Volume 33, Number 18 · November 20, 1986
The Nose Knows
By Robert M. Adams
The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination
by Alain Corbin
Harvard University Press, 307 pp., $25.00
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
by Patrick Süskind, translated by John E. Woods
Knopf, 255 pp., $16.95
Smell is the pariah among the senses, or has been until now. Kant wouldn't admit it into his aesthetics, Freud dismissed it as an aspect of anality, for many people it has aspects of bestial sexual behavior summarized in the image of two dogs mutually sniffing. Most of us do not smell as good, for as much of the time, as we think we should. Perhaps it's true that the more clean-minded we are, the more we are obsessed by nasty ideas, of which fecality and body odors from groin, rump, armpit, and mouth are the most embarrassing. Different people vary widely in the acuteness of their smell sense, as in the different odors to which they are sensitive. But compared with those of the other animals, like blood-hounds to be sure, but also insects such as the emperor moth (Saturnia pavonia), our keenest noses are gross and pitifully short of range. It's not beyond thought that smell is a vestigial sense, much reduced from what it once was, likely to vanish altogether before long.
Review, 3044 words
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