Sniffing Between the Lines

An English Lit dissertation blows the roof off of X

Source: @DrAllyLouks on X.

An olfactory riot erupted on X the day before Thanksgiving. It began when Ally Louks, a newly minted PhD in English Literature at the University of Cambridge, posted a photo of herself proudly holding a bound copy of her dissertation. The innocuous image quickly went viral. Why? Apparently the visible title of her dissertation—Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose—was enough to spark widespread mockery and derision.

My initial reaction was one of sympathy. Smell is an inherently ridiculous topic, and if you are a fragrance marketer, a perfumer, or a smell scientist (especially a smell scientist), you quickly recognize this and learn to roll with it.

A lot of the responses to Louks’ post were simply jeering; some had a nasty edge. It’s X, after all: c’est le guerre. As someone who has written about the use of smell in literature, and who has theorized about the nature of olfactory genius, I felt inclined to defend her.

Two day later, Louks sought to clarify things by posting the abstract of her dissertation.

This thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse—the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates—in structuring our social world. The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures. I focus largely on prose fiction from the modern and contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy of olfactory prejudice into today and situate its contemporary relevance. I suggest that smell very often invokes identity in a way that signifies an individual’s worth and status in an inarguable manner that short-circuits conscious reflection. This can be accounted for by acknowledging olfaction’s strongly affective nature, which produces such strong bodily sensations and emotions that reflexivity is bypassed in favour of a behavioural or cognitive solution that assuages the intense feeling most immediately. Olfactory disgust, therefore, tends to result in rejection, while harmful forms of olfactory desire may result in sublimation or subjugation. My thesis is particularly attentive to tensions and ambivalences that complicate the typically bifurcated affective spectrum of olfactory experiences, drawing attention to (dis)pleasurable olfactory relations that have socio-political utility. I argue that literary fiction is not only an arena in which olfactory logics can be instantiated, but also a laboratory in which possibilities for new kinds of relations and connections can be fostered and tested.

Chapter One explores how smell can be used to Indicate class antipathies, partly as they relate to homelessness, beginning with George Orwell’s seminal non-fiction text, The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), before considering Iain Sinclair’s The Last London (2017) and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). In Chapter Two I explore the fantastical, idealistic, and utopic thinking that surrounds olfaction, which presents smell as fundamentally non-human, by addressing J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021), and Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020). Chapter Three focuses on the intersectional olfactory dimensions of ‘misogynoir’—the coextensive anti-Black racism and misogyny that Black women experience-and considers Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), Bernice McFadden’s Sugar (2000) and Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020). In Chapter Four, I conceptualise an oppressive olfactory logic, which is used against women and girls in order to legitimise their harassment or abuse, drawing primarily on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), but also Patrick Suskind’s Perfume (1985). Chapter Five discusses two forms of olfactory desire—perversion and queerness—which have separate moral valences. I address J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994), Ann Quin’s Berg (1964), and Sam Byers’ Come Join Our Disease (2020), and argue for fiction’s role in reorienting readers’ habitual relations to olfaction.

The passages I set in bold are the ones that caught my eye: they are what caused my initial sympathy for Louks to evaporate.

Why? Two reasons.

1. Louks adopts the standard-issue formulations used ad nauseum by the academic Left, which sees “gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures” everywhere. By focusing on group identities rather than individuals, Louks signals her commitment to the ruling pieties. It doesn’t bode well for the originality or independence of her work. Rather than explore multiple works by one author, or works by different authors that deal with a single theme, she begins with the pre-approved articles of faith and find examples that conveniently illustrate each of them.

2. Rather than use clear declarative prose, Louks deploys the inscrutable jargon favored by post-modern scholars (“typically bifurcated affective spectrum of olfactory experiences” and “(dis)pleasurable olfactory relations that have socio-political utility”). This is not the mark of an independent thinker. It is, at best, a sad attempt to blend into the herd.

My bookshelf already holds The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature, by Hans J. Rindisbacher (1992), a volume with the density of a collapsed star, which I tried to read at least three times before giving up. Nearby sits the over-rated (and, I suspect, under-read) The Foul and the Fragrant (1986) by Alain Corbin. It consists of a stream of historical anecdotes interlarded with summary assertions about the underlying social mentalités. It’s very French and, like certain sauces of the ancien régime, impossible to digest in large quantity.

I have no quarrel with analyzing an author’s use of smell: it can be illuminating. I’ve done it myself, with some of the same writers chosen by Louks, for example Vladimir Nabokov (here and here), Toni Morrison, and Patrick Süskind. Hell, I even wrote an appreciation of the olfactory elements in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal.

Where I differ from Louks is that I’m not interested in power structures or group identities. My aim is to appreciate how well (or poorly) a specific author employs olfactory themes and references, regardless of whatever moral or political issue the author addresses. In What the Nose Knows, I even proposed three traits of olfactory genius: awareness, empathy, and a well-developed olfactory imagination.

Am I judging Ally Louks too harshly? Maybe. If you think so, tell me why in the comments.