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?
Notes
1 1. Caroline Bushdid, Marcelo O. Magnasco, Leslie B. Vosshall and Andreas Keller, ‘Humans Can Discriminate More Than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli’, Science 343, 2014, pp. 1370–2.
2 2. Richard C. Gerkin and Jason B. Castro, ‘The Number of Olfactory Stimuli that Humans Can Discriminate is Still Unknown’, eLife, 7 July 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.08127; Markus Meister, ‘On the Dimensionality of Odor Space’, eLife, 7 July 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07865
3 3. Anne-Sophie Barwich, ‘What Is So Special about Smell? Olfaction as a Model System in Neurobiology’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, November 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2015–133249
4 4. Lavi Secundo et al., ‘Individual Olfactory Perception Reveals Meaningful Nonolfactory Genetic Information’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(28), 14 July 2015, pp. 8750–5.
5 5. This trend can be traced back to Alain Corbin, Le Miasme et la Jonquille: l’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIe–XIXe siècles. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982, published in English translation as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, tr. Miriam Kochan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
6 6. Sébastien Doucet, Robert Soussignan, Paul Sagot and Benoist Schaal, ‘The Secretion of Areolar (Montgomery’s) Glands from Lactating Women Elicits Selective, Unconditional Responses in Neonates’, PLOS One 23 October 2009, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007579
7 7. Regulation (EC) No. 1334/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2008 on flavourings and certain food ingredients with flavouring properties for use in and on foods.
8 8. Aurélie Biniek, Odeurs et parfums aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Master’s dissertation, supervisor Robert Muchembled, Université de Paris-Nord, 1998.
9 9.
