Contemplating Canadian scents

by Tamara Lee


Recently, I started incorporating some scents into my work.

I'm trying to use scent mnemonics for some characters, based on my own scent associations. A few months ago, some writer pals and I played a game of 7-Up, where we considered the stages of our life in 7-year intervals. I decided to associate each of my 7-year eras with a specific scent. For example: "7: Living in North Vancouver, BC, high up on the side of a rainforest mountain. Best memories include towering evergreen forests and secluded creeks to play in. Best friend is Stephen C--: he shows me his if I show him mine. I discover reading, writing, languages and the lonely pleasure of solitude. The smells for the age are moss and pine."

Not that I want to get all Proustian in my writing, but I wonder if Proust and his "petites madeleines" are the reason scent is the lesser-used sense in the development of story or character. I mean, he really milked a lot out of those cookies. But he also got it right: the simple whiff of gasoline reminds me of childhood road trips; the smell of smoke in a mackinaw reminds me of my sitting with a teen-aged boy and my dog outside a Mac's.

Humans have a fraction of the olfactory capabilities of dogs. Just watch the dog dramas in the dog park, and you’ll observe dozens of stories of dominance and submission. Regular Icelandic sagas, those. But what of literature since the Viking age of Gisli the poet? Poetry, by its nature, has relied more heavily on scent, in a way that fiction does not.

And what is scent’s place in the other arts? We have visual, aural, tactile arts, but why is this one sense so ignored? In fact, smells rarely register as ‘art.’ Even the art of gourmet cooking places taste above scent.

Apparently I’m not alone in this search for scent in contemporary literature. A few years ago Vendela Vida pondered the scentless state of American literature, suggesting its use is more a European tradition. Searching her shelves she "came across long and textured descriptions of sublime fragrances and rancid stenches in Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, and George Orwell. But a casual survey of writings produced by American writers in the past decade suggested that collectively, like Gogol's Major Kovalev, we've lost our noses.”

Apart from Michael Ondaatje, I’m not able to think of many other Canadian scribes who have cooked up gloriously, scent-filled passages.

So, have Canadian writers also lost their noses?



(Photo courtesy of gambafrolla )