Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 64

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Popular Culture Review

gamblers in the scented area to continue inserting coins for longer periods
than usual.”
^ Wall Street Journal, 13 0 :t . 1988, sec. B. This article discusses "environmental
fragrancing systems” and warns that their "dark side is mind control.”
^ New York Times, 3 Dec. 1988, sec. A.
^ San Jose Mercury News, 30 Jan. 1987.
^ Der Spiegel, 6 July 1987,168.
^ Der Spiegel, 30 March 1987, 250-53.
® Patrick Siiskind, Das Parfum (Zurich: Diogenes, 1985). Engl, trans.: Perfume,
trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1986).
^ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
Here the public and private spheres have been cleansed of unpleasant odors
and are periodically infused with good smells from specialized equipment.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930; ed. and trans. James
Srachey [New York: Norton, 19611), sec. 4.
For a fuller account of this issue see Hans J. Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books:
A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann
Arbor: Michigan Diversity Press, 1992).
Thanatos and Eros are used here in analogy to, if not identical with, Freud's
usage of these two figures of thought in Civilization and its Discontents,
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkldrung (1947;
Frankfurt/Main: Rscher, 1971).
Dialektik, 165, my translation.
Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), 115-16.
Trygg Engen, "La m^moire des odeurs,” La Recherche, February 1989, 176.
Engen, a specialist in sensorial psychology, has been one of the more
persistent researchers in matters of olfaction in recent years. His Odor
Sensation and Memory (New York: Praeger, 1991) provides a recent
readable overview of the field.
The most complete account of this development is Alain Corbin's analysis of
cleaning up the city of Paris. Alain Corbin, he miasme et la jonquille (Paris:
Aubier Montaigne, 1982). Engl. The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1986).
The just discontinued Sears catalog, a true historical compendium of
twentieth-century taste and style, sheds some valuable light on this matter.
All from the 1993 J. Crew January Clearance mail order catalog.
^ All from the 1993 Tweed mail order catalog.
In literature it is J. K. Huysmans, the aestheticist writer from the turn of the
century who in his novel Against the Grain provides an imaginative
example of such a transposition of one sensory mode's experience into the
terminology of another. The novel's hero, Duke Des Esseintes, owns a "taste
organ," an elaborate contrivance of "a row of little barrels" of liquors that