Do not trust literature that does not smell

Now 50 years ago, in 1972, Italo Calvino began to write a book of stories about the five senses.

In 1985, when he died, he had only finished the ones dedicated to smell, hearing and taste.

It was the title of the one devoted to the latter,

which takes place in Oaxaca, the one used by his widow, the Argentine translator Esther Judith Singer, to baptize the volume that brings them together (there is a version by Aurora Bernárdez in Siruela) .

opens with

a story that talks about the search for two women by two men who only have one piece of information about them: their smell.

In addition, both live in times as distant as the refined Paris of the eighteenth century and a prehistory in which our ancestors hardly practiced the upright posture.

"We ran with our heads down," says the narrator.

“Without losing contact with the terrain, helping us with our hands and with our nose to find the way, and everything we had to understand we understood with our nose before with our eyes, the mammoth the porcupine the onion the drought the rain They are, above all, odors that are separated from other odours, food is what is not food, ours, the enemy, the cave, danger, everything is felt first with the nose, everything is in the nose, the world is the nose”.

There have been few times like ours: so ready to tolerate everything and, at the same time, to find everything intolerable

Last Saturday the philosopher Nuria Sánchez Madrid quoted that story in the conference she gave at the Prado Museum within the cycle that accompanies the “olfactory exhibition”

.

Following Calvino, Sánchez Madrid pointed out that walking on two legs produced, in addition to back pain, an entire epistemological change: the privilege of sight as a form of knowledge: "The eyes help the nose", we read in the story.

"They grab things in space."

Perhaps it is this privilege that has led literature to trust images with all their repulsive capacity.

According to Giorgio Agamben, there have been few times like ours: so ready to tolerate everything and, at the same time, to find everything intolerable.

In other words, so ready to imagine everything and, at the same time, to find everything unimaginable.

That is why it is sometimes in the transition from voice to sight that the life of the artist is at stake.

If in

Bong Joon-ho's film, he smelled poor, in the story

by JM Coetzee, you can smell the blood of butchered animals.

It also smells

(The Broken Nail), the book of poetry?

that Angélica Liddell dedicated to the death of her father.

Quite the opposite of the stage version that, performed by its author, could be seen at the beginning of the year at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid.

Nothing in that parade of sick bodies, urine and manure gave off the slightest odor or transmitted any risk to the public, convinced that they were on the good side.

It was all harmless, rhetorical, odorless.

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