Beizer on Krueger (2023)

Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France takes its place in a rising wave of cultural criticism that displaces a traditional focus on the (ostensibly more elevated) distance senses of vision and hearing to the more proximal ones of smell, taste, and touch—long relegated to the animal and the savage, and so condemned to the margins of propriety. Krueger concentrates on smell: on perfume in its paradoxical contradictory loyalties to civilization or degeneration, hygiene or embellishment; similarly conflicted perceptions have it as antidote to noxious air or instead, as miasma's disguised twin. Taking as territory the nineteenth-century golden age of perfumery, and particularly the years 1821–85 (with brief forays back to ancient Egypt and ahead to contemporary Paris), Krueger aims not only to show us perfume culture in its heyday, but to explore, as well, nineteenth-century socio-cultural mores through their trail of scent (sillage), and especially to trace the often difficult inscription of sillage in language. To this end, she looks at wide-ranging writing on and around perfume, including fiction and poetry (by literati such as Baudelaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Renée Vivien, Rachilde, Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers), magazine articles (fashion columns among them), etiquette books, medical, hygienist, and chemistry treatises, privileging no single genre as she looks at their collaborative work of cultural production. Under Krueger’s expert guidance (she really does know everything there is to know about perfume), we retrieve stories of various scents in the most apparent context of their materiality and modes of delivery, and then also their discursive uses and social coding (in particular, gender cues, prescriptions, and proscriptions), and the stumbling translation of smell into word. If the classic fragrance pyramid has three tiers that correspond to the base notes, heart (or middle) notes, and head (or top) notes that together give a scent its structure and dimensions, this pyramid is also metaphorically useful, Krueger explains, to render the form and amplitude of Perfume on the Page. Its base notes (which, I suggest, are roughly compatible with the naive reader’s expectations upon first coming to the book) align with the fragrance materials themselves; its heart notes are analogous to period discourses on women; its head notes have to do with correspondences (and non-correspondences) between odors and words. I turn first to the base notes.

In a well-known scene near the beginning of La Peau de chagrin, Balzac’s overwrought Raphaël de Valentin enters an antiquarian’s shop following an aborted suicide attempt, “dans l’intention de donner une pâture à ses sens.”  The sheer heterogeneity of civilization’s relics scattered over this overgrown sensorial grazing ground beggar the imagination—of Balzac's reader along with his protagonist—as well as the senses. I digress to La Peau de chagrin not because this novel features in Cheryl Krueger’s book, but rather, because Raphaël’s flânerie through the antique shop provides a useful analogy for the reader’s stroll through her book. As Balzac’s hero wanders from bric-a-brac trinkets to more refined curios and on to socially sanctioned objets d’art, he climbs the cultural ladder along with the floors of the antique dealer’s display, much as the reader of Perfume on the Page weaves through this text from one curious scent-related discovery to another, led by enchantments of seeming randomness through the echelons of the perfume pyramid and its accoutrements. I was particularly fascinated, on the base level, by the bague à jet d’odeur, the fountain finger-ring conveniently located at arm’s length of its wearer whenever a spray of fragrance was called for; the lance-parfum Rodo (memorialized by the Mucha poster featured on the cover of Perfume on the Page) and its promises of spurting solitary pleasures, rivalling with the more communal practice of shooting scents subcutaneously into the blood at perfume injection parties. Hardly less riveting than such titillating rehearsals of penetration and ejaculation were accounts of Septimus Piesse’s odophone, a kind of synesthesia machine before Huysmans constructed his. Piesse’s odophone was a smell organ that matched a fragrance note with a musical note. Intriguing, too, was an account of MSUD (Maple Syrup Urine Disease), an illness that endows the excretions of individuals unable to process certain amino acids with a very particular odor. Less sensational if equally instructive was the information that the scent of musk was associated with the lingering odor of Germany for French citizens who had lived through, or inherited, tales of the Prussian invasion of 1870 and its odious soldiers who wore musk to ward off parasites.  

It is true that the reader tends initially to be dazzled, like Raphaël, by the sheer volume and variety of information and anecdotes about specific scents. Modern consumers of nineteenth-century texts, Krueger contends, tend too quickly to scan and skip rather than more deeply understand and contemplate references to fragrances no longer familiar. But while Krueger makes a plea for lingering with these scents and their components, she asks that we not stop at their sensory aspiration or even subsequent cognitive inspiration. The process of reading this book depends on an ongoing mediation among material scents, the words to say them, and the discursive forces they put into play which, conversely, put ostensibly evident scents into play and meaning. Consider the fragrance of violet, for example, socially coded in the nineteenth century as appropriate for demure young girls and other respectable women, yet reappropriated by writers such as Renée Vivien as a bolder, badder scent whose sanctioned chaste associations might be subversively rethought and repurposed.

I will leave to the book’s future readers the pleasure of discovering the nine chapters in their detailed negotiations among material scents, renditions on the pages of literary, scientific, and social texts (and secondarily, of Krueger’s study of all of the above), and the cultural-political stories of “the male sniff” they reveal (for the history of perfume, she argues, is ultimately a construct of women by men). I will pinpoint, however, a handful of windows opened for me by my reading, and a few perspectives tantalizingly glimpsed that might be further considered.

Krueger’s reflections on the olfactory-lexical debate are especially provocative for thinking about poetry. If everyday language falls short when it comes to accounting for smell, poetry, she contends (with Baudelaire’s work as prime example), performs admirably: the deficiency of words to describe smells engages metaphor and other tropes, so that perfumes find their voice more easily in poetic language. The book’s ongoing forays into the traffic between somatics and semiosis are fascinating, as is the circulation of terms that kept me flipping to the footnotes and reaching for my dictionary. I promise this book will grow your vocabulary. You may have heard of the osmazome, but what about ozolagny? Are you familiar with algophilia? Can you define genital synesthesia? Milk sickness? Flankers? You may need to search gutta-percha, anethole, iatraliptic, lait virginal, amorphophallus, petrichor, or calone, but you will be the wiser for it.

I wanted to hear more about a few of the vistas opened by the book. The lexical/olfactive problem made me think about similar challenges posed by nineteenth-century writers about the fraught relationship between words and senses other than smell—for instance, Balzac, eternally lamenting language’s inability to convey what music and painting superbly express. A survey of the larger lexical/sensory debates of the century would ground the word-scent discussion. The framing of perfume culture by the parameters of “the male sniff” (son of the male gaze) is clever and helpful, though I wondered if this might be refined as “the white male sniff,” bringing France’s colonial past more solidly out of the book’s shadows (where it plays a minor role) into its foreground to discuss in greater breadth the role of imperialism and the exoticized non-hexagonal Other in the history and production of good and bad smells along with race. Ditto for pondering the male sniff more particularly as “the cis male sniff,” and to expand the field to men’s fragrances, and non-cis sniffings. Similarly, class (alluded to in many passing references) might be addressed at greater length to help us think more about how scent and odor are socially constructed. But these horizons are all at least gestured toward. A single book cannot do it all, and Perfume on the Page does its main job memorably, while offering sneak peeks at the rest. Perhaps we will be lucky enough to have a sequel—or, to use a term I now know, a flanker?