The Scent of the Jonquil

In Rattle: A Journal at the Convergence of Art & Writing 3, p. 109-115. London: 2012.
Socrates: Upon my word, a delightful resting place, with this tall, spreading plane, and a lovely
shade from the high branches of the agnos. Now that its in full flower, it will make the place
ever so fragrant. And what a lovely stream under the plane tree, and how cool to the feet!
Judging by the statuettes and images I should say its consecrated to Achelous and some of the
nymphs. And then too isnt the freshness of the air most welcome and pleasant, and the shrill
summery music of the cicada choir! And as crowning delight the grass, thick enough on a
gentle slope to rest your head on most comfortably. In fact, my dear Phaedrus, you have been
the strangers perfect guide.
Plato Phaedrus 230b-c

Never mind, said Socrates. Its like clothing, you knowone kind looks good on a woman,
another kind on a man. So with scentsone kind is right for a woman, another for a man.
Anyway, no man smears himself with perfume to please another man. Even women
especially young brides like Niceratuss and Critobolusswhat use do they have for perfume?
They smell of it as they are. As for a man, the smell of olive oil used in gymnasiums is sweeter
to him than perfume to a woman, and when he doesnt have it he misses it more. When a slave
and a free man are smeared with perfume, both smell alike right away. But the smells of a free
mans efforts require much time spent in noble pursuits before he picks up the delightful scent
of freedom.
Xenophon Symposium 2.3-4


It is outside the city walls of Athens, intoxicated by the cicadas song and the fragrance of
the chaste tree, that Socrates delivers one of his two famous speeches on love, featuring the
charioteer that must drive the white and black horses, each representing one aspect of the soul.
Socrates other great eulogy to Eros in which the Idea is attained in a series of stages beginning
with the appreciation of a beautiful body can be found in the Symposium of Plato, but it is that
penned by Xenophon that documents his antipathy toward perfume, which, like rhetoric, has the
potential to unsettle the normative fabric of society. It is only the organically produced odour
excreted in the gymnasium that merits the name delightful, while the artifice of perfume has such a
radical potency that it may render indistinguishable slave and master.
In more recent times, the faculty of smell has been endowed a similarly radical character by
Immanuel Kant, who denies the olfactory any part in aesthetic judgement due to its subjective
character. Scent is restricted to the realm of the sensible, and can only be agreeable rather than
beautiful. In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant fractures the universal from the particular in
the body of the flower by distinguishing its delight for all from the agreeableness of its fragrance,
writing that one person revels in it, but it gives another a headache.
1
This particular quality of
scent has a disruptive capacity: The man who pulls his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket
treats all around to it whether they like it or not.
2
Kant repeats this sentiment in Anthropology from
a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), in which he describes smell as contrary to freedom and less
sociable than taste, where among many dishes or bottles a guest can choose one according to his
liking, without being forced to share the pleasure of it.
3
Of this most ungrateful sense, he avers,
It does not pay to cultivate it or refine it at all in order to enjoy, for there are more disgusting
objects than pleasant ones (especially in crowded places), and even when we come across
something fragrant, the pleasure from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient.
4

Yet, it is precisely this unexpectedness of the encounter with the perfumed handkerchief,
that strange mutable immutability manifest as a lack of freedom, that founds the two prevalent
associations with the sense of smell: memory and eroticism. The scent of freshly cut grass recalls
the lost innocence of a pastoral childhood; a whiff of sultry musk arouses our attention in a crowded
elevator. The aroma of a grandmothers kitchen, the scent of a lovers napethese tropes of the
olfactory, nostalgia and seduction, are firmly lodged in popular consciousness, and yet they are
equally the domain of the visual and the aural. What is unique to the domain of the nose is its
superfluousness. Olfaction, our most primordial sense, is largely considered the least critical. One
can envision few life or death scenarios in which the sense of smell alone is pivotal; anosmia is
more a discomfort than a disability. In its obsolescence, therefore, olfaction is uniquely aesthetic.
Perfume, stimulant to this sense not of utility but of pleasure and repulsion, manifests a
peculiar marriage of Nature and artifice that is unrivalled by any other substance. The perfumer is
first and foremost a chemist, whose skilful combinations of precious and often volatile elements
result in aromas that are sometimes truer to life than the real thing. For example, the precious
essence of coumarin, which naturally occurs in crystallized form on the surface of the Guyanese
tonka bean, corresponds in perfumery to the scent of newly mown hay. Further, its synthetic
production in 1868 allowed for its use in higher concentrations than previously viable, with the
effect of a new aromatic intensity hitherto unknown. Coumarin is not the only scent to fool the
nose. The syrupy green scent of the poisonous lily-of-the-valley may be the ground of numerous

1
Immaneul Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith , ed. Nicholas Walker
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 111; see also Section 8, p 47.
2
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 158.
3
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 50.
4
Kant, Anthropology, 50-51.
contemporary fragrances, but it exists only in synthetic form as the natural material is too unstable
to transform into perfume.
5

