The Problem with Pleasure

Modernism and Its Discontents

Laura Frost

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231526463
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Aldous Huxley decried "the horrors of modern 'pleasure,'" or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss.

In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire.

Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period's high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists' commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture.

1

JAMES JOYCE AND THE SCENT OF MODERNITY

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”¹

That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought.

It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man²

The interwar debate about pleasure clusters most intensely around cinema and popular literature. However, I will begin with a sensual experience that has received far less attention: smell, and specifically perfume, viewed as a vehicle of pleasure that is as interpretable as any text. Recent scholarship on the modernist sensorium focuses almost exclusively on vision and hearing, and few literary critics have attended to the olfactory sense. Historically, smell has been construed as vision’s other: the archaic to the modern, the spontaneous to the cultivated, the irrational to the logical. Accordingly, the pleasures of scent have been dismissed as frivolous and nonaesthetic. Just so, while the impact of cultural innovations in cinema, music, and the fine arts on modern literature has been carefully documented, the remarkable conceptual and material innovations in perfumery during the modern period have gone largely unnoticed. (An exception is Chanel No. 5, which is usually highlighted more for its bottle shape, typography, and abstract name or for its maker’s biography than for the substance itself.³) The history of perfume from the 1880s to the early years of the twentieth century strikingly dovetails with the history of literary modernism.

Perfume would seem to be an extreme embodiment of the somatic, commodified pleasures that modernists decry. Aside from the aesthetic choice of which perfume to wear, scent is a largely passive pleasure that plays on the senses. However, as Jennifer Wicke reminds us, commodities and the activity of their consumption offer an important window into the experience of modernity.⁴ A peculiar kind of pleasure, perfume is mostly mass-produced but also intimate and individual, thought to disclose the essence of the wearer and publicly advertise his or her taste, passion, and predilections. Ephemeral (it evaporates and fades from the skin; when specific brands or formulas are discontinued, they may disappear forever), perfume can evoke deep-seated, unconscious responses and memories. A product that becomes part of the body itself by seeping into the skin, perfume elicits equally somatic reactions from those who smell it.

This chapter will first give a brief history of perfume’s synthetic revolution and demonstrate how modern writers, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, registered the impact of these material changes in their work. Subsequently, I will examine how James Joyce deploys scent, and particularly perfume, as a means of expanding the conventional boundaries of what is “scentually” appealing to include the repulsive and the repellent in a pungent dialectic of pleasure and unpleasure. Joyce notably engages with sensual and popular pleasures at the same time that he upholds the vaunted modernist value of difficulty. He is far less defensive about vernacular culture than many other modernists. Indeed, he revels in the absurd, cliché, and shameless side of mass culture and literary genres such as pornography and romance: hence, his work immediately complicates the stark polarities of the great divide. However, Joyce’s work—and Ulysses in particular—demonstrates how modernism incorporates easy, somatic pleasures but renders them through contorted kinds of unpleasure and challenging reading effects. Although contemporary criticism gives the impression that Joycean texts are most attuned to auditory pleasures and early visual technologies, Joyce also constantly registers the appeal—and repulsion—of olfactory sensation, and these moments are fundamental to his hedonistic universe.⁵

Joyce had a keen understanding of what Barthes called the “texture of perfume.”⁶ The representation of perfume in Ulysses indicates that Joyce thought of it as a commodity as well as a sensuous experience, a material substance, and an aesthetic creation. For example, in a December 17, 1931, letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce remarks that an unauthorized edition of Ulysses is “a contrefaçon [forgery] of a French printer’s output just as a falsified French perfume would be.”⁷ Joyce understood that perfume formulas, like literary texts, had a kind of aesthetic autonomy, particularly in the early years of the twentieth century, when perfumery had reached new heights of invention. Joyce’s textual scents are never single-note; rather, they are constructed through layers of memory, bodily response, attraction, and resistance. Perfume is a pleasure with unexpected depths. It is, to borrow a felicitous metaphor from Wicke, one way “fashion intelligence is sprayed all over Ulysses.”⁸ Odor in general, and modern perfume in particular, is a means through which Joyce models a complex eroticism and an equally intricate reading experience.

“STRANGER FLOWERS, PLEASURES NOT YET DISCOVERED”

When Stephen Dedalus walks on the beach in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, he tests Aristotle’s theories of perception by experimenting with his vision and hearing. Western philosophy has always ranked vision at the top of the sense hierarchy, along with hearing, above smell, taste, and touch.⁹ The eyes and ears were thought to put more distance between the perceiver and the source of stimulation than the lowly nose, skin, or mouth: the farther the object of perception from the body, the more opportunity for reason to exert its influence. Most early philosophers argued that the most valuable forms of sensual pleasure are rational and ethical. Smell, by contrast, was thought to be somatically reflexive and so not subject to the higher mechanisms of the mind. Smell was also pronounced aesthetically deficient. Vision and hearing had corresponding arts (the fine arts and music), but perfumery was, and still is, not thought to constitute a disciplined or principled artistic activity.¹⁰

The Enlightenment inquiry into the nature of the senses demoted olfactory experience even further. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations maintains that smell “is the one [sense] that seems to contribute the least to the operations of the human mind.”¹¹ Kant asks, “Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems to be the most dispensable? The sense of smell. It does not pay to cultivate it or refine it at all in order to enjoy; for there are more disgusting objects than pleasant ones (especially in crowded places), and even when we come across something fragrant, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient.”¹² For Kant, smells—ephemeral and mostly foul—are associated with the masses and the irrational body. Olfaction was not thought to be connected to aesthetics, and the pleasure it did produce was deemed too ephemeral to merit contemplation.

Most mid-to-late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social scientists continued to regard olfaction as a crude and primitive sense. Both Darwin and Freud assert that smell is a faculty more useful to animals than humans, and that vision, rather than scent, guides civilized culture.¹³ Freud speculates that vision gained dominance over smell when humans began to walk upright and their noses were no longer on the same level as their genitals.¹⁴ In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he remarks that “coprophilic pleasure in smelling … has disappeared owing to repression,” at least among those who are properly socialized.¹⁵ Sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex devotes a substantial section to the sense of smell, recognized the role of odors in mental life and, like Freud, linked unconventional olfactory pleasure to deviance.¹⁶

Ellis remarks that “odors do not, as vision does, give you information that is very largely intellectual; they make an appeal that is mainly of an intimate, emotional, imaginative character.”¹⁷ This is partly right. The olfactory sense is reflexive, involuntary, and somatic; however, it also involves the capacities of the mind insofar as it is highly associative and mnemonic. “No sense,” Ellis asserts, “has so strong a power of suggestion, the power of calling up ancient memories with a wider and deeper emotional reverberation” than smell.¹⁸ Smell is both an immediate, somatic response and a trigger to emotional retrospection; it is a sensual impression in the present as well as a door to the past. Olfaction is closely related to memory and cognition; however, contemporary scientists agree that most humans find it difficult to describe specific odors in words (although they are more successful at matching smells with their sources). “In evolutionary terms,” Piet Vroon writes, “the sense of smell is an old one, with relatively few direct connections with the youngest part of the brain—namely, the left neocortex, a system which houses, for example, ‘language centers.’”¹⁹ Significantly, smell is understood as beyond or outside language, similarly to the way that pleasure has often been theorized.

