What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [61]
The Three Traits of Olfactory Genius
It’s a depressing fact that nearly every analysis of putting smells into words—by scientists and pundits alike—stresses weakness and incapacity. The conventional wisdom is oddly anti-intellectual: it seems to deny smell a place in the life of the mind and dismiss its contribution to art and literature.
Yet some writers and artists manage to create works of art in which we recognize our olfactory experience. They invest smells with meaning. They turn an odor into a symbol, a clue to a character’s personality, or the atmosphere of a time and place. What do these artists have that the rest of us do not?
I’d like to challenge my academic friends to stop giving random odors to college sophomores in the psychology lab, and start observing odor fluency where it happens naturally—in creative people actively engaged with smell. We need to take a fresh look at how they express olfactory experience in their finished work and at the role of smell in the act of creation. As a first step toward characterizing olfactory genius, we can look for the psychological traits of the olfactively minded artist. I’ll kick things off by proposing three of them: awareness, empathy, and imagination.
Let’s begin with awareness. Charles Darwin was a great field biologist because he was a careful observer. He was also attuned to smell. Both talents are in evidence in this passage where he describes animal musk: “The rank effluvium of the male goat is well known, and that of certain male deer is wonderfully strong and persistent. On the banks of the Plata I have perceived the whole air tainted with the odour of the male Cervus campestris, at the distance of half a mile to leeward of a herd; and a silk handkerchief, in which I carried home a skin, though repeatedly used and washed, retained, when first unfolded, traces of the odour for one year and seven months.” For Darwin, smell was a recordable fact like time, place, and species.
Behavioral clues help us identify the odor-aware person. In Portugal years ago, I was eating dinner at a pousada, an old castle refitted into an elegant restaurant and hotel. At the next table was a tall, elderly American, his wife, and a Portuguese gentleman. The tall fellow looked familiar; with a bit of eavesdropping I realized it was John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and diplomat. At the end of the evening Galbraith followed his guests from the dining room. He paused before a large bouquet of red roses near the door, stooped down, and took a long, contemplative sniff. Here was a guy of impressive achievement who actually did stop to smell the roses.
To portray scent in a believable way and have it resonate emotionally, an artist must be alive to smells in the real world. The odor-aware artist is by nature a scent seeker who finds the smells of things, places, and people intrinsically fascinating. He thinks in smells and finds them to be distinct and almost palpable, not wispy and transparent.
To be odor-aware, a person needs only an adequate nose, not a supersensitive one. Emile Zola, the nineteenth-century French writer, is a case in point. His novels were known for their abundant references to smell. Late in life he agreed to be examined by a panel of physicians and psychologists eager to trace creative genius to “organic” factors. Among other things, they did a thorough work-up of his sense of smell. It turned out that Zola’s sensitivity was somewhat below average, but not bad for someone in his mid-fifties. Despite his relatively dull nose, his sense of smell was quite refined—he liked to compare and analyze odors, and did so “with a confidence that always astonished his followers.” Zola’s memory for odors was especially good, and he was able to bring them to mind more vividly than colors or shapes. The investigating panel concluded that Zola’s fictional smells were more the result of a supple olfactory imagination than of nose-skills as such.
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