The synthetic element has long been an aspect of olfaction, which among philosophers has
frequently been associated with the imagination. Taking note of scents ability to give tone to the
nerves, in his 1762 tract on education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, Smells by themselves are
weak sensations. They move the imagination more than the sense and effect us not so much by
fulfilment as by expectation.
6
As a faculty of the imagination, scent exceeds the temporal present,
providing a synthetic sensory experience of what is to come. However, for Rousseau, this
experience ultimately has a narrow resonance. As a mechanism of forewarning, smell precedes taste
as sight precedes touch, and its imaginary capacity is limited to a natural biological order.
Despite his refusal of the patronage of Louis XV, Rousseaus is a principal voice at the
zenith of the Enlightenment, that period during which the taste in perfume shifted from the animalic
to the floral. The entry for perfume in Diderots Encyclopdie describes this shift in preference from
the heavy musks of the Baroque to the flowery scents of the Rocaille: At one time, perfumes made
with musk, ambergris and civet were sought after in France, but they have fallen out of style since
our nerves have become more delicate.
7
This evolution of taste follows the giving way of the
dense, dark theatrical forms of the Baroque for the light florid immersive environments of the
Rocaille. As the murmurs of liberty increased in popular discourse, so did the profusion of vegetal
forms in the Rocaille style. Equally, the construction of the Natural gained traction in perfect
tandem with the first stirrings of the industrial revolution in France, then and now the capital of
perfumery. This moment is perfectly expressed a decade later by a confection of Marie Antoinettes
milliner Rose Bertin who had the fine-crafted silk flowers that she procured from an Italian convent
carefully scented by Jean-Louis Fargeon, a preeminent perfumer in Paris, so as to be indiscernible
from the actual blossom, an alchemical artifice of the highest order.
8

Rousseau was not the only philosophe interested in the significance of smell. In the Treatise
on the Sensations of 1754, tienne Bonnot de Condillac renders olfaction of fundamental import in
his critical inquiry into the nature of human consciousness. In a well-known thought experiment,
Condillac hypothesized a statue to which each of the senses would be added, one by one, beginning

5
Luca Turin, The Science of Scent: Adventures In Perfume and the Science of Smell (London: Faber
and Faber, 2006), 21-23, 58-59. Biophysicist Turin is known for his controversial theory that scent
is determined by molecular vibration. Lily-of-the-valley has recently featured in Lars Von Triers
film Melancholia, in the bridal bouquet and the grooms boutonniere.
6
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, mile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1979), 115.
7
Louis de Jaucourt, Parfum in Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et
des mtiers, 11 (Paris, 1765), 940.
8
Elisabeth de Feydeau, A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinettes Perfumer,
trans. Jane Lizop (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 54.
with scent, proving that all aspects of cognition, including pleasure and pain, memory, comparison,
judgement, and imagination can be derived from our most primitive faculty.
9
Unlike the present day
in which the self is generally considered a linguistic construction, Condillac thus located olfaction
at the centre of human cognitive experience, determining it as the foundation of subjectivity.
Scent and language, indeed, are often counterposed. A frequent refrain found in olfactory
discourses, whether those of scholars, physiologists, or perfume critics, is the inability to perfectly
express olfactive experience in language. For Kant, this amounts to the reducibility of scent to taste
to which it must always refer by way of comparison,
10
while for biophysicist and fragrance
connoisseur Luca Turin it confounds our scientific understanding of the sense of smell. It is not
scent that is subjective, he argues, but language.
11
Despite, or perhaps because of, this limitation,
critiques of perfumes, including Turins own, are often florid, poetic, even synesthetic. He describes
Guerlains Nahma (1979) as an explosion played in reverse: a hundred disparate, torn shreds of
fragrance propelled by a fierce, accelerating vortex to coalesce into a perfect form that you fancy
would then walk toward you, smiling as if nothing had happened.
12

Scent, thus understood as being in excess of language, assumes the form of an image. In this
vein, a generation after the philosophes, tienne Pivert de Senancour pushed the significance and
transportive ability of scent beyond the experiential foundation of Condillac and Rousseau, beyond
the pictorial imagistic, into the realm of the imagistic uncanny. Written in the last throes of the
eighteenth century between France and Switzerland during the French Consulate, for the peripatetic
Senancour, imagination exceeds the Natural, and scent is its privileged driver. In the letters of his
alter ego the young anti-hero Obermann published in 1804, Senancour describes a dull and cold
March morning when he passed a single jonquil in bloom:
It is the strongest expression of desire, and it was the first fragrance of the year. I caught a
glimpse of all happiness meant for man. That indescribable harmony of creation, the vision of
the ideal world, was rounded to completeness within me; I have never felt anything so sudden
and inspiring. I should be at a loss to say what form, what likeness, what subtle association it
was suggested to me in this flower an illimitable beauty, the expression, the refinement, the
pose of a happy, artless woman in all the grace and splendour of the days of love. I cannot
picture to myself that power, that vastness which nothing concrete can display; that form which
nothing can reveal; that conception of a better world which may be felt, but never found in

