Reading Tahitian francophone literature: the challenge of scent and perfume

This article focuses on one particular recent French Polynesian novel, Hutu Pa-inu: Tahiti, Racines et Dechirements (2004), and more generally on the issue of how to approach and read Tahitian literature from the ‘outside’ given the heavily over-determined images of Tahiti in the western imaginary and the still relatively small (but growing) amount of indigenous literary production. The focus is on the poetics and hermeneutics of scent as explored by the author, Marie-Claude TeissierLandgraf. The article argues that French Polynesian writers generally have been extraordinarily sensitive to over-determination, and that the theme of scent is used to challenge both western images of Tahiti as a floral paradise, and tendencies to idealize scent as a potential postcolonial form of sensory resistance to more containable modes of knowledge such as vision or hearing. The text suggests that Tahiti remains always a powerful object of outside desire, and this desire constantly threatens to foreclose the full potential readings of the literature. Resume Cet article traite un roman francophone recent de la Polynesie Francaise, Hutu Pa-inu: Tahiti, Racines et Dechirements (2004), et plus generalement, la question de la maniere dont il faut s’approcher de la litterature Tahitienne et la lire ‘de l’exterieur’, en vue du fait que l’image de Tahiti est nettement sur-determinee dans l’imaginaire occidental, et la voix litteraire locale en francais est nee seulement depuis trente ans. Le point de depart de l’article est la poetique et l’hermeneutique de l’odorat, telle qu’elles sont examinees par l’auteur, Marie-Claude TeissierLandgraf. L’article demontre que les ecrivains de la Polynesie Francaise ont ete tres sensibles a la sur-determination, et que le theme de l’odorat est employe a la fois pour mettre en question les images de Tahiti comme un paradis floral et en meme temps les tendances a poser l’odorat comme une forme de resistance postcoloniale sensorielle aux connaissances plus faciles a contraindre, comme la vision et l’ouie. Le texte suggere que le Tahiti est toujours un objet de puissants desirs externes, et le ce desir menace d’appauvrir la richesse potentille de cette litterature. Ma petite, apprends qu’on ne voit pas Tahiti, on la sent. Elle offre d’abord tous ses parfums aux voyageurs courageux [...] Tu n’as pas besoin de tes yeux pour connaitre certaines choses, car ils peuvent te tromper. (Teissier-Landgraf 2004: 19) IJFS 16.1&2_Cowell_113-133.indd 113 10/30/13 4:04:31 PM 114 Andrew Cowell | Maureen DeNino 1. Bougainville, Le Voyage Autour du Monde (see chapters 7–10). Gauguin’s most famous writing on Tahiti is entitled NoaNoa, which means ‘fragrant’ in Tahitian, more properly spelled no’ano’a. See Drobnick (2012) for an analysis of scent in the work and writings of Gauguin more generally as it relates to Tahiti. In Marie-Claude Teissier-Landgraf’s 2004 Tahitian coming-of-age novel Hutu Pa-inu, these are the words of a Tahitian passenger on a ship arriving in Tahiti from France just after World War II. They are spoken to six-yearold Sophie Rigolet, a half-Tahitian/half-French girl coming to join her father and see for the first time the place where she will grow up after escaping from war-torn France with her French mother. The words of the Tahitian passenger raise a number of interesting points of departure for reading the novel. First of course, the ‘parfums’ evoke the western imaginary of Tahiti and Polynesia as a supposed tropical, floral paradise, as discovered and described by Cook and Bougainville, and reinforced by later writers.1 As the clouds part and the passengers gaze at the island from aboard the ship, the scene situates the arriving Tahitians themselves – and Sophie in particular – as ‘voyageurs’, recalling a familiar image of the island utopia so desired by seafaring explorers (Edmond and Smith 2003: 2–3). These Tahitian ‘voyageurs’ complicate the notion of the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘explorer’, a complication explored throughout the text as experienced by Sophie, a demie in local parlance. Most profoundly, however, while evoking colonial fantasies of fragrant island utopias, the passenger’s words also hint at the possibility of a different hierarchy and ontology of bodily senses in Tahiti and for Tahitians in comparison to European experience, privileging the sense of smell in particular, and the lower bodily senses in general (smell, taste, often touch) over the higher ones of vision and hearing. As we shall see, this privileging of the lower senses is problematic generally in the western context, where odours are perceived alternatively as invasive and undesirable or dangerously, yet invitingly, sexual. How, then, might we read the novel in light of these evocations suggested by the words of this Tahitian ‘voyageur’? What does the primacy of smell over sight indicate for the Sophie’s experience on the island? Is this evocation of the odour of Tahiti a form of resistance to European control and constraint, or a fulfilment of European utopian desires? What might make up the ‘poetics of scent’ of Hutu Pa-inu? Our interest here is precisely to locate that poetics of scent. We will begin with a broad overview of the possible readings suggested by the words of the Tahitian passenger, ranging from European and colonial attitudes towards smell and odours to postcolonial artistic efforts to construct an olfactory poetics. Through a close examination of the novel’s depiction of the ‘parfums’ of Tahiti, we will ultimately posit a particular, and particularly Tahitian, ‘poetics of scent’ that both reflects and resists the motifs evoked by this opening scene. From the broadest historical and geographical perspective, the hierarchy of the senses, with vision at the top and smell often at the very bottom, has a long history in European thought, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and notably emphasized by Kant in his aesthetics (see Corbin 1986: 7; Classen et al. 1994: 84–85; Shiner and Kriskovets 2007: 275; Curtis 2008: 10). The downgrading of the sense of smell in the domains of philosophy and aesthetics has typically rested on several criteria: that it is related to the ephemeral rather than the permanent, since most smells are difficult or impossible to preserve or exactly reproduce (see Corbin 1986: 7; Classen et al. 1994: 3); that it is non-cognitive or non-intellectual, especially due to its lack of a vocabulary IJFS 16.1&2_Cowell_113-133.indd 114 10/29/13 11:10:32 AM 115 Reading Tahitian francophone literature and thus the possibility of discursive analysis, control and stability; that it is more closely connected to mere bodily experience than mental reflection (see Classen et al. 1994: 3; Batty 2010: 1137 – though she goes on to challenge this claim, and Curtis 2008); and that smells are part of the secondary, subjective experience of an encounter with an object, rather than an objective form of knowledge of the object itself. Thus, noted art critic Roger Scruton argues that while the visual sense (particularly in the aesthetic domain) involves a direct engagement with the object of vision, the sense of smell involves only a secondary internal experience derived from the object (Scruton 1979: 114). In the European experience, this intellectual dismissal of the sense of smell has been accompanied – especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – by sociological degradation of smell (see Corbin 1986: 4–5, 143–48; Classen et al. 1994: 161–68; Terranova 2007: 137–53; Curtis 2008). In The Foul and the Fragrant, Alain Corbin lays out the ways in which the sense of smell in the European imagination of the nineteenth century came to be associated with the refreshing scents of the flower garden and perfumes, but also lower bodily functions such as lust, defecation and putrefaction. This latter association in particular linked smell to the savage and the animal: Sniffing and smelling, a predilection for powerful animal odors, the erotic effect of sexual odors – all become objects of suspicion. Such interests, thought to be essentially savage, attest to a proximity to animals, a lack of refinement, and ignorance of good manners. In short, they reveal a basic failure at the level of social education. The sense of smell is at the bottom of the hierarchy of senses, along with the sense of touch.