Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”1
That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought.
It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man2
The interwar debate about pleasure clusters most intensely around cinema and popular literature. However, I will begin with a sensual experience that has received far less attention: smell, and specifically perfume, viewed as a vehicle of pleasure that is as interpretable as any text. Recent scholarship on the modernist sensorium focuses almost exclusively on vision and hearing, and few literary critics have attended to the olfactory sense. Historically, smell has been construed as vision’s other: the archaic to the modern, the spontaneous to the cultivated, the irrational to the logical. Accordingly, the pleasures of scent have been dismissed as frivolous and nonaesthetic. Just so, while the impact of cultural innovations in cinema, music, and the fine arts on modern literature has been carefully documented, the remarkable conceptual and material innovations in perfumery during the modern period have gone largely unnoticed. (An exception is Chanel No. 5, which is usually highlighted more for its bottle shape, typography, and abstract name or for its maker’s biography than for the substance itself.3) The history of perfume from the 1880s to the early years of the twentieth century strikingly dovetails with the history of literary modernism.
Perfume would seem to be an extreme embodiment of the somatic, commodified pleasures that modernists decry. Aside from the aesthetic choice of which perfume to wear, scent is a largely passive pleasure that plays on the senses. However, as Jennifer Wicke reminds us, commodities and the activity of their consumption offer an important window into the experience of modernity.4 A peculiar kind of pleasure, perfume is mostly mass-produced but also intimate and individual, thought to disclose the essence of the wearer and publicly advertise his or her taste, passion, and predilections. Ephemeral (it evaporates and fades from the skin; when specific brands or formulas are discontinued, they may disappear forever), perfume can evoke deep-seated, unconscious responses and memories. A product that becomes part of the body itself by seeping into the skin, perfume elicits equally somatic reactions from those who smell it.
This chapter will first give a brief history of perfume’s synthetic revolution and demonstrate how modern writers, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, registered the impact of these material changes in their work. Subsequently, I will examine how James Joyce deploys scent, and particularly perfume, as a means of expanding the conventional boundaries of what is “scentually” appealing to include the repulsive and the repellent in a pungent dialectic of pleasure and unpleasure. Joyce notably engages with sensual and popular pleasures at the same time that he upholds the vaunted modernist value of difficulty. He is far less defensive about vernacular culture than many other modernists. Indeed, he revels in the absurd, cliché, and shameless side of mass culture and literary genres such as pornography and romance: hence, his work immediately complicates the stark polarities of the great divide. However, Joyce’s work—and Ulysses in particular—demonstrates how modernism incorporates easy, somatic pleasures but renders them through contorted kinds of unpleasure and challenging reading effects. Although contemporary criticism gives the impression that Joycean texts are most attuned to auditory pleasures and early visual technologies, Joyce also constantly registers the appeal—and repulsion—of olfactory sensation, and these moments are fundamental to his hedonistic universe.5
Joyce had a keen understanding of what Barthes called the “texture of perfume.”6 The representation of perfume in Ulysses indicates that Joyce thought of it as a commodity as well as a sensuous experience, a material substance, and an aesthetic creation. For example, in a December 17, 1931, letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce remarks that an unauthorized edition of Ulysses is “a contrefaçon [forgery] of a French printer’s output just as a falsified French perfume would be.”7 Joyce understood that perfume formulas, like literary texts, had a kind of aesthetic autonomy, particularly in the early years of the twentieth century, when perfumery had reached new heights of invention. Joyce’s textual scents are never single-note; rather, they are constructed through layers of memory, bodily response, attraction, and resistance. Perfume is a pleasure with unexpected depths. It is, to borrow a felicitous metaphor from Wicke, one way “fashion intelligence is sprayed all over Ulysses.”8 Odor in general, and modern perfume in particular, is a means through which Joyce models a complex eroticism and an equally intricate reading experience.
“STRANGER FLOWERS, PLEASURES NOT YET DISCOVERED”
When Stephen Dedalus walks on the beach in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, he tests Aristotle’s theories of perception by experimenting with his vision and hearing. Western philosophy has always ranked vision at the top of the sense hierarchy, along with hearing, above smell, taste, and touch.9 The eyes and ears were thought to put more distance between the perceiver and the source of stimulation than the lowly nose, skin, or mouth: the farther the object of perception from the body, the more opportunity for reason to exert its influence. Most early philosophers argued that the most valuable forms of sensual pleasure are rational and ethical. Smell, by contrast, was thought to be somatically reflexive and so not subject to the higher mechanisms of the mind. Smell was also pronounced aesthetically deficient. Vision and hearing had corresponding arts (the fine arts and music), but perfumery was, and still is, not thought to constitute a disciplined or principled artistic activity.10
The Enlightenment inquiry into the nature of the senses demoted olfactory experience even further. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations maintains that smell “is the one [sense] that seems to contribute the least to the operations of the human mind.”11 Kant asks, “Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems to be the most dispensable? The sense of smell. 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 coming from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient.”12 For Kant, smells—ephemeral and mostly foul—are associated with the masses and the irrational body. Olfaction was not thought to be connected to aesthetics, and the pleasure it did produce was deemed too ephemeral to merit contemplation.
Most mid-to-late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social scientists continued to regard olfaction as a crude and primitive sense. Both Darwin and Freud assert that smell is a faculty more useful to animals than humans, and that vision, rather than scent, guides civilized culture.13 Freud speculates that vision gained dominance over smell when humans began to walk upright and their noses were no longer on the same level as their genitals.14 In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he remarks that “coprophilic pleasure in smelling … has disappeared owing to repression,” at least among those who are properly socialized.15 Sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex devotes a substantial section to the sense of smell, recognized the role of odors in mental life and, like Freud, linked unconventional olfactory pleasure to deviance.16
Ellis remarks that “odors do not, as vision does, give you information that is very largely intellectual; they make an appeal that is mainly of an intimate, emotional, imaginative character.”17 This is partly right. The olfactory sense is reflexive, involuntary, and somatic; however, it also involves the capacities of the mind insofar as it is highly associative and mnemonic. “No sense,” Ellis asserts, “has so strong a power of suggestion, the power of calling up ancient memories with a wider and deeper emotional reverberation” than smell.18 Smell is both an immediate, somatic response and a trigger to emotional retrospection; it is a sensual impression in the present as well as a door to the past. Olfaction is closely related to memory and cognition; however, contemporary scientists agree that most humans find it difficult to describe specific odors in words (although they are more successful at matching smells with their sources). “In evolutionary terms,” Piet Vroon writes, “the sense of smell is an old one, with relatively few direct connections with the youngest part of the brain—namely, the left neocortex, a system which houses, for example, ‘language centers.’”19 Significantly, smell is understood as beyond or outside language, similarly to the way that pleasure has often been theorized.
