Smells. Robert Muchembled
and umami has a very different tone in the two countries. I do, however, agree fully with her former point, however subjective it may be, because it maps perfectly onto my own purpose in writing this book: demonstrating that smell is the most flexible and manipulable of the senses, making it a rich seam for any historian interested in the forces driving long-term cultural and social change.
A further characteristic specific to smell is its direct link to the oldest part of the human brain, as olfactory information is decoded in the prefrontal cortex. The ‘limbic system’, to use a familiar expression now out of favour among specialists, is also the site where memories are formed and emotions such as pleasure, aggression and fear are managed. Like smell, aggression and fear are controlled by the amygdala. In simple terms, our sense of smell is the primary seat of our emotions. It reacts in a flash to alert us to potential threats, before sight and the other senses validate the message. The initial warning is of necessity simple and binary: good or bad. For newborns to survive, they must latch on to the breasts of an unfamiliar woman who smells good before she tastes good. Conversely, children coming across a chopped onion for the first time cry when it triggers their trigeminal nerve; the pain becomes indelibly associated with a smell that is recorded as highly unpleasant. Things do not smell good or bad in and of themselves: our brains categorize them and then record the memory. Humans adapt perfectly to strong smells: after about fifteen minutes, we stop smelling even the worst stench or most delightful fragrance. Nor can we detect our own odour, which floats around us like an invisible bubble about a metre in diameter, protecting our personal space, on the model of the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume.13 The brain must learn to create an association, negative or positive, with smells that are impermanent and trigger an initial, fleeting danger signal. Even things that now disgust us deeply require a process of social conditioning that can, in some cases, be very lengthy indeed. In the United States, world-beaters when it comes to masking smells, Rachel Herz reports that children like the smell of their own excrement until the age of about eight. It takes them the same amount of time to come to appreciate the taste of bananas or to reject the ‘stinky’ cheeses that adults are so disgusted by. To my knowledge, no French researchers have explored the reverse mechanism by which French cuisine has come to be dominated by strong-smelling foodstuffs that disgust people across the Atlantic. This is a missed opportunity, because a well-thought-out marketing campaign targeting very young children, associating such products with pleasure rather than pain, could boost international sales considerably. A French anthropologist has studied the lack of disgust at faeces and urine in children up to the age of four or five; yet the sixteenth-century essayist Montaigne wrote that everyone likes the smell of their own excrement, while Erasmus said the same of farts.14 These monuments of sixteenth-century culture did not learn anal repression, as we will see in chapter 3.
Smell is useful in allowing us to swiftly identify and decide whether to approach or avoid everything from food and sexual partners to predators and toxins, promoting the survival of individuals and hence the human race.15 This multifaceted sense shapes our instinct for contact or revulsion, helping forge solid social bonds, training our taste buds, and encouraging procreation to keep the species alive. Far from casting us back to the animality of our earliest ancestors, such intertwined olfactory fields are part of the rich tapestry of what it means to be human. The earliest olfactory exchanges between mother and foetus in the womb from the twelfth week of pregnancy are followed in the first days of life by a powerful bond generated by the irresistible lure of the mother’s nipple. This is in turn followed by a long period of preferential attachment, as children can identify their mothers by smell alone, starting from between two to five, until they are around sixteen.16 This vigorously contradicts the old dogma of the deodorized society some argue we now live in. It also has potential long-term consequences for the dominant note of womanhood it foregrounds. Our experiences as infants ‘could be a sort of imprint that leaves its mark on us for the rest of our lives’.17 Recent experiments have demonstrated that women can detect, identify and memorize smells better than men. There seems to be some mysterious link, as yet unexplained, between our sense of smell and human reproduction.18 Research in this area could shed light on our understanding of the widespread terror caused by the power of women’s bodies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with numerous broadsides against their stench, as chapter 4 will show. Are the sudoriferous glands, which begin producing sweat in puberty, mainly around the nipples, anus, genitalia, groin and armpits, more active in women than in men? The current norm is to deodorize these body parts. This is relatively straightforward, as the substances emitted have no smell of their own. They are, however, very rich in proteins that are ingested by bacteria that then release foul-smelling gases.19 Five centuries ago, it was a very different matter: it was impossible to rid the body of such smells, since water and bathing were considered dangerous. At best, they could be masked by powerful scents.
The eighteenth-century philosopher Diderot held smell to be the ‘most voluptuous’ of the senses. Other Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau and Cabanis were of the same opinion.20 Freud’s theories led the ethnologist Yvonne Verdier to research the role of excremental odours in male erotic sensibility. The sociologist Marcel Mauss posited the existence of a relationship between armpit sweat and the notion of personality, with bodily odours offering excellent clues to a potential sexual partner’s suitability.21 The exact mechanisms at work remain a mystery, since no formal scientific proof of the existence of human pheromones has been found. The most commonly accepted theories posit that such mechanisms are necessary to the survival of the species. Pleasant smells suggest excellent health rooted in a strong immune system that puts up a powerful fight against parasites and microbes, making the potential partner – male or female – a good bet. Unpleasant smells, on the other hand, are signs of disease, and therefore of danger and failure to reproduce successfully.22 Binary olfactory signals are connected to our emotions, as we have seen. The neurobiologist Antonio R. Damasio has identified six such ‘primary’ or ‘universal’ emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise and joy. Our emotional range is completed by secondary emotions reflecting well-being or discomfort, calm or stress. In the end, he considers biological regulation to be based on pleasure, connected to the notion of reward, and pain, aligned with punishment.23 Our first olfactory impression is absolutely fundamental, particularly when it comes to falling in love.
Finding the perfect life partner should not be seen as a bolt from the blue, but rather as a brief instant of olfactory ecstasy. The romantic quest for a Prince Charming or Sleeping Beauty takes on a surprising new dimension. We all have our own unique smell, described by scientists as our ‘olfactory fingerprint’. There are currently over seven billion such signature smells on earth. And though we are unaware of it, it is our noses that lead us to the man or woman of our dreams, the Romeo or Juliet who will help us perpetuate our genes and thus protect the future of the species. It is no surprise that all sorts of myths have sprung up to explain the mystery. Plato’s concept of androgyny, taken up centuries later with lasting influence by the humanist philosophers and poets of the Renaissance, explains our constant quest for our twin soul: humans were originally dual beings with two sexes, before being split into two separate entities, both dissatisfied with their lot.
The roots of this myth may well lie somewhere in the biological quest for the ideal partner. Men and women are literally led by the nose to the one bubble of scent that suits them best, by a process of trial and error, illustrated by a series like Sex and the City. The flood of positive emotions that washes over us when we discover someone who smells right is automatically memorized along with their pleasant scent. Coming across the same scent again spontaneously triggers the whole bundle of affective memories in a sort of chain reaction that could be called the ‘madeleine effect’, after the famous scene in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Clever investors have doubtless seen this as a potential money-spinner, which explains why ‘natural’ scents have made such a comeback in perfumes and body-care products for men and women alike. Systematically stripping away our natural odour upsets human sexuality by removing the signals that instinctively guide it. It is an insidious cultural mechanism for controlling sexuality and setting humans apart from the animal