Jaume Serra Cantallops: Bad Smell
'There was a basic perfumatory theme to the odour of humanity: a sweaty-oily,
sour-cheesy, quite richly repulsive basic theme that clung
to all humans equally ...' [1]
I.
Although the popular idea that most people in the pre-modern past rarely washed and smelled constantly of sweat, excrement, and other foul odours is largely a myth, it can be agreed that they certainly lived in a far less deodorised and sanitised world than you and I have been reared within.
One can only assume that because everyone lived in the same malodorous human environment, people in
the pre-modern past were largely indifferent to the natural body odours of their fellow citizens (although they remained acutely sensitive to any smells that suggested disease).
II.
Personally, as someone with hyperosmia [2] on the one hand and osmophobia [3] on the other, I have to confess I'm glad I was born in the modern world - with indoor plumbing, plenty of hot water, and a huge range of soaps, shower gels, and shampoos available.
That, however, puts me at odds with D. H. Lawrence, who argues that vital human sympathy rests upon our natural odour and that "the flow of spontaneous warmth" [4] between people has collapsed today precisely because we have become physically repulsive to one another. He writes:
"While the old sympathetic flow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another [...] They smell in each other's nostrils."
Confirming what I say above, Lawrence then writes in the same text:
"It has been said often enough of more primitive or old-world peoples, who live together in a state of blind mistrust but also of close physical connection with one another, that they have no noses. They are so close, the flow from body to body is so powerful, that they hardly smell one another, and are hardly aware at all of the offensive human odours that madden the new civilisations. [...] And this is basically true."
For Lawrence, then, once the blood-sympathy breaks - and only the nerve-sympathy remains - then men begin to smell to one another. This is revealed not only by the fact that we get gleaming white bathtubs, wash basins, and toilets, but in the novels of James Joyce and those "awful advertisements [...] about 'halitosis', or bad breath".
Lawrence - who is dying of tuberculosis at the time of writing - is also irritated by the modern person's horror for "coughing, spitting, or any of those things" and seems to suggest that he'd rather see human excrement in the street than piles of litter and old rubbish.
III.
Again, I'm afraid I have to differ with Lawrence on this last point - and I can't say I'm thrilled by the fact that some local authorities in Europe and the UK are now having to erect signs explicitly asking people not to shit in public and post multilingual or pictogram-based instructions on how to use a toilet correctly.
Some might think of this as cultural enrichment and a revival of an older form of human sympathy, but I don't.
Notes
[1] Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, trans. John E. Woods (Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Books, 1987), p. 154. Note that I have slightly modified the quote.
[2] Hyperosmia is the medical term for an intense or heightened sensitivity to smells.
Nietzsche had this condition and exploited it to his philosophical advantage to sniff out moral and cultural corruption, often boasting that his genius lay in his nostrils. See Nietzsche, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1), in Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 126.
[3] Osmophobia is a specific fear or psychophysiological aversion to (usually bad) odours that can trigger headaches, nausea, and other symptoms of migraine.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Bottom Dogs by Edward Dahlberg', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 121. All following quotes from this text are also found on p. 121 of this book.