At various points in history, perfume has been a tool for hygiene, a means of fumigation, a spiritual substance, or a sensual accessory. Homer associated perfume with divinity, and ancient Greeks also thought of it as a luxury.20 In the Middle Ages, scent was a prophylactic against the fumes of the plague and poor sanitation, making the smell of dirty bodies bearable. The early Church frowned upon perfume, as it did other sensual indulgences. However, in the fourth century, it adopted the use of scent in ritual.21 Incense signifies purification, a religious offering that converts the aromatics of pagan practices into a spiritual show of holiness. A fundamental change occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Like so many innovations, it happened in the 1880s in France. Chemists and perfumers developed synthetic, artificial scents to supplement the costly and often rare natural fragrances that had been the palette of perfumery. Like the synthetic pigments that expanded the array of colors available to late nineteenth-century painters and hence the course of art, the perfume innovations made possible, writes Richard Stamelman, an unprecedented “scale of perfume notes and accords, an ‘immense register of scents,’ completely unknown” to earlier perfumers.22 In the years that followed, there was a radical reconceptualization of what a perfume could be. Many perfumers developed abstract rather than mimetic compositions. Scents such as Coty’s Chypre and Chanel No. 5 were nonreferential. Rather than striving to imitate a perfect rose or a convincing violet, they presented a heady blend of abstract and unnatural odors that Luca Turin, biophysicist and perfume critic, likens to “jumping from Delacroix’s neoclassic people with arms that looked like, well, human arms into a nonhuman, natureless Kandinsky world of triangles, dots, and machine-tooled blobs.”23 L’Heure Bleue, Guerlain’s sweetly melancholic creation of 1912—and also, supposedly, Jean Rhys’s favorite perfume—was said to have been inspired by the “fleeting sensation” captured by impressionist painters.24 Just as impressionism changed the lens through which painters represented the world, from the colors they employed and the quality of their brushstrokes to their understanding of vision and cognition, and just as abstraction changed the premises of mimesis itself, the new perfumery altered the kinds of fragrances people could smell as well as their ideas about what perfume could be.25
Other changes were afoot. Particularly during the Renaissance and up until the eighteenth century, strong, “animalic” scents (as bestial odors are known by perfumers) had been popular. The most common were musk, a substance that comes from a musk deer’s scent gland; ambergris, which is extracted from the excrement or vomit of sperm whales; and civet, from the anal gland of a civet cat. To be sure, these ingredients were and continue to be used in very sparing amounts in perfume, but they nevertheless added a hint of dissonance to the dominant notes.26 The nineteenth-century hygiene movement with its “growing deodorization of society” meant that perfumes were no longer used as health remedies but were classified as cosmetics, and advertised and sold as luxury products.27 The scent of cleanliness—or no odor at all—had become the new standard, and scents that had once been hugely popular fell out of favor. In the Victorian era, animalic scents were superseded by more delicate and less bodily fragrances, including violet, lavender, and rose, as the cult of female purity took hold. Floral and herbal perfumes were the scents of choice for the Angel in the House, while “The thick vapors of impregnated flesh, heavy scents, and musky powders were for the courtesan’s boudoir or even the brothel salon.”28 But French perfumers, armed with the new synthetics, extended their formulas to include animalics. The first perfume with man-made ingredients was Houbigant’s Fougère Royale (Royal Fern, 1882), featuring a synthetic reproduction of coumarin, which simulates the smell of freshly mown hay and other, more corporeal odors. Luca Turin describes the now defunct scent, which can only be smelled in the archives of the International Perfume Museum in Grasse:
Fougère Royale starts the way some Bruckner symphonies do, with a muted pianissimo of strings, giving an impression of tremendous ease and quiet power. It does smell of coumarin, to be sure, but it is also fresh, clean, austere, almost bitter. This is the reference smell of scrubbed bathrooms, suggestive of black and white tiles, clean, slightly damp towels, a freshly shaven daddy. But wait! There’s a funny thing in there, something not altogether pleasant. It’s a touch of natural civet, stuff that comes from the rear end of an Asian cat and smells like it does. … Small wonder Fougère Royale was such a success. At a distance, he who wears it is everyone’s favourite son-in-law; up close, a bit of an animal.29
Turin’s description vividly conveys the subtle blending of clean and “dirty” odors that destabilizes the strong cultural imperative to separate such entities, as detailed by Mary Douglas.30 This blend of artificial and natural, fragrant and foul smells produced a combination of referents and textures that was more challenging to the nose—and the brain—than a conventional floral perfume. The most innovative fragrances of this and the modern era, including Jicky, Shalimar, and Chanel No. 5, feature civet. If perfume is connected to memory, then the reminiscences triggered by the new synthetics included the primal, the infantile, the bestial, and the excremental.
Fin-de-siècle decadent writers were the bards of the new scents. Glorifying modern perfume was a way to flout bourgeois conventions, but it also reflected a fascination with aesthetic innovation in perfumery. In poems such as “The Double Room,” “Lethe,” “The Cat,” and “Exotic Perfume,” Baudelaire praises odors that arouse melancholy and macabre eroticism; perfume reflects the interior landscape of the moody modern subject.31 The ur-scene of synthetic poesis is chapter 10 of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), in which Des Esseintes sets out “to master the grammar and understand the syntax of odors.” He strives to create “New perfumes … stranger flowers … pleasures not yet discovered,”32 asserting that smell “could give one delights equal to those of hearing and sight; each sense being susceptible, if naturally keen and if properly cultivated, to new impressions, which it could intensify, coordinate and compose into that unity which constitutes a creative work” (168–169). His experiments, then, challenge both the traditional classification of olfaction as inferior to hearing and sight and the idea that perfumery is not an art. Moreover, they defy the conception of odor as extralinguistic, as Des Esseintes deploys “effects analogous to those of the poets” (176), using metaphors and layering odors like lines of a stanza: a prosody of perfume. His fragrance referents are distinctively modern and industrial. He produces, for example, the smell of factories “whose tall chimneys flared like bowls of punch … chemical products … sweet effluvia amid this putrescence” (177). In another creation, he conjures “a singular odor, at once repugnant and exquisite” that “partook of the delicious fragrance of jonquil and of the stench of gutta percha and coal oil” (177–178).33 Des Esseintes’s scents are narratives of dissonance and perversity, referencing experiences such as those with his “unbalanced” former mistress who could have been a Krafft-Ebing case study: she “loved to steep the nipples of her breasts in perfumes, but [she] never really experienced a delicious and overpowering ecstasy save when her head was scraped with a comb or when she could inhale, amid caresses, the odor of perspiration, or the plaster of unfinished houses on rainy days, or of dust splashed by huge drops of rain during summer storms” (180–181). Des Esseintes’s experiments in olfaction, like his lover’s libido, map circuitous routes to ecstasy through byways of negation and revulsion. Joyce was markedly influenced by Huysmans’s aestheticized approach to the senses and his linguistic-aromatic odorscapes.
Such paeans to synthetic scents were not the order of the day. More typical was Augustin Galopin’s study Le Parfum de la femme (1886), which warns against the effect of artificial perfumes: “Men who frequent the society of women” who are heavily perfumed, the author cautions, “often have their own sense of odor perverted,” as the “strange and dangerous perfumes that temporarily heighten the senses” confound the distinction between illusion and reality. Galopin laments men who have been “ruined” by women “saturated with artificial perfumes.”34 The new perfumes were disparaged by many as unclean and immoral. In an era of (relatively) advanced hygiene, the ideal was deodorization: the less odor, the better. Heavy perfume had to be hiding something, whether it was a dirty body or moral licentiousness.
