Text and Talk

January 11, 2025

Oppressive Olfactory Logic – If It Smells Bad It Probably Is

In June of last year, Amelia (Ally) Louks’ completed her dissertation for the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from Cambridge University. The title: “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” Upon its successful defense, Ms. Louks, she was awarded her post-grad degree in English Literature from Cambridge University. Whereupon she joyously posted “Thrilled to say I passed my viva [oral exam] with no corrections and am officially PhDone,” on X (aka Twitter) on November 27, 2024. Thereupon, the new (social) and old (print) media went viral. With the storms winds of controversy over this innocent post filling the sails, a new gale force came when Louks’ dissertation abstract was reviewed in light of a study by The Economist tracking and analyzing the change in academic writing between 1812 and 2023 (they studied 347,000 phd abstracts published over that period). Louks’ obtuse abstract stood out.

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 primarilyon Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), but also Patrick Süskind’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.

Note the aim of the thesis: “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’sapplication in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures.”

What do you see here? Beyond the obtuse jargon, what does this thesis say about how we read literature? Is the scholarly task like an archeological dig; or like releasing gas stored in rock formations deep underground through fracking? To painstakingly sift through the meaningless narrative of the story and fracture the literary formations to discover the really important odious finds of oppressions “subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures.”

Dr. Amelia Louks’ dissertation is just a recent example of how radically the ideas of Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault have taken hold in the modern university. Especially in the liberal arts.

This is not to say that each of these philosophers and literary critics offer nothing worth learning from. The Heidegger reference here is to his emphasis on hermeneutics – on interpretation. Drawing upon Heidegger (and Husserl’s and de Saussure’s phenomenology) and reacting to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “On the Origins of Language” and his promotion of the return to man’s pristine “state of nature,” in his 1967 Of Grammatology Derrida proffers his deconstructionism –and the idea that “there is nothing outside the text,” which can be paraphrased as “everything is interpretation.” Foucault reacted against Derrida’s deconstruction, but went on to turn Francis Bacon’s declaration that “knowledge is power” on its head declaring “power is knowledge.” That all institutions and networks of human relations reduce to power relationships: knowledge and justice reduce to power. And Lyotard describes postmodernism as the elimination of all metanarratives. Notwithstanding the nuances of their specific philosophies, the way their ideas have seeped into the academic and popular “social imaginary” in our secular age of a purely immanent frame with no transcendent reality, to use Charles Taylor’s terms, have in recent years combined to form a prevailing metaphysical outlook of critical theory.

Within a purely immanent frame – without reference to anything outside the material order –deconstruction, power relations, and competing narratives are what is left.¹

 

1. One recent Christian approach to making a counterargument using the tools of critical theory is Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022) ↩︎