Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Food and smell 199
name krauts). The smell of garlic (so distinctive it has its own adjective
alliaceous) provides the basis for several ethnic and racial insults. 50
As with our food tastes, very little of the way we react to smells seems to
be biological. Typically, it depends on the associations that a smell has for
us as to whether we find it agreeable or disagreeable. So why are we so
uneasy about smells – why the taboos? Perhaps it is simply that we like to
stand aloof from our animal origins, and this sense doesn’t let us. We can
shut our eyes, we can cover our ears, but we cannot stop breathing and when
we breathe we take in odours. More than any other sense, our ability to
smell reminds us that, as much as we like to deny it, we are animals. We all
have our own odour-producing glands, and when we try to mask their smell
with perfumes and deodorants we cannot overcome the fact that each person
smells different.
Ambivalence is part of the human condition, unavoidable in a species struggling to
reconcile the existence of an advanced brain in the scented body of a naked ape.
(Watson 2000: xii)
Distaste for the body and its effluvia goes back a long way. Christian
teaching maintained that human life was only a temporary stage in what
was seen as a journey towards a much better future existence. Therefore
only the soul was worthy of attention, and any attempt to prolong life was
deemed irreverent. The body was just too base a thing to be of any
importance and was certainly not the affair of the pious, some of whom
went to extraordinary lengths to uphold this belief; there are even records of
people canonized solely on account of the fact that they did not wash. 51
However, it seems our queasiness about smells and smelling has endured, to
the extent that natural body odours are now subject to some of the most
stringent of taboos, particularly when it comes to women’s procreative
organs. So-called personal hygiene products explicitly target women – there
are no male-oriented sprays to complement the array of feminine sprays
(vaginal deodorants) currently on the market.
A memorable figure in any discussion of smelling would have to be Patrick
Süskind’s creation, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the grotesque character in his
novel Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer. Grenouille’s remarkable gift was
his extraordinary sense of smell. Described as ‘the finest nose in Paris’, and
capable of nuancing hundreds of thousands of different odours, Grenouille
could differentiate objects by smell far more keenly and more precisely than
others could do by sight. For Grenouille, the mismatch between his rich world
of smells and the poverty of his language was particularly acute. The French
language proved totally inadequate for his intense olfactory experiences, even
those he encountered on a day-to-day basis. ‘Why should smoke possess only
the name “smoke”’, he complained. ‘Why should earth, landscape, air – each