While there was an animalic upswing in French perfumes from the turn of the century to the early years of the twentieth century, UK consumers continued to prefer light floral and herbal scents. British perfume preferences were different from the French—the central scents of Yardley, a classic British perfumer, for example, are English Lavender, Lily of the Valley, and English Rose. A 1902 notice for a British perfumer underscores the distinctive character of its scents: “Bayley’s new perfumes for this season are, if one may say so, the very essence of patriotism. They are really British perfumes, made here in England from British flowers, and are in all respects most excellent, as everything British should be.”35 Flowers: not factories or feral cats. In contrast to the Continental (particularly French) literary decadents and aesthetes who were infatuated by artificial and conceptual perfumes, many British and American modernists were suspicious of these contrived scents.
In Brave New World, synthetic perfume is one among numerous engineered sensual pleasures that pacify the masses. It is a feature of public space: restrooms, hotels, and even hospitals are fitted with scent dispensers offering a medley of synthetic odors. When John the Savage and Lenina, the epitome of an artificial woman, attend the feelies, the show is accompanied by a “synchronized scent-organ” whose “Herbal Capriccio” includes “a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung,” parodying both Huysmans’s scene of synaesthesia and what Huxley sees as modern perfumery’s infatuation with farfetched innovation and aesthetic excess in its exotic fecal odors.36 (Lawrence similarly lampoons modernist olfaction in “Surgery for the Novel—Or a Bomb,” where he characterizes the “serious” novel of Joyce, Richardson, and Proust as obsessed with the minutiae of idiosyncratic scent impressions: “Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed?”)37
For T. S. Eliot, modern scent signals decay and spiritual corrosion, and perfume is a particularly toxic sign of depraved femininity. At the beginning of “A Game of Chess” in The Waste Land, for example, Eliot alludes to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in which the queen’s barge sports sails “so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them” (II, ii, 217). Eliot’s glittering woman is exotic, orientalized, and foreign. She sits surrounded by “vials of ivory and coloured glass,” both natural and artificial, in which, “Unstoppered,”
lurked strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours. …38
The scents are the product of some malicious alchemy: “strange synthetic” substances that do not inspire love and devotion but rather befuddlement and engulfment, amplifying the theme of drowning that runs throughout the poem. The prostitute in Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” “twists a paper rose, / That smells of dust and eau de Cologne, / She is alone / With all the old nocturnal smells / That cross and cross across her brain.” These odors summon a “reminiscence” of still more smells, including “sunless dry geraniums” and “female smells in shuttered rooms.”39 The second half of “Whispers of Immortality” introduces the very modern, eyeliner-wearing Grishkin, with her “promise of pneumatic bliss.” She is compared to a “sleek Brazilian jaguar,” but even that cat “Does not in its aboreal gloom / Distil so rank a feline smell / As Grishkin in a drawing room.”40 For Eliot, heavy perfume is a sign of female sexual aggression that crosses over into animalistic behavior. Colleen Lamos notes his frequent invocations of “feminine effluvia” and “noxious fumes” to “suggest the pestilential atmosphere of … female spaces, an odor that attracts and distracts.”41 Lamos points out the resemblance between Grishkin and Fresca, another odiferous cat woman who appears in outtakes from The Waste Land. A “can-can salonnière” who awakens “from dreams of love and pleasant rapes,” Fresca radiates “Odours, confected by the cunning French” that “Disguise the good old hearty female stench.” Pound suggested that “cunning” should be changed to “artful,” a snide comment on the pretentions of the new perfumer).42 Eliot’s palpable disgust at these funky-smelling women betrays his anxiety about sexually powerful female bodies. While he represents Victorian perfumes such as hyacinth and lilac favorably, his rapacious and slatternly women wear animalic, artificial—and significantly, French—perfumes.
Virginia Woolf’s acerbic comment about Katherine Mansfield in her 1917 diary is a further illustration of the modernist bias against the new perfume. She remarks that she and Leonard “could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap.”43 “Cheap” is a word that comes up with some regularity among modernists disparaging perfume. Although the decadents saw synthetic perfumes as a rarified and sophisticated pleasure, in the British context, they indicate popular tastes, coarse female sexuality, and specifically prostitution.44 Even after Mansfield and Woolf had struck up a close friendship and after Mansfield’s death, Woolf wrote, “I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in ones nostrils.”45 (Mansfield’s biographer, Antony Alpers, came to her defense, explaining that Mansfield wore fashionable French perfume.46 Indeed, her stories suggest that she was inspired by Continental decadents’ aromatic combinations; for instance, she describes the smell “of soap and burnt paper and wallflower brilliantine,” “tar and ropes and slime and salt,” and “paint and burnt chop-bones and indiarubber.”47)
Joyce’s olfactory instincts are quite different from Eliot’s or Woolf’s. He capitalizes on the tensions of modern perfume: its artificiality and naturalness, its somatic and emotional qualities, its discordant compositions, and its evocation of exotic erotic pleasure. Extending the decadent exploitation of perfume as a palette of aesthetic possibilities, Joyce uses odor to explore the structure of pleasure itself.
“PERFUME OF EMBRACES ALL HIM ASSAILED”
The opening pages of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man famously rouse the five senses. Stephen Dedalus is highly attuned to smell, from the “queer” odor of the oilsheet on his bed to the “nicer” aroma of his mother.48 His Irish Catholic inculcation, redolent of cool, dark churches and sweet, dusty incense, creates powerful olfactory associations among sex, smell, and sin. The herbs burning in the thurible counter the stench of sin, as Father Arnall emphasizes in his terrifying Hell Sermon of chapter 3:
The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone too which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. (120)
Borrowing from Dante’s descriptions in Inferno, with its abysses of “outrageous stench”49 and sinners mired in shit (contrasted to the ambrosial smells of Paradiso), Arnall likens the reek of hell to those in the boys’ own environment: offal, scum, sewers, fungus, and various smells emanating from bodies. Human bodies, for a Catholic adolescent, are a miasma of spiritual contagion and damnation. Hell is right here on earth, in our bodies, if we are not careful. Stephen absorbs this lesson and uses it to torture himself. Stench features prominently in his “putrid” nightmare of the “hell reserved for his sins” (138), in which goatish men move in circles while “An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung” (137). Stephen is overcome by “the reeking odour pouring down his throat, clogging and revolting his entrails” and he gasps for “Air! The air of heaven!” (138). Similarly, after his dramatic confession in chapter 3, Stephen “knelt to say his penance, praying in a corner of the dark nave: and his prayers ascended to heaven from his purified heart like perfume streaming upwards from a heart of white rose” (145). He selects the right perfume for the occasion: the white rose is Mary’s symbol, representing purity. Dante pictures the Empyrean heaven as a huge white rose inhabited by the blessed.
