What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [68]
Faulkner set his stories in the South, yet he took the stereotypically sweet and romantic scents of wisteria and honeysuckle and turned them into symbols of sorrow and “the inherent tragedy of southern history.” He pushed the envelope further in The Unvanquished, a novel about young Bayard Sartorius, whose father was a colonel in the Confederate cavalry. At first Faulkner pairs smell with emotion in conventional ways: gunpowder with conflict, and dead roses with a murdered grandmother. It’s not until the final chapter—“An Odor of Verbena”—that Faulkner really uncorks the olfactory symbolism. In real life, true verbena (Verbena officinalis) is nearly scentless. By talking about it as if it had an aroma, Faulkner forces the reader to see the scent as a symbol of courage and violence.
Faulkner gives the odor of verbena a different strength in each scene. Bayard perceives the “now fierce odor of the verbena sprig” on his jacket as he walks to confront his father’s killer. The Southern code of honor demands that he avenge the murder. When the man fires twice, deliberately missing the unarmed Bayard, honor has been satisfied without bloodshed. Bayard returns home and is able to smell the flowers at his father’s wake above the now-diminished odor of verbena. We understand that violence is no longer needed; the call for courage has been met. Smells wax and wane in real life; Faulkner’s genius was to synchronize the sensory with the symbolic.
His most extended use of smell was in The Sound and the Fury, a novel about the breakdown of the Compson family of Mississippi. Faulkner tells it in time-fractured sections and by taking the point of view of different characters, each with their own smells. The mentally defective Benjy perceives the world as a confusing, multisensory jumble; he finds calm in the bodily scents of his caretakers, especially his sister Caddy. Benjy’s constant refrain is that Caddy “smells like trees.” Their brother Quentin’s obsessive, guilt-ridden, and erotically tinged thoughts about Caddy are paired with “the twilight-coloured smell of honeysuckle.” When Quentin prepares to commit suicide, the tone of the story changes and honeysuckle is replaced by the harsh smell of gasoline. Jason is the hard and cynical Compson brother who lacks feelings. The stink of gasoline and camphor are the only smells to appear in his story. In the novel’s final section, an all-knowing voice completes the story against a depersonalized and oppressive aromatic backdrop: “obscurity odorous of dank earth and mould and rubber,” a “faint smell of cheap cosmetics,” a “forlorn scent of pear blossoms,” and a “a pervading reek of camphor.”
Faulkner tried to convince an impressionable undergraduate that this all proceeded from a sharp sense of smell, that he had “no deliberate intent” to make a big deal of smell in his work. But I detect a whiff of bullshit. Masterfully gauged metaphors don’t happen by themselves.
A Night at the Opera
Early in 1993, I received a letter from Roland Tec, director of the New Opera Theatre Ensemble of Boston. Tec was producing a new work called Blind Trust, a boy-meets-blind-girl story with an improvised score and script. The production was to take place entirely in the dark, with scenes to be accompanied by scent to give a sense of place. Could I help them do this?
I convinced my boss at Givaudan-Roure Fragrances that this was an interesting creative