9
tienne Bonnot de Condillac, Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (Los
Angeles: University of Southern California School of Philosophy, 1930), 3-18.
10
Kant, Anthropology, 51n52.
11
Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of
the Senses, advance uncorrected proofs (New York: Random House, 2002), 258-259.
12
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, rev. ed. (London: Profile Books,
2009), 396.
Nature; that heavenly radiance which we think to grasp, which captivates and enthrals us, and
which is but an intangible phantom, wandering astray in depths of gloom.
13


Anticipating the philosophical pessimism that reigned a century later, Obermann finds his only
escape from the monotony of the quotidian not in the mountains or forests that he spends his days
and evenings prowling, but in an unexpected encounter with the scent of a flower. The perfume of
the jonquil transports Obermann beyond his troubled existence into an imaginary landscape of all
happiness meant for man, if only available privately to him and for just a fleeting instant that
reveals the very paradox of Nature and Artifice, confounding their distinction. The perfume of a
flower conjures an artless femininity. This transcendental experience, this vision of the ideal that
exceeds sight, however, in the end reveals nothing. The world imagined in the joy of scent is one
that cannot be found in nature. The ideal is a phantom, and Obermann is left with mere
contemplation.
The thread drawn here between the delicacy of the nerves and aesthetic sensibility in regard
to the olfactory is evident in two disparate but equally decisive discourses of the nineteenth century.
The first is the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche who remarked that aesthetics is nothing but a kind
of applied physiology,
14
and the second is the increasing concern for public health and hygiene
correlative to the ascent of bourgeois moralism. Something of a spiritual ancestor of the equally
atheistic mountain-dweller Obermann, Nietzsches Zarathustra has an acute acoustic sense rivalled
only by his ultrasensitive olfactory prowess. Allusions to this power abound throughout his
wanderings, as he tastes the air with his nostrils distended like cups.
15
It is with his sense of smell
that Zarathustra recognizes that he has escaped the realm of the common man. He writes, With
happy nostrils I again breathe mountain freedom. At last my nose is delivered from the smell of
everything human. Tickled by the sharp air as by sparkling wines, my soul sneezessneezes and
jubilates to itself: Gezundheit!
16

Speaking in his own voice, Nietzsche too lauded his own ultrafine sense of smell that can
detect truths and lies, souls and decomposing ideals. Scent is not only elevated above the classically
privileged aesthetic sense of sight, it is also the foundation of ethical judgement. On the first page of
his autobiography Ecce Homo (1888), he declared, To the first indications of ascending or of

13
tienne Pivert de Senancour, Obermann, Vol. I, trans. J. Anthony Barnes (London, New York &
Melbourne: Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1923), 102.
14
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1968), 664.
15
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, 419.
16
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 298.
descending life, my nostrils are more sensitive than those of any man that has yet lived.
17
Never
one for modesty, he returned to the nasal in the concluding section:
My destiny ordained that I should be the first human being, and that I should feel myself
opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple
reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehoodthat is to say, I
smelt it as such. My genius resides in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted
hitherto, and am nevertheless the reverse of a negative spirit. I am the harbinger of joy, the like
of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such lofty greatness that, until my
time, no one had any idea of such things.
18


Through the primordial sense of olfaction where his genius resides, Nietzsche surpasses the status
quo, the order of the human, and enters that of the ubermensch with a joyful exuberance.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, in the nineteenth century the prominence of the
olfactory gave rise to social anxiety. The sense of smell and perfume assumed a prominence in
popular literature in which it came to epitomize desire. Historian Alain Corbin writes of this
phenomenon, The evanescence of perfumes encouraged the relishing of anticipated enjoyment,
intoxication; it symbolized the discontinuous nature of the dialogue of love. . . . Like voyeurism,
some olfactory behaviour patterns permitted a new conduct of the rhythms of desire.
19
This
association of scent with desire, however, was not a positive one and the olfactory became a mark
of self-indulgence in bourgeois culture. Considered in the previous century as the sensory faculty of
the imagination, the primacy of the sense of smell instilled a fear of animal regression manifest by
the pathologization of olfactory pleasure as an autoerotic psychic disorder.
20
This is but one
example of that eras vilification of aesthetic pleasure, a trend that has persisted to the present day.




Jenny Doussan, 2011


17
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Mineola, NY: Courier Dover
Publications, 2004), 9.
18
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 132.
19
Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans.
Miriam L. Kochan (Leamington Spa, Hamburg & New York: Berg Publishers, 1986), 206-207.
20
Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, 208.