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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
6:56 AM 29th May 2020
arts

‘An Odorous Wind’: Smells By Robert Muchembled

 
It somehow comes as no surprise to learn that our olfactory processes are as well-honed and subtle an instrument of definition as our oracular and auditory senses, in spite of our time-worn tendency to negotiate and re-invent our social relationship with smell(s). For Robert Muchembled, we presently occupy a clinically-pinched universe, our be-pegged noses hyper-sensitive to the ‘foulness’ of certain stenches largely because we have learned to disabuse ourselves of our fundamental instincts.

Muchembled’s fascinating, some might say ‘pungent’, examination of the landscape of smell gives the lie to his own assertion that the olfactory experience is the most difficult to describe. For this is a witty, thorough and erudite journey through several centuries of the midden and the boudoir, and his elegance of thinking mirrors the ingenuity of those modern perfumiers who get round the problem of differentiation by ‘developing their own metaphorical jargon’ to distinguish fruity and floral notes, like so many wine-tasters accustomed over time, and according to changes in cultural taste, towards a synaesthesia of the senses.

It is heartening, too, to learn that we stop noticing noxious smells after only fifteen minutes of exposure to them, a fact especially congenial to dog-owners amongst us. Not that the good citizens of fourteenth century Paris would even have noticed dogs, acclimatised as they were to the varying smells of dead animals, faeces and dung flowing freely from makeshift latrines. Professor Muchembled’s historical journey of discovery uses Paris – its exponential increase in size and demography over several centuries were the drivers of mostly reactive change – as a kind of touchstone for shifts in olfactory taste, sanitary arrangement and sewage disposal. And he is never less than fascinating on the overwhelming stenches of an increasingly urban city, the ad hoc alfresco defecation, the miring sludge, the beginnings of ‘mooning’ as insult, and the foul emanations of stinking trades such as tanning, cloth bleaching and the abattoir. ‘Money’, as Muchembled notes, ‘smells sweeter than shit’: there was ready cash to be made from the collection of urine for scouring, and the provision of roadside privies for the peristaltic passer-by with a couple of sous to cover the cost of a crouch.

No wonder, then, that the well-heeled were keen to leave the Paris of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for country homes – an exodus which was provoked at least as much by ‘push’ as ‘pull’ factors, in spite of the clear arcadian blandishment:

‘The trend became a major fashion in Rousseau’s day, partly due to his descriptions of enchanting, virtuous nature where the air bore the scent of simple happiness, but also largely due to the vital urge to flee the putrid, stifling air of the monstrously sprawling, expanding capital’.

The volte-face which Muchembled traces to the 1620s precipitated a sea change in cultural attitudes to stenches both private and public. The onset of a new, ‘rising tide of intolerance and pious humanism’ began to replace the perceived vulgarity of its contemporaries – no ‘sign of anal or sexual repression’ seems hitherto to have beset the French of any class – with a new sense of shame. And we are natural heirs to this tradition of ethical prudery whose sense of the olfactory universe has despatched Rabelaisian honesty to the shitpot of history.

One detects, in Muchembled’s relentless enthusiasm for the scatology of Rabelais, Brueghel and the unlikely figure of Marguerite de Navarre, a residual lament for their sheer, unblinking verve. The learning of modesty was a slow-burner: whilst not becoming of Louis XIV to fart publicly, his brother, the Dauphin and wife, were regular participants in their own afflatus contests. Indeed, the Princess Palatine wrote extensively, and satirically, on the subject of shit to her aunt Sophia, Electress of Hannover – the visceral past took a while to dissipate, like a bad smell secured beneath a blanket.

Robert Muchembled
Robert Muchembled
Muchembled’s prose is at its most purple when describing the art, prose and poetry of the period, and he is especially (ef)fluent on the relationship between smell and sexuality, or at least on the indifference of any other than the most haughty to bodily odours, of farts interrupting coitus, and of vaginal ‘musk’. Postulating the suggestion that perfumes were developed simply to satisfy male taste – ‘The unpleasant smell of women haunted the collective cultural imagination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ – the writer is perceptive on the inherent paradox of musky vaginal smells which repelled as they attracted. At the heart of this prevailing misogyny – science has since shown that men emit fifty times as many substances as women – lies the ‘horror’ of the menstrual cycle, and the time-indentured equation of foul smells with Satan, death and putrefaction. The extensive range of plates which illustrate the book’s thesis include several sixteenth and seventeenth century pictures – chief among them works by Saenredam and Falck - whose positioning of sweet-smelling flowers secure amorous male attention from the stench of their respective paramours.

The association of terrible smells with the Devil was exacerbated during the various Plague pandemics of the mid-millennia: the smells of necrotic flesh, decay and death were so appalling that all manner of tinctures, herbs and sweet-smelling remedies were suborned to the spurious service of protection. It is Professor Muchembled’s contention that the post-Renaissance European obsession with perfume stems from unprepossessing necessity: an entirely reasonable desire not to gag on these smells from hell.

And to ward off the depredations of age - an indication of ‘society’s utter rejection of older women’ - which occasioned the reverse effect of poisoning the bodies of the young recipients, owing to toxins present within the, frequently, bizarre remedies. The slaughtering of hosts of animals of all kinds in the service of vanity, sexual predation, and to mask a ‘total indifference to basic hygiene’, is one manifestation of a social phenomenon which engendered an according, and all-pervading, smell of death alongside floral scents, ambergris and civet. Robert Muchembled’s diverting chapter on the experimental beginnings of a new culture of smell is as breathtakingly odoriferous in suggestion as to remind the reader of the olfactory melange of the filmic version of Patrick Süskind’s fine novel, Perfume.

The new culture of, albeit infrequent, bathing which swept the France of the eighteenth century precipitated an epiphany in attitudes to perfumery: the animalistic, erotically-charged base notes of scents were gradually replaced by floral essences which found a correspondence in Rousseau’s philosophical imperative to embrace natural dispositions of civilising behaviour. The industry of perfume which began in the fields around Grasse in France’s deep South as a response to the exponential new demand establishes a counterpoint which was always, in any case, evident:

‘...Grasse was not only the centre of the French perfume industry, but also a tannery town “where the smell of death and the smell of flowers went hand in hand.’”

Epochal changes in taste have always mirrored the omnipresence of ‘binary olfactory codes’: Muchembled’s observation that the rise of Napoleonic militarism subsequent to the failure of the Revolution was accompanied by a wave of renewed interest in musky male perfumes is irresistibly persuasive.

At its most insightful, this immensely entertaining history works as a palimpsest: a sense of the present is everywhere a reflection of that which has gone before. The obsession, in modern California with scentlessness, hairlessness and health, represents not so much a profound rejection of a past - and elsewhere, a present – of sybaritic olfactory exoticism, as one more mutable fashion in a process of continual change.



Smells – A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times, Translated by Susan Pickford, is published by Polity.

More information here: https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509536771