Pynchon colours the smell

[Ya Sam]

"If smell is the sense of the imagination, then writers are the best placed 
to translate it into words. Yet writing about a sense as un-literary or 
indeed anti-literary as smell is surely one of the most difficult challenges 
a writer can undertake. One time-honoured way to write fragrantly is to use 
synaesthetic metaphors. The poet Martial starts out on this route with his 
"smell of a silvery vineyard flowering with the first clusters of grass that 
a sheep has freshly cropped." Do we smell the sheep, we might ask, or are 
they part of a visual image that is somehow equivalent to the smell? Proust, 
of course, is the master of synaesthesia and extended metaphor. For him the 
countryside reverberates with odours so evocative that they assume human 
traits: "smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving and settled, 
heedless and provident." The scent of the hawthorn takes on the intensity of 
music: it has a "rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a 
youthful light-heartedness." More recently, Thomas Pynchon's description of 
breakfast in Gravity's Rainbow has undertones of Proust and of Martial. The 
"musaceous odour of Breakfast" is "flowery, permeating, surprising, more 
than the colour of winter sunlight." Like Martial, Pynchon colours the 
smell. Perhaps colour is one of the most effective ways of describing an 
odour: our reactions to both tend to be immediate and emotional."

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7953

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