What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [88]
“The television screen shows branches and violets. It shows pine forests and sheets of falling white water ending in curls of clean, shining spray. It shows meadows full of buttercups and pine forests full of mystery and crisp needles. It is telling you—enticing you—to re-create these atmospheres in your own home with air fresheners, with aerosol sprays of scented furniture polish, with…” You get the drift.
Byatt objects on ethical grounds: “The smells that have invaded our modern lives are neither the good smells nor the bad smells, but the guilty, masking smells. Smells that we use to cover human smells.” Apparently perfumes are deceitful because they hide our true primate stinkiness.
Unsurprisingly, Byatt’s fiction is riddled with morbid smells. Here’s a typical example: “It was not a clean train—the upholstery of their carriage had the dank smell of unwashed trousers.” Elsewhere she describes a husband’s “evil-smelling breath full of brandy and stale smoke.” Occasionally she outdoes herself: “It was a liquid smell of putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.” Her preoccupation with unwashed trousers gives the impression of a nose tuned to the Dark Side. She recoils from perfume like the Wicked Witch from the fire bucket. Hide the Giorgio or she’ll send the flying monkeys after you.
Perhaps an elderly British novelist is entitled to get cranky about perfume, but why should a thirtysomething Internet columnist lose it over an air freshener? That’s what happened when Mark Morford, of the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com website, teed off on Procter & Gamble’s ScentStories aroma player:
What vile marketing decision was made, and by whom, that said we must now progress from static mute little tabletop chemical-bomb air fresheners to more sinister, electronically activated Glade plug-in thingies with silly little built-in fans to full-fledged toaster-size appliances that require huge amounts of plastic and massive marketing campaigns and full AC power and interchangeable chemical-soaked disks?
It’s not just the ever-grander technology that makes Morford hot under the collar—it’s the implied message contained in the aroma:
This is the marketing strategy: each disc is apparently designed to somehow lift you out of your sanitized tract-home suburban kids-’n’-dogs-’n’-minivans dystopia and transport you straight to the Misty Mountains or the sultry Bahamas or the Brazilian rain forest or whatever.
What unhinges Morford and others like him isn’t a particular smell, it’s the marketing of smell. Consumerism, mass consumption, and the excesses of the free market as embodied by a scent-delivery contraption really put his nose out of joint.
The psychoanalysts G. G. Wayne and A. A. Clinco offered a related criticism in 1959: “What was once a vital instrument for survival—directing and warning primitive man—has now deteriorated to an instrument for irrelevant and obtuse titillation through the double-jointed vocabulary of advertising.” Emma Cook makes a similar claim: “Until recently, appealing to our sense of smell was relatively virgin territory for marketeers and manufacturers.” (Cook missed the fact that her countryman Eugene Rimmel was marketing up a scented storm in the 1860s.) Common to all these critics is the notion that things were better in the good old days. They long for the unscented state of nature that existed before air fresheners, television, and perfume. Their