ABSTRACT
At the turn of the last century, the sense of smell became a new topic of investigation in many fields, including psychology, sexuality, anthropology, and the arts. Hans Rindisbacher has shown that the discourse about the sense of smell underwent an important paradigm shift:
In the time from about 1880 to the 1910s, significant shifts take place in olfactory perception… . [Smells] are no longer mere object smells, but they enter into an interactive perceptual relation with that vibratory organism the modern human has become, breaking down borders of subject and object, transgressing present and past, linking immediacy and memory.
(Rindisbacher 1992: 147) Smell might well have been the Symbolist sense par excellence. While the naturalists and realists used detailed descriptions of smell as a literary device to imbue the environment with a moral atmosphere or to enrich the verisimilitude of their works, the Symbolists used smell in suggestive, mysterious, and expansive ways to dissolve barriers between subject and object, individual and environment. The idea that art should be an evocation of a hidden reality through symbolic means was a central belief of the Symbolists. In Mallarmé’s formulation,To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which derives from the pleasure of step-by-step discovery; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object little by little, so as to bring to light a state of the soul or, inversely, to choose an object and bring out of it a state of the soul through a series of unravelings.
(Mallarmé 1995: 141)