Abstract
Smell is a primary and primitive sense; it is our “chemical” sense, as the French geographer Jean-François Staszak states.1 The sense of smell begins with the contact between a molecule and a cell. The stimulus (a set of odorant molecules) is processed by the brain together with other information, both contextual (visual, tactile, and olfactory) and emotional.2 The brain, as the anthropologist Joël Candau explains, identifies, names and categorizes these pieces of information, creating an olfactory image.3 In this complex process, the data that an individual has stored during a lifetime produces olfactory traces. The social and cultural environment and the biography of the individual determine what these traces are. At the end of this “operation,” according to Candau, the stimulus “is codified in the long-term memory in the form of a new olfactory trace.”4 Therefore, individuals carry their own personal, subjective, and intimate olfactory cultures and memories. Two different persons can smell the same odor, but each one memorizes and collects different traces.
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Notes
Jean-François Staszak, “Pistes pour une géographie des odeurs,” in Géographie des odeurs, ed. Robert Dulau and Jean-Pierre Pitte (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 49–58, quoted by Gianni Hochkofler, Le geografie di Primo Levi, Tesi di Laurea, Université de Genève, Faculté des Lettres, Département de langues et littéralures, July 2001, 124, http://librisenzacarta.it/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/le_geografie_di_primo_levi.pdf, accessed May 15, 2012.
Joël Candau, “Traces singulières, traces partagées?,” Socio-anthropologie 12 (2002): 20, http://socio-anthropologie.revues.org/149, accessed October 7, 2012.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noondays Press, 1977), 136.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, I: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, ed. William C. Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 53.
See the work of P. J. Douglas, “Il paesaggio olfattivo,” in Fatto e finzione: Geografia e letteratura, ed. Fabio Lando (Milan: Etas libri, 1993), 115–42, quoted by Hochkofler, Le geografie di Primo Levi, 129.
We must not forget, as Paul Ricoeur has underlined, that “the Greeks had two words mnēmē and anamnēsis to designate, on the one hand, memory as appearing, ultimately passively, to the point of characterizing as an affection—pathos— the popping into mind of a memory; and, on the other, the memory as an object of a search ordinarily named recall, recollection.” Paul Ricoeur, On Memory and Recollection, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pallauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4.
Primo Levi, “The Mnemagogues,” in The Sixth Day and Other Tales, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: M. Joseph; New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 12–13.
The first edition of L’altrui mestiere was published by Einaudi in 1985. It is a collection of “elzeviri,” that is to say, what is called in the slang of the Italian journalists a literary, historical, or artistic feature article, which is published on the third page of the journal. Traditionally, the third page of Italian journals is dedicated to the culture section. An earlier version of “Il linguagio degli odori,” titled “Capire il linguagio degli odori: Profumo di donna,” had previously appeared on October 7, 1984, in the journal La Stampa (page 3). The text is now available in Primo Levi, “Il linguaggio degli odori,” in L’altrui mestiere, in Opere II, ed. Marco Belpoliti, intr. Daniele Del Giudice (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 837–40.
The English translation by Raymond Rosenthal, Other People’s Trades (New York: Summit Books, 1989), omits “Il linguaggio degli odori” and another 11 pieces published in the Italian edition.
Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 171.
Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86–87, quoted in Levi, “Il linguaggio degli odori,” 839.
Joël Candau, “El lenguaje natural de los olores yla hipótesis Sapir-Whorf,” Revista deAntropología Social, Universidad Complutense deMadrid 12 (2003): 250, http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RASO/article/viewFile/RAS00303110243A/9726, accessed October 7, 2012. Translation mine.
Ernest Cassierer, La philosophie des formes symboliques 3: La phénoménologie de la connaissance, trans. Claude Forty (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 150–51, quoted in Candau, “El lenguaje natural,” 251. Translation mine.
Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, trans. and with a preface by Rosette Lamont (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1990), 3.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes el memorioso,” in Ficciones (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1981), 130
quoted in Levi, “Un ‘giallo’ del Lager,” in Racconti e saggi, Opere II, ed. Marco Belpoliti, intr. Daniele Del Giudice (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 911. Translation mine.
Levi, Moments of Reprieve, trans. Ruth Feldman (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 11.
Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Orion Press, 1959), 8.
Marco Belpoliti, La Prova (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 75.
Levi, Se questo è un uomo, in Opere I, ed. Marco Belpoliti, intr. Daniele del Giudice (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 3. Translation mine. The opening poem “Shemà” was not included in the first English edition of the book published in 1959.
Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 39.
Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone Edition, 1995), 176.
Marco Belpoliti, ed., “Ritorno ad Auschwitz: Intervista a Primo Levi,” in Marco Belpoliti and Andrea Cortellessa, Da una tregua all’altra: Auschwitz-Torino sessant’anni dopo (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2010), 98. Translation mine. Transcript of an interview with Levi conducted in June 1982 by Emanuele Ascarelli and Daniele Toaff, producers of a television series on Jewish culture, Sorgente di vita [Source of Life]. The interview was broadcast on RAI 2 on April 25, 1983. The text was first published in II racconto della catastrofe. Il cinema di fronte ad Auschwitz [The Story of the Disaster: Cinema Facing Auschwitz], ed. Francesco Monicelli and Carlo Saletti (Verona: Società Letteraria di Verona, 1998), 91–101. Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPOKXfHOuw4; part 2: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=1A7Xa2ANx2c&feature=relmfu.
Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Viking, 1997), 6.
Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sydney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 19.
Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 32.
Imre Kertész, Fateless, trans. Tim Wilkinson (London: Vintage, 2006), 108.
See the work of Philippe Mesnard, Témoignage en résistance (Paris: Stock, 2007).
Georges Perec, L. G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), 88–89. Translation mine.
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Morán, I.V. (2016). Une histoire des odeurs: The Olfactory World in Primo Levi’s Narratives. In: Vuohelainen, M., Chapman, A. (eds) Interpreting Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435576_9
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