Honouring other organisms’ communicativeness – either human or nonhuman – entails fundamental shifts in method and approach. Pollan quotes the plant biologist Stefano Mancuso as affirming that ‘a scientist needs to “love” his [sic] subject in order to do it justice’.19 This is also a view held by Isabelle Stengers: part of ethically responsible and epistemologically accurate research involves ‘shared suffering’ with those organisms experimented with as co-investigators.20 The objectifying lens of scientific inquiry is no longer taken to be uncontroversially acceptable when dealing within biological contexts, especially in ethological studies. Shared suffering reverses the objectifying ‘view from nowhere’ as Thomas Nagel disparagingly names the feigned numbness to one’s feelings and the illusion that an observer could remove himself from a situation to spy on the workings of the universe from some disembodied and hence rational place.21 The self-reflexivity of scientists interacting with living beings as beings aware of themselves as being interacted with, creates the beginnings for a new communicative biological paradigm, a verstehendes Erklären (understanding-based science).22
The vegetal other slowly erodes its ontological distance as Robbins’s novel inducts us into understanding plant-thinking, which is plant being. The happy irony that becoming fully human means becoming more plantlike in our information age, not only ushers in a new respect for plant sentience and intelligence, but also permits the linear lineage of Western thinking to compost into the less burdened direct apperception of life through smell. This praise of direct experience, of plant experience, permits humans the opportunity to enter into the suspended states of time indicative of the great freedom and patience plants seem to demonstrate.
Becoming Plant as Actualising Human Agency
Agency in Jitterbug Perfume is diffused from the wilful Western autonomous subject into the chemical reaction world of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These allow plants to ‘smell’ their environment, learning information carried by the wind that aids their decision-making. Much as how plants communicate with each other through sending and receiving accidental and deliberate molecules through the air, scent intoxicates the human characters in Robbins’s work. As the book’s characters travel through dimensions and time, speeding up and slowing down much like the different timescales plants inhabit, they are guided not by their own wills but are carried by the waft of aromatic chemicals determining their behaviours. This transvaluation of automaticity and autonomy, valuing the ‘lightening up’ that characterises plant photosynthesis over the plodding pondering of human thought paralysis, becomes the event horizon of human evolution as we become more plant-like.
Wiggs Dannyboy, eccentric but ethical tycoon and founder of the Last Laugh Foundation, an organisation exploring immortality in Robbins’s novel, understands aroma as a tool for evolution.23 Rather than the ‘bloody pendulum’ of action and reaction which animal bodies and human society are bound up with (swinging between Classicism and Romanticism in art, conservativism and liberalism in politics), Wiggs yearns for the asymmetrical circumnutations of plant growth (p. 321). Tapping into smell for Wiggs is not a regression to some more primitive animal instinctual state but instead a leap forward that finally permits humans to bypass many of our fight-or-flight responses bound up in the olfactory triggers to our sympathetic nervous system. Wiggs attempts to explain his philanthropic rationale for getting into the perfume business to the Seattle waitress and perfumery protégée Priscilla:
‘See here, Priscilla, I have an interest in smell. That is, I have an interest in the evolution o’ consciousness. Smell is the only sense to communicate directly with the neocortex. It bypasses the thalamus and the other middlemen and goes direct. Smell is the language the brain speaks. Hunger, thirst, aggression, fear, lust: your brain interprets these urges with a vocabulary o’ smell. The neocortex speaks this language, and if we can learn to speak it, why we may be able to manipulate the cortex through the nose.’
‘For what?’
‘For expeditin’ the evolution o’ consciousness.’
‘For what?’
‘So’s we can be happy and live a long, long time and not be bloody blowin’ each other to bits.’ (p. 244)
Reorienting the privileging of sight to that of smell in humans for Dannyboy also entails becoming more plantlike with our nose. The immediacy of molecular trafficking with our brains bypasses the prickly bits of cognition that get in the way of intuitive action. Delinking consciousness from thinking and mental brooding, Dannyboy understands the key to co-constitutive consciousness as a fundamental superficiality, the directness of plant existence.
Plant philosopher Michael Marder has argued that the superficiality of plants is not something to be derided, but reveals their hidden strength.24 The agonising ‘depth’ of modern man, epitomised in the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism, itself is a hall of mirrors. The fetishisation of interiority, which reached its apotheosis in Freud as an almost complete rejection of the body and escape into the limitless waters of the mind, is the opposite of plant consciousness, which comes without the debilitating hyperbolic doubt and navel-gazing artefacts of some varieties of (especially Western) thought.
The speculative realist elements of Robbins’s concentration on the plant possibilities for human consciousness can be aided by the hermeneutic science of biosemiotics. The biosemiotic lens is crafted through pairing Jakob von Uexküll’s theoretical biology with Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, and asks the question how all types of organisms make meaning in their environments. By biosemiotically inquiring into the species-specific way plant sensory organs make meaning from the world they inhabit, Jitterbug Perfume can be read as imploring humans to take the next step in evolution not through accentuating commonly deemed attributes of human exceptionalism, but instead by moving beyond such linear evolutionary stories and branching into our phytosemiotic potentialities.25 As Marder explains in Plant-Thinking, the philosophy of ‘weak thought’ envisions philosophical foundations and rigid systems giving way to the ebullient mycorrhizal varieties of pragmatic networked intelligence. The traditional dualism of the superficial and the deep falls away in thinking the plant, as plant being is plant-thinking. Recognising how the world shows up differently to each species according to their placement and interpretation of reality as a species-specific Umwelt (environment) or sensory bubble requires letting go of stolid insistence on interiority – the individual narcissist’s proverbial rabbit’s hole without end. Instead, we can access our vegetal nature through scent, as it is accessed chemically rather than symbolically. In stripping away culturally laden armature, ironically, more meaning presents itself. This meaning simply was not accessible behind the barricade of symbolic suture. In giving up allegiances to the burrs of interpretation deforming our access to easy meaning, the information that was always in front of our faces floods forth in a wash of organismic unfurling.
Of course, part of arguing for redeeming the plain chemical aspects of scent is to acknowledge how the chemical and symbolic elements of olfaction cannot finally be separated, but instead reside in our viscera, recursive to the full impression of experience. Osmology, then, remains an intersubjective science at the joint of molecular and individual states. The evolutionary alchemy of odours elicits geographically- and culturally-trained dispositions in the same way that durian fruit smells like heavenly bubblegum to some and flatulence to others.
The different elements of a triadic sign in semiotics – often crudely parsed into the identical or iconic aspect, the referential (denotative) or indexical aspect, and the representational (connotative) or symbolic aspect – have shifted weight patterns in modern times with the semiotic alienation from physical life through language and the mediations of human artifice.26 Whereas previously the smell of mango could be had only by really encountering the fresh, bursting fruit, with distillation and then synthetisation technologies one can now find a dizzying pervasiveness of artificial mango smell in ‘mango’-scented body s
crubs, scratch-and-sniff stickers, air fresheners, cosmetics, artificial and natural flavourings and perfumes. This move from the smell of mango signalling a fruit at hand, to the smell (or its verisimilitude) becoming the vehicle for endowing otherwise bland products with a sort of exoticism, allure, lusciousness, pungent and tangy, and sweet quality, is precisely the ‘semiotic drift’ of overinterpretation which at its asymptote results in an implosive semiotic emptiness.27 This limit case of the empty signifier would occur in a world populated by the simulacra of mango scent but in which every last mango tree had been killed by the effluent of capitalism.
Robbins’s attention to plants as the carrier of non-symbolic confrontations with scent, provides a common rootstock connecting the novel’s fantastic voyages into the esoteric practices of Taoist immortality. Alobar, along with later Kudra, are the unlikely protagonists in Robbins’s epic which covers over a thousand years of history, a story that concludes, according to the book’s jacket copy, precisely tonight at 9 p.m. A former pagan king who narrowly escaped death from an ancient European kingdom that ritually executed its leaders at the first signs of senescence (lest approaching decrepitude bode collective decline for the people), Alobar’s name appears a possible portmanteau of ‘cinnabar’ – the vermilion mineral that apocryphally transubstantiates into gold – and ‘alchemy’, chemistry’s precursor art of transformation to arrive at an elixir of life (his name also recalls the term ‘a-lobar’ – lacking separation of brain lobes).28 In his exile, he reaches India, where he finds Kudra, finally persuading her to leave the stake she’s tied to, about to commit sati and die alongside her husband. Quickly proving to be the more worldly and clever of the pair, Kudra follows Alobar and they spend seven years in the caves of the immortal Bandaloops, soaking in the taoists’ teachings of longevity and immortality through geo-aromatic osmosis.
Connecting with the teachings of the Bandaloops through meditations infused with the lingering scent of incense burned there long before, Alobar and Kudra romp through astral dimensions before moving on to Istanbul, where they must flee once their agelessness, proclivity for loud sex and mixed-sex bathing becomes noticed by medieval prudes. After losing their successful spice and perfume home business to village arsonists, they eventually move on to Paris, where coincidentally, Kudra’s perfume shop in 1666 becomes the very location for the LeFever perfume family empire for centuries. It is at this spot that Kudra and Alobar’s search for the perfect perfume base note causes them to part, and centuries later, to unexpectedly reunite.
Kudra and Alobar’s mystical concoction, K23, emerges out of the lovers’ separation, on their hunt for the perfect perfume base note. As the opening sentence of Jitterbug Perfume declares, ‘The beet is the most intense of vegetables’ (p. 1). It is this intensity of the beet and cinnabar, and Alobar as the living vessel for this alchemical transmutation, which brings forth the perfect perfume. From the beet-blood pulsing of the vegetal-human, the aromatic elixir to activate the photosynthesising consciousness of human potential is simultaneously a love potion and an olfactory trace, to foster recognition of kin across space and time. Kudra proposes to Alobar:
If we were marked by a unique scent, a fragrance all of our own, we could always identify each other, even if the light was not clear, even if our vision was clouded or our shapes physically altered; we could find each other no matter if we were lost in the rooms of Death. (p. 182)
In identifying their personal scent, Kudra recognises that ‘smell needs no interpreter’, as Diane Ackerman in her A Natural History of the Senses phrases it. ‘The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought or translation’, Ackerman concludes, and for Kudra, this extends beyond usual dimensional formalities as well.29
The base note of the perfume – beet pollen – strikes Alobar in an instant of satori during a meditation he shares with Kudra, though instead of escaping the physical world as Kudra does, entering into the rooms of Death and Life, and observing the entire Tibetan Book of the Dead-inspired process, he is dragged back to earth and time by the musty beet pollen odour. This moment of revelation, as Alobar is ‘knocked back’ to earth by an ‘overpowering odor’ (p. 183), serves as the bifurcation point around which the entire novel turns. Alobar comes back to medieval Europe, forced to trudge through the centuries looking for his beloved, while Kudra’s visit to the dimensions beyond life catapults her forward hundreds of years before her unlikely return to present-day Paris, coinciding magically with the arrival of Alobar, the LeFevers, V’lu, Priscilla, and the rest of the scent-hunting cadre. As Marcel LeFever will later echo in the book, ‘Scent is the last sense to leave a dying person’ and for Kudra this sense perhaps persists to some nagging degree beyond death (p. 283).
Nose as Instinctual Organ
In Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, a Japanese-American matsutake (Tricholoma matsutake) mushroom-hunter friend of the author explains how he finds his way to these subterranean mushrooms through sense and smell:
When one arrives in the spot, the memory washes over one, making every detail of that time come suddenly clear – the angle of a leaning tree, the smell of a resinous bush, the play of light, the texture of the soil. I have often experienced just that wash of memory. I am walking along what appears to be an unfamiliar stretch of forest, and suddenly the memory of finding a mushroom – just there – bathes my surroundings. Then I know exactly where to look, although finding is still as difficult as you can imagine.30
Strikingly, Tsing’s description linking place, smell and memory resonates with Robbins’s weaving of these three elements. The chiaroscuro of memory erupts from the confluence of geographical and olfactory grounding. Memory, then, exists in relation with, rather than estranged from, these filaments. Like a puppet, memories come and go according to the state of the organism. The strings of place and time, of odour molecules and other elements, all tug at what pops out from the unconscious becoming present. The presence of so-called external sensory impressions stir the orientation and fruiting of so-called interior recollections.
While humans are known to discriminate among several million distinct colours, the human capacity for fine-grained scent differentiation clocks in at well over a trillion distinct odour stimuli.31 The sensation of odour figures central to our primal interface with the world. As Florence Williams has pointed out, our species’s ability to smell had been waning, evolutionarily. While in wild apes around 30 per cent of olfactory genes are non-functional, in humans, over half of our thousand-plus nasal receptor genes are inactive.32 Williams postulates that our defunct nasal receptors are the consequence of the decreased evolutionary importance of olfaction for human survival, especially with the rise of sight as the dominant sense. Yet, as mentioned above, research amplifies smell as a direct line to the brain.33 This uncanny sense bypasses much of the computing and conceptual gatekeeping of the mind and instead washes the brain in holistic, integrated impressions that defy rationalisable symbolic orders. Without the compartmentalisation resulting from the circuitous nerve pathways other senses run, nasal stimulation is direct and immediate.
Drawing on perfumery norms, the novel emphasises that choice perfume contains three distinct and harmonious elements: the base, heart, and top notes. Because scent cannot be quarantined, it is the interplay between these aspects that twizzles the nose. Robbins describes the perfect perfume, K23, thus:
Like a lobster with a pearl in its claw, the beet held the jasmine firmly, without crushing or obscuring it. Beet lifted jasmine, the way a bullnecked partner lifts a ballerina, and the pair came on stage on citron’s fluty cue. As if jasmine were a collection of beautiful paintings, beet hung it in the galleries of the nose, insured it against fire or theft, threw a party to celebrate it. Citron mailed the invitations. (p. 189)
Robbins’s vegetal acrobatics describing the relationships these three simple elements create together in the stirrings of their aromatic harmony hints at the impassioned complexities such pungently brewed perfu
mes can elicit.
Despite its potent allure, K23 is not exalted in the novel on the basis of its appealing aroma. In Robbins’s tale, the power of the perfect perfume lies in anchoring and recalling memories that allow longevity and immortality. As Marcel LeFever proclaims in his presentation to the Last Laugh society, ‘sight simply cannot compete with smell when it comes to the ability to awaken memory. Memories associated with scent are invariably more immediate and more vivid than those associated solely with visual imagery or sound’ (p. 228). The unmediated chemical signal of scent bypasses cognitive processing prone to malfunction and error, directly sending the precise message to the awaiting receptors along the olfactory nerve. The spark of immediacy Robbins detects in scent keeps the smeller in the present moment, away from age-inducing thoughts drifting into past or future.
Olfaction defies quantifying and categorisation. Alain Corbin notes that ‘Linnaeus, Haller, Lorry, and Virey in turn suggested lists of aromatic categories; none proved exhaustive. It rapidly became apparent that olfactory sensations could not be contained within the meshes of scientific language.’34 The slippery substance of odour elides pinning down the subjective experience of smell, which emerges as an interface between the wafting chemical and the attuned participant. The same airborne molecular compound conveys different meanings and even elicits divergent scents to the same nose across time and place.
Even Michael Edwards’s well-known fragrance wheel, which attempts to pin down the geography of particular scents relative to their woody or citrus notes, fails to capture the enormity of smell: it is merely a shorthand tool for the fragrance industry trade. Despite the lucrative business of selling scent, the non-commercial aspirations for the perfect aromatic are perhaps most striking in Jitterbug Perfume. The primary noses all have spiritual aspirations for their preparation. Kudra and Alobar wish to create a distinctive but impalpable scent to help their friend Pan navigate in a sanitised Pasteurian world, as well as to fashion an olfactory anchor to waft each other back again during meditative time-travelling. Scent thus can never exist as an objective sense; instead, as Kant indicated (despite his derision of the fact), smell is the most profound of subjective sense faculties.
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