portland and never developed an interest in her Indian heritage” (TCH, 203). Volunteering in a local (unspecified) Native American community, Hansen puts herself at risk of further exposures. As she notes, “The prevalence of MCS is higher in the Indian community that in the general population . . . 31 percent of the Native Americans surveyed [by New Mexico’s Department of Health] identified themselves as chemically sensitive, compared to 17 percent in the general population” (TCH, 203). Hansen explains that Native Americans’ vulnerability is likely connected to the fact that “more toxic wastes are dumped on reservations than anywhere else in the United States” (TCH, 204). Instead of escaping to a safer, “purer” atmosphere, Hansen exposes herself to disproportionately polluted spaces in order to assist and advocate for her community: Hansen has authored numerous articles documenting chemical poisoning among Native Americans, and she founded the National American Indian Environmental Illness Foundation. She employs Indigenous therapies to manage her condition, reminding us that ideas about “purity” are culturally variable: “Every morning and every evening I burn and smudge sage or sweetgrass to purify myself and my home” (TCH, 201).82 MCS sensitizes Hansen to her Native American descent, as well as the chemical consequences of settler colonialism for Indigenous lands throughout the United States. Yet despite its role in triggering her chemical sensitivity, Hansen does not rely on olfaction to make these connections: instead, she turns to the data provided by health surveys. Like the clusters of short narratives collected by Johnson, Hansen’s narrative shifts the scope of environmental detection from individual olfactory experience to broader patterns of damage resulting from differential deodorization.

Simultaneously an organ of olfactory knowledge and olfactory invasion, the detective’s nose catalyzes diverse responses to modernity’s atmospheric risks: nineteenth-century efforts at deodorization and olfactory control, the systemically poisoned atmospheres of hard-boiled crime fiction and Fisher and Himes’s Black detective narratives, and the chemically sensitive “detective” figures who employ their noses to sniff out systemic environmental risks rather than criminalized individuals. The hyperosmic detective indicates how trans-corporeal modes of embodied knowledge and ecological relation have always haunted the genre of detective fiction. In addition to situating detective fiction as a genre with important environmental implications, the literary history of the hyperosmic detective illuminates the tension between individualized criminality and environmental violence. In many twentieth-century and contemporary narratives, the activity of sniffing out criminals draws detectives into new, intimate understandings of environmental toxicity. Through olfaction, intoxication—frequently stigmatized as a sign of irrationality and criminality—becomes an invaluable yet potentially debilitating epistemological tool for detectives navigating modernity’s stratified atmospheres.

While their direct and detailed accounts of smell are effective in communicating emergent, trans-corporeal ways of knowing the effects of anthropogenic atmospheres upon individual bodies, hyperosmic narratives have not been so effective when it comes to communicating the spatial and demographic patterns of atmospheric violence. As I argue in the following chapter, literary naturalism—along with twentieth- and twenty-first-century environmental justice narratives that draw on naturalist techniques—leverages olfactory description to address atmospheric disparities at the level of aggregate populations. In these works, atmospheric risks taken in through olfactory pathways are most devastating when characters notice them least. Whereas the relative mobility of detectives and some authors with MCS (who are frequently forced to move in search of safer spaces) frequently exposes them to new and unfamiliar smells, characters in naturalist novels tend to be immersed in (and thus become habituated to) a circumscribed smellscape. Without the detectives’ hyperosmic sensitivity and deodorizing sensibility, naturalist characters could be said to be hypo-osmic: whether through desensitization, habituation, or denial, they hardly notice or think about the smells to which they’re chronically exposed.