The bifurcation of smells into the pure, celestial odors of Catholic grace and the stink of earthy and bodily sin complements the many other Catholic dichotomies (saved/damned, virgin/whore, etc.) that shape Stephen’s consciousness. However, his sense of smell leads him to confound these divisions. “The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a delicate and sinful perfume” (155). The religious rituals that have impressed upon him that smell can be holy (incense) or sinful (the stench of hell) become attached to signifiers that allude to the mysterious female body. This chiastic sentence indicates Stephen’s confusion about whether women are soft and delicate or delicate and sinful, like perfume. His linguistic sensitivity and his synaesthetic sensibility that associates words with smells are tendencies Joyce develops further in Ulysses to connect smells with linguistic creativity and forbidden pleasures.
Stephen’s body itself, and his nose in particular, resists the demonization of odor that the Church tries to impress upon him. When he sets out to mortify his senses as a means of bringing his unruly body into line, he finds ways to discipline his senses of vision, touch, taste, and hearing, but he has difficulty restraining his sense of smell. Although the scent of white rose leads “upwards” to the heavens, he looks downward, towards the earth, to focus on odor.
To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odours, whether they were the odours of the outdoor world such as those of dung or tar or the odours of his own person among which he had made many curious comparisons and experiments. He found in the end that the only odour against which his sense of smell revolted was a certain stale fishy stink like that of longstanding urine; and whenever it was possible he subjected himself to this unpleasant odour. (151)
There is something quite wonderful about Stephen’s discovery: he has found a part of himself that has eluded his Catholic indoctrination. The allusion to his “many curious comparisons and experiments” with “the odours of his own person” suggests a stealth or Faustian exploration. His olfactory revolt proves an advantage to a boy looking to fly by the nets of Catholic conscience. When, agitated after a school drama, Stephen flees from his family and schoolmates to a filthy alley.
He saw the word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank heavy air.
That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. (86)
Stephen is viscerally soothed by rank odors; they pacify him by reflecting his fallen nature: a sensual creature, driven by bodily and blasphemous desire. He savors foul smells because they align the external world (“the outdoor world”) with his interior sense of self as well as his body. When Stephen realizes that he does not have a vocation, “The faint sour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchengardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul” (162). Relinquishing the idealism of cleanliness and purity represented by the white rose scent, he gravitates toward putrid, grimy, earthy odors.
Stephen’s tolerance for, and even attraction to, noxious smells—urine, excrement, and rotting matter—is surpassed by Leopold Bloom’s in Ulysses. While Bloom does not have as much to prove to the world as Stephen does, olfaction is a means through which he can explore his transgressive desires. Bloom’s first appearance in the novel signals how he relishes unconventional odors: “Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”50 In the WC, he is “seated calm above his own rising smell” (“calm” is the word that Stephen uses to describe the effect that horse piss and rotten straw have on him) (4:512). Much later in the day, in “Ithaca,” Bloom picks his toe and “raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and inhaled the odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the lacerated ungual fragment” (17:1489). Reviewing Ulysses in The New York Times, Joseph Collins aptly described the novel as having a “mephitic atmosphere.”51
That said, natural, fresh odors and sweet perfumes are equally important to the novel’s environment, including the “creamfruit smell” (3:369) that symbolizes Molly (“heavy, sweet, wild perfume. Always the same, year after year” [4:208–209]) and in her scented lotion of “sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin” and “orangeflower water” (5:490-491), as Bloom recites the “recipe” to the chemist. “Know her smell in a thousand,” he thinks. “Reminds me of strawberries and cream” (13:1024–1025). In “Sirens,” Bloom recalls the “First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon’s in Terenure. … Waiting she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat warbling” (11:725–732). Molly’s lilac-perfumed voice is a synaesthetic aphrodisiac to Bloom, and throughout the novel, she is connected to fragrance. Even Martha Clifford, who seems otherwise befuddled, knows enough to inquire about Molly’s bouquet: “P.S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to know” (5:258).
For Joyce, odor is significant because it so hauntingly hovers on the threshold between body and mind, confounding the bifurcation that has always been central to the cultural hierarchy of pleasure. His understanding of smell is predicated on the idea that it is a primitive, irrational sense that expresses base instincts and has strongly associative, mnemonic properties.52 Odor is one of the key means of accessing memory in Ulysses. Bloom vividly recalls odors he smelled ten years earlier. Whereas in the case of Proust’s madeleine, a sensuous experience in the present triggers the journey to the past, for Joyce, even the mere contemplation of odors from the distant past can prompt a profound reverie. Scent is one of the great unifiers of Molly and Bloom—at least in their memories. Although they are sexually estranged, perfume bridges the gap between them. In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom reprises a moment on Howth with Molly: “A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore” (8:637–639); “Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass” (8:642–643). Both Molly and Bloom have a heightened sensual recollection of that scene. In her famous last utterance, Molly recalls, “he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” (18:1607–1609). Yet perfume also represents the couple’s respective acts of adultery. While Bloom imagines Molly’s scent as “always the same, year after year,” throughout Ulysses, perfume marks the modulations of her, and his, fidelity. Memories of his courtship with Molly (“Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees” [11:730]) also prompt thoughts about the perfume she was wearing the night she met Blazes Boylan. In “Sirens,” perfume is the direct link to Bloom’s vivid fantasy of Blazes arriving at their home: “Perfumed for him. What perfume does your wife? I want to know. Jing. Stop. Knock. Last look at mirror always before she answers the door” (11:687–689). Bloom knows that Molly has perfumed herself for Blazes just as she had once done for him. Martha’s postscript is woven into this thought, but she encloses a nearly odorless flower in her letter to Bloom (“He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket” [5.260–261]). She and Bloom have no past--and no embodied present—together, and this is part of Martha’s appeal to him as an alternative to the passionate, perfumed woman he loves, redolent as much of the past as the present.
Joyce was interested in the cultural meanings of scent. He knew sexology texts that linked olfaction to eroticism,53 and he owned Galopin’s Le Parfum de la femme, which argues that women’s odors are determined by characteristics such as hair color and race: a sort of phrenological approach to scent. At points, Joyce imagines perfume as disclosing the wearer’s character traits, and also as a sort of Victorian language of flowers, signaling the wearer’s desires.54 But he is also interested in its material, phenomenological, and structural dimensions. When Bloom smells Gerty’s scent in “Nausicaa,” he meditates on the physics of perfume. He interprets its transmission as an insinuating influence of dispersal, delay, and involuntary response that is analogous to memory.
Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That’s her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I leave you this to think of me when I’m far away on the pillow. … Why did I smell it only now? Took its time in coming like herself, slow but sure. Suppose it’s ever so many millions of tiny grains blown across. Yes, it is. Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this morning, smell them leagues off. Tell you what it is. It’s like a fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they’re always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it. Clings to everything she takes off. (13.1007–1023)
Bloom attributes the diffusion of scent to physiognomy, speculating that, using traditionally feminine metaphors, “It’s like a fine veil or web” on a woman’s skin, “and they’re always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, rainbow colours without knowing it.” He imagines women as both passive and active atomizers. Scent is an involuntary secretion issuing from the body, but it is also a deliberate enticement women choose to send out into the world. Perfume here is simultaneously an immediate, somatic experience (likened, punningly, to orgasm: “took its time in coming like herself”) and also a conjuring of memory (“I leave you this to think of me when I’m far away”).
