DEATH SMELLS LIKE STRAWBERRIES: THE OLFACTION SIMULACRA

Abstract

By regarding the smell as a cultural, social, historical, and political phenomenon, and by positing the sense of smell within the broad framework of scientific, philosophical and literary Western thought, the paper attempts to reexamine the status of olfaction as a marginalized constituent of human anatomy, cognition, and ontology. Relying on the hypothesis that the advent of late Capitalism and subsequent development of consumer society logics lead to further sterilization of Western civilization, we analyze olfaction in the light of Baudrillard’s simulacrum theory, inferring that the smell has shared the fate of other signs: the radical symbolic transposition into hyperreal. What is necessarily affected by the precession of simulacra is the intimate relationship between olfaction, emotions, memory, imagination, and intuition, which is a phenomenon that paper tries to further explore and exemplify within the context of contemporary American culture and fiction, most notably Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides.