For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress. According to this reading of history, banishing odours is a sign of progress. Civilisation doesn’t smell.
Neither Bjorn Berge nor William Tullett stand for this. For them, older times may have been smellier, but people were comfortable with living alongside middens, rotting corpses and foul tanneries. Smell in the modern age is now under threat and at risk of extinction or of being even more marginalised – Tullett uses the word ‘ephemeralised’ – than it already is in this age of visual primacy and screens. Even after reading the third book in my small library on the subject, I am still not persuaded by this argument. We definitely live in strange times when it comes to smell – we are, after all, the culture that requires an artificial fragrance named ‘new car’. But perhaps the artificiality of modern odour doesn’t mean we’re incapable of smelling; we just smell different things.
Berge is a Norwegian architect who writes with the erudition and whimsy of W.G. Sebald. I have no idea how his mind went from exploring the stench of burning bodies in the Holocaust to what testosterone smelt like on 1929 Wall Street on the next page, but I think I’m glad it did.