Like Huysmans, Joyce imagines odor in terms of linguistic structure and syntax. The dispersal of scent also resembles the production of stream of consciousness, a spontaneous spinning of words that bypasses censorship (“always spinning it out of them … without knowing it”). Joyce’s characters’ thoughts are generated like a sort of time-delayed perfume, with words and refrains scattered across the text, repeated later, inevitably, “slow but sure.” Joyce’s prose, even outside of stream of consciousness, operates similarly, through suggestion and slow disclosure. But unlike perfume, which automatically registers in the nose and the brain, Joyce’s language requires an alert tracking of those “tiny grains.” Ideas and images that may not make sense in the moment will eventually, with dedicated reading, become clear, strengthening and shifting as they develop just as a perfume changes over time. (“Wandering Rocks” is an intensified version of this principle that operates throughout the novel.) In “Nausicaa,” Joyce uses the metaphor of perfume’s dispersal not just to establish a material history of perfume and the tension between Victorian and Catholic odors and more modern, carnal scents, but also to assert the erotic appeal of difficult and contorted pleasure.
“NAUSICAA”: THE PERFUME OF PERVERSITY
While olfactory pleasure influences every episode of Ulysses, the jocoserious Gilbert and Linati schemas for Ulysses steer us toward understanding “Nausicaa” as the “eye and nose” episode of the novel. The first half of the episode emphasizes visual effects, as the couple on the beach gaze at each other, and the second half calls attention to olfactory experiences, pivoting in the switch from Gerty’s narrative to Bloom’s stream of consciousness. John Bishop discusses the shift in his essay “A Metaphysics of Coitus in ‘Nausicaa’”: “as the dominant colors in the first half of the episode—mystical ‘rose’ … and shrinking ‘violet’ … evaporate into invisible fragrances … Bloom’s nose gains ascendancy over the idealizing eye.”55 Rose and violet, which are odors as well as colors, were dominant scents in the Victorian and Edwardian period, before the synthetic revolution caught up to Ireland. The episode enacts, through its two parts, the differences between the Roman Catholic approach to odor, perfume, and bodily pleasure, which favors the visual, the rational, and the hygienic, and a pagan (Homeric) or secular stance that engages with olfactory and haptic senses and the messy realities of the body. Joyce demonstrates these differences by aligning different kinds of odors and perfumes as well as different reading effects with each part of the chapter.
As Gerty is introduced early in the episode, she is the picture of fashionable, if fastidious womanhood:
A neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes (because it was expected in the Lady’s Pictorial that electric blue would be worn) with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket (in which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy threequarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim graceful figure to perfection. (13:150–155)
Gerty thinks in fussy language that reflects her preoccupation with appearance and tidiness. She applies perfume the economical way, on a handkerchief or cotton ball, rather than directly to the skin. The way she stores her scent is similarly sanitized: in “the drawer of her toilettable which, though it did not err on the side of luxury, was scrupulously neat and clean” (13:637–638); it contains “her girlish treasures trove, the tortoiseshell combs, her child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the eyebrowleine, her alabaster pouncetbox” (13:638–640). Gerty’s scent, like Stephen’s in his spiritually devout phase, is the virginal white rose. Her perfume, then, reflects her commitment to hygiene and Catholic purity. While indulging in the pleasures of consumption—perfume is a fashion statement, like the “eyebrowleine” and the other products that Gerty collects to effect her “winsome womanhood” and attract a “dreamhusband”—Gerty does “not err on the side of luxury”: the white rose is not a rarified or opulent scent.
Joyce’s choreography of odors in this episode seems influenced by Galopin. In Le Parfum de la femme, Galopin ponders the smells of various classes of people, including masturbators (who smell like “rancid butter”), virgins, homosexuals, and religious women—“l’odeur de Sainteté” (199). Gerty’s scent is named but not described in the first half of the episode, in which she is rendered odorless, like the other deodorized woman in Ulysses, Martha Clifford, Bloom’s other quasiadulterous partner. Bloom does not smell Gerty’s perfume until the second half of the episode, when she waves the “wadding” at him as she leaves the beach. The dominant odor of the first part of the episode is the incense that issues from the temperance meeting:
Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted and with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. (13:371–374)
She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned in the church like a kind of waft. And while she gazed her heart went pitapat. … (13:406–411)
Incense becomes Gerty’s perfume; she displays herself to Bloom as a parodic offering to the “mystical rose” (she imagines Bloom “literally worshipping at her shrine” [13:564]). The odors on Sandymount Strand present an ironic history of Catholicism’s co-optation of pagan perfumery. Just as the action on the beach is converted through Gerty’s sentimental discourse into a humorously deluded romantic encounter, incense is the smokescreen for the more earthly activities that unfold between Bloom and Gerty: it becomes the perfume of perversity.56
The two parts of “Nausicaa” are marked by the contrast between the romanticized, fantasy-driven vision that leads up to orgasm and Bloom’s “profoundly anti-idealizing nose” and his postorgasmic thoughts (Bishop, 199). The shift in narrative voice from Gerty to Bloom also signals a change in the kinds of smells that are represented. While Gerty’s thoughts are bound by propriety and fashion—with some jarring slips when she mentions matters such as “those iron jelloids” and “those discharges she used to get” (13:84–86)—Bloom’s musings are freewheeling, bawdy, and base.
After Gerty walks away, Bloom ponders a number of unusual odors, both present and imagined, in the second part of the episode, including “mansmell” (13:1036), the fragrance of priests (“Women buzz round … like flies round treacle … The tree of forbidden priest” [13:1037–38]), armpits, and bad breath. This is typical of his curious nature: he sniffs his own waistcoat for a whiff of his ejaculate (“celery sauce” [13:1040]), but finds it masked by the almond-lemon smell of the soap. Gerty’s retreat triggers a joke about a foul smell. “Watch! Watch! See! Looked round. She smelt an onion. Darling, I saw your. I saw all” [13:935]. Don Gifford explains that this reference is
From a joke about the man who determined to keep himself free from any entanglement with women. In order to fulfill his determination, he ate a raw onion whenever contact with women was imminent. His scheme and his self-discipline collapsed when he met a woman who found his oniony breath extraordinarily attractive.57
This recollection of a quip about bad breath that is strangely compelling58 sets Bloom’s thoughts toward a series of imagined odors, including diapers (13:957–958), a “husband rolling in drunk, stink of pub off him like a polecat” (13:964), “the dark, whiff of stale boose” (13:965), violets, and turpentine (13:1002), a jumble of associations that create a bouquet as strange and various as Des Esseintes’s. This is the olfactory overture to Gerty’s scent, which finally drifts across the beach and reaches Bloom’s nose. “What is it? Heliotrope? No. Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She’d like scent of that kind. Sweet and cheap: soon sour” (13:1008–1010). The same rose scent that is exalted for its purity and sacramental nature in the first half of the episode is now pronounced “cheap.” As for Woolf and Eliot, in Joyce’s vocabulary, that word is closely associated with prostitution. Molly scorns the “cheap” perfume of her youth; she also associates cheapness with sexual promiscuity (18:864).59 The irony here is that Gerty acts like an “amateur” in “Nausicaa”: she is “cheaper” than a prostitute.60 That said, even as Joyce draws on the familiar modernist connotations of cheapness, when Bloom’s erotic imagination is really unloosed, particularly in “Circe,” “cheap” perfume is strongly attractive.
