In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

i n t r o d u c t i o n Strange, Invisible Perfumes But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past The mysterious power of smell to evoke a “remembrance of things past” (or what scientists now term a “Proustian” or “involuntary” memory) was recently revealed . On October 4, 2004, Dr. Richard Axel and Dr. Linda B. Buck were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking discoveries of “odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.”1 The New York Times framed their discovery in more general terms: the science section boldly proclaimed that Axel and Buck had won the Nobel for “demystifying the sense of smell,” the “most enigmatic sense,” by clarifying how the human body “can recognize and remember” more than ten thousand distinct odors.2 In announcing the award, the jury noted, like Proust, that smell was essential both to survival and to the enjoyment of life’s more subtle pleasures, like enjoying a good wine or appreciating a beautiful lilac.3 Solving a two-thousand-yearold scientific puzzle, Axel and Buck had cracked this intimate, enigmatic, and ephemeral sense, mapping Proustian memory through a “molecular logic” of smell.4 In the press that followed this announcement, however, the metaphoric logic of smell remained enigmatic, odd, and at times, gross. The Times immediately ran a secondary piece on the award, noting that it carried “a whiff of spoof science ” and linking it to the previous month’s Ig Nobel prize, which honored a “bizarre” biological breakthrough in herring communication.5 Herring appear 2 The Ephemeral History of Perfume to communicate through the release of bubbles, or by “farting.”6 The researchers of the fish study, however, warned that any connection to Axel and Buck’s work was minimal since the “fish flatulence” in question were not digestive gasses and, thus, carried no odors.7 In a similar vein, the Wall Street Journal ran a frontpage piece the following week on J. M. Knight, creator of “odd” and “evil” scents for a variety of educational and consumer applications, including those that mimicked the smell of locker rooms, meteorites, mummies, body odor, dragon’s breath, machinery, rainforests, “evil” cotton candy, rotten eggs, Havana cigars, iron smelting , “granny’s kitchen,” coal fire, flatulence, and, perhaps most troubling, a “Japanese prisoner of war.”8 Both headlines punned that the smell of success is not always sweet. As both the Nobel and Ig Nobel awards demonstrate, smell bridges acute sensory perception and brute bodily materiality. Both exist within a specific spatial and temporal setting. Axel described his work on olfaction as a study of “the astonishing problem of how the brain represents the outside world . . . how it is that the rich array of mechanical, optical, and chemical properties that define touch, hearing, vision, smell, and taste can be represented by bits of electrical activity that can essentially only vary in two parameters: time and space.”9 Invisible chemical properties of smell are inhaled by the nose and then are translated into electrical charges that travel throughout the brain. These charges form patterns , or smell memories, that can be recalled at a later point in time (if experienced again). Axel and Buck’s work demonstrates how, once smelled, a rose is a rose is a rose (at least in terms of brain recognition).10 Yet, as Axel’s meditation on perception also suggests, the representation of that rose (whether as electrical energy or as a sonnet) depends on particular encounters in time and space. Though the human body is programmed to instantaneously recognize more than ten thousand different scents, the cultural and material meanings of those scents vary greatly.11 As the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognized, smell is culturally and biologically central to human life, yet it often seems enigmatic. Though scientists have unlocked the molecular logic of olfaction, its role in the past remains a mystery, virtually ignored in historical scholarship. This book explores how time and space determine the metaphoric and material history of smell, arguing...

Share