"Olfactory Ghosts: Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White"

This essay analyses Michel Faber’s neo-Victorian novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, focusing in particular on olfactory images or representations that create a sense of the unfamiliar within the familiar conventions of narrative realism. Smells often haunt our memory in many unpredictable ways. Faber’s high awareness of the olfactory modality is in tension with his own cultural memory and with the task of “remembering the Victorian novel” (Schor) – a task he shares with other contemporary writers. The essay is divided into four sections. The first section focuses on what scientists, from different fields, still call the mystery of smell. I describe some of the characteristics that distinguish smell from the other senses – characteristics that have some interesting implications on how smells are represented in literature – as well as the evanescent, ghostly nature of odours. I then analyse Faber’s post-realist approach to the imagined world of the past and the structure of sensations upon which his novel is built. Faber’s post-realism, I argued, is a question of re-naming or signifying matter, the historical ‘real’, by appealing to sense perceptions: the character’s own perceptions of their material world – amplified beyond proportions -- as well as the reader’s second order perceptions of the “proposed world” of the text. Smells occur with remarkable regularity in this narrative. They are not quantitatively more relevant than visual descriptions, but they are qualitatively different, especially when used to deflate the comforts of realism. The return of Victorian odours in Faber’s novel produces uncanny effects within the familiar conventions of realistic discourse: olfactory ghosts disrupt the homely and the ordinary, muddling the flattened image of the “doxological Victorians” that heritage culture promotes. Olfaction is also historicized, as the male protagonist is in the business of perfumery and therefore actively involved in the deodorizing project of nineteenth-century civilization. The final section addresses the question of the relationship between history and fiction and the present-day relevance of Victorian culture.