In the first half of “Nausicaa,” the rose is “poetical” and religious, but in Bloom’s mind it is connected to menstruation through the euphemism “roses,” and leads him to ponder a particularly foul smell: “Some women, instance, warn you off when they have their period. Come near. Then get a hogo you could hang your hat on. Like what? Potted herrings gone stale or. Boof! Please keep off the grass” (13:1031–1033). The stench resembles the “certain stale fishy stink like that of longstanding urine” that repels Stephen in Portrait. There is, in these musings on odor di femina, a misogynist streak of repulsion at the female body, as with Eliot.61 Unlike Eliot’s Grishkin, however, or his other reeking cat women, Joyce’s off-odors become aphrodisiacs.62
Adopting the structural grammar of perfume, the first half of “Nausicaa” reveals “top notes” of incense and white rose, while the “base notes” in the second half are darker, earthier, and smellier. Gerty’s scent leads away from the body, toward religious sublimation, hygiene, and heaven; Bloom’s preferred odors lead to secular, corporeal experience. He speculates about the source of scent.
Wonder where it is really. There or the armpits or under the neck. Because you get it out of all holes and corners. Hyacinth perfume made of oil of ether or something. Muskrat. Bag under their tails. One grain pour off odour for years. Dogs at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm. Very well, thank you. Animals go by that. Yes now, look at it that way. We’re the same. (13:1025–1031)
Muskrat turns Bloom’s mind to the bodily folds and orifices that most Victorian scents sought to conceal. He goes right to the source—“bag under their tails”—and imagines humans as driven by the same kind of primitive desires as animals. Artificial musk was part of the synthetic revolution, but Bloom is drawn to the idea of musk precisely because of its origins in base parts of the body.63
Odor appeals to Joyce for the same reasons it is often devalued: its emotional, irrational, archaic dimensions. Ellis explains that the “anatomical seat” of smells “is the most ancient part of the brain. They lie in a remote and almost disused storehouse of our minds and show the fascination or the repulsiveness of all vague and remote things” (vol. 1, part 3, 54–55). Joyce was interested in depicting the primal allure of desublimated desire, as he told Arthur Power, and the “motives, the secret currents of life which govern everything … the hidden world, those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface. … We believe that it is in the abnormal that we approach closer to reality.”64 For Joyce, the “abnormal” is best accessed through the unconscious, as it makes itself known through fantasies and uncensored associations, including memory, rather than the willed, rational, “daylight” world of the “active mind.” Involuntary olfactory impulses are not subject to civilizing sublimation, so they open pathways to such “undercurrents.” Joyce could not have known it, but recent neuroscience research suggests that unpleasant smells may have more impact on memory than pleasant ones.65 Foul odors may, in fact, be a secret path to the unconscious.
PEAU D’ESPAGNE
In her recollections of Joyce, Djuna Barnes said he “loved pointless jokes … carried the calendar of saints wherever he went, even into the red light district [and] likes the perfume known as opoponax.”66 If this is true, then Joyce shared this preference with his earthy heroine. In “Nausicaa,” Bloom recalls the perfume Molly wore when she met his rival, Blazes:
Molly likes opoponax. Suits her, with a little jessamine mixed. Her high notes and her low notes. At the dance night she met him, dance of the hours. Heat brought it out. She was wearing her black and it had the perfume of the time before. … Clings to everything she takes off. (13:1010–1022)
When Bloom returns to the marital bedroom after a day of wandering, he surveys Molly’s scattered lingerie, including “a pair of outsize ladies’ drawers of India mull, cut on generous lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti’s Turkish cigarettes” (17:2092). The Turkish cigarettes reinforce Bloom’s orientalist dreams about Molly. Jessamine, or jasmine, has such a pungent scent that it is often recommended for planting near outhouses: the sort of incongruity that would have amused Joyce.67 Molly’s primary scent, opoponax, is etymologically related to a Greek word meaning “all-healing juice,”68 which is appropriate for the woman who holds out this curative promise to Bloom. Opoponax is a sumptuous scent. Huysmans once referred to “the libertine virtues of that glorious perfume.”69 Iwan Bloch writes that “If [a woman] is silent and reserved, a few drops of ancient oil charged with extract of violet will suffice her; if fiery, she will love the haughty zinnia … the violently voluptuous will have as favorites, stephanotis [otherwise known as jasmine], chypre, and the opulent opoponax” (Odoratus Sexualis, 219). Tracing the variable nature of this scent, Judith Harrington points out that there is more than one material basis for it: “Opoponax for healing and opoponax for perfume were not always from the same sources.” All of Harrington’s sources note the pleasant and off-putting nature of opoponax. The OED describes it as “a fetid gum-resin. … In perfumery, it has a slightly pleasant and quite distinctive odour.”70 George William Septimus Piesse’s Art of Perfumery describes it as “a very remarkably strong and aromatic odour, much abused by some as being nauseous, and praised by others for its fragrance.”71
Bloom both dreads and enjoys thinking about Molly as a “violently voluptuous” woman. In his mind, the smell of opoponax links his own passion for her—“Know her smell in a thousand” (13:1024)—to her first meeting with his rival. Like many of Bloom’s erotic thoughts, opoponax combines sweet notes (indicating sentimentality and faithfulness) with rancid ones (signaling discord and adultery). Here is the crux of Bloom’s erotic temperament and the basic syntax of his pleasure: his nostalgic longing for romance (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”) is constantly juxtaposed with a desire for painful experiences. This complexity of smell, nauseating and pleasant, like the way ingredients such as civet can be pleasing in the right amount but atrocious in excess, reflects Joyce’s eroticization of paradox.
The perfume Bloom tells Martha that Molly uses, Peau d’Espagne, is a similarly complex fragrance, straddling the line between delicious and noxious. It features leather, musk, and civet in its composition. Its name, “Spanish Skin,” is fitting for Molly’s Gibraltar heritage, and for Bloom’s erotic fantasies about his wife’s “animalic” tendencies. Ellis writes at length on this scent in Studies in the Psychology of Sex:
Peau d’Espagne may be mentioned as a highly complex and luxurious perfume, often the favorite scent of sensuous persons, which really owes a large part of its potency to the presence of the crude animal sexual odors of musk and civet. It consists of wash-leather steeped in ottos of neroli, rose, santal, lavender, verbena, bergamot, cloves, and cinnamon, subsequently smeared with civet and musk. It is said by some, probably with a certain degree of truth, that Peau d’Espagne is of all perfumes that which most nearly approaches the odor of a woman’s skin. Whether it also suggests the odor of leather is not so clear. (vol. 1, part 3, 99–100)
Unlike perfumes that mask human odors, Peau d’Espagne emphasizes carnal, mammalian scents: musk smeared on leather, the animal in the human. Contemporary perfumer Santa Maria Novella produces a Peau d’Espagne that lives up to the description. Two sprays of the perfume on a paper tester strip fill a room for an entire day with a sweet leather fragrance with a slightly rotten undertone. If this is the scent of a woman’s skin, she has been astride a horse all day in the hot sun. It is the reek of Bella Cohen. Marketed now for men as a “very masculine” scent, Peau d’Espagne also captures the bisexual qualities of Joyce’s huntswoman. Peau d’Espagne was anomalously popular in the UK even when floral perfumes were at their peak of popularity. An advertisement for wholesale perfumers H. Labern & Son in 1893 boasts that they offer the “‘best’ genuine perfumes in all the charming, fashionable odours, including Violette de Parma, Wildflower, Violet de Nice, Chypre, Lily of the Valley, Peau d’Espagne, White Rose, etc.”72 Peau d’Espagne is the odd scent out in this sequence, a blast of beast in a forest of florals.