At various points in history, perfume has been a tool for hygiene, a means of fumigation, a spiritual substance, or a sensual accessory. Homer associated perfume with divinity, and ancient Greeks also thought of it as a luxury.²⁰ In the Middle Ages, scent was a prophylactic against the fumes of the plague and poor sanitation, making the smell of dirty bodies bearable. The early Church frowned upon perfume, as it did other sensual indulgences. However, in the fourth century, it adopted the use of scent in ritual.²¹ Incense signifies purification, a religious offering that converts the aromatics of pagan practices into a spiritual show of holiness. A fundamental change occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Like so many innovations, it happened in the 1880s in France. Chemists and perfumers developed synthetic, artificial scents to supplement the costly and often rare natural fragrances that had been the palette of perfumery. Like the synthetic pigments that expanded the array of colors available to late nineteenth-century painters and hence the course of art, the perfume innovations made possible, writes Richard Stamelman, an unprecedented “scale of perfume notes and accords, an ‘immense register of scents,’ completely unknown” to earlier perfumers.²² In the years that followed, there was a radical reconceptualization of what a perfume could be. Many perfumers developed abstract rather than mimetic compositions. Scents such as Coty’s Chypre and Chanel No. 5 were nonreferential. Rather than striving to imitate a perfect rose or a convincing violet, they presented a heady blend of abstract and unnatural odors that Luca Turin, biophysicist and perfume critic, likens to “jumping from Delacroix’s neoclassic people with arms that looked like, well, human arms into a nonhuman, natureless Kandinsky world of triangles, dots, and machine-tooled blobs.”²³ L’Heure Bleue, Guerlain’s sweetly melancholic creation of 1912—and also, supposedly, Jean Rhys’s favorite perfume—was said to have been inspired by the “fleeting sensation” captured by impressionist painters.²⁴ Just as impressionism changed the lens through which painters represented the world, from the colors they employed and the quality of their brushstrokes to their understanding of vision and cognition, and just as abstraction changed the premises of mimesis itself, the new perfumery altered the kinds of fragrances people could smell as well as their ideas about what perfume could be.²⁵

Other changes were afoot. Particularly during the Renaissance and up until the eighteenth century, strong, “animalic” scents (as bestial odors are known by perfumers) had been popular. The most common were musk, a substance that comes from a musk deer’s scent gland; ambergris, which is extracted from the excrement or vomit of sperm whales; and civet, from the anal gland of a civet cat. To be sure, these ingredients were and continue to be used in very sparing amounts in perfume, but they nevertheless added a hint of dissonance to the dominant notes.²⁶ The nineteenth-century hygiene movement with its “growing deodorization of society” meant that perfumes were no longer used as health remedies but were classified as cosmetics, and advertised and sold as luxury products.²⁷ The scent of cleanliness—or no odor at all—had become the new standard, and scents that had once been hugely popular fell out of favor. In the Victorian era, animalic scents were superseded by more delicate and less bodily fragrances, including violet, lavender, and rose, as the cult of female purity took hold. Floral and herbal perfumes were the scents of choice for the Angel in the House, while “The thick vapors of impregnated flesh, heavy scents, and musky powders were for the courtesan’s boudoir or even the brothel salon.”²⁸ But French perfumers, armed with the new synthetics, extended their formulas to include animalics. The first perfume with man-made ingredients was Houbigant’s Fougère Royale (Royal Fern, 1882), featuring a synthetic reproduction of coumarin, which simulates the smell of freshly mown hay and other, more corporeal odors. Luca Turin describes the now defunct scent, which can only be smelled in the archives of the International Perfume Museum in Grasse:

Fougère Royale starts the way some Bruckner symphonies do, with a muted pianissimo of strings, giving an impression of tremendous ease and quiet power. It does smell of coumarin, to be sure, but it is also fresh, clean, austere, almost bitter. This is the reference smell of scrubbed bathrooms, suggestive of black and white tiles, clean, slightly damp towels, a freshly shaven daddy. But wait! There’s a funny thing in there, something not altogether pleasant. It’s a touch of natural civet, stuff that comes from the rear end of an Asian cat and smells like it does. … Small wonder Fougère Royale was such a success. At a distance, he who wears it is everyone’s favourite son-in-law; up close, a bit of an animal.²⁹

Turin’s description vividly conveys the subtle blending of clean and “dirty” odors that destabilizes the strong cultural imperative to separate such ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Repudiation of Pleasure
• 1. James Joyce and the Scent of Modernity
• 2. Stein’s Tickle
• 3. Orgasmic Discipline: D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Hull, and Interwar Erotic Fiction
• 4. Huxley’s Feelies: Engineered Pleasure in Brave New World
• 5. The Impasse of Pleasure: Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys
• 6. Blondes Have More Fun: Anita Loos and the Language of Silent Cinema
• Coda: Modernism’s Afterlife in the Age of Prosthetic Pleasure
• Notes
• Index