Читать книгу Smells - Robert Muchembled - Страница 9

The human sense of smell is remarkable and unique. The team of scientists who first discovered the role of molecules produced by the areolas of lactating mothers concluded that their role was to help the individual, and therefore the species, to survive. This is true for all mammals. The widely held idea that the human sense of smell is weak and residual is merely a myth with no real basis: in fact, our sense of smell fell prey to cultural repression with the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

While the fourth of Descartes’ Méditations métaphysiques ranked olfaction the third of all our senses, it was later scorned by philosophers and thinkers alike. Kant rejected it out of hand, considering it and its close relative taste to be the only subjective senses; Freud explained its supposed decline by ‘organic repression’, generated by the march of Western civilization. In around 1750, ‘aerist’ hygienists condemned smell for bringing people into contact with ‘putrid dangers’. Fast-paced urbanization in the industrial area saw smell become a major factor in class discrimination.¹⁰ The long period when our sense of smell was unloved and unsung is now coming to an end before our very eyes, and it is recovering some of the longlost glory the great historian Robert Mandrou intuited it must once have had. Way back in 1961, Mandrou argued that in the sixteenth century, when hearing and touch ranked higher than sight, people were ‘highly sensitive to smells and perfumes’ and delicious food. Ronsard’s poetry, for instance, associates kissing with the ‘sweet-smelling breath’ of his beloved.¹¹

Our sense of smell has a number of highly original features. It develops in the foetus at twelve weeks. Learning about tastes and smells begins in the womb with amniotic fluid, which absorbs chemical traces of everything the mother eats. Some babies are born with a taste for garlic, for instance. It then takes another few years for the sense of smell to mature fully. The American experimental psychologist Rachel Herz is ‘convinced that our aroma preferences are all learned’, whereas the five basic tastes – salty, sweet, acid, bitter and umami (savoury) – are innate and therefore codify how we experience food and drink.¹² My years of experience with American cuisine make me question her second argument somewhat, as the American love of combining sweet and salty foods is quite alien to the French palate and umami has a very different tone in the two countries. I do, however, agree fully with her former point, however subjective it may be, because it maps perfectly onto my own purpose in writing this book: demonstrating that smell is the most flexible and manipulable of the senses, making it a rich seam for any historian interested in the forces driving long-term cultural and social change.

A further characteristic specific to smell is its direct link to the oldest part of the human brain, as olfactory information is decoded in the prefrontal cortex. The ‘limbic system’, to use a familiar expression now out of favour among specialists, is also the site where memories are formed and emotions such as pleasure, aggression and fear are managed. Like smell, aggression and fear are controlled by the amygdala. In simple terms, our sense of smell is the primary seat of our emotions. It reacts in a flash to alert us to potential threats, before sight and the other senses validate the message. The initial warning is of necessity simple and binary: good or bad. For newborns to survive, they must latch on to the breasts of an unfamiliar woman who smells good before she tastes good. Conversely, children coming across a chopped onion for the first time cry when it triggers their trigeminal nerve; the pain becomes indelibly associated with a smell that is recorded as highly unpleasant. Things do not smell good or bad in and of themselves: our brains categorize them and then record the memory. Humans adapt perfectly to strong smells: after about fifteen minutes, we stop smelling even the worst stench or most delightful fragrance. Nor can we detect our own odour, which floats around us like an invisible bubble about a metre in diameter, protecting our personal space, on the model of the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume.¹³ The brain must learn to create an association, negative or positive, with smells that are impermanent and trigger an initial, fleeting danger signal. Even things that now disgust us deeply require a process of social conditioning that can, in some cases, be very lengthy indeed. In the United States, world-beaters when it comes to masking smells, Rachel Herz reports that children like the smell of their own excrement until the age of about eight. It takes them the same amount of time to come to appreciate the taste of bananas or to reject the ‘stinky’ cheeses that adults are so disgusted by. To my knowledge, no French researchers have explored the reverse mechanism by which French cuisine has come to be dominated by strong-smelling foodstuffs that disgust people across the Atlantic. This is a missed opportunity, because a well-thought-out marketing campaign targeting very young children, associating such products with pleasure rather than pain, could boost international sales considerably. A French anthropologist has studied the lack of disgust at faeces and urine in children up to the age of four or five; yet the sixteenth-century essayist Montaigne wrote that everyone likes the smell of their own excrement, while Erasmus said the same of farts.¹⁴ These monuments of sixteenth-century culture did not learn anal repression, as we will see in chapter 3.

Smell is useful in allowing us to swiftly identify and decide whether to approach or avoid everything from food and sexual partners to predators and toxins, promoting the survival of individuals and hence the human race.¹⁵ This multifaceted sense shapes our instinct for contact or revulsion, helping forge solid social bonds, training our taste buds, and encouraging procreation to keep the species alive. Far from casting us back to the animality of our earliest ancestors, such intertwined olfactory fields are part of the rich tapestry of what it means to be human. The earliest olfactory exchanges between mother and foetus in the womb from the twelfth week of pregnancy are followed in the first days of life by a powerful bond generated by the irresistible lure of the mother’s nipple. This is in turn followed by a long period of preferential attachment, as children can identify their mothers by smell alone, starting from between two to five, until they are around sixteen.¹⁶ This vigorously contradicts the old dogma of the deodorized society some argue we now live in. It also has potential long-term consequences for the dominant note of womanhood it foregrounds. Our experiences as infants ‘could be a sort of imprint that leaves its mark on us for the rest of our lives’.¹⁷ Recent experiments have demonstrated that women can detect, identify and memorize smells better than men. There seems to be some mysterious link, as yet unexplained, between our sense of smell and human reproduction.¹⁸ Research in this area could shed light on our understanding of the widespread terror caused by the power of women’s bodies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with numerous broadsides against their stench, as chapter 4 will show. Are the sudoriferous glands, which begin producing sweat in puberty, mainly around the nipples, anus, genitalia, groin and armpits, more active in women than in men? The current norm is to deodorize these body parts. This is relatively straightforward, as the substances emitted have no smell of their own. They are, however, very rich in proteins that are ingested by bacteria that then release foul-smelling gases.¹⁹ Five centuries ago, it was a very different matter: it was impossible to rid the body of such smells, since water and bathing were considered dangerous. At best, they could be masked by powerful scents.

The eighteenth-century philosopher Diderot held smell to be the ‘most voluptuous’ of the senses. Other Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau and Cabanis were of the same opinion.²⁰ Freud’s theories led the ethnologist Yvonne Verdier to research the role of excremental odours in male erotic sensibility. The sociologist Marcel Mauss posited the existence of a relationship between armpit sweat and the notion of personality, with bodily odours offering excellent clues to a potential sexual partner’s suitability.²¹ The exact mechanisms at work remain a mystery, since no formal scientific proof of the existence of human pheromones has been found. The most commonly accepted theories posit that such mechanisms are necessary to the survival of the species. Pleasant smells suggest excellent health rooted in a strong immune system that puts up a powerful fight against parasites and microbes, making the potential partner – male or female – a good bet. Unpleasant smells, on the other hand, are signs of disease, and therefore of danger and failure to reproduce successfully.²² Binary olfactory signals are connected to our emotions, as we have seen. The neurobiologist Antonio R. Damasio has identified six such ‘primary’ or ‘universal’ emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise and joy. Our emotional range is completed by secondary emotions reflecting well-being or discomfort, calm or stress. In the end, he considers biological regulation to be based on pleasure, connected to the notion of reward, and pain, aligned with punishment.²³ Our first olfactory impression is absolutely fundamental, particularly when it comes to falling in love.

Finding the perfect life partner should not be seen as a bolt from the blue, but rather as a brief instant of olfactory ecstasy. The romantic quest for a Prince Charming or Sleeping Beauty takes on a surprising new dimension. We all have our own unique smell, described by scientists as our ‘olfactory fingerprint’. There are currently over seven billion such signature smells on earth. And though we are unaware of it, it is our noses that lead us to the man or woman of our dreams, the Romeo or Juliet who will help us perpetuate our genes and thus protect the future of the species. It is no surprise that all sorts of myths have sprung up to explain the mystery. Plato’s concept of androgyny, taken up centuries later with lasting influence by the humanist philosophers and poets of the Renaissance, explains our constant quest for our twin soul: humans were originally dual beings with two sexes, before being split into two separate entities, both dissatisfied with their lot.

The roots of this myth may well lie somewhere in the biological quest for the ideal partner. Men and women are literally led by the nose to the one bubble of scent that suits them best, by a process of trial and error, illustrated by a series like Sex and the City. The flood of positive emotions that washes over us when we discover someone who smells right is automatically memorized along with their pleasant scent. Coming across the same scent again spontaneously triggers the whole bundle of affective memories in a sort of chain reaction that could be called the ‘madeleine effect’, after the famous scene in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Clever investors have doubtless seen this as a potential money-spinner, which explains why ‘natural’ scents have made such a comeback in perfumes and body-care products for men and women alike. Systematically stripping away our natural odour upsets human sexuality by removing the signals that instinctively guide it. It is an insidious cultural mechanism for controlling sexuality and setting humans apart from the animal kingdom – which can only be done by turning us all into robots or denying the obvious truth that we have a highly developed sense of smell, albeit downplayed by dubious legends. There are a number of other smell-related facts about animals. Did you know, for instance, that the mammal with the keenest sense of smell is not the dog, but the cat? It might have been awkward to admit before science stuck its nose in, because household cats, the most sensuous of all the animals tamed by man, make no attempt to hide their torrid sexuality. That is, when their owners have not had them neutered, supposedly for their own good, but actually in line with an unspoken moral vision of castration that deprives children of a once common erotic apprenticeship.

Smell is also a profoundly social sense, producing binary reactions of bonding or rejection. Each human grouping has its own preferred aromatic field arising in particular from the local cuisine and collective management of smells. Lucienne Roubin’s ethnological fieldwork in the Haut-Verdon region in the south-eastern French Alps in around 1980 provides one example. The local cuisine was dominated by pairings of garlic with onion and thyme with bay leaf for protection against disease and witchcraft. Onion was also associated with virility and parsley with lactation. In the first case, the painful sensation overcome by little boys first encountering the taste of onion was given a positive slant towards the expression of masculinity, indicating how infinitely flexible our sense of smell really is. The ideal life partner has the base note shared by the wider community, the note of their gender, and their own personal ‘smellprint’. Their smell will also vary from season to season. In the summer it is sweatier, in autumn more animal, after cleaning manure from the stables. Every stage of life is saturated with scented messages. The merry month of May is when young swains court their beloved by wearing hawthorn blossom and basil, and break up with them with cypress and thistles. Rosemary expresses the joy of shared attachment. Unpleasant smells are associated with social disapproval: the custom of charivari, or ritual public heckling, at the nuptials of ill-matched couples came with the stench of a donkey carcase being burned. As everywhere, wafts of foul smells heralded the arrival of elements likely to challenge the local social order, particularly strangers, who naturally smell unpleasant.²⁴ There is no need for words to see danger coming: it is inherent in anyone from other parts who eats other things and smells different. In Asia, Westerners are reputed to stink of butter.

In all cultures, smells are of major significance in the relationship between men and the supernatural, the gods, or God. Some three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks laid the foundations for the Western concept of smells, which in their understanding could not be neutral. Either they were pleasant, like the delicious perfumes of Olympia, or unpleasant, like the fetid stench of the Harpies who would swarm in and devour everything, then fly off again leaving only their droppings. In the Greek world, pleasant smells were associated with the divine, as in Plutarch’s description of Alexander the Great’s delightfully fragrant mouth and body. Even after death, his body did not smell of decay and his tomb gave off a sweet fragrance: this was later picked up by the Christians, who invented the sweet ‘odour of sanctity’ for dead saints. Ordinary mortals were less fortunate. According to the medical theory of humours, men were warm and dry, and therefore supposedly smelled better than women, who were cold and damp, but there was no denying some individuals still smelled terrible. The worst insult the sixteenth century inherited from ancient medicine was to accuse someone of stinking like a billy goat: ‘A fearsome goat lodges in the hollow of thine armpits’, wrote one poet. Another wrote of a ‘pestilential stench’ more terrible than ‘a billy goat that has just made love’. Human beings were not to behave, or smell, like animals. Body odour, bad breath, faeces, urine and burping were stigmatized, sometimes humorously. In all cases it was doubtless a way of exorcising the inevitable slide towards death, hinted at by noxious whiffs. In the Greek myths, such smells were constantly bound up with death and sacrilege.²⁵

Perceiving a fetid smell was an immediate trigger for the fear of death in ancient Greece. In our own culture, lengthy exposure to a relatively smell-free environment suggests that our deodorized world now offers a kind of antidote to existential anguish, as olfactory ‘silence’ has developed in parallel with the silence surrounding disease and death, dating from around the same time. In France, the custom of burying the dead in and around churches in the centre of towns and villages, often in very shallow graves, was outlawed in 1776 by a royal decree that forced the transfer of graveyards far away from centres of population on grounds of public hygiene. Keenly opposed at first, the new norm gradually came to be accepted over the centuries. In parallel, the sick and dying were taken ever further out of the social sphere and isolated from the public gaze in hospitals. The recent positive reappraisal of our sense of smell doubtless reflects shifts in the deep-rooted bond linking it with our fear of ageing and death, though it is impossible to pinpoint their scope and cause.

One final aspect of this fascinating question is how extremely difficult it is to express olfactory experience verbally, whatever language you speak. Those in professions that deal regularly with smells, such as chefs, forensic pathologists and perfumers, encounter this problem on a daily basis. Perfumers have solved it by developing their own metaphorical jargon to differentiate ‘green’ and ‘pink’ fragrances, ‘spicy’ and ‘grassy’ perfumes, fruity and floral scents, dissonant, balsamic, fresh and amber notes.²⁶ The explanation for this mystery stems from the direct correlation between scents, emotions and memory, wholly unconnected to the parts of the brain that handle verbalization. The binary system warning of danger is triggered initially in a flash, with no need for language processing. The memory that remains has no link to the rest of memory function and cannot be conjured up at will. As a result, many scholars have sought to draw up typologies of smells with their own naming system, including the great Linnaeus in 1756. The results, however, have always been disappointingly subjective. In 1624, the doctor Jean de Renou took a great interest in smells, defined as ‘a vaporous substance emanating from odourable matter’, identifying a close analogy with flavours detectable by taste. The concept fills some hundred pages of his book, recording nine varieties of smell categorized according to the theory of humours. Acrid (or mordicant), bitter and salty smells were caused by heat; acid, austere and astringent smells by excessive cold, while soft, fatty and insipid smells were triggered by moderate heat. Jean de Renou further argued that our weak sense of smell explains why an infinite number of scents have no name of their own.²⁷

Scientists are still hard at work drawing up a universally accepted inventory of smells. In 2013, a factorial survey conducted in the United States identified 144 combinations of smells divided into ten related basic families perceptible by humans: fragrant, woody-resinous, fruity non-citrus, sickening, chemical, minty-peppermint, sweet, popcorn, lemon and pungent.²⁸ It is by no means clear that this represents significant progress over the past four centuries, or that such progress is indeed possible. ‘Salty’ has been replaced by ‘sweet’, which dominates American food and drink, now available globally. Both salty and sweet, however, refer to tastes rather than smells. ‘Fragrant’ and ‘chemical’ are somewhat perplexing, as their meaning is so broad and unspecific that it is hard to imagine noses all over the world agreeing on them. The same is true of ‘popcorn’, granted universal pride of place even though the sickly-sweet smell is not familiar in every urban jungle or remote rainforest. Might it be the case that the scientific categories were ‘contaminated’, as it were, by the taste preferences of the scientists themselves? When the lead author Jason Castro was asked why the ‘popcorn’ category also included ‘woody-resinous’ elements, his answer was that there was not enough vocabulary to describe the incredible complexity of smells. He also conceded that classification was still an open question, explaining that the team might have come up with nine or eleven groups, but that they found ten was the smallest number to capture the interesting features of smell.²⁹ In other words, the subjectivity of the so-called ‘soft’ sciences has found its way into the conclusions of what is at first glance a highly scientific factorial analysis. Was the project’s main objective to catch the eye of financial backers, particularly in the food and perfume industries, who might be interested in a set of labels for identifying smells without actually having to smell them? It might even be imagined that the correlations identified between types of base might generate business opportunities, for instance by encouraging popcorn-buying cinema audiences to consume closely related ‘woody-resinous’ products and perfumes. Who could have predicted that Proust’s literary madeleine might one day become a powerful vector for scientific and economic innovation?