Peau d’Espagne exemplifies the intricacy of scent in Ulysses. Its sweet and bracing blend of odors invokes pleasant and painful memory, romantic and brutish fantasies, as well as deception and honesty. In fact, Peau d’Espagne is pure memory and fantasy in Ulysses: it never actually appears in the novel’s present. Rather, it is Bloom’s fabrication for Martha, as he tries to coax out the “dormant tigress” in her. Molly herself dismisses Peau d’Espagne as “cheap”: “there was no decent perfume to be got in that Gibraltar only that cheap peau dEspagne that faded and left a stink on you more than anything else” (18:864–865). Molly shares some of Bloom’s olfactory kinks,73 but she does not share his love of “stink.”
The second half of “Nausicaa” does not merely undermine a sentimental and romanticized narrative.74 It introduces a Rabelaisian counternarrative in which foul odors have a dialectical relationship to fragrant ones. This is true of pleasure in general for Joyce: it is never far from—and is heightened by—unpleasure. For example, in “Circe,” Bloom shares a fond memory of his school days: “I was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies’ cloakroom and lavatory, the throng penned tight on the old Royal stairs (for they love crushes, instincts of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice). … Halcyon days” (15:3318–3324). It is notable that the odors themselves are not transformed into ambrosia; their foulness renders them arousing to Bloom. From his excitement in “Circe” at inhaling “Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease” (15:3477) to being commanded by Bella/The Hoof to “Smell my hot goathide” (15:2820) and to “souse and bat our smelling underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines” (15:3065–3066), Bloom is stimulated by the animalic and lavatorial smells that transgress the deodorizing modern impulse. When Judge John M. Woolsey argues that “Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac,” he misses the point that the emetic is an aphrodisiac—at least to Bloom, if not to the reader.75
In the clinical literature of Joyce’s time, a predilection for bad odors was considered a sign of deviance and mental unbalance. Both Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis associate a fetishistic attachment to foul odors, and particularly what Freud called “coprophilic pleasure,” with masochism. Krafft-Ebing defines masochism as a disorder in which “Impressions obtained through the senses of smell and taste, which in the normal man produce only feelings of nausea and disgust, are made the basis of the most vivid emotions of lust, producing in the perverse subject mighty impulses to orgasm and even ejaculation.”76 The description corresponds to the many moments in Ulysses that reflect what H. G. Wells calls Joyce’s “cloacal obsession”77 and also brings to mind the infamous series of so-called “dirty letters” that Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle when they were separated. Joyce rhapsodizes about “the perfume” of Nora’s “drawers” as well as the “warm odour of [her] cunt and the heavy smell of [her] behind” (Selected Letters, 184). Praising her body in the language of The Dead, “musical and strange and perfumed” (163), Joyce exalts the smell of her farts as if they are the winds to Cleopatra’s barge: they “com[e] blowing … like a wind of spices” (181). Joyce even gives Nora a sort of “recipe” for scent: “My sweet naughty little fuckbird, Here is another note to buy pretty drawers or stockings or garters. Buy whorish drawers, love, and be sure you sprinkle the legs of them with some nice scent and also discolour them just a little behind” (185). Were it not for the writer’s earnestness, the proposed combination of “nice scent” and excrement would seem like a parody of modern perfume, with its whisper of civet blended with “nice” notes.
For Joyce, pleasure is heightened by and even constituted through obstacles and tension. This applies as much to perfume, in which base notes enhance sweeter top notes, as it does to eroticism and to Joyce’s reading effects in Ulysses, where attention to form and linguistic pyrotechnics actively work against the kind of direct somatic pleasure of his letters to Nora. We see this particularly clearly in one of the novel’s most striking depictions of readerly pleasure that also features a dizzyingly complex smell.
SWEETS OF SIN
The structural midpoint of Ulysses, as Hugh Kenner and others have noted, is the episode called “Wandering Rocks.” The middle section shows Bloom at a bookseller, ostensibly looking for reading material for Molly. Having rejected Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch (“she wouldn’t like that much. Got her it once” [10:605]), he is drawn to a volume called Sweets of Sin, which he claims seems to be “more in her line.” He reads from “where his finger opened” (10:607):
—All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul! …
Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabille. …
You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare. The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly. (10:608–617)
Captivated by the selection, Bloom takes up this “book of inferior literary style” (17:733), and its phrases appear throughout Ulysses as one of several “coincidences” that perfectly mirror Bloom’s own situation: here is a cuckold buying a book about a cuckold for his wife. It is also important as it signals a moment of reflection in which the distance between the reader of Ulysses and Joyce’s character is temporarily collapsed while they share a common text of pleasure.
Critics generally agree that among the many humorous, sentimental, naughty, and absurd intertexts (popular songs, postcards, advertisements, magazines, pulp novels, etc.) that Joyce embeds in Ulysses, Sweets of Sin plays an important role.78 For one thing, Bloom carries the book around with him for the rest of the day, along with the heirloom potato and his soap, both of which have symbolic weight. For another, it is supposedly a book to please Molly, although it clearly appeals to his own sensibilities. The ridiculous phrases that enrapture Bloom are cast “like a fine veil or web” across the subsequent hours of the day as he thinks through his relationship to his wife and his rival. Sweets of Sin is all the more intriguing because the real-world referent text, if there is one, remains elusive. Gifford suggests that Sweets may be “Joyce’s own coinage” (272); others have concluded that it simply has not been located yet. The major obstacle to the identification of Sweets is uncertainty about its genre. The pretentious “embonpoint” and “deshabille” might appear in a women’s romance novel, and the “sabletrimmed wrap” and “queenly shoulders” are plausibly erotic in the Sacher-Masochian sense. However, a woman is unlikely to “glue” a kiss on a man in a romance or “a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency,” as Sweets of Sin is described in “Ithaca” (17:2259). In Bloom’s own memories, in “Calypso,” however, “Lips kissed, kissing kissed. Full gluey woman’s lips” (4:450). “Costliest frillies” also rings false, or rather, Bloomian. Both these phrases seem directly from the mind of Bloom, suggesting an intimacy between him as reader and the mysterious author of Sweets of Sin (“a gentleman of fashion”), but just the opposite between the reader of Ulysses and Joyce. That is, the incongruous phrases in Sweets of Sin draw attention to strange word choice and tone and generic oddity, and necessarily interrupt the kind of immersive reading effects that pornography or romance elicits. This manipulation of readerly response grows stronger as the episode moves on.
One gets further in the hunt for the “original” Sweets of Sin by looking not at racy fiction but at a (somewhat) less steamy source: the Bible. The phrase “sweets of sin” appears throughout early Christian texts to signify worldly temptation, such as adultery. One version of Psalm 141, “A Prayer for the Preservation from Evil,” which begins with an invocation of incense, warns that “Sinners pretend to find dainties in sin; stolen waters are sweet, forbidden fruit is pleasant to the eye: but they that consider how soon the dainties of sin will turn into wormwood and gall, how certainly it will, at last, bite like a serpent. … Good men will pray against even the sweets of sin.”79 Alison Shell asserts that the phrase “sweets of sin” appears so often in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Catholic texts as to constitute a “sweets-of-sin topos,” throughout which “Perfumes as well as tastes convey the synesthaesia of Catholic sin.”80 Just as for Stephen Dedalus the “delicate” and “sinful” are linked in his erotic imagination, “sweets of sin” slyly combines the threat of damnation with its lusciousness.81 Given how Catholicism shapes Joyce’s most fundamental understanding of sensual pleasure, it is appropriate that Sweets of Sin should be underwritten by a theological text that warns against the provocation represented by Raoul and his lover. The play of the novel’s title, with its titillating co-optation of a biblical phrase, becomes, for Joyce, a reference to didactic texts and their management of readerly pleasure.
Before Bloom opens Sweets of Sin, he encounters the insalubrious bookseller, who speaks in a demotic voice: “Them are two good ones” (Fair Tyrants and Sweets of Sin). Like Molly’s voice, “full of perfume,” the bookseller’s voice is scented: “Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth” (10:596–597). This unkempt, odiferous man (who coughs and “puked phlegm on the floor” [10:633–645]) sets the stage for Bloom’s unusual (to put it mildly) response to the snippets from Sweets of Sin:
Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amply amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (For him! For Raoul!). Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint!). Feel! Press! Chrished! Sulphur dung of lions! (10:619–623)
Bloom’s reading, or rather, his interpretation of Sweets of Sin combines the haptic and the olfactory senses in a flurry of synaesthetic associations that are possibly fragrant (melting breast ointments?) but mostly foul. If Sweets of Sin were a perfume—the name would certainly be appropriate, as Lanvin launched Mon Pêche (My Sin) in 1924—its top notes would be fur, cash, and lacy underwear, giving way to rank, excremental undertones. The smells are bizarre, counterintuitive, and nonmimetic. The fecal theme, as we have seen, has its place in the world of perfume, but the smells of sulphur, onions, and fish virtually never appear. Fishy smells are singled out as repulsive to both Stephen and Bloom; an eccentric affection for onion breath is a joke in “Nausicaa.” Sulphur, or brimstone, as Father Arnall emphasizes, is the dominant odor of hell.
Yet this is a scene of arousal, as Joyce conveys through Bloom’s physical response to erotic content: eyes rolling, swooning, and flesh yielding. Joyce’s readers are prevented from participating in this when they are brought up short by the highly idiosyncratic images that ensue. “Fishgluey slime” and “sulphur dung of lions” hardly follow from the banally salacious text of Sweets. If we think back on what we know about Bloom’s gravitation toward unpleasure and the images that made an impression on him earlier in the day (the lions, for example, from Ruby: Pride of the Ring, another book he reads in a highly imaginative way), they begin to make a kind of absurd sense. Still, that required step of interpretation puts the reader in an analytical rather than a concupiscent mode of engagement with the text.
Some of the most perplexing scents Bloom imagines in response to Sweets of Sin reprise those from a passage of Giacomo Joyce (1907) that describes the audience at an opera:
A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms; sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting breast ointments, mastick water, the breath of suppers of sulphurous garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax, the frank sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men.82
In this Huysmans-inspired composition, smells become the notes of a “symphony” that includes many odors from Sweets of Sin—armpits, sweat, “melting breast ointments,” “sulphurous garlic” breath—and places the almightly opoponax right in the middle of it all, balanced between disgust and desire. Joining words that would seem to contradict one another, such as “soapy” and “stink,” with cryptic images such as “nozzled oranges,” “phosphorescent farts” and the sweat of women differentiated by their marital status, the strange odors Joyce forges in his lexical laboratory are aimed less at evoking the senses than at displaying the author’s linguistic virtuosity and playful imagination. Sweets of Sin is a more concentrated passage, but it similarly distances Joyce’s reader from the olfactory images and calls attention to the author’s manipulation of language.
Joyce does not invite the reader to enjoy Sweets of Sin in the direct and somatic way that such texts, like the explicitly masturbatory “dirty” letters, are typically consumed. Rather, the passage’s incongruities and ironies ask us to read with a strong sense of critical distance: we might laugh, but it is an arch, knowing kind of laugh. This effect is repeated throughout Ulysses in other scenes of pleasure: the orgasm on the beach in “Nausicaa,” for example, or Molly Bloom’s raunchy monologue. In both cases, the racy passages are rendered through ostentatiously parodic or inventive prose that has the effect of focusing the reader on the construction of language itself rather than permitting a direct, sensuous reaction to the text. As Allison Pease puts it, “potential pornographic pleasure [in Joyce] is always disrupted, held at bay by an intervening discourse”—namely, Joyce’s “modernist form [which] necessarily violates the pornographic forms within, recoding such works for the high-brow reader.” Ultimately, Pease argues, “the sensuous content of Ulysses’s narrative is rendered impotent by form.”83 Joyce invokes but contains sensuous pleasures: like Stephen mortifying his senses, he contorts and pushes them beyond their limits through language.
Joyce’s sensuous material is not exactly impotent, but it is crucially qualified by linguistic convolution that is an acquired taste gained by reading the text. Through Bloom’s response to Sweets of Sin and many similar passages in Ulysses, Joyce models the approach to pleasure that he wants the reader to adopt. It is a very different kind of pleasure from reading pornography or a romance novel, just as inhaling Peau d’Espagne is very different from sniffing Yardley’s English Rose. In a letter to Ezra Pound on September 7, 1915, Joyce vents about the state of contemporary theatre. “The prudery of my country (i.e. all of it that isn’t lured by vulgarity.) The sheer numbers to which a play must appeal before it is any use to a manager. Bed room scenes where the audience can be tittivated, eroticised … excited and NOT expected to think.”84 Ulysses offers the thematic titillation of bedroom scenes, but the novel’s allusive and ironic layers demand active, analytical reading practices. Joyce mediates somatic pleasures by rendering them aestheticized, self-reflexive, and textually difficult, but puts forward that mindful, complex process of reading as its own reward and as superior to other kinds of reading. Hence the irony of the censorship of modernist works such as Ulysses. If we are reading the correct way—the way that Joyce instructs us—we are never in the realm of unadulterated sensuous pleasure, but rather always aware of the work’s textuality and the author’s deliberate effects. The ideal reader—the well-trained reader--is constantly aware of the construction of the reading experience alongside Joyce’s appeal and obstacles to pleasure. Once we have followed Joyce’s “perfumance,” it is doubtful that we will regard olfaction or scents as neutral, simple commodities; just so, once we have learned to read Ulysses, our horizon of what constitutes readerly pleasure has been irrevocably altered.