Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 62

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Popular Culture Review

contiguity, not of selection and similarity, as is the case for color
designations.
Even when we do use a descriptive adjective for a smell we run
into difficulties, for olfactory-specific adjectival paradigms are
virtually nonexistent. Expressions such as "the sweet smell," "an
acrid stench," or "a pungent odor" have as their adjectival base
either a gustatory or a tactile experience and cause a breach of
reference level in the text. We are simply using the terminology of
other sensory modes for olfactory purposes. Commonly it is taste
which provides the experiential base of such transposed adjectives.
Although itself verbally rather limited taste, particularly in
culinary writing and wine tasting, has recently developed a
blossonrung metaphoric and metonymic vocabulary
Linguistic representation of smell, then, uses~to borrow a
psychological term-strategies of displacement. These are built into
the very structure of language. It is therefore a "displacement in good
faith"—for there are no other ways of referencing smells than those
borrowed from another sense, those indicating origin, and the
evaluative categories of good and bad. These points may serve as a
preliminary explanation of why the sense of smell is so often
considered the most apt to trigger memory. Its very linguistic
structure brings up an Other, a reference to the outside.
In the world of advertisement, which for fashion and luxury
products is tom between the two contradictory tasks of assuring the
potential consumer both of the wide availability of the product and
simultaneously of its exclusiveness, we thus find an unexpected
honesty in ads for perfumes. While the product may be widely
available, even affordable, and thus far from exclusive, there is a
uniqueness to its experience both in the concrete individual
physiological blending of a given scent with a given individual's skin
odors and, as we have pointed out in detail above, in the linguistic
and semiotic aspects of the perceptual process. Perfumes are an
almost purely auratic phenomenon. In their application on the body,
they virtually disappear materially, the fragrant substance as
signifier thereby transferring all its powers of enticement in the most
direct way to the wearer herself (but increasingly also himself). To a
degree, then, the beautiful woman in the ad, the achievement and
status of the designer, the warm translucence of the aesthetically
shaped and backlighted bottle do come with the